YA Pride

New Releases: May 2015.

By Nadia|2020-03-28T13:41:38-05:00May 29th, 2015|Categories: Archive, New Releases|Tags: Fantasy, LGBTQIA, New Releases, Queer Girls, Queer Guys, Realistic|

May 1st (USA) Flesh and Bone (Luminis Books, 2015) Flesh and Bone by William Alton — (G,Q) Goodreads Summary: "A literary novel for young adults that deals with a despairing teen uncertain about his sexual preferences who turns to drugs, alcohol, and unreliable friends for solace. Told in a series of images and fragments, Flesh and Bone is a raw and real portrayal of a teen struggling to find love in his life. When Bill’s father leaves and he and his mother move far away to live with her parents, his whole world implodes. His grandparents [...]

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Review: Hold Still by Nina LaCour

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:41:39-05:00May 29th, 2015|Categories: Archive, Book Review|Tags: Minor Characters, Queer Girls, Realistic|

reviewed by Marie Hagen of MarietheLibrarian Hold Still by Nina Lacour Hold Still | Nina LaCour | 231 pages | Paperback | With illustrations Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Realistic fiction Themes: Death, friendship, loss, suicide Goodreads rating: 3.99 Synopsis: Hold Still tells the story of Caitlin who recently lost her best friend Ingrid, to suicide. Ingrid and Caitlin shared everything together, and Caitlin is facing an unknown life without her best friend to laugh, cry and share her secrets with. One day Caitlin finds Ingrids journal under her bed, and through her journal, Caitlin gets to [...]

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LGBTQ YA by the Numbers: Gender and Genre

By Nathaniel|2020-03-28T13:41:39-05:00May 28th, 2015|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Updates and Announcements|

After seeing an ask about speculative fiction with LGBTQ+ protagonists on the Gay YA tumblr a few weeks ago, I got curious, so I did what I often do in circumstances like these: I went through the masterlist to figure out just how much LGBTQ+ speculative fiction was on it. Thinking about speculative fiction numbers got me thinking about other numbers, so I thought it might be interesting to do a gender breakdown as well. This turned into a slightly more involved project ("more involved" meaning "I had to count more books", basically). These numbers are based on [...]

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Friendships Are Hard.

By Nadia|2020-03-28T13:41:39-05:00May 27th, 2015|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Teen Voices|Tags: gay, LGBTQIA, Queer Guys|

by John Hansen By most standards, I've won the queer lottery. I live in one of the first U.S. states to have legalized gay marriage; I have parents who went through only a minimal learning curve when I came out to them; I attend a high school that not only has a gay-straight alliance, but whose gay-straight alliance is active enough that the school newspaper often reports on its activities. I'm lucky. I know that. And yet, here I am: seventeen years old, proudly queer, out to everyone I know online—but I'm still beyond terrified to tell anyone [...]

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Writing Across Barriers

By Olivia|2020-03-28T13:41:39-05:00May 26th, 2015|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: New Releases, Queer Girls, Realistic|

by Bill Konigsberg With my new novel The Porcupine of Truth, I tried to be brave. I decided to do the one thing that writers talk about as being among the most challenging things an author can do. To give a realistic interior to an “other.” To write across a boundary such as sexual orientation. I wrote from the point of view of a straight male character. I know, I know. I should probably get a medal. But I did it because I fully believe that straight guys deserve the same rights and privileges I’ve been afforded. They [...]

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Reasons Writers Exclude Queer Characters: Debunked!

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:41:39-05:00May 25th, 2015|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Writers on Writing|Tags: Representation|

by Libertad Araceli Thomas As an aspiring writer, over the past year I’ve heard and read perhaps a dozen reasons why some writers are reluctant to incorporate queer narratives in their work in progresses. I mean, I get it, writing characters outside of your comfort zone isn’t always easy. What do they always tell us, write “what you know”. As unreal as it sounds a lot of people don’t know any Queer people personally and want to hold onto that excuse but in order to unlock something deeper from your writing, I think it can be a learning experience [...]

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Searching the Aisles for Girls Kissing Girls

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:41:39-05:00May 23rd, 2015|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Fun Things|Tags: Other Media, Queer Girls|

by emily m. danforth It’s nearly summer, and for me that always means more time to read and write: long mornings spent at my desk followed by endless hammock-afternoons spent with a stack of novels and a pitcher of iced coffee kept close. But in our house, summer also means movie nights. Lots and lots of movie nights. (I tend to indulge my love of horror films in the summer—I save them up all year and binge in June, July, and August. Usually my wife will not watch these particular movies with me, which means I end up [...]

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Let’s Take Queer YA Out of the Closet

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:41:40-05:00May 22nd, 2015|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Readers on Reading|Tags: Booktube, Representation|

by Vee S. Authors, editors, and readers are important to the Queer YA community, but there’s another group that matters too: reviewers. We are lucky that there are so many fantastic reviewers reading, loving, and reviewing Queer YA books. But a growing number of reviewers have adopted a “code of silence” around queerness in the YA books they review. They are well meaning, but that code of silence is putting queer YA in the closet. thingslucyreads posted this excellent video on what she calls Booktube's "code of silence." Luce says in her video that she's noticed that in reviews [...]

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Never Sellout Your Heart

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:41:40-05:00May 21st, 2015|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog|Tags: gay, publishing|

by Adam Silvera When my agent and I went on submission with More Happy Than Not, I expected editors to reject the book. I wasn’t wrong. I’m not some pessimist who believed publishers would pass on my book simply because it was my book. This certainly isn’t the case for all the editors, but a couple of them—their names and houses to remain unnamed—didn’t think the character’s homosexuality was really the best move for this book and essentially wanted me to rewire my narrator’s heart. More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera (SoHo Teen, June 2015) [...]

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Tumblr Teens: BookMad for Diversity

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:41:40-05:00May 20th, 2015|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Readers on Reading, Teen Voices|

by Manda/BookMad “People talk about coming out as though it’s this big one-time event. But really, most people have to come out over and over to basically every new person they meet. I’m only eighteen and it already exhausts me.” – Everything Leads to You by Nina Lacour This ongoing call for diverse characters—of all races, of all genders, of all sexual/romantic orientations, anything you can name under the sun—isn’t so widespread because readers are hungry for new and interesting characters to paint the ever-changing, complex fictional worlds they’ve built inside their heads. It runs much, much deeper [...]

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