ABSTRACT
This chapter advocates for the importance of implementing analytical frameworks that emphasize the role of fluidity and privilege in critiques of the YA coming out narrative. It invites educators to consider the importance of approaching coming out narratives as malleable and subject to change, and considering how their narrativizations are inflected by factors such as a protagonist’s class, gender, race, cultural background, and social upbringing. Rather than pushing for a departure from the coming out narrative, as other scholars of YA literature have suggested, this chapter instead calls for the need to reiteratively consider how changes in sociocultural circumstances affect the intervention that a coming out narrative represents. This chapter addresses the state of the YA coming out narrative in the field and then examines how Albertalli’s (2015) Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda reinforces and complicates understandings of the coming out narrative. This chapter then offers suggestions for discussing these matters in the classroom and recommendations for further exploring how contemporary queer narratives address the coming out process.
