Dante & Ari

[Spoiler alert: some details about the book “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz]

I’m reading the book “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz. A novel about the friendship, bromance, and love between two teenage boys in El Paso, TX, in the late ‘80s. 

Usually I’m a slow reader but last night I couldn’t put the book down, I devoured over a hundred pages. 

I had started reading this novel a few months ago, when my housemate had just finished it and, having really enjoyed it, she offered it to me as a light, “sweet, heartwarming, and adorable” book as I was still feeling the sharpness of my grieving pain. So I started reading it then but had mixed feelings around it and when finally Dante tells Aristotle that he’s leaving at the end of summer, having to go to Chicago with his parents for the upcoming school year, it hit home too painfully for me — too recent of a reminder of the separation from my European queer ex-lover & their return to Europe in August. So I put the book down, on hold. 

In the meantime, I’ve healed and read many other good books, including “Queer Theories” by Donald E. Hall and most of the heart-wrenching novel “Giovanni’s room” by James Baldwin. 

Somehow last week I felt ready to start reading “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” again, alternating it with “Giovanni’s room”. 

Both of these novels are pulling at the strings of my heart very strongly and intensely now. They both touch upon, revolve around, one of the themes that I’ve been going back to over and over in the past three or four years: deep, close, intimate friendship, even love and romance, between two boys/men. 

I had to put down the book “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” a couple months ago because Dante reminds me so strongly of my European queer ex-lover, Dante is them and Ari is me. Just with a difference of three decades in age. 

What would it have been like to meet them (my European queer ex-lover) back then, as teenagers? 

But this novel doesn’t pull at the strings of my heart so strongly only because of the romance & love with my European queer ex-lover. It pulls at the strings of my heart in a bittersweet way also because it partly reminds me of my adolescence, of my being — or trying to be — a boy with the boys, of my bromances with my guy-friends. It also reminds me, though, of what I really would have wanted but couldn’t fully have. Because despite having deep, fun friendships with boys and being able to get close to them and be accepted by them almost as one of them, it was never quite like it would have been if I had been allowed to be a boy fully. It wasn’t my friends’ fault or a biological difference: it was society’s fault, a cultural problem. Actually, thinking back at the environment in which we grew up and were living our bromances, it’s really quite amazing that we were to able to get that close and somewhat break the rules, inadvertently tearing down the walls in our young, spontaneous way. And yet, I wish I had had more: I wish that our genitals had not made a difference. I wish I had been brought up in a world where only our spirit, our identity made a difference, and not our genitals (& ensuing sex assigned at birth). 

I wish I had been allowed to be a boy, to be a boy fully, to be my whole pansexual, genderqueer boy self, already in my teens (& later as a young adult, too).