The story follows two teenage boys, Harry and Craig, as they try to break the world record for the longest kiss (a thing which actually happened in the real world), a transgender boy named Avery who begins to fall in love for the first time with a boy named Ryan, and Cooper, a teenager who is violently outed by his parents and finds himself in a place familiar to a lot of LGBT kids with unsupportive families. I adore this book I own two copies-one kindly autographed for me by the author and another with copious amounts of notes for the eventual production-and have bought several more for friends. I remember reading it in my neighborhood coffee shop in Austin and being moved to tears multiple times.
This is the brilliance of the New York Times bestselling author of the source material, David Levithan, and if you haven’t read the book already, you should rundon’twalk to your local library and check it out. That idea-a Greek chorus of gay men who lost their lives during the AIDS crisis-seemed so simple and elegant that I couldn’t believe that I hadn't heard of a story being told in that way before. When I was first asked by the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus to adapt a 2013 book called Two Boys Kissing, I sat down to read it and was stunned at how beautiful the framing device worked in terms of compellingly telling the stories of the various boys in the story.
