Genre: LGBT YA
Words: 80,000
Query:
In My Aim Is True, gay teenager Guy Dimchek details the sudden crack-up of his semi-happy, semi-celebrity parents. In 1970’s California, an extremist crusade overwhelms his family’s private crisis. Through it all, Guy struggles with his first sexual experiences and eventually finds first love.
My Aim Is True is not really a “coming-out” novel because Guy has already come out by his Confirmation Day, at least to himself. He is, though, coming of age almost faster than his young, attractive, ambitious parents. Left largely alone when his parents split up, Guy hopes to find his own, true way amid the Me-Decade hustle.
Bemused but observant, Guy stands apart from San Francisco’s promiscuity, gay and straight. Adults’ obsessions--self-help charlatans and cults of radical faith--provoke Guy’s distaste for delusion. All around him, extreme politics forecast 1978’s perfect tsunami: the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, Anita Bryant’s homophobic campaign, and gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk’s assassination at City Hall.
When his father becomes an accidental candidate for state office, trading on his fading Gold-Medal Olympic fame, the novice candidacy suffers the first strike of American anti-gay, “family values” cultural warfare. Compounding the conflict is Guy’s new stepmother, who opposes openness on the gay issue. The Dimchek family’s true values face the supreme test when the opposition—modeled on the 1978 anti-gay Briggs Initiative-- launches a covert attack on Guy, threatening both dirty tricks and physical violence.
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