Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

Simon has been emailing another closeted classmate for months — funny, honest, slowly-becoming-something-more emails neither of them has signed with their real name. Then a classmate finds the emails and threatens to out Simon unless he helps engineer a setup with Simon's friend. What follows is not a story about the trauma of being gay — it's a story about the violation of having your private self exposed before you decided you were ready, on someone else's timeline, for someone else's leverage. Albertalli writes Simon's world with warmth, humor, and an insistence that being gay is not the plot's tragedy — the tragedy is having the choice taken away. The novel became Love, Simon, the first major studio film centered on a gay teen romance with wide theatrical release, and made some readers uncomfortable simply by depicting gay teen joy as ordinary. For the Be Yourself bundle, this is close to ideal: everyone has a Simon, a private self not yet ready to be shared, and the right to control your own coming out — your own timeline, your own narrative — is the authenticity the bundle is actually about.