For a book trying so very, very hard to be an inspirational tale of a gay black man and his assortedly diverse friends fighting against oppression, it is kind of amazing how racist, sexist, and ableist it turned out to be.

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I wouldn't call it particularly homophobic, but between the bury your gays main storyline and the fact that, for all the main cast's careful diversity of orientation and gender, the only relationship among the major character that survives after that is the heteroromantic asexual ship between the disabled biromantic guy and the ace girl, I wouldn't recommend it on the basis of its excellence regarding LGB issues to any LGB person I know even if the rest of the book was spectacular.

It's a poorly written mess of a first novel that was apparently changed at the last minute from a dystopia to a contemporary, and good god does that show. And the effects of that are often unfortunate. When you're attempting to write about real oppression that actually does occur IRL, if you need to make up silly fake machines and ridiculously implausible scenarios for your characters to be hurt despite the fact that you are ostensibly in the real world, you're implying that the oppression they face isn't real. In a book about police brutality, that's insulting.

Speaking of ridiculously implausible scenarios, let's talk about Reg. Reg was badly hurt a few years ago and is still alternating between wheelchair and crutches, and because of this, and because he's a poor probably black kid going to a majority PoC school, the state, through its utter and malicious disregard for his health

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cripples him.

This is not implausible, which is why it's so ridiculous that what it takes to

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cripple him is not only a metal detector that turns out to have magnets so strong it pulls his presumably titanium pins against its walls (note: the type of pins they put in your body are so weakly magnetized that MRIs won't affect them), but we spend some time watching the entire school walk through the machine before him, and he spends some time quizzing them about whether it's safe. I can believe in a magical magnet machine before I can believe that an entire student body passed through the aforementioned magical magnet machine with no piercings, braces, fillings, steel toed boots, belts with metal buckles, hair pins, underwires, leftover loose change, metal zippers, etc. alerted the people running it to holy shit this metal detector is dangerous and dozens of students have already been injured before Reg passes through.

It is breathtakingly stupid.

What takes it to breathtakingly stupid to really fucking ableist is where the entire storyline goes from there.

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As Reg goes down, Moss is overcome by rage and grief-driven flashbacks to his father's death. But, it's okay! Just before Reg passes out from the agonizing pain, he takes the time to tell his friend "not now", and when Moss' rage runs out of him, Reg smiles at him. Because, you know, the guy who's just been crippled for life and in agonizing pain is definitely not the one whose pain is important here. This...ends up being exactly how the rest of Reg's storyline goes. They have meetings about the protest they're going to arrange in his honor - but don't bother to, like, skype him in at all. There is a hashtag they're using to arrange the protest, #EveryoneWalksInOakland. Did anyone consult him about it? Why would they? On the first day he's back in school after his injury, the student body picks up his wheelchair and carries him up the rickety ramp in a grand sign of unity, and- like the number one don't do this for frequent wheelchair users is don't try to move them without permission. That's not even disability rights activisim level awareness, that's basic politeness awareness. Don't move people without consulting them! Especially if they're injured! As events unfold and get bigger, Reg fades in to the background, a cog in the wheel of fury his injury has unleashed. His biggest role near the end is a passioned thank you to Moss, which I will quote in full:

“Moss, you helped organize a protest when most people wouldn’t have done anything after I got hurt,” Reg said. “You supported me even after you lost Javier. You still cared about me. So don’t you dare say you failed us. You didn’t fail me!”

Because hot damn, for a book that's spends as much time condemning white allies or anything resembling white allies like, apparently, PoC women with white relatives, Moss sure gets a lot of people giving him ally cookies and attributing frankly weird amounts of credit to him. Okay, yes, Moss is involved in the protests about Reg. But he's not really the primary driver of them. The primary organizers are his mother and Reg's girlfriend. He's just the one who the book persists in giving the credit to, and hey, that seems like a gendered dynamic, what a good segue into the book's issues with women!

Because what really, seriously, truly made me absolutely fucking furious at this book was the misogyny of one particular storyline: Esperanza. Esperanza is Moss' best friend, a wealthy Latina lesbian who was adopted as an infant by white people. Esperanza adores Moss! Her favorite story is how he got his nickname as a child, she's endlessly good about helping him with his mental illness, she's always willing to be the one taking on the work of arranging their meetups, and Moss- Moss quietly, viciously, despises her. And the book doesn't even seem to realize it. Esperanza suggests an ice cream place and pays for his ice cream, it has too many white people and Moss spends the entire time mentally disparaging her for taking him to a place like that. Esperanza says she'd like to go to school with him and the rest of their friends, because she's lonely over at her white-majority school, and all he can think of is she's not good enough to handle it. Moss and Esperanza talk about their respective schools' college fairs, and she's a little tone deaf as she tries to understand why his is so bad and suggests he apply to the schools that didn't show up anyway, and he leaves in a snit of you don't deserve to have me tell you all about my awesome boyfriend when you ask and spends literal ages fuming about how she made the conversation about herself.

