"Am I Blue?" By Bruce Coville

     I read the short story "Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville recently. In this short story, a boy named Vince is continually getting bullied by a boy named Butch because Butch has decided that Vince is gay. Vince meets a man, Melvin, who says that he is Vince's fairy godfather and that he gets three wishes. When he talks with Melvin, he learns that Melvin was killed by gaybashers in an alleyway. This makes me think about how there are a bunch of stories of memorials for people killed in hate crimes against gays and many other things, such as being black or latino.
     In the story, Melvin tells him about one of the Three Great Gay Fantasies, which is that every one who is even partially gay or deciding turns a shade of blue that everyone can see. Vince uses one of his wishes to wish for this, for 24 hours, coast-to-coast.
     When people start to realize that being blue means being gay, reactions were, expectedly, mixed. Vince asks Melvin to turn Butch blue, but Melvin comes back and says that Butch is already blue. This sheds some light on Butch's reasons for beating up Vince. He was realizing that he was gay, so to prove that he wasn't and that he hated them, he beat up a guy that he thought could be gay.
     Bruce Coville blends realism and fantasy perfectly in this story, throwing real issues into a fictitious, and often humorous, setting. He puts a light air on a serious issue.
     The moral of "Am I Blue?" is that you shouldn't have to hide your sexuality from anyone, no matter if gay, straight, or otherwise, and that whether you like it or not, everyone is different in some way or another.. Everyone knows someone that's gay, whether you know so or not.