NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) | After service one Sunday, little Greg Howard wandered past one of the church ladies, who was confiding to another nearby.
“It would kill his mama,” the woman said, “if she knew he was funny.”
The way she emphasized the last word, in reference to the perceived sexual sin of a little boy, made him tremble.
Howard’s mom, a dark-haired beauty queen from small-town South Carolina, was in the hospital. And she was dying.
Suddenly, Howard wondered if it was because he was gay.
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.
“I prayed every night for God to make me not gay,” he said. “I prayed for God to take it away.”
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.
“The Whispers,” the latest novel by the now 52-year-old Nashville author, is his acknowledgement of that. 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.
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.
Howard grew up in Georgetown, S.C., the third oldest city in the state and the ghost capital of the South. In the coastal factory town, everyone worked in one of the mills, either paper or steel.
As a boy, Howard would wander into the woods beyond the corn fields that stretched behind his house.
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.
He would create fantasy worlds filled with princes and princesses, hobbits and cowboys.
“It was this place where anything was possible,” he said. “I could make the world I wanted.”
His imagination also helped him fill in the parts of his life he couldn’t understand — particularly when it came to his mother.
She had cancer, a fast-moving lymphoma that killed her six months after she was diagnosed, at just 26 years old.
Her death was too much for a 5-year-old boy to comprehend.
“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?”
In Howard’s book, the main character, 11-year-old Riley, deals with his own tragedy.
Riley’s mother is missing, and with the police investigation stalled, Riley fears that he is somehow the prime suspect in her disappearance.
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.
That’s something Riley shares with the book’s author, too — discovering that he is gay.
For Howard, it was a secret. He grew up in a staunch Pentecostal family, one that attended church on Sunday morning, Sunday night and every Wednesday for prayer service.
Howard knew early on that he liked boys and not girls. But he never told a soul.
At church, they preached that being gay was unnatural and sinful. When he looked around, he didn’t see anyone like him.
He wasn’t bullied or called sissy. Instead, he says, “I felt kind of erased.”
“It was very lonely, just to know you can’t talk to anybody about who you really are. So I retreated. I created worlds in my head where I could feel accepted, like I could be myself.”
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.
At first, Riley thought it was just a bedtime story his mother used to tell him.
Then, one night, he heard them calling. “She’s here,” they told him.
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.
For Howard, it’s a tale of family, friendship and loss, filled with magic and heart.
He knows that, for some readers, the story line featuring a young boy discovering he is gay will be hard to accept.
Although 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.
He also knows that there are places where his book may be banned for its subject matter — possibly in the very places where he believes some teens need it most.
But he is willing to fight that fight.
“I hope to reach those kids who feel invisible,” he says. “To help them know that they matter. To help them see, through The Whispers, that they are okay just the way they are.”
