Queer self-acceptance

Queer self-acceptance is a central process in Colton Davidson’s life: he moves from fearing that his attraction to men makes him irredeemable to recognizing his identity and allowing it to belong to him. The novel makes that change inseparable from the pressure of his religious upbringing, the harm inflicted by adults who claim to correct him, and the care he finds in relationships that do not demand his self-erasure.

Identity and the Inherited Ideal

Colton’s fear of being gay begins in a home where family life offers little warmth and marriage appears less like a promise than a sentence. He dreads repeating the unhappy pattern he sees between his parents, and imagines that avoiding sexual desire might keep him from marrying and becoming a husband like his father. That attempt to escape a prescribed future is shaped by the same ideal that makes him fear himself: he has been taught that a man’s proper purpose is to marry a woman and raise a family.

In adolescence, attraction to Ronnie Baker makes that ideal impossible to maintain. Colton’s realization brings shame and a desperate wish for his feelings to disappear; he interprets being gay as incompatible with both his faith and his hopes of living a good life. His struggle is not simply uncertainty about a label. He fears that acknowledging his desire will condemn him, and that his identity will cost him the future and family he has been told to want.

Naming Himself After Harm

When Colton is living on the streets and washing in a juvenile detention center, the word gay comes to him as both painful and clarifying. He recognizes that it is the truth of his experience and stops trying to deny it, even though saying it does not make the fear or consequences vanish. The moment marks a change in self-understanding, not a sudden recovery: he is still vulnerable, without a secure home, and uncertain what help will demand of him.

Colton later tells Amit that he is Mormon, but doubts that his family or religious community would want him as he is. He cannot yet say confidently what he is; he explains that he had always known he was different, tried to hide it, and was caught. When Amit offers space to speak, Colton decides that he wants to tell the story. That choice matters because disclosure is no longer only something forced from him: with someone willing to listen, he can choose to begin describing what happened.

The consequences of his parents’ response become explicit when Colton tells Marcel that they sent him to Father Benson’s conversion camp after discovering he was gay. Colton says he ran away because the experience was increasingly painful and he feared he might die. He was then apprehended for vagrancy and sent to Ted House. His account connects the rejection of his identity to homelessness and institutional intervention, while making clear that leaving the camp was an act of self-preservation. The camp’s attempt to change him does not define his identity; his decision to flee preserves the possibility of a future beyond it.

Support Without Erasure

At Ted House, Kimball describes the residents as young people who deserved better and points to Sage and Derek, who helped build a place informed by their own experience. Colton arrives distrustful, aware that he is not whole, and uncertain whether he can accept the help offered. In the House’s community, however, his past is not treated as a secret he must keep hidden. He comes to feel permitted to be fragile, to develop into the person he will become, and to exist without apologizing for having been born as he is.

That support does not erase Colton’s wish to be more than someone continually rescued. When he worries about vulnerable animals, he says he wants someday to be the person doing the rescuing. Sage’s example—that the money supporting the House came from his own work, while his father’s money helped other young people—offers a model of agency alongside care. Colton comes to understand that he has lost his faith and family yet found himself. Self-acceptance here is not a claim that every loss has been repaired; it is the possibility of embracing himself without pretending those losses do not matter.

Colton’s recurring visits to Ruby’s show how that possibility develops unevenly. He goes to the bar to feel removed from the good Mormon boy he was supposed to be, while remaining afraid of sin and of living openly as a gay man. Ruby lets him sit with that conflict and gives him a Shirley Temple rather than alcohol. She calls Will, who welcomes Colton into the kitchen to make gulab jamun; Sage later collects him. Colton runs away four more times, and each time Ruby’s and Will’s kitchen provide a temporary route back to the people responsible for him. He is not punished with violence, though Sage’s disappointment troubles him. The pattern shows both his continued distress and the presence of adults who respond with connection rather than the coercion he has known.

Faith, Friendship, and Adult Possibility

Colton’s relationship with faith becomes more complicated than a simple rejection of everything he learned. He tells Marcel that religion was not for him, but that he still values kindness, doing things for others, and having faith in something. In the same conversation, he admits that he has faith Jason will not always be difficult. Marcel, in turn, speaks of faith in the possibility that they could be friends despite his own mistakes. Colton answers that they are something like friends. The exchange places trust in particular people alongside the loss of institutional and familial certainty: faith can survive as a chosen relation rather than obedience to a framework that condemned him.

Friendship does not instantly remove the practical limits on Colton’s choices. When he is denied financial aid for veterinary school, he learns that he does not qualify as independent because his parents have not legally lost custody, so their income is counted against him despite his time in foster care. He is overwhelmed by the decision, and a burst pipe then damages his apartment, leaving him with little more than a few belongings and the clothes he had kept for emergencies. The school’s requirement and his housing crisis intensify the vulnerability that accompanies his effort to build an adult life.

Colton resists asking Sage and the others to solve the aid problem. He is tired of relying on people for his job, housing, transportation, and even his temporary place to stay. Marcel answers that Colton is staying with him because they are friends, not because he pities him. Their roles are not identical: Marcel recalls having nowhere to go after his boyfriend betrayed him, while Colton’s dependence has accumulated through foster care, limited resources, and earlier rejection. But Marcel’s response contests the idea that accepting a friend’s offer makes Colton merely a burden.

When Colton later tells Derek that he has a problem but does not want help with it yet, Derek respects his wish to work things out while sharing that his own path to independence was difficult. He does not dismiss Colton’s need to stand on his own; he offers the assurance that the community will be there if Colton falls. Colton’s panic recedes as he recognizes that a setback will not leave him alone for the rest of his life. His hope that he can become more than his present circumstances is grounded in both personal effort and the knowledge that support remains available.

Being Loved as He Is

Colton’s self-acceptance also takes shape inside his relationship with Marcel, where the age difference and Colton’s insecurity about work and temperament become things he can name rather than reasons he must be rejected. He describes himself as hyper, nervous, much younger, and working at a café. Marcel responds by affirming those very qualities, including Colton’s love of stray dogs and the small domestic detail of folding his socks. The reassurance does not make their differences disappear; it tells Colton that being loved does not depend on performing an older, steadier, or more conventionally successful self.

By the time Colton is nearly twenty, he has his own place, is saving for a car, and has an accepted college application, with six weeks remaining before his start date. These concrete signs of a future stand beside the fear that life may also be ending in some former sense. Queer self-acceptance remains a process rather than a completed cure: Colton carries trauma, financial constraints, uncertainty, and the loss of family and faith. Yet he no longer treats his identity as the unforgivable fact that must be erased. He is learning to choose what he believes, speak when he is ready, accept care without surrendering agency, and imagine a life in which being gay and being fully himself are not opposing possibilities.