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A review by indiekay
All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson
3.0
3.5 stars
I'm not a huge fan of nonfiction or memoirs, so this isn't really for me. While the stories of the author's life were interesting, their "solutions" at the end of each chapter felt juvenile. I don't need to be told that gay men can enjoy sports too. I suppose this book is meant for a young adult audience, so maybe pointing that out isn't fair to the story, but I think it would have been a stronger book without the attempt at life lessons at the end of each chapter. There were a few things about this book that irked me: I hated how they felt the need to continuously misgender and dead name their trans cousin. Mentioning 9/11 seemed completely unneccessary to the story too. There's a bit where the author describes playing jump rope with the girls and says something like, 'the girls hold their chests so they don't bounce even though the girls didn't have large breasts, they must have been doing that just to feel included', or something like that, and it's just ignorant. Breasts growing in fucking HURT, and breasts bouncing fucking hurts too. Even if you can't see any breasts there yet they probably were hurting, and speaking for what those girls were thinking is just irresponsible, because the author has no idea about those girls' experience.
I thought I've seen this book listed as books about trans people, and the pink and blue on the cover made me also think that, but it's not. I'm unsure if I just misremembered seeing it on trans book lists or those people were mistaken. I see the author uses they/them pronouns in their bio, but in the book the author continuously refers to themself as a man (maybe the they/them pronouns are new development, maybe they're a nonbinary gay man, I don't know). They talk about thinking as a teen that they had to be a woman to be able to have sex with men, but I really don't think anything that happens in this book relates to the trans or nonbinary experience, and really focuses on the Black gay experience. And that's fine! But this should not be on trans book recommendations when the book does not talk about the experience of being trans or nonbinary - and if it does, it's in an incredibly convoluted way. And it was frustrating hearing all the misgendering and dead naming of their deceased trans cousin.
The strongest part of this book for me was the middle where he wrote about family and letters to family members, that got some tears out of me. The author also narrates the audiobook, and I think he did a good job at that.
I'm not a huge fan of nonfiction or memoirs, so this isn't really for me. While the stories of the author's life were interesting, their "solutions" at the end of each chapter felt juvenile. I don't need to be told that gay men can enjoy sports too. I suppose this book is meant for a young adult audience, so maybe pointing that out isn't fair to the story, but I think it would have been a stronger book without the attempt at life lessons at the end of each chapter. There were a few things about this book that irked me: I hated how they felt the need to continuously misgender and dead name their trans cousin. Mentioning 9/11 seemed completely unneccessary to the story too. There's a bit where the author describes playing jump rope with the girls and says something like, 'the girls hold their chests so they don't bounce even though the girls didn't have large breasts, they must have been doing that just to feel included', or something like that, and it's just ignorant. Breasts growing in fucking HURT, and breasts bouncing fucking hurts too. Even if you can't see any breasts there yet they probably were hurting, and speaking for what those girls were thinking is just irresponsible, because the author has no idea about those girls' experience.
I thought I've seen this book listed as books about trans people, and the pink and blue on the cover made me also think that, but it's not. I'm unsure if I just misremembered seeing it on trans book lists or those people were mistaken. I see the author uses they/them pronouns in their bio, but in the book the author continuously refers to themself as a man (maybe the they/them pronouns are new development, maybe they're a nonbinary gay man, I don't know). They talk about thinking as a teen that they had to be a woman to be able to have sex with men, but I really don't think anything that happens in this book relates to the trans or nonbinary experience, and really focuses on the Black gay experience. And that's fine! But this should not be on trans book recommendations when the book does not talk about the experience of being trans or nonbinary - and if it does, it's in an incredibly convoluted way. And it was frustrating hearing all the misgendering and dead naming of their deceased trans cousin.
The strongest part of this book for me was the middle where he wrote about family and letters to family members, that got some tears out of me. The author also narrates the audiobook, and I think he did a good job at that.