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Summary from the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Twelve-year-old M. describes the prejudices and struggles that his entire family faces when people learn that his older brother B. is gay.
Notes/Excerpts:
At the beginning of the book, B. begins dropping from sports teams. At his very last swim meet, his dad notices a boy from another school with painted toenails. Later, B.’s family sees a headline:
M., B.’s brother asks: “‘What does homophobic mean?’ ‘It means an aversion to gay people.’ I know gay men are the ones who fall in love with other men. Gay women are like G. and V., the two ladies who live on the corner of our block (49).”
M.’s dad sends him to turn on the computer so that they can order a baseball glove from the Internet. M. gets into his dad’s office and sees B. on the computer. B. closes the screen immediately and tells him not to say a word. M. says: “Just a couple of naked men dancing. No big deal” (68-69).
A bully is talking to M. at school: “‘You’re brother’s a freak! A pervert!’ M. asks his friend, ‘What exactly is a pervert?’ ‘I think it’s somebody who does weird sex things.’ ‘What’s a three-letter man, do you happen to know?’ ‘I don’t know what it is here, but in ___, it’s another way of saying, ‘fag’. A four letter man is a ‘homo’ (82-83).”
M. tells his brother: “I found your dirty homo magazines, B. (84).”
“ ‘Can’t you try to change yourself?’ I asked my brother. ‘Get normal?’ ‘I’ve been trying all my life,’ B. said. ‘Couldn’t you get a girlfriend (86)?’ ”
“ ‘[School bully] is making sure the whole school knows. He wrote ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ all over my mitt.’ B. tells his brother about the post-it notes in his locker: ‘We don’t need any queers putting AIDS in our pool. I guess I queered it all right. I lost our meet…I’m a homo, I’m pretty sure…’ There was more B. told me later…he got ‘romantic feelings’ for a member of [his stamp] club and wrote him a note…kid showed everyone. B. dropped out…I heard him crying (86-87).”
B. and his friend J. build a rainbow colored kite, fly it at nighttime with their families present and then they go back to B.’s house. Pages 128-130 are about how kids put a paper bag with a dead rat in it on B.’s doorstep, “hung a ladies’ brassiere from the hoop” and spray painted the word “FAGGOT” on the garage door.
B. went upstairs to take a shower and wrapped a towel on his head (135). His dad asks him why someone would target him and B. tells him: “I’m gay” … “I’m queer, Dad” (137).
“I wished Dad was right: he’d find a good shrink for B. and he’d be cured of being gay (139).”
After that incident, J.’s dad says that he does not want his kids involved with the kite project J. and B. planned and B. tells his brother M.: “ ‘It’s the rainbow kite. He will not allow any of his kids to be a part of it.’ ‘It’s a fag thing, a rainbow kite. That’s what he said, isn’t it, Dad?’ ‘He said it was a ‘fag flag.’ That’s what you told me, Dad.’ ‘Well, he’s right about the rainbow. It’s a symbol. For homosexuals. It’s the gay flag. Isn’t that right, B.?’ (155).”
M. & B.’s parent’s get into an argument: “ ‘I’m saying God is not a homophobe!’ Dad’s eyes had red rings… ‘And you’re implying that I am!’ B. steps in the middle: ‘I think everyone else would be better off if I were dead!’ (156)”
“A homophobe is a person who hates gay people, I found out the next day…Dad told B. that he didn’t want him flying his kite at graduation… ‘Get rid of it, B. Get rid of the damn thing (158)!”
M. is sitting in computer class; the monitor goes to a dark color and there is a message: GO HOME NOW (163). M. goes home to find an obituary his brother wrote for himself:
B. did not die, but he did try to commit suicide; he also took the kite with him. He is now at home, sick in bed and his brother is talking to him making him promise not to do it again. Since B. cannot talk, he writes on a piece of paper:
B. goes to his graduation ceremony. The principal talks about “hate crimes and how hateful they are, and how we should all pretend we’re cousins…” His principal continues his speech on hate crimes and said the [school bullies] were caught with spray paint and spraying “hate graffiti.” His principal said no one should condone “malicious behavior towards any minority (201).”
At the end of the graduation ceremony: “…B.’s name was called…J. leaped up, pulled off his cap, and his hair was striped in rainbow colors! And now the triplets came running down the aisle yelling and waving their baseball caps and, you guessed it, their hair was dyed in the same rainbow strips! All of a sudden I saw a whole bunch of kids pull off their graduation caps or just appear from the back of the audience, and they’d done it too. They’d dyed their hair in reds and greens and blues…an amazing, dazzling, eye-popping…sight…the principal said… ‘You’ve become an emblem of our tolerance and we want you to know we’re sorry for what you’ve had to go through’ (203).”
The ending: “When both Mom and Dad gave him looks, it seemed like things were pretty much back to normal in our family (205).”