Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

Dear reader,

The bravest kids I've ever known meet once a month in the basement of a Unitarian church outside Washington, DC. They're boys in princess gowns and girls with cropped hair five-year-olds and twelve-year-olds and every age in between. Some of them are trans kids. Some avoid labels. Many of the boys will come to identify themselves as gay. But most of the time they're still figuring things out. Piecing together their identities is the entire point.

This is a group that thrives on flexibility, change and fluidity. Kids join and leave the group. Names and pronouns change. Parents strategize and discuss and brainstorm and advocate for kids whose needs seem to evolve daily. We the volunteers, clinicians and parents make mistakes. We bump along together.

These are the kids who inspired my book, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. They're a few years younger than Simon. Love and sex and attraction aren't necessarily on the table yet ? but their search for authenticity is very real. These kids are already grappling with huge questions about identity, even as their identities are very much in flux.

In many ways, this is a uniquely LGBTQ experience but there are also threads of something so universal. Everyone changes. There are moments when we don't recognize ourselves. There are moments when core aspects of our identities shift and expand.

It's a strange feeling and, though it never entirely goes away, it's very much a teenage feeling. As adults, I think we sometimes forget how all-consuming and awkward and amazing that feeling can be.

To me, that's Simon's story. While Simon can be described as a book about coming to terms with sexual identity, it's really about that terrifying, thrilling process of figuring out who you are during a time when your entire identity sexual, social, emotional, etc. Is a moving target. So much of being a teenager is this search for authenticity: trying on different identities, exploring new relationships and discovering how it all fits together.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is a story about a sixteen-year-old boy getting to know himself and I hope you love getting to know him, too.

Becky (Author)

#SimonVs #ComingOut