ABSTRACT
David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing sets itself apart as a cutting-edge work within the framework of queer consciousness/community. This novel exemplifies literary experimentation through its fragmented structure and kaleidoscopic narrative mode. It also binds together diverse queer communities from the past and present exposing their commonalities, differences, heartaches, and aspirations. One can potentially focus on how characters relate to one's own respective queer communities and to the queer communities that paved the way for one's community to come to fruition. Levithan fosters queer consciousness and community, however, not by representing cohesive groups, but by representing groups that must learn how to cooperate in order to contest homophobia. The novel's construction of queer consciousness/community via narrative innovations and the implementation of temporal drag stress the importance of looking back to the work of past queer generations in order to not escape but ultimately repair heteronormative and homophobic notions of gender and sexuality.
