The Boys on the Rock

The Boys on the Rock
	1984 hardcover edition cover
Author	John Fox
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	St Martins Press (hardcover) ; St Martins Griffin (paperback)
Publication date	1984 (hardcover) ; 1994 (paperback)
Pages	146 pages (hardcover) ; 160 pages (paperback)
ISBN	0-312-09419-1
OCLC	10274692
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 Fic 19
LC Class	PS3556.O934 B6 1984

The Boys on the Rock is a short debut novel by John Fox which details the coming out and falling in love of a gay sixteen-year-old swimmer, nomine Billy Connors, who narrates the story in the first person. It is notable as perhaps the first novel ever to blend politics with the travails of a gay adolescent.

Plot

Set in the Bronx against the historical backdrop of United States Senator Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic presidential candidate for the 1968 elections, the novel focuses on Connors's "rocky relationship that fared no better than McCarthy's campaign", in the words of critic Wayne Hoffman (author of the novel Hard), who described it in The Washington Post as a "classic".[1]

Reception

Kirkus Reviews called it "a slight first novel with an uneasy blend of graphic sex, a faux-naif Y A tone, and gay-pride preachiness." and found it "Occasionally sharp in its place/time specifics, but otherwise a juvenile debut--both punkily narcissistic and sloppily sentimental."[2] while Trevor Sydney said that "Fox's only novel remains a compelling Bildungsroman."[3]

Influence Overseas

The Boys on the Rock has been described as "A watershed in the history of the translation of queer literature into Japanese...". Its translation "was subsequently followed by a large number of translations of novels about queer desire - more specifically about gay men in the West."[4]

Editions

1994 Stonewall Inn papeback edition

The popularity of Boys on the Rock is evidenced in the substantial quantity of editions to which it ran, having first been published in 1984 by St. Martin's Press in New York.

A Stonewall Inn paperback edition was published in 1994 by St. Martin Griffin.

References

Hoffman, Wayne. "Gay New World." The Washington Post, 11 October 2006: C9.

Hoffman 2006.
"The Boys on the Rocks". Kirkus Media LLC. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed. (2009). Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States. ABC-CLIO. pp. 226, 227. ISBN 9780313348600. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
Jeffrey Angles (2015). by Beverley Curran, Nana Sato-Rossberg, Kikuko Tanabe (eds.). Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan. Routledge. pp. 101–108. ISBN 9781317567059.CS1 maint: uses editors parameter (link)

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[1] Hoffman 2006.

[2] "The Boys on the Rocks". Kirkus Media LLC. Retrieved 28 May 2015.

[3] Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed. (2009). Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States. ABC-CLIO. pp. 226, 227. ISBN 9780313348600. Retrieved 28 May 2015.

[4] Jeffrey Angles (2015). by Beverley Curran, Nana Sato-Rossberg, Kikuko Tanabe (eds.). Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan. Routledge. pp. 101–108. ISBN 9781317567059.CS1 maint: uses editors parameter (link)