Think Neil Patrick Harris or Sir Ian McKellan or maybe a pre-cancellation Ellen. Chances are the first few you thought of are white cis men who are either single or monogamous and largely scandal free. Think of a few high-profile LGBTQ+ celebrities. For that reason, Hunter’s Label keeps a particularly close eye on his public persona. Anyone can enjoy boybands, but there’s no question that their primary demographic is young straight girls.
There are a lot of openly gay celebrities out there these days, but Khorram deliberately puts his protagonist in a place where there still aren’t many of them: the modern boyband. It proves that Khorram isn’t a one-trick pony.Īt its heart, Kiss & Tell is about the commodification of queerness. Would someone who didn’t know these were written by the same author be able to tell immediately without being given clues? Maybe not, but that’s a good thing. Darius is more about Iranian culture with a minor sprinkling of queerness and Kiss & Tell is the opposite, mostly focused on queer issues but with an eye out for intersectionality and race. The emotional heart and complex interplay between internal self-worth and external validation are strong in both. Ultimately, though, they’re not so drastically different. On surface level, that’s clearly true, as the Darius books tell a very internal and culturally rooted story of a regular boy while Kiss and Tell follows a celebrity playing out his personal crises on the world stage. Hunter finds himself in a PR maelstrom, and his team quickly moves to rehabilitate his image to be more easily palatable to his primarily straight fanbase, including setting up a fresh, controlled romance for him.īefore reading Kiss & Tell, I’d seen some reviews that indicated that it is a significantly different book than either Darius the Great is Not Okay or Darius the Great Deserves Better.
They are about to kick off a national tour of the US when Hunter’s ex-boyfriend Aidan leaks some of Hunter’s old texts that reveal that their relationship wasn’t as chaste and G-rated as he-and more importantly, The Label-had previously acknowledged. Hunter Drake is a singer/songwriter in the gigantically popular Canadian boyband Kiss & Tell. I would’ve read Khorram’s newest book regardless of what it was about, but I was particularly excited by the premise of Kiss & Tell (I love books that touch on fandom, as I am a huge fangirl), and it did not disappoint. Is there anything better than one of your favorite writers releases a new book? Well, Adib Khorram-who wrote the brilliant Darius the Great is Not Okay- just published his new novel Kiss and Tell.
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