Hard enough to grow up gay in America—families hope that their child can be spared the hardships of being in a persecuted minority. But add to this the unique cultural tradition in the Philippines that is bayoquin: “Bayots are boys who want to be like girls, and girls only want to be with straight men.

Gay being with gay is wrong!” In a pervasively Roman Catholic theocracy where gays can at most “go to a rainbow” when they die, the challenges facing two boys growing up into a genuine, romantic couple are overwhelming. This story is a voice—one magnificently powerful and clear voice.

It is also a struggle—a myriad of them—to overcome blockades that would halt all but the most stubbornly determined. Seamlessly retreat into the heart, mind and eyes of James: grow with him and journey with him as he lives through major stages (in the first-person, present tense) of his life from the ages of thirteen to twenty-two.

An offbeat exotica begins to feel familiar as we are transported to his everyday life in this remote tropical wasteland. Only his undying courage and stoic defiance in refusing to accept the life already pre-ordained for him, fraught with cruel fault lines as he discovers, can save him from a spiral into endless prejudice, poverty and subordination.

At its conclusion, the story is a call for change—to reconsider the traditional mores that have governed and ultimately discounted the lives of this most visible minority group for generations, the mores our hero must disentangle himself (and his partner) from through a hard-fought college education and abandoning his rural past. .