GRAYALITY

In this romance, a young transgender man negotiates his new identity in hopes of finding self-acceptance and love in Montana.

Pate Boone is “twenty-six years old and going nowhere” when he leaves his suburban Georgia home and heads to small-town Montana to stay with his old friend Oakley’s grandmother. Oakley had been Pate’s first lover, back in high school when he was called Patricia, in the days before his transition to his male identity. Oakley and his dad had taken Pate in when his parents rejected him, and the two have remained close friends. When Oakley’s Granny needs help following a double mastectomy, Montana seems like the perfect place for Pate to escape the ghost of Patricia and figure out how to navigate the world in a body that only partly affirms his masculine self. After enrolling in the local college, he is thrilled when his first flirty encounter with a student named Maybelle develops into a real dating relationship. There are only two drawbacks: Maybelle has a violently jealous ex, and she doesn’t know that Pate wasn’t assigned a male gender at birth. Things become even more complicated when the solidly heterosexual Oakley finds himself powerfully attracted to Jody, a proud, gay drag queen, leading him to question if he’s really as straight as he thinks he is. PW recounts this deeply personal narrative from both Pate’s and Oakley’s points of view, flipping back and forth from one to the other as the two protagonists trace their separate but linked journeys of self-discovery. Numerous trans issues, such as Pate’s “years of sacrifice and slaving away to scrape together enough funds to pay for my hormones and, eventually, my top surgery”; the suicidal ideation and depression that are side effects of his testosterone injections; and the multiple complications of being a man with a vagina, are woven into a romantic narrative of young love. Pate’s lack of honesty in his relationship with Maybelle is disturbing, if understandable, but the love stories play out with suspenseful tenderness, and the characters’ struggles to come out as “fully human” are persuasive and poignant.

An engaging queer love story of confusion, courage, and self-realization.