(courtesy Harper Collins Australia)
Unless you’ve grown in the church, it’s near impossible to fully appreciate just how all that corrosively twisted dogma can seep into your mind, heart and soul and turn your nice and healthy nascent humanity into something that looks like Eton Mess (a deliciously chaotic English dessert) that’s been dropped on the floor and stomped on with alacrity and not a little glee.
It’s not pretty and it’s not even remotely healthy and it means that perfectly normal and lovely things like realising that you’re gay suddenly take on a darkness and a threat posture that your fight-or-flight response – an evolutionary reality that, by the way, the church has no time for either, reality be damned – that can ruin otherwise wonderful things like falling in love with a guy you meet at a summer camp.
Some of you may have been spared a childhood in what is best described as a Christian asylum, but one person who most definitely has not, okay make that two, are the titular characters in Kevin Christopher Snipes’ beautifully realised tale of YA gay love and the ramifications therein and thereof, Milo and Marcos at the End of the World.
Not actually an apocalyptic tale, though it feels like that to the main characters figuratively, and much of the time literally, the book explores what happens to Milo Connolly when Marcos Price comes back to his sleepy Florida town and the two of them realise that the close friendship they built three years earlier at a camp where religious Milo and atheistic Marcos met, is actually something far more than that.
At some point Marcos and I will have to chose between our families and each other. And when that day comes, I realize [sic] I have no idea what I’ll do.
So much more than that, in fact, that what they realise they are both feeling, and in the glorious way of all good YA romances, it takes a lot of toing-and-froing and dancing around, to the unending frustration of Milo’s bestie, Van – she is exactly the sort of friend anyone needs – frank, fearless and a defender of those she cares without peer – it dawns on Milo at least (Marcos who has no time for the church is already well ahead of the realisation curve) that admitting he’s gay will mean the end of everything he’s ever known.
Goodbye to being the golden religious boy of the church he attends and farewell to his parents regarding him with unalloyed joy that he is one of God’s anointed.
And, quite likely, adios well and truly to the anonymity he’s built at school where no one really likes him, besides Van, but then no one hates him either; but come out, and boom!, all that will end and he’s become the prime target for all the bullies out there.
It’s not an appealing prospect when all your identity, security and certainty is tied up in the church and one that many millions of people who have fallen foul of the unrelenting expectations and unforgiving scorn of the church will be all too familiar with.
(courtesy official author site)
But as Milo and Marcos at the End of the World progresses and Milo realises he is very much in love, and yes a tremendous degree of lust too with the handsome, forthright Marcos, it becomes all too clear that sooner or later he’s going to have face the opprobrium of an institution that has no time for his dogma sullying ways.
While this great torment and anxiety of the soul is taking place, the town in which Milo and Marcos live is experiencing some weird phenomena – earthquakes, hailstorms out of seemingly clear, blue skies, meteors obliterating cars etc and while Marcos dismisses them as nothing more than freak occurrences, Milo, who’s always been of nervous disposition, becomes increasingly convinced that God doesn’t want he and Marcos to be an item, a thing, a couple.
Anything at all, really.
If Milo’s deeply entrenched anxiety which is married to almost hilariously over-the-top and highly imaginative seems way too much and not a little realistic, ponder on the fact, and again this ex-church reviewer can attest to this, that that runaway line of madness-inducing thought and nervousness stoking internal fearmongering is exactly how it feels.
The church runs on fear, is addicted to the stuff in fact, and so Milo’s unending fear, which frustrates Marcos no end, is exactly what would happen to someone in this young man’s position.
The heart might want what the heart wants but when you’ve been told ALL your life that it’ll damn you to hell and eternal torment, well, then, it’s very hard to silence that preposterously terrifying voice.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she [Van] says. ‘Call me if you need anything, okay?’
I nod.
‘And, Milo?’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s not going to be like this every day. I promise. Things will get better.’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
Yeah right.
Thankfully, while Snipes captures how loud and persistent the hateful voice of internal condemnation can be, and how it interpret things like natural disasters as some of deeply spiritual warning system, he also beautifully evokes how blissfully lovely it is to finally know who you really are and to act on it in a way that liberates your soul even as you continue to quake in your squeaky clean religious boots.
Reading as Milo and Marcos, the former particularly, embrace their true selves and what it will mean to them as individuals and as a couple in the years to come, is pure, unalloyed joy, as is Milo’s growing conviction, interrupted quite a few times by nervy attacks about whether God is out to get them, that he can either surrender to the unendingly negative and cataclysmic voices in his head or he can choose Marcos and the love they are and handle whatever consequences comes his way.
It’s a huge, gigantic fork in the road, and as Milo and Marcos come to grips with whether their grand, world-smashing love is worth defying everything and almost everyone they have ever known, Milo and Marcos at the End of the World becomes not just a statement on how the church sullies something quite beautiful and soul enhancing with its bigotry, but a rom-com-level grand affair for the ages which reminds us that love, real love, the kind with tenacity, emotional muscles and verve, can take on anything and win if only we will trust our selves and what we know, deep down, to be true.