I grew up, by virtue of gay friends and family members, bonded to the gay community. I was often the only straight girl in the room. Emphasis on straight girl. Now that I'm writing YA, I still feel like I have that taped to my chest like a name tag. I'm not generally forthcoming about my personal life in this respect—for complicated reasons, I would no longer call myself, in any situation, the only straight girl in the room—but I am very clearly not a gay male, and many of my books, particularly by 2012 love story GONE, [...]

by Rachel Caine When I was growing up, I was sheltered. Really sheltered. I still remember the first book I read that had a different kind of sexual experience in it: Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, which featured aliens whose sexuality could, and did, change from male to female and back again. It was a shocking, exciting read for me at sixteen, and although it didn't so much deal with themes of homosexuality, it certainly broke free completely of the restraints of the world I'd always known, in which sexuality was a fixed constant. And I [...]

Once when I was discussing my book, The Secret Year, with a book group, a reader asked me why one of the secondary characters had to be gay. As it happens, that character’s coming out was the perfect subplot for a book about secrecy. Coming out is a move from secrecy to openness, from isolation to community. Secrecy doesn’t ever seem to have made anyone straight, but it’s made a lot of people suffer. In The Secret Year, coming out is ultimately a move toward honesty, self-confidence, and happiness. The main character’s secrecy isn’t about sexual orientation, but [...]

We were both really pleased to be asked to write a blog post for Gay in YA and we decided that what we most wanted to talk about were our favorite books.  There are many wonderful novels for teens and adolescents with GLBT characters, but if you are a fan of fantasy and the paranormal -- as we are -- the pickings are slightly more limited.  With every year, there are more offerings, but there are also older titles that we come back to again and again. We selected mostly books published as YA to discuss, along with [...]

We interrupt this program to bring you... a chance to add your voice to the conversation! I hope you have been enjoying our fabulous bloggers thus far. We have been honored and astounded by the outpouring of support from authors and readers alike. Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Our "Gay in YA" blogathon will be wrapping up at the end of the week. We are thrilled to say that we will be able to continue featuring some incredible authors and bloggers throughout the next several weeks, and we have decided that [...]

Scott Tracey is the author of WITCH EYES, a modern, gay Romeo & Juliet with witches, coming in September.  He can be found on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/#!/scott_tracey and his blog at http://www.scott-tracey.com. When I started fleshing out the idea behind WITCH EYES - back when it was just a concept rather than a story, I knew I wanted it to be different.  I read a lot of urban fantasy/paranormal, so I knew that's what I wanted to write.  As a reader, there were a lot of great books, but there weren't a lot of books that would speak [...]

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of numerous books including Pay it Forward and the upcoming Don't Let Me Go. She can be found at her website or tweeting under @cryanhyde. As recently as the 90s, when my first novel saw print, things were different in LGBT publishing. Authors worried about the positioning of books that contained LGBT characters. No one wanted publishers to perceive their books as being only for the niche “gay market” instead of the wider mainstream one. Authors always felt their work had that indefinable “broader appeal,” and didn’t want to be put into [...]

Tiffany Trent writes dark YA fantasy and can be found online at tiffanytrent.com I find it so odd—all the buzz of including or not including gay characters in YA. To me, the fact that any of my characters at any moment are gay is a given. I don’t have to work to include them or sit and decide that one of them will be gay. Some of them are; some of them aren’t. These are the facts. I’m always delighted whenever a character shows him or herself to be LGBTQ, and I work very hard to make sure that [...]

Small intro: Ana Grilo is a geek and a book smuggler. You can find her, along with Thea James, blogging at www.thebooksmugglers.com and on twitter @booksmugglers I was ecstatic when we were invited to take part of the Gay YA blogathon: it is a worthy cause and we love to be part of worthy causes. Then it came the part where I had to decide which book to review. All I knew is that I wanted to review a book where the main character was gay and although there are a good number of YA LGBT stories being [...]

by Debra Touchette I’m a straight, white woman. Plenty of books cater to me, reflect me, although, if I’m being honest with myself, most were written around 1900. Old fashioned is one of the nice things people have called me. I’m single and over 30, a former teacher, an assistant librarian (with the black framed glasses) and graduate student. (Spinster is the other name I get, but what evs.) Like I said, there are plenty of books geared towards me. But here’s the thing. Not everyone is like me. It’s shocking, I know, but true, and it’s my [...]