There are ironic moments in pop culture that are gift-wrapped jokes for comedians and pundits. Newt Gingrich running on a family-values platform despite his Warren Jeffs-esque lifestyle; an anti-gay senator who just happens to know the perfect toe tap to find a play-pal in an airport bathroom stall. But it’s especially rich when a rapper who tells Playboy magazine “I don’t like gay people around me” during the height of the It Gets Better anti-bullying campaign decides to write a young-adult book about bullying.
But Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, is a consummate businessman with an estimated net worth of more than $100-million. And he publicly changed his tune about gays because he realized it’s no longer financially advisable to be homophobic, admitting that the LGBT audience and its supporters can now make or break an artist. Nice.
So although Jackson is most famous these days for barely decipherable tweets such as “Ok so are all women in capable [sic] of controlling there [sic] feelings?” he has penned a fairly decent, if predictable, young-adult novel. Most adults know that being picked on for a myriad of reasons (race, class, size) in a school setting means that some kids look at the options of being the victim or victimizer, and for survival choose the latter.
The narrator, nicknamed Butterball, is a loveable misfit underdog who, with the help of a social worker, learns to see the error of his bullying ways. He’s picked on for being fat and the new kid in a typically banal suburb. The author really nails the cruelty that most fat kids face from both their peers and adults. His father, whom he idolizes, is alternately cruel or indifferent to him. Butterball blames his mother for his unhappiness, for leaving his father and moving them away from the city to a suburb on Long Island, where she attends nursing school in an effort to make a better life for herself and her son.
From the moment that Butterball’s mom’s friend starts to pick him up from school, it was clear that she is his mother’s partner. We eventually discover that this is Butterball’s secret, and the reason he walked up to his former best friend and hit him in the face with a sock full of D batteries: His friend had figured out his mother’s Sapphic ways, and told him he was cool with it. But Butterball definitely wasn’t cool with it at all.
While Butterball eventually comes around to accepting his mom’s partner, Evelyn, he never actually confronts his homophobia or admits it. A lot goes unsaid. But when Evelyn moves in, and Butterball realizes that she is much more present and attentive to him than his father is, there is some begrudging acceptance. It is hard to say if this is just an accurate reflection of how a troubled 13-year-old boy would feel and act in the situation, or a way for the author to not really address it head on.
Said to be inspired by Jackson’s own life, though his own mother died when he was 8, Playground is well-structured and surprisingly not terrible. It’s difficult to switch genres, but Jackson pulls it off (presuming he did the work; there’s no mention of a ghost writer or special thanks to an editor). I imagine we will see a Disney film adaptation in the not-too-distant future. Playground will likely be enjoyable and potentially cathartic read for the junior-high set. And if a celebrity name gets kids reading and discussing these issues, then that is ultimately a really heartening thing.
I can’t help but note, however, that in a publishing climate where North American gay writers (who dare write about gay people) find it nearly impossible to find mainstream publishers, books such as Playground are a kind of cruel insult and an indicator that, while being “tolerant” is becoming a capitalist necessity, the playing field on the publishing playground is far from level.
Zoe Whittall is a Toronto poet and novelist. Her latest book is Holding Still for as Long as Possible.