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Esperanza dares to be sad and shaken at Javier's death rather than furious and planning protests, and Moss and the rest of them act like her being sad and shaken is the equivalent of a puppy shitting on the rug, how dare she think she has the right to be sad and shaken. Esperanza's white ally parents turn out to have been the ones to tell the school about the walkout in their attempt to help, and basically Esperanza might just as well have murdered Javier herself. Esperanza humbly apologizes for her parents being racist and tells Moss that she'll shut up now and learn to listen, and shortly thereafter, despite the fact we're climbing up into the climax of the story, the other lesbian and the ace girl pause the action to have a discussion about what sexist jerks men are and how bad they are at listening to women say no. Moss establishes himself as the bestest male ally for thinking straight men are jerks, and wonders why Esperanza is standing awkwardly off to the side in silence. Moss has successfully browbeat a lesbian into feeling that she has less right to speak than him on issues that directly pertain to her and don't to him, and we haven't even hit the really offensive part.

Shortly thereafter, the protest erupts into violence. Esperanza is not spared from the violence, and Moss seems to quietly revel in that.

There was a large crack running down the right lens of Esperanza’s glasses. “Moss, what do we do?” she screamed. “Please, I don’t know what to do.”

The thought that crept into his mind felt so bitter. Maybe now she understands it.

and

“Moss?” It was Esperanza, but he couldn’t look, wouldn’t look at her. He heard her scramble over and she loomed into his sight.

“Are you okay?” The cop’s reaction was robotic. His foot shot out and he put the sole of his boot on Esperanza’s right shoulder and pushed as hard as he could. She slammed into the side of the van, and Moss heard the air knocked out of her. He looked up. Her glasses had fallen off her face and lay broken on the floor of the van. There was a sniffle. Kaisha was crying. So was Reg.

It’s over, Moss thought. It’s all over.

The door slammed shut and Esperanza regained her breath. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t talk,” Moss’s mother said, even and quiet. “Not a word, Esperanza.”

“I’m sorry I never understood … until now,” she said, and that got Moss to turn his head slightly, and he looked straight at her, saw the rawness and terror in her eyes, and he inclined his head. It was his way of saying: Now you know.

He watched her gasp for breath, watched her lean her head back, desperate for air, watched her cry openly. This was what it took. This was the line she had to cross. He didn’t know if it was enough.

And in the end, it works! Esperanza shows up at Moss' place the next day, crying and injured, and apologizes sincerely. His response? As for the first time in the book, he comforts her and nobly accepts her back into the fold? "I'm sorry you had to find out the hard way."

I feel like I just read a fucking domestic abuse storyline, with the actual violence necessary to put the woman in her place carefully offloaded onto bad people by the narrative so the protagonist can reap the benefits while keeping his hands clean. WOMEN DO NOT NEED TO EXACTLY SHARE YOUR OPINION ON THE OPPRESSION THEY FACE AS MUCH AS YOU DO IN ORDER TO NOT DESERVE A BEATING TO TEACH THEM A LESSON YOU MISOGYNIST SHITFUCK WHAT THE FUCK

...Ahem. This is not the only way the misogyny in this book shows up; there is a stark disparity in general between how women of color are treated by the narrative and how men of color are treated, and in how white women are treated versus how white men are treated. And what it all boils down to is this: Women's job is to direct men's anger productively. When it comes to white women, it comes down to they are being held disproportionately responsible for the violence of white men, until you start to wonder if the author even thinks that white men are capable of being violent without a white woman directing it. (For those who need to ask: they are.) When it comes to the WoC who surround Moss, the degree of responsibility his mother constantly bears in regards to monitoring his emotions and keeping him stable, and how much all the women are expected to drop everything and monitor his emotions when it comes to, well, anything. And Moss monitors the purity of the women around him's anger and judges them for a lack in a way that is...honestly, really feels like a vague underlying threat to me. Especially after the way Esperanza's storyline turned out. And that is really, really not something I wanted to read in a book that was being sold to me on its diversity and social justice.

Look. Police brutality is an important topic. Racism is an important topic. I wish I had something nicer to say about this book; I didn't think it was going to be a work of spectacular genius, but I was hoping for reasonable competency? And there were a few moments that were genuinely well done. But. I could maybe overlook

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Bury Your Gays

on its own, if the rest of the book were well done. I could maybe overlook the intensely ableist inspirational cripple story on its own, if the rest of the book were well done. I...okay, I could overlook at least some of the sexism, if it were well done. I'm going to be honest, the way the book treated women really creeped me out in a way that I have very rarely been creeped out by a book's sexism, but normally I do accept that books that are good on one axis may not be good on another and I am willing to deal with reasonable amounts of sexism if it's good on another. I could overlook the clumsiness of the writing, if the author had managed to make the characters reasonably likeable and the social justice issues reasonably well-handled.

But at some point, I have just give in: this book is a steaming dumpster fire.