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David is confused. He’s started seeing his friend, a girl named Kick, but he can’t stop thinking about guys, especially Sean from his running team. David is sure he’s not supposed to feel this way so he does everything he can to curb his urges and become ‘normal’. He distances himself from his friend Eddie, who has just come out, he gives up writing to romance novelists and he even puts an elastic band around his wrist so he can snap it whenever he starts to think about men. When he finds out that Sean is interested in him David thinks everything is about to get better, but Sean’s not interested in coming out or even showing affection in private. Now David has to decide what he wants from life. Is sleeping with Sean worth lying to himself and those closest to him?‘David Inside Out’ is a thoughtful variation of the coming out story. Through its three gay characters it shows three different reactions from men discovering they’re gay. Eddie has known he’s gay for most of his life and once out he becomes involved in gay issues, as he battles to set up a gay/straight alliance at school. David denies his feelings, but doesn’t want to continue to lie indefinitely once he is involved with Sean. Sean is so entrenched in a world where being gay is wrong that he’s made up his own internal logic to explain his feelings, enabling him to live deep in denial while fooling around with David. It’s interesting how Lee Bantle manages to balance these different reactions without demonising the characters that hide their feelings and making Eddie, the more open character, saintly. Eddie is often shown as obnoxious, overbearing and crude as he tries to force David to operate on the same schedule as him. Despite his hypocrisy and unkindness Sean is often a sympathetic character, as the reader sees his mother reinforce his feeling of shame, by taking him to a shrink when she finds some copies of Playgirl in his room. David’s character is where Eddie and Sean’s attitudes collide and change, showing how wrong David’s reaction to Eddie’s news is, but how it is understandable and underlining how hard it can be for gay men to come out, while explaining how necessary it is.
David’s voice is a lot of fun. How could I not love a character who goes to church and says ‘This is what I had sunk to. Checking out Jesus.’ . Listening to David can at times be a really intimate experience of the first person narrative. That sounds odd doesn’t it, because surely every first person narrative is intimate. However, David’s narrative feels special because it never feels like he’s shielding or blurring parts of his experience. There’s something raw in his voice, as he reveals things to the reader that show how fractured his sense of identity currently is. One part that absolutely broke my heart was:
‘My eyes were blazing. I saw my mother’s lipstick sitting out on the counter. I pulled off the top, wound it out and stabbed at my lips. I was a girlie boy too.’ .
There are a few places in this book where paragraphs that discuss big teenage issues seem to have been tacked on in strange places,
‘ “You need a haircut.”
Suddenly I was twelve years old. “No I don’t.”
“This weekend,” she said firmly, heading off to bed.
My mom can be confusing without even trying. If I tell her I have to do something because everyone is doing it, she says just be yourself. She says people respect that. But what if you send fan mail to romance writers?...Being yourself might make people reject you. People you care about desperately. Being yourself only work if you’re basically cool. Which I’m not.’
This portion jumps from getting a haircut to being yourself, which doesn’t quite seem to follow on naturally. However this is a rare occurrence and most of the novel is written is precise prose.
‘David Inside Out’ has a couple of main themes in common with ‘The Saints of Augustine’ and ‘What They Always Tell Us’. Both are coming out stories and both feature characters who are enthusiastic about running. I don’t want to compare the books too much in this review, but I did notice that ‘David Inside Out’ shares the one flaw that bothered me when I was reading the other two books. Its female characters are entirely undeveloped, which is especially unacceptable in the case of Kick. If you give a girl a cool name like that then she’d better have a personality strong enough for that name. ‘David Inside Out’ contains minimal information about Kick: she feels her parents are too controlling and she wants to sleep with David, that’s pretty much it. She exists as a blank girl for David to use as a shield against temptation. The most insight into her character appears in a note she sends to David after he tells her he’s gay and while that note shows a new, vulnerable facet to her personality little else is revealed. Kick has a female friend Molly who is even less developed and who seems to exist for no reason at all. I know this book is all about the boys but secondary characters always deserve proper development and while it didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the book as I read it, it’s something that played on my mind when I thought about it later.
Overall ‘David Inside Out’ is a fantastic addition to the dialogue about coming out, portrayed in young adult books. If you want to read about more YA novels that feature teens thinking about same sex relationships you can read my reviews of ‘Empress of the World’, ‘What They Always Tell Us’ and 'Saints of Augustine’.
(Full disclosure this book was sent to me by the author).
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