Secret Matter

Toby Johnson

Completed 2/17/2018, Reviewed 2/17/2018

4 stars

This was a fun book.  It’s about acceptance and denial, love and fear, and first contact.  It was first published in 1990 and described a gay young man’s journey to self-acceptance through a relationship with an alien.  Since it was a near future story, the author updated the book for the twenty-first century.  It won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay SF/Fantasy in 1991.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book even though the beginning seemed to drag a little.

The story is about Kevin, a gay young man who is living in denial.  Fresh out of college and from a religious family, he gets an internship at an architectural firm in San Francisco to help rebuild after the big one (as in earthquake).  Then the Visitors come.  The Visitors contract with Kevin’s firm to build their embassy on Earth.  Kevin meets ‘Bel, one of the Visitors, and falls in love.  Together, they must save their worlds from destruction by clearing up a misunderstood secret matter.

The part that dragged for me was the first few chapters with Kevin.  There, we experience Kevin’s self-loathing over being gay.  It gets old pretty quickly.  I just wanted to slap him and say, “Wake up!  You’re an adult now.  It’s time you figured this shit out.”  Maybe I’m just a little less patient with this in fiction than I would be in real life.  Then Kevin meets ‘Bel and he finally starts to accept himself.  That finally gets the book going and we can get on with the plot.

The rest of the book is a fun first contact story about alien Visitors coming to Earth.  They try to stop the US from testing a new defense shield, but for some reason, won’t be completely honest of their intentions.  This leads to a breakdown in relations between the US and the Visitors.  Then it’s up to Kevin and ‘Bel to resolve the matter. 

The book is fairly light reading.  It’s a short, easy read, except when they get into the physics.  That takes a little effort.  But this is basically soft SF.  It also gets a little heavy into religion.  There’s a born again right wing pastor with a radio program that spews hate talk.  He comes into play at several points in the book, but particularly in the end. That also gets a little heavy but it’s not too much. 

It should be noted that the author, Toby Johnson, was an editor for the White Crane Journal, a gay men’s spirituality newsletter that I subscribed to in the late ‘80’s.  It was a wonderful journal of interesting articles and ruminations on what it meant to be gay and have spirituality.  So needless to say, a novel by Toby Johnson would probably have a fair amount of interesting reflections about the Bible in it.  In fact, the latest edition of the book has a bonus essay that’s an alternative Genesis story playing on “Adam and Steve” and turning it into something funny and though-provoking. 

Even with its slow beginning, it’s an exciting adventure story.  And there’s an innocence to the book which is refreshing to read compared to the darker, grittier SF of today, almost YA in tone.  I give the book four out of five stars.