book cover, Susan and Daniel Cohen, 1989
This book was aimed at high school students, and the advice that it offers is a series of straightforward questions and answers intended to help the friends of gay teens accept and understand their friends. I’m curious as to who the realistic target audience of this book might have been, considering the level of misinformation and xenophobia that is assumed of the reader. Would students so prejudiced bother with buying such a book or would they simply reject their gay peers outright? My hunch (confirmed by the back cover’s promotional blurb) is that though the book’s title claims to address a straight audience, it was actually also directed at gay teens themselves and intended to support and arm them with information and pre-crafted responses to probing questions. Several of the chapters are highly anecdotal, offering (fictional?) tale after tale of various gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered teens whose experiences are supposed to shed some light on the challenges of being gay in high school.
As for the visual elements of the book jacket (the only place where images appear,) the red question mark at the top of the page acknowledges the delicacy and uncertainty readers may feel when approaching this subject. The converging hands however lend a sense of community and acceptance. The title’s tubular, back-shadowed, and colorful typeface is oddly whimsical considering the tone and topic of the rest of the book, perhaps an attempt at normalization or optimism, and an appeal to the teenage audience. It’s also notable that the word “GAY” appears in not only larger, more dramatic upper case lettering, but also in a slightly different typeface. There is no doubt what the main issue of the book will be, it will be GAY people, there’s no attempt to conceal that. Quite the contrary, the cover design celebrates its subject matter with a pink triangle shooting out from the “A” in GAY as the most prominent visual element on the cover. Another somewhat interesting design choice is the impression that the central wording is pasted either on top of or beneath the black cutout portions which boast tiny doodled faces of (presumably gay) men and women smiling and laughing. It’s a book cover that both embraces its subject matter and then hesitates and falters in expressing this enthusiasm, a visual representation that is likely representative of the increasingly accepting yet still cautions reception of gay teens in the late eighties and early nineties.
No comments:
Post a Comment