On Gillian St. Kevern's The Biggest Scoop, and Why I'm Obsessed with Representation.

Okay, so let me be real for a moment and talk to you about the piece of writing that shaped my love and worship for queer content. The first time I ever saw queer people on television, if I’m not mistaken was on the television soap opera Generations maaany years ago before it was discontinued. I was still in primary school. It was beautiful to watch, to experience, especially for a young person still coming to terms with their feelings and not understanding what it all means beyond being feminine and ‘not like other boys’. A few years later, I got to watch Ian Iqbal Rashid’s ‘Touch of Pink’ – I did not tell anyone because no one would understand why seeing two men kissing, embracing one another and being in love mattered that much to me; not even my friends. I was thirteen then. When I was in my twelfth grade in High School I was already somewhat secure in my sexuality and sexual orientation that I religiously sought out books and writings online that had a semblance of gay representation. Another thing worth noting is how I did not even know that such a word as 'representation' even existed. Before then it had not occurred to me that gay boys could exist in literature, for I had never come across any in the books I read; it was only after I started reading erotica on a gay porn site GayDemon that I found them. I had just started experimenting with what I would later learn to be fanfiction; another word that did not exist in my vocabulary. I would spend hours on the internet reading homoerotic content on the site, sometimes I would even scan for images of Naruto and Gaara getting it on beyong just means of absorbing stories, but as also a quick ways to get a nut – as avid a reader as I was, I was also young and still getting to know how my body works. The GayDemon site provided a platform for me to do both. This yearning for queer content grew from one that was erotic to just basically searching for writings that had gay characters – I realise now more than ever that I was searching for myself in a space that I felt worked to exclude me. There weren’t that many stories written about young gay boys – let alone black gay boys – at the library. I remember one time when a friend of mine and I were at the library, she showed me this book with a cover of a boy with freakishly green hair and the words ‘Sprout’ written in bold – I was not interested and as quite expected, told her to shove off; she persisted and told me off, cautioning me about ‘judging a book by its cover’. I read the synopsis, and hey there, it was LGBTQIA+ themed. I read it in one sitting when I got home and it broke my heart; but to refrain from further digressing, I promise to write about that book sooner or later because it, too, had a profound impact on my consumption of queer literature and my writing when I was uch younger to fully understand what this need to be seen actually meant. During one of those casual internet searches, which at that time had become somewhat a pastime whenever I had data bundles, I came across a free book on Goodreads titled ‘The Biggest Scoop’. It is thhis one book that would burst open the doors to a genre I had no idea existed within the world of Fiction. The book, by Gillian St. Kevern, was one of those pieces of writing that made an impression so everlasting I was taken aback earlier today when I remembered that I had read such a book. Searching my Google Drive, I found it there, and will read it again soon because such a book cannot be read once in a lifetime. It birthed in me this understanding – that while Dale Peck’s Sprout shattered my heart with the way it ended and its depiction – of homosexual attraction that stayed with me. To be honest, I do not know when I became inclined to write gay romance, but I reckon it was after reading The Biggest Scoop. I was still young and very impressionable then, so much so that it never occurred to me how I was easily absorbed into Milo and Taylor’s love story. I started reading the book late in the evening, slept at ungodly hours and I remember very well how I finished it in the morning during breakfast. If it had been a physical copy I would have done everything with it in my hand, and the chore on the other. With work like that I would cry when it was finished. And, and, and, before I forget – I died with envy when Taylor referred to Milo as ‘the bane of [his] existence’ in front of the entire world. The sexually frustrated teenage version of myself wailed at the way that seemed so easy, to be claimed like that, to be loved like that, to love and be loved – a reciprocated feeling back then was just a myth. During my High school days there weren’t that many openly queer people – let alone gay people, because the term queer is more political than I intend this blog to be; the only person I knew to be gay was this flamboyant guy who behaved so free and extravagant I reacted towards him the very way that every other guy did, with detachment and lack of acknowledgment. He was kind of like Declan, a character on The Biggest Scoop who owned his femininity and took pride in being out, but this guy was waaaaaay effeminate. Another was my friend’s cousin, Mita, whom I have grown to love so much because of the way she is so free in her own skin and loving despite how much her family continues to try and silence her – she was also the person whom I got to experience fully both as a person and one who’s queer; and I got to realise my attraction towards masculine presenting women, which would later allow me to come to terms with my nonbinary identity. I understand self-hatred because of the way I felt towards the guy, and I have fallen in love with myself so much and so effortlessly these few years that I don’t think I will ever fall victim to that kind of resentment again, and that is because of people like Mita and that guy living their truth – and Gillian St. Kevern for writing the book. In a nutshell, I would love to take this moment to extend my deepest of gratitude to St. Kevern for having written this book. I hope to review it for this blog after reading it with fresh eyes. And mostly, I hope to fall in love with Milo all over again, because even after years he still reminds me of how a young, scared and confused black gay boy found peace and comfort in knowing that books had not forgotten him. Milo was my way of looking in the mirror and realising that I mattered, I mattered so much that someone wrote a book about how I was feeling. He made me take that pen and write my horrors and fears out of the darkness from where I had kept them – no matter how poisonous they became. I confronted them and wrote my first refrain (probably the worst piece of writing I have ever written, but it was my way of crawling before walking) and it is all thanks to having some sort of representation. Having grown up a bit now, I fully understand the implications of wanting to see myself – and other queer people in general – in something other than erotic fanfiction. I had grown to eroticise my attraction to men for so long that I could not think of it any other way, and the fact that there weren’t that many books that told me otherwise – and we need to address this in school curriculum, really – I believed it, for it would only be years later that I would come across Jeff Garvin’s ‘Symptoms of Being Human’ and understand that nonbinary people also get written about, and Mark Oshiro’s ‘Anger is a Gift’ to understand that black gay boys will also get to be seen in books, and not so much as being the gay best friends or the gossipmonger archetypes but get to own their own identities and narrative. Because while seeing gay boys being written about and shown to exist is a beautiful thing, this still doesn’t take away from the fact that the experiences of white queer people differs from those of people of colour and nowadays we are privileged enough to be the ones to change the narrative where young children of colour who will grow up to identify as queer will see themselves in books, in poetry, on television and realise that they matter. Representation is everything, and I am grateful that we now have a seat at the table and have decided to turn the very table and create a seemingly more inclusive world, literature wise that is. It only starts with one book, and then the rest is inevitable.