“You need to be strong enough to get to the heart of something,” Raziel Reid states, matter-of-factly.
Strong does not even begin to tell the story of the 25-year-old Vancouver writer, and his debut novel, When Everything Feels Like The Movies.
Equal parts captivating, heart-breaking and eye-opening, the novel exposes the chasm between millennials and every generation before them.
Reid’s vision wasn’t always so grand. He set out to write a version of the quintessential coming-of-age tale, but of a gay teenager, something he says wasn’t available to him.
“I had no understanding of gay sex, but I had porn. I was a reader and really craved truth,” he explains. “Something like this would have made me braver and more confident, so I wanted teens to feel like they had a stake in it.”
When Everything Feels Like The Movies is the story of Jude, a 15-year-old boy growing up in small town Canada. It should be that simple. Delving deeper, it is the story of an effeminate, flamboyant, gay teen relentlessly harassed, bullied and beaten, who narrates his journey through a daily hell of misguided parenting and lack of community and acceptance, all under the guise of a forever rolling, invisible camera.
Jude’s starring role in the movie of his life is his only method of surviving the cruel, tiny world we call youth.
“Dreaming is like breathing for him,” Reid explains. “It’s essential. For me, too.”
It is that dreaming, that imagining outside of the proverbial box that drove Reid to create Jude in the first place. A voice not unlike his own, Jude “is a symbol for gay kids” and despite his, some would say, inevitable demise, “Jude himself had to be the positive message throughout the book” because just as in real life, endings aren’t always happy ones.
Reid’s work was inspired by the real life story of Larry King, a California teenager gunned down in the “safety” of his own high school after asking a male classmate to be his valentine.
There has been no shortage of accolades for the young adult novel, nor controversy. A petition to rescind Reid’s Governor General’s Award has been met with a second place finish on CBC Canada Reads (after an impassioned defending by Elanie Lui) as well as Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award nominations.
“I think it comes down to what is considered gender normative,” Reid says of the controversy surrounding his book. “People have issues with a boy that is feminine, and that is almost rooted in misogyny. I grew up with depictions of hetero-normative love stories and can be affected by them. Why can’t they feel the same about homosexual representations of love?”
Of the attacks on the book’s sexual content, Reid simply says he is depicting a culture, not promoting it.
“These kids have little shock value anymore, there are so desensitized to these terms, sometimes as a result of technology and a life lived behind screens,” he says.
Powerful words for a first time writer, whose title has been picked up by Little, Brown Book Group in the UK, and will next focus on the film adaptation of When Everything Feels Like The Movies with Random Bench Productions. Reid says he looks forward to “keeping the truth of the story, but showing it in a different way.”
“This story was always a script, so making this film is a natural evolution of Jude’s own unique entity.”
