He knows that, for some readers, the story line featuring a young boy discovering he is gay will be hard to accept.Īlthough much has changed since Howard's childhood - same-sex marriage is legal, pride parades march jubilantly down city streets - in the deep South, Howard knows pockets remain where kids who identify as gay or lesbian, transgender or queer are ridiculed and bullied.
So an adventure ensures as Riley sets out into the woods on a camping trip with his dog, his best friend, and his crush, Dylan Mathews, to find the Whispers.įor Howard, it's a tale of family, friendship and loss, filled with magic and heart. In the book, Riley finally decides to take the case of his missing mother into his own hands, turning to the Whispers - the magical wood creatures who could grant him his heart's desires.Īt first, Riley thought it was just a bedtime story his mother used to tell him. I created worlds in my head where I could feel accepted, like I could be myself." For the kids who feel 'invisible' "It was very lonely, just to know you can’t talk to anybody about who you really are. Instead, he says, "I felt kind of erased." When he looked around, he didn't see anyone like him. But he never told a soul.Īt church, they preached that being gay was unnatural and sinful. Howard knew early on that he liked boys and not girls. He grew up in a staunch Pentecostal family, one that attended church on Sunday morning, Sunday night and every Wednesday for prayer service. That's something Riley shares with the book's author, too - discovering that he is gay.įor Howard, it was a secret. He's desperate to find her and worries that his "condition," which led him to kiss a boy behind the coat cubby in first grade, might be the reason she's gone. Riley's mother is missing, and with the police investigation stalled, Riley fears that he is somehow the prime suspect in her disappearance. In Howard's book, the main character, 11-year-old Riley, deals with his own tragedy. "I would use my imagination to fill in the holes the adults weren’t filling in for me," he says. "What happened to her? Where did she go?" Feeling lonely and erased by a 'sinful' secret Her death was too much for a 5-year-old boy to comprehend. She had cancer, a fast-moving lymphoma that killed her six months after she was diagnosed, at just 26 years old. His imagination also helped him fill in the parts of his life he couldn't understand - particularly when it came to his mother. "It was this place where anything was possible," he said. "I could make the world I wanted."
He would create fantasy worlds filled with princes and princesses, hobbits and cowboys. Under the canopy of leaves, he would play hide-and-go-seek, build forts and dig tunnels, all the while hoping not to run into any of the gators that trolled the swamps nearby. In the coastal factory town, everyone worked in one of the mills, either paper or steel.Īs a boy, Howard would wander into the woods beyond the corn fields that stretched behind his house. Howard grew up in Georgetown, S.C., the third oldest city in the state and the ghost capital of the South. The woods where imagination made anything possible While few books for middle-school-level readers feature a young gay protagonist, Howard's personal story helps create a fictional narrative both realistic and relevant, while also calling on the fantastical magic of the imagination. An ode to Howard's real past, the coming-of-age story is set in the rural and religious South where a young boy is discovering who he truly is. "The Whispers," the latest novel by the now 52-year-old Nashville author, is his acknowledgement of that. When he finally came to accept himself, and absolve himself of responsibility for his mother's death, he knew he never wanted another boy to feel like he did - invisible, shameful, repressed.
"I prayed every night for God to make me not gay," he said. He struggled with the guilt of it for years, praying at his bedside as a boy and later sprawled across his blankets as a young college man.