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Editorial: Author's teen novel offers hope for LGBT youth

A reformed man tangled in drugs and a murder web doesn't seem a likely candidate for a teenager's muse. But, perhaps, it's these free-living qualities that give author James St. James a more real, more visible appeal to the masses of youngsters he's attracted.
Now 40, he's shed his sinful-shroud, as he told Between The Lines in this week's issue, and overcame what many people never can – or never want to. In St. James' self-inspired second novel "Freak Show," he revisits his high school days through Billy Bloom, a lanky redhead whose rise-above teenage years are ones St. James wishes he could have reached sooner.
It's the same doctrine – this quasi-outsider Declaration of Independence – that his gaggle of teen fans (most of them outcasts, like the author was), who swarm his e-mail and MySpace inboxes, want to assign themselves to. Like the former Michigan resident, they want to be coiled in humanity, and immersed in love. St. James, through a book and a character that breaks barriers, is pledging that there is a fabulous world out there – it just sometimes takes a moment, or two, to get there.
In the mountain-moving inspirational story, he's standing up for a day when high school students can waltz into class in their Prada pumps and knee-high skirts, and hair that's as whimsical as the way they flutter their eyelashes, and say: "You ain't stopping me from running for homecoming queen – bitch."
LGBT high school students often feel a sense of isolation, of inferiority, of ultimate despair. Like a fly caught under a swatter, their feelings are trapped because they are not able – like St. James in high school – to be themselves. Though his memoir "Disco Bloodbath" recalls St. James' days of living on the edge as a loyal club kid (and the book-inspired film "Party Monster" became a lifeline for teens), his motivation for writing "Freak Show" was to reach out to his core fanbase without glorifying the drugs, the drinking, the debauchery.
St. James can't believe youngsters look up to him. But we can. The once-struggling author demonstrated a free-bird way of living. Though marred by irresponsible behavior, he became a prototype for living with wings in a country that doesn't always let us fly.
"(It was) that creative freedom we (St. James and friend Michael Alig) had in the way we lived and all of that is wonderful and ideal for young gay people," St. James told us.
He's a prime example of what teens need: Someone who's strong, who's fiercely fabulous and who can demonstrate to them that being real doesn't mean you can't be different. St. James might not have been able to achieve as much as Billy Bloom did, but through the book, let's hope the kids whose heels are on the verge of breaking can keep standing.

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