Openly Straight is a beautiful journey of self-discovery told on a completely new level.

The catch is…Ben has no idea about his potential boyfriend status. The story soon turns into a gripping and emotional train wreck you know is about to happen but you just can’t look away from when Rafe finds a best friend and potential boyfriend. But through a writing exercise set by his English teacher - the only person at Natick who knows Rafe’s secret – he begins to wonder if labels aren’t a part of us for a reason. Rafe relishes in being allowed to be a jock and being treated normally in the locker room. Rafe is immediately taken in by the jocks for his soccer abilities and on his first day finds himself with the very thing he was trying to avoid – a label. Hoping to find a new identity as just Rafe and not just ‘that gay kid’, Openly Straight is the story of Rafe’s decision to move from accepting Boulder, to an all boys boarding school on the other side of the country and attempt to live a life without labels. And most importantly, nobody in Natick knows that Rafe is gay.

Natick, Massachusetts is the kind of place where boys wear polo shirts, attend boarding school and claim to be accepting but are secretly afraid of anything different. Boulder, Colorado is the kind of place where people do naked yoga, drink hemp milkshakes, and parents throw their tween children coming-out parties.

Openly straight by bill konigsberg