"Openly Straight”

Adamfoxie* gives you something new to read to ponder.
Aaron Hartzler and Rafe Goldberg grow up mostly as polar opposites. Aaron comes from a fundamentalist Christian Kansas City family; Rafe is a child of modern-­hippie Boulder, Colo., (stereo)types. Aaron, the main character in the memoir “Rapture Practice,” is real; Rafe, the protagonist in Bill Konigsberg’s novel “Openly Straight,” is made up. But both wrestle, over several hundred pages, with their identities. And both share a secret: They’re liars.

 If I were growing up in the Hartzler household, I’d want to lie too. The devoutly Baptist Hartzlers rear their children in eager anticipation of Jesus’ second coming. Movies are banned. He-Man action figures too. For his 16th birthday, Aaron’s parents give him a purity ring, his mom agush about “when you’ll be able to slip this ring off your finger and give it to your new bride — the best wedding gift of all: your virginity.”

Hartzler paints a compellingly unlikable portrait of his preacher dad — Jerry Falwell meets Kim Il-sung, religiously ultraconservative and determined to protect the hermit kingdom of his home from evil. Temptation is everywhere. One stirring passage describes a battle over whether Aaron must wear socks with his Top-Siders to church. (Aaron says no: “It’s dorky.”) Aaron: “It’s just socks.” Aaron’s father: “Aaron, it isn’t just socks. It’s rebellion.”

Despite Aaron’s repetitive rebellion, cover-up attempts and exposure, “Rapture Practice” is often effervescent and moving, evocative and tender. Aaron’s as-yet-inexplicable romantic feelings are described in a particularly affecting, authentically adolescent way. One day, while working at the local skating rink, he meets a cute boy on the ice. “We shake,” Hartzler recalls, “but when I try to drop his hand, he holds on to mine. . . . I’m short of breath, but I haven’t been skating hard.” Sweet.

But like its protagonist, “Rapture Practice” struggles with identity issues not atypical for the genre. The book is cast as a young adult memoir, and the author’s note, which includes a parenthetical that says, “Be warned: There is kissing” affirms that skew. But how many teenagers today would get certain unexplained cultural references — Peter Cetera? Wilson Phillips? — that suggest Hartzler really wanted to write for people who remember Peter Cetera and Wilson Phillips?

Hartzler wants to inspire, but he overreaches. He attempts to cover his whole childhood, examine his diminishing faith, poke at his super-­religious upbringing, map his evolving sexuality and play it all for laughs (and a few tears). Sometimes he feels like memoirist-as-Anne-­Hathaway. He’s talented, but you never forget he’s performing — and trying so hard.

“Openly Straight” suffers no such identity crisis. It chronicles Rafe Goldberg’s first semester at an all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts. Back in Boulder, he’d come out in eighth grade, prompting his mom to become president of the local chapter of Pflag. At his new school, he tells nobody he’s gay. “I was silently saying goodbye to a part of myself: my label. That word that defined me as only one thing to everyone.”

Characters have worn masks and wrestled with the consequences, in works as similar but divergent as “Twelfth Night” and “There’s Something About Mary.” “Openly Straight” is a thoughtful, modern spin on that venerable device, and it works because of Rafe. While some secondary characters are thinly drawn — especially his parents and his best friend from home, Claire Olivia, who flits to another, more flamboyant gay boy once Rafe heads east — Rafe feels real. He’s convincingly teenage. He’s smart but never too articulate. He’s searching but not always finding what he thinks he’s looking for. That’s especially true as his friendship blossoms with his taciturn, totally crush-worthy classmate Ben.

Konigsberg depicts teenhood’s somersaults especially adroitly through Rafe’s journal. In one entry, Rafe writes about his embarrassing dad: “I’m pretty chill, I’m pretty comfortable, but there’s a difference between normal comfortable and being 40-something and shaking your backside to a bad hip-hop song in an Illinois restaurant full of strangers.” “Normal” is, in some sense, what “Openly Straight” is all about. If Rafe passes for straight, will he be considered normal? What does that feel like? What does that even mean?

We all grow up. That makes the coming-of-age tale so tough to tell well. At some point, each of us will compare, consciously or not, the story with our own. Thanks to Konigsberg’s artful engineering, we travel deep into Rafe’s world, and through his longing and his angst, the flutters of young love and the strains of seeking to be understood, we also revisit the same but different stations from our own journeys.

Being openly gay may not be a curse, but it’s exhausting, Rafe writes in his journal. “Always wondering what people are seeing, and feeling separated from so much of the world, that’s hard.” For many of us, that’s also life, whether you’re gay or straight. Konigsberg’s lovely novel invites us to walk with Rafe through his season of assumed identity and his costly emergence into honesty. It’s beautiful. It’s a story of salvation.

Jeff Chu, an editor at large for Fast Company, is the author of “Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America.”