At least Jay's Gay Agenda ended my 2021 on a high

Welcome to: Another book that has been on Matthew’s radar for a while that he’s finally gotten around to reading. On today’s episode we will be talking about Jay’s Gay Agenda by Jason June. I don’t have anything that I immediately want to say, other than the cover of the book is really pretty, and I finished reading this literally on December 31^st 2021.

Our good Judy, The Blurb, says that there’s one thing Jay Collier knows for sure – he’s a statistical anomaly – because he’s the only gay kid in his rural Washington town. His friends can’t stop talking about their heterosexual hookups and relationships while he can only dream of his firsts that he hopes to experience one day, his gay agenda. Then his family moves to Seattle, which I assumed the book was going to be set in, given that the Space Needle is on the cover, and when the family is in Seattle, he can make a start on this agenda. Then it’s your standard, life doesn’t go according to plan.

Solid, from that, before I even started reading, I assumed it would be a sort of coming-of-age type deal. And also, given how the cover looks (with all the pages blown around this park) I did wonder if that meant that he (Jay) was going to end up in a relationship, but the person he was in a relationship with somehow found out about this agenda Jay has organised, and that would then be a source of conflict as the love interest would only think Jay was with them to cross these firsts off his list. That was my assumption, anyway.

We open on chapter zero, and all the chapters in this book have little subtitles. The first one is literally “Start a gay agenda” which was cute. But this first chapter opens on Jay telling us he realised he was gay at a Shawn Mendes concert, and then five pages in, Jay has come out to his best friend, Lu, his parents, his grandparents, and his entire school – this is the school in rural Washington by the way – and everything is fine, so, slay for him, I guess. Also, and maybe this is the rural Washington part of Jay, but his taste in celebrities is bland. Like, there’s Shawn Mendes, and the other one that gets mentioned is KJ Apa… Like are they both, objectively, attractive? I guess. But Jay, bestie, you have Instagram, and this might be my personal taste coming through, but find other celebrities.

I will say, despite Jay’s taste being as spicy as flour in chapter zero, I did like him, he seemed like a dork or a bit of a loser. He makes a lot of lists, including the aforementioned gay agenda of his, which ranges from literally just meeting another gay person to losing his virginity. But the thing that made me say he was a dork was that he referred to having sex as going to SexTown… And I mean… What was I meant to do with that information when I saw it on the page? Not think Jay was a dork? Here’s a quote I want to include from page 11 that supports my thinking in what Jay is like: “I face palmed, my hand hitting my forehead with just enough impact to make my swooped bangs whoosh with dramatic yet cute effect. Too bad my signature move was entirely wasted”. Now what is this? It’s loser behaviour. And honestly? That’s why I warmed to Jay so quickly, because of this dorky, loser-ish behaviour.

Anyway, by the end of chapter three, Jay has moved to Seattle, and by chapter four, Jay has had a decidedly uncool meet-cute with the love interest, Mr Man from the front cover, Albert Huang, when they literally crash into each other and Jay’s bag splits open. And then because this book was all about the slapstick comedy (until it, weirdly, just disappeared later in the book), Jay, later in the day, gets slapped in the face by a wet poster for his new school’s queer straight alliance (QSA), and Albert is there. But Jay basically gets commandeered by this other gay kid Max who takes Jay under his wing, pointing out who some of the other gays in the QSA are – Albert included – so Jay is in full internal slay mode. What I will say about Max is that, and I won’t spoil the reason why, he gives bad advice, straight up. The some of the advice he gives Jay was good. But some… Mary, garbage. Even with the garbage advice, and after I wrote my first draft, I realised I never gave my thoughts on the characters. They were solid! There were maybe a couple side characters I would have liked to have seen a little more of, but other than that? No complaints!

Anyways things remain on full slay-mode for Jay for the first 80 pages or so, he finds out, and becomes vice president for, I believe it was, the homecoming dance, or committee, in his new school. But he ends up going to his new apartment and Skyping best friend Lu, back where he used to live, and she tells him she’s excited for this hoedown that their town does every year, and it just happens to be on the same day as his new school’s homecoming, uh-oh, mess incoming.

Now, the first bit of the book that I wasn’t a fan off – and I want to say that this isn’t a negative for this book specifically, it applies to books in general. There’s one point where Albert is playing a game on his phone called “Digimals”, which is clearly just meant to be Pokemon Go, and I guess I can understand you making up a game for the sake of, maybe, copyright, but I’d much rather books just use the real names of games. Like, is Nintendo really going to sue, or give order a cease and desist over referencing a video game in a book? No. They might do if you based your entire book around their game, but just referencing it, surely that wouldn’t be a problem.

Now, throughout the whole book, since it is about Jay’s own version of the gay agenda, he does keep adding and taking bits off of it throughout the book. Like, when he meets Albert and has the instant crush on him, Albert gets added into it. However, when Max introduces him to this random hot guy, Tony, Jay is immediately like, “You know what? Why do I have to focus on one guy when there’s a whole,” and this is the phrase used in the book, “smorgasbord of gays…” And it was disappointing to see Jay like this, because I liked who he was more with Albert than with anyone else. Jay also literally writes out that he feels safer to be himself with Albert more than anyone else. But at the same time, I did understand it for Jay’s character, even if I didn’t really like it. Like I’ve just mentioned, he’s gone from zero gay interaction to gay overload, and since he’s so excited to finally have the chance to do all of these firsts for himself that his heterosexual counterparts from his hometown have all done, of course he’s going to focus on whichever route is the quickest.

It’s one of those things that, as someone who isn’t 18 (like Jay is), I obviously know better than him. There’s a moment, about halfway through the book, where Jay mentions that he’s been two weeks in Seattle, he’s surrounded by gay people, but not gay action. And it’s like I said, he’s so hyper-focused on just ticking off these items, when the reality of the matter is, even though all these straight people have already done this stuff, he shouldn’t be rushing them. However, I do understand that when you’re a teenager, these things do seem like the most important thing in the world, when, in reality, they’re not.

And a lot of the conflict in the book does surround the existence of Jay’s gay agenda he’s created for himself, and the fact he’s rushing to cross as much off of it as quick as he can is pretty much the reason. Like, the agenda does cause all the problems that leads to the conflict. In one case, things are getting bad for Lu back in Riverton (the town Jay moved from) in terms of her financial situation and her own relationship, and there’s one point where a paragraph ends with saying that if he chooses his gay agenda over her, he’ll end up breaking her heart. Things do also end up getting messy in Seattle as well, with the friends he’s making there, no surprise. I’m not going to spoil what happens, since this is a fairly recent book, but I’ll say that Jay ends up making some choices… Not great ones… and I’ll leave that there.

One thing I do want to mention is that I saw more negative review about this book before I started reading it that said that Jay starts sleeping around, and basically made out Jay to be a horrible person. So, I was expecting Jay to go full on slut-mode in this book, but he didn’t, and this “sleeping around” that he does is get caught between two guys (not in an Eiffel Tower way) whilst he’s trying to tick items of his gay agenda list. So, I wouldn’t agree with that review, or that Jay was a bad person. Did he do some bad things? Yes, but he was also 18, gay, and moved from a rural farm town to Seattle, so, it’s not exactly all that surprising when it comes to the why of what he does.

But I liked this book overall. There were a few bits that were, not eye roll moments, but like when Jay conveniently gets slapped in the face with the flying QSA poster near the beginning of the book. It’s those, “Oh look, it’s a convenient plot device” moments, but to be fair, I’ll hold my hands up and say that I’m guilty of using them as well. But saying that, I’d personally rather have a convenient plot device show up instead of the having book meander.

Okay, bye!