When You Call My Name Review

Happy Pride everyone!!

In the spirit of the author’s massively popular Twitter thread, Tucker Shaw’s When You Call My Name is a heartrending novel about two gay teens coming of age in New York City in 1990 at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, perfect for fans of Adam Silvera and Mary H. K. Choi.

Film fanatic Adam is seventeen and being asked out on his first date—and the guy is cute. Heart racing, Adam accepts, quickly falling in love with Callum like the movies always promised.

Fashion-obsessed Ben is eighteen and has just left his home upstate after his mother discovers his hidden stash of gay magazines. When he comes to New York City, Ben’s sexuality begins to feel less like a secret and more like a badge of honor.

Then Callum disappears, leaving Adam heartbroken, and Ben finds out his new world is more closed-minded than he thought. When Adam finally tracks Callum down, he learns the guy he loves is very ill. And in a chance meeting near the hospital where Callum is being treated, Ben and Adam meet, forever changing each other’s lives. As both begin to open their eyes to the possibilities of queer love and life, they realize sometimes the only people who can help you are the people who can really see you—in all your messy glory.

A love letter to New York and the liberating power of queer friendship, When You Call My Name is a hopeful novel about the pivotal moments of our youth that break our hearts and the people who help us put them back together.

General Impressions

I wanted to read "When You Call My Name" because 1. it's a queer book by a queer author, 2. it's being published during Pride month and 3. I thought the title was a reference to Alexander the Great and his boyfriend and I'm trash for classical queers. That cover being absolutely **fire** barely needs to be mentioned as that's a given, for me.

I started this book knowing that the chances of it making me cry were very high. I have consumed a few recent movies and books that talk about the AIDS epidemic in the queer community and how discrimination and intentional disregard on the part of the government and society at large was to blame for the loss of so many, but none set in the 90s and I think that was what shocked me the most.

We are used to hearing about how bad it was in the 80s but then the tragedy ends there. Medicine and scientific breakthroughs eventually start to happen when enough straight white people get sick and LGBTQ groups to organize in such a way that they become impossible to ignore. That's what I thought happened: it was awful in the 80s but then things got better because gay, lesbian, and Trans refused to keep quiet and eventually won (never forget, the white cute gay boy might be the face and oiled chest of the movement in most people's eyes but we're all standing on trans, particularly BIPOC, mighty shoulders).

This book paints a vastly different picture: a new decade yes, but people were still dying every day, were still going undiagnosed, were still being refused treatment in hospitals or even denied respect and safety for simply being suspected of being queer, looking or acting a certain way. Being queer was losing dozens of friends, lovers, and acquaintances every month. One day there, a few weeks later someone told you they were gone.

This book forces us to put ourselves in the shoes of two young gay men, Adam and Ben. knowing that being who they were, and daring to love someone was a death sentence in the making. There was no cure or even the promise of any kind of drug that would help or even extend your life. That leaves these two teenagers not only having to deal with the normal pressures of being young with all kinds of important decisions ahead of them plus being discriminated against, taught to hide and hate themselves, and demonized by the adults around them. Instead of making plans for the future and falling in and out of love, they become intimate with grief and forced to grow up in a world that would rather see them dead and gone.

We look around now, with all the 90s trends coming back, a time not so long ago at all and it doesn't seem that difficult to imagine being there: we might have never played a cassette but we still listen to a lot of the same artists, recognize the neighbourhoods, watch the same movies, these two boys feel like our friends, we know them, we were them and then out of nowhere, the reader is slapped in the face with how vastly different their world is. You recognize the shirts and the music and little else. Reading this book felt like living in the most wonderful polaroid that turned into a nightmare with a casual sentence. Again and again and again. Madonna? Gay-bashing. RuPaul? A table filled with mementoes of dead people. Kate Moss? God-sent plague.

The writing was beautiful, the setting felt real, and the craft immaculate. And yet, this was such a work of art not only because the characters were impactful and fleshed out, and the story able to draw you in but because this book was written by Tucker Shaw. This man didn't read about this time, he didn't research it as a personal hobby or choose it as the setting for his novel to set himself apart from the crowd. He lived through it, he survived it, while his loved ones didn't. This book is penned in blood and memory and you feel it in every word. After crying my way through the last few pages, I never cried harder than when I read the author's final notes where I learnt the reason for the book title was not in remembrance of Alexander's love but his own.

And yet, after all the pain, tragedy and rawness across its 300 pages, if you decide to learn more about what the queer community went through out of curiosity, the titanic war they fought, you realize that this man went easy. What he relates here is nothing but a very short time, in the life of characters that if marginalized due to their sexual orientation, still have their whiteness, their economical security, adults that love, nurture and protect them and that privilege matters and shields them and the reader. Perhaps it's less about their youth than the book's target audience's, but what they went through was nothing compared to the hand others less fortunate were dealt. There is a reason I made sure to put "recent" in bold at the beginning of this review and it's because, what happened, what was allowed to happen to the queer community was an attempted genocide, both cultural and physical and what people went through fighting it is only now starting to be discussed and taught about, this book being part of that effort.

I don't want you to think that this story was nothing more than a sequence of tragic events: yes there was plenty of sadness, confusion and injustice, but if being queer means anything, is being part of a loving, accepting community, a family that you choose and chooses you back and there's joy in that. There was so much laughter when queer characters met and insisted on joking around, reading each other, honouring the memory of those that were gone and taking care of the ones still around. There were pride marches, gay clubs, allies, and a culture that was enmeshed in the fabric of the world, even if only visible to those looking for it.

Conclusions

I finished this book more aware of and thankful for those that survived, those that refused to be erased and lie down to die out of the way, and those that fought for everything that, as a queer person I get to enjoy now. That sentiment is matched only by an immense sense of sadness for a generation of queer people taken from us, a piece of our history that was not allowed to happen. Think about what could have been, all the love that did not get to fluoresce, all the art, stories, and people cut too short for nothing but prejudice. That is why we march this June.

These characters, like so many people then, could picture a hotel on the moon more easily than gay marriage. Look around. We got that, we got legislation, gay presidents and prime ministers just like we used to have queer emperors and kings. We've always been here. We're still here. Thank you. We wouldn't have it without you.

Thank you to Penguin for sending me this copy.

Rating: 5/5

I started crying again writing this damn review, goddammit!