I try to escape into my phone, but my notifications are once again flooded with questions about … the astronauts. I want … I don’t know what I want-to not feel helpless when they’re like this.

I slam the door to make my presence known, but it doesn’t fix things, it doesn’t stop them. “A frown falls over my face almost instantly. With his pilot/aeronautical engineer dad Calvin Sr suddenly accepted into NASA’s mission to Mars program known as Orpheus, and so quickly that in one disruptive weekend Calvin’s life is completely upended, Calvin has no choice but to go with his father and mother to Clear Lake, Texas, a Sixties retro-styled community in which all twenty members of the audacious bid to go to the red planet live in a heavily media-covered community. Part of this welcome new wave of queer storytelling is The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper, a YA novel that explores what happens when one displaced young man, aspiring seventeen-year-old journalist Calvin, finally finds his sense of belonging with a person he never expected in a place thousands of miles away from the place he has always called home.

This has been well and truly rectified in recent years as an increasing number of queer creators pour their lives into their books, movies and TV shows, partly as a way of contributing to a much-needed diversity in storytelling, but also to tell the kinds of stories they wish they had been exposed to in their formative years.

It meant that as they struggled, and this reviewer is very much counted in that number, struggled to come to grips with their sexuality in a society that consistently told them, in ways big and small, that what they intrinsically were was wrong, perverted and desperately uncommon, there were no cultural touchstones with which to orient themselves, to process what they were feeling and, quite rightly, reach the point where they could accept who they were and what they were feeling as entirely normal. Something that LGBTQIA+ people of a certain age accepted, reluctantly it is best to add and with great disappointment, was that, growing up, they were likely to never see people like them reflected in grand and epic love stories on TV, and in movies and books.

The gravity of us by phil stamper