Grieving The Loss of My Closeted Teen Self, a guest post by Robbie Couch

An internet friend of mine once tweeted: “Gay culture is being a teenager when you’re 30 because your teenage years were not yours to live.” 

The post quickly blew up. It sparked debates and drew backlash, as even the most benign takes tend to do once they’ve spun off into the distant corners of the internet. But mostly, the viral tweet earned praise by fellow LGBTQ+ users who felt seen by its assertion. “This,” they chimed in, signaling they could relate. I could too.

The “being a teenager when you’re 30” part of the tweet highlights the second adolescence queer people end up navigating well into adulthood because the closet deprived us of the many important milestones that our straight, cisgender peers had the privilege of fumbling through awkwardly at age fifteen—not twenty-five. Whether it be first kisses or first attempts at eyeliner, it’s not uncommon for LGBTQ+ people to feel like they’ve fallen behind the pack.    

But it’s the “not yours to live” part—the root cause of the need for a second adolescence—that especially hit home for me. In fact, it’s what inspired my new YA novel, Another First Chance, out May 28^th.

The book follows openly gay eighteen-year-old River—whose best friend, Dylan, died in a car accident a year before the story begins—as he enters a mysterious research study aimed at helping struggling teens. Flashbacks to the day Dylan died, told through the late teen’s perspective, capture an outwardly straight high school junior grappling with his sexuality behind the closet doors, and feeling as though he’s living his life for everyone else except himself. 

A life, Dylan feels, which is not his to live.

Grieving a lost loved one is a clear theme of Another First Chance. But it’s worth noting the less visible, but no less significant, form of grief that floats just beyond the pages of the book; the one that exists in the “what could have been” space between the maybe-more-than-just friends, had they both felt empowered to be who they are in the short time they had together.  

While it’s true that many (most? virtually all?) teenagers don’t feel as though they can be their truest selves for various, valid reasons, there’s a specific form of pain that us queer people who weren’t out in high school may carry with us long after the fear of rejection, judgment, and even violence had forced us to suppress crucial aspects of our identity. 

And that’s no fault of our own. Just look at the world around us, says Jesse Kahn, director and sex therapist at The Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York: “Homophobic and heteronormative, transphobic, and cisnormative narratives, as well as governmental policies and cultural norms in religion, families, schools, social spaces, laws, and various other institutions, all contribute to people suppressing or fearing their sexualities and sexual orientations.”

Fortunately, the tide has been turning. More LGBTQ+ youth are feeling comfortable coming out at earlier ages, and that’s a wonderful thing. But for the many queer kids who still can’t—and for the LGBTQ+ adults who couldn’t—I don’t think we recognize the loss caused by that suppression nearly enough. It’s a loss worth grieving, though, I’ve come to realize. 

My childhood was a closeted one, but a good one, all the same. I had great friends and a loving family, not to mention a reliable roof over my head and three meals a day. Awareness of those privileges left me hesitant to process the loss of openly gay thirteen, fifteen, or seventeen-year-old Robbie—a Robbie who wouldn’t have needed to hide his love of Mariah Carey songs, or monitor his “gay voice” in the locker room, or dance with a cute boy at prom without it becoming a Whole Big Thing.

I’d had it good, for the most part. What did I have to complain about?

But I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors by downplaying what our warped world stole from us by trapping us in the closet during our most formative years. At least I wasn’t. That’s why I chose to mourn out-and-proud high school Robbie—so that, ironically, he could live on. 

As the cliché goes, we never really lose the people we love; we carry them along for the rest of our journeys, their impact shaping who we are in ways both big and small. I needed to grieve the loss of openly gay high school Robbie in order to realize that he’s still within me, celebrating the person we’ve become today. I hope all LGBTQ+ adults who were robbed of being their authentic younger selves do the same.

It may seem as though Dylan will never get that opportunity. But that’s the magic of speculative YA fiction—he could end up getting Another First Chance at love, after all. 

Meet the author

Robbie Couch writes young-adult fiction. If I See You Again Tomorrow, his New York Times bestselling third novel, received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. Robbie’s debut, The Sky Blues, was a Barnes & Noble Young-Adult Book of the Year finalist and Junior Library Guild selection. Robbie is originally from small-town Michigan and lives in Los Angeles. 

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About Another First Chance

They Both Die at the End meets You’ve Reached Sam, in this heart-stopping speculative young adult novel from New York Times bestselling author Robbie Couch that explores all the different ways love can live on after tragedy.

It’s been a year since eighteen-year-old River Lang’s best friend died in a car accident. And every day since, he’s had to pass by the depressing billboard that appeared as a result: a texting and driving PSA that reduces Dylan to a cautionary tale and River to the best friend of the dead kid at school. Dylan was so much more than a statistic, though, and River hates that everyone in town seems to have forgotten.

When he’s caught improving (a.k.a. vandalizing) Dylan’s billboard, River is blackmailed into joining the Affinity Trials—a research study that’s observing teens who are “struggling socially.” But as soon as he arrives, River’s social struggles only worsen as he’s thrown together with the last person he wants to spend an entire week with: his ex-best friend and Dylan’s former girlfriend, Mavis, who’s the only one who knows the truth about the night Dylan died.

During the Trials, River befriends a charming quarterback named Nash, and it doesn’t take long for romantic feelings to start bubbling to the surface.But so do bizarre developments within the Trials that make him wonder what researchers are actually studying while monitoring his every move. And when suspicions lead him to a bombshell discovery, River will have to decide just how far he’s willing to go for another chance at first love.

ISBN-13: 9781665935302
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date: 05/28/2024
Age Range: 12 – 18 Years

Filed under: Guest Post