Leavitt, David. The Lost Language of Cranes (1986). New York: Bloomsbury, 2005.

Leavitt's first novel is a kind of twinned coming-out narrative. At its start, Philip is a mid-twentysomething editor of romance novels who hasn't come out to his folks yet. Rose, his mother, is a copy editor, who doesn't seem to take any interest in other people and is as a result pretty uninteresting herself. Owen, her husband, spends every Sunday trolling for sex at a gay porno theater. The plot of the novel throws everyone together, all secrets uncovered, and then tears them apart as a family, until the final scene, where father and son are left together, neither knowing what to do about the other.

A Phylis Schlafley or a Pat Robertson would condemn this novel as a homosexual fantasy in which fathers and sons can fuck one another without feeling bad about it. Perhaps they did, way back when it was published. Leavitt's not a sicko, nor is he the kind of radical sex-positive fag that would force his reader to confront the beauty of Owen and Philip's love. The possibility of any coupling is simply unspeakable, as it would be with you and your father, and when the story ends on a final image of Owen's "white ankles in the bright moonlight," the result is touching.

This novel should be required reading for any high-school boy, in case that boy is working through confusing feelings about sexuality. Oh, to have come across the following passage fifteen years ago!

His sexual life had been bred in secret; he had never spoken of it with anyone, not even himself. Could something so private be real, he wondered? Wouldn't he someday soon meet a girl, fall in love with her? Wouldn't there be some shifting in the hormones he was just learning about in science class, so that he could make love to a woman like any other man, marry her like any other man? He would be free of it, then, that other life, the secret life; it would fall away, unknown to anyone but him, and he would look back on it as a distant dream. (75)