Simon Vs. The Homosapiens Agenda and the Suburban White Aesthetic

Simon Vs. The Homosapiens Agenda and the Suburban White Aesthetic

Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs The Homosapiens Agenda is witty, romantic and fun. It’s important representation for LGBT teens, since many YA depicting LGBT experience focuses on traumatic coming out stores and struggles with sexuality. By making Simon’s coming out the secondary focus of the novel, the stereotypical teen romance is made central-a problematic trope that has nonetheless been unavailable to queer teenagers.. This isn’t the most radical of narratives, but it’s important for LGBT teens to have access to this story.

I think access is particularly salient because Simon Vs. The Homosapiens Agenda is not on any banned book lists that I could access, though other popular, and more radical, queer young adult books like Aristotle and Dante discover the Secrets of the Universe are commonly banned. Having a book with a LGBT protagonist that is widely accessible even in conservative schools is significant.

That said, in creating a classic teen romance for LGBT teens Albertalli relies on many tropes and facets of upper middle class suburbia that limits the importance and the reach. Simon’s mother for example, desperately wants to be a “cool mom” and makes fancy snack trays for Simon and his friends, something only available to wealthy Mothers with extra time and money. There are also material assumptions:  all of Simon’s friends have access to cars at 16 and 17. His school offers opportunities for extra curricular activities, which is for Simon theatre, something that students who need to work after school are less able to participate in. This isn’t to say that there is no struggle in Simon Vs The Homosapiens Agenda: after all Simon is blackmailed, comes out, and struggles with his friendships. But the concerns, and activities, of Simon and his friends reflect a upper middle class lifestyle unfamiliar to many LGBT people.

I was struck by the idea that there is a difference between queer and LGBT literature. While Simon is groundbreaking in its depiction of a gay male teen romance, the novel sticks to formulaic teen drama and romance, upper middle class and primarily white suburbia, and a family that watches The Bachelor together. Simon may be queer, but I would argue that Simon V. The Homosapiens Agenda is not a queer novel in the way that Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley discuss in their essay “Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.” They write “the figure of the queer child is that which doesn’t quite conform to the wished-for way that children are supposed to be in terms of gender and sexual roles. In other circumstances, it is also the child who displays interest in sex generally, in same sex erotic attachments or in cross-generational attachments.” (x). Simon and Bram don’t conform to their expected sexual identity, but Simon in particular fulfills the other expectations of his upper middle class suburban parents. He succeeds in school, is involved in drama, is relatively popular, attends parties, talks with his parents, and even allows his mother to make his friends a cheese plate. Because Simon accepts most other expectations of an upper middle class suburban high schooler, the narrative of his romance does not defy gender or sexual expectations in the ways that might be expected.

The novel is also not queer textually, which is a conscience choice made by Becky Albertalli. In writing a novel so in line with the tropes and archetypes of the romantic comedy, Albertalli introduces a queer character into a straight passing narrative structure rather than queering the novel itself. In contrast to books like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Ramona Blue, there is a lack of grappling with sexuality and identity. There is also a lack of diversity-racially and otherwise-that prevents Albertalli from making some of the radical moves that writers like Julie Murphy did when focusing on sexual fluidity. Though Simon is not out, and is nervous to discover the true identity of Blue, he does not necessarily struggle with his own sexuality or identity. He knows he is gay and keeps it quiet, instead of going through the periods of queering and discovery found in other young adult novels. By framing Simon in this way, Albertalli both denies and erases the struggles of LGBT youth while also giving LGBT kids what other kids have had all along: simplistic white romantic comedies.

I was also struck by the ways in which Simon’s popularity in some ways weaponizes his white privilege. As Martin points out (unsympathetically), Simon does not necessarily acknowledge the ways in which he has succeeded socially in high school. As an LGBT teenager, his ability to be almost universally accepted as popular relies on the fact that he is both straight passing, as well as upper middle class and white. Simon’s ability to fit in with varying social circles: the athletes like Nick and Bram, the Tumblr girls like Leah, the theatre kids, etc rests on Simon’s ability to pass for straight and non-threatening, to participate in demanding extra curricular activities, to get parental support for outings with his friends, and to have a home to welcome his friends and acquaintances too. If Simon could not deploy his white and upper middle class privilege, his ability to retain popularity and pass for straight (if and when he wanted too) would be much less.

Though Simon Vs. The Homosapiens Agenda is a flawed book, particularly in terms of racial and socioeconomic diversity, the flatness of secondary characters, and the lack of a queer textual and narrative structure, it is important in terms of representation. Simon Vs. The Homosapiens Agenda is innocuous enough to avoid the banned books lists, making it accessible to a wide swath of teenagers, and was the basis for the first “typical” teen romance between teenage boys.