Title: Blackbird Author: Larry Duplechan Published by: St. Martin's Press, 1986 ISBN: 0-312-08340-8 [hardcover, 182 pages]
"No way is a black boy, never mind a gay black boy, going to get to play Romeo in this high school's senior play," thinks Johnnie Ray Rousseau as he fidgets in Drama class. Still the news that he doesn't get the part hits him like a body blow. In retrospect it seems fitting, almost like an opening bell ringing in the most intense few weeks of life Johnnie Ray had ever experienced. For it was the month that Todd Waterson, high-school hero and all-around hunk, got Leslie Crandall, the Baptist minister's daughter, pregnant, a scandal to be hushed up when Leslie is sent away, triggering a real-life (and that means dangerous) version of Romeo and Juliet. The month sweet Cherie Baker, Johnnie Ray's girl all through high school, decided the time had come for them to make love. The month his best friend, Efrem Zimbalist Johnson, was beaten so badly by his father he had to be hospitalized. The month he tried out for a play at the local junior college, a play about sex and violence in prison, the play in which he met Marshall MacNeill, surely the sexiest man ever to walk God's good earth. And, of course, the month of his exorcism. All in all, a month to remember.
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