★★★★★
When You Call My Name by Tucker Shaw
Published on May 3, 2022
by Henry Holt & Co.
Genres: Young adult fiction, LGBTQ, gay, queer, romance, historical fiction
“He likes the anonymity of the city. It’s funny how much freer he feels on a crowded city sidewalk than in a small town. How much less scrutinized. He can be himself, and no one thinks it’s weird, because no matter where you are in New York, there’s always someone or something weirder than you right up the block.”
Synopsis
Film fanatic Adam is seventeen and being asked out on his first date—and the guy is cute. Heart racing, Adam accepts, quickly falling in love with Callum like the movies always promised.
Fashion-obsessed Ben is eighteen and has just left his home upstate after his mother discovers his hidden stash of gay magazines. When he comes to New York City, Ben’s sexuality begins to feel less like a secret and more like a badge of honor.
Then Callum disappears, leaving Adam heartbroken, and Ben finds out his new world is more closed-minded than he thought. When Adam finally tracks Callum down, he learns the guy he loves is very ill. And in a chance meeting near the hospital where Callum is being treated, Ben and Adam meet, forever changing each other’s lives. As both begin to open their eyes to the possibilities of queer love and life, they realize sometimes the only people who can help you are the people who can really see you—in all your messy glory.
A love letter to New York and the liberating power of queer friendship, When You Call My Name is a hopeful novel about the pivotal moments of our youth that break our hearts and the people who help us put them back together.
My Thoughts
Does anybody else request a pile full of new YA books from their library every so often and then by the time they come in, you realize you aren’t actually that interested in most of them? No, just me? Well, When You Call My Name was not one of those books. It was one that I requested from my library, and I’m not kidding when I say I hugged it to my chest for a good 20 minutes after I finished it. Naturally, I bought my own copy soon thereafter.
When You Call My Name is one of my all-time favorite YA novels because it does what I think young adult fiction can do best: educate and entertain about events of the past of which younger readers might be unaware. Of course, most people and even young adults should be aware of the AIDS crisis, but short of living through it, it’s only through novels like this one that younger generations can truly understand what it was like to be a young gay man during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Shaw’s novel was inspired by this Twitter thread he wrote in 2018.
I was born in 1997, around the same time that an effective cocktail of medications for people living with AIDS started to make sure those individuals didn’t have a nearby death sentence. Thus, I was not alive for the worst of the crisis. But since coming to terms with my own queerness in my late teens, I’ve often felt the weight of generational trauma from the AIDS years as a gay man, even though I wasn’t yet born nor do I personally know anyone who had or died from the disease. It wiped out an entire generation of people who share my sexuality, people my parents’ age who I would have grown up around.
I’ve done a lot of reading on the AIDS years, and even though I’ve often had to go long stretches without reading about it because my heart and my stomach couldn’t take much more, I continue to seek them out. When You Call My Name not only repeatedly ripped my heart from my chest, but is also the best gay YA novel I’ve read. I recommend it to everyone queer or straight year round, but it’s an especially potent recommendation during Pride month.
After When You Call My Name ruined my life in the best possible way last summer, I made Tucker Shaw come on 20 Questions as punishment. He was one of my favorite guests, and you can read that interview here.
“But no matter what the world throws at you, if you are able to fully inhabit your queerness, and to fall in love with yourself — not in spite of the fact that you’re queer, but because of the fact that you’re queer — so many things fall into place. You see that the world is not beautiful because everything and everyone conforms to a specific, codified structure — it is beautiful because it’s full of things and people that don’t conform, like you. To see things this way, to see your difference not as an obstacle but as a fountain of strength, is deeply energizing. A queer superpower, I think.”
—Tucker Shaw
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Jeffrey Reads 