A Brief History of LGBTQ+ Young Adult Literature (Pride Month #5) (#119)

This Pride Month, I had to incorporate something that I love, and that’s books. Over the last couple of years I’ve been reading more queer books, both non-fiction and fiction — either because it’s just happened that way and I seem to gravitate more towards queer books, or because I have been actively seeking them out and making an effort to read more of them, especially when it comes to non-fiction.

When I started researching for this episode, my aim was to make it about the history of LGBTQ+ literature as a whole. It was only when I was a little while into my research, digging through stuff as far back as the ancient times, that I realised I was in way too deep, trying to cover way too much in too little time, and I wasn’t having much fun with it. So I’ve decided to narrow this episode down a bit to one particularly large area in terms of growth, and that’s young adult literature, or YA.

A Medium article written by Michael Waters explains why YA literature is an important lens through which we can examine cultural shifts. Waters says that because YA books are geared toward up-and-coming generations, what is changing in YA reflects what is changing in our world — and the treatment of queer people is no exception.

In 2021 alone, publishers released hundreds of LGBTQ+ young adult novels, spanning all sorts of genres from realistic contemporary fiction to sci-fi and superhero comics. But while queer YA has exploded over the past decade, it actually began in the middle of the 20th century – although it wasn’t as positive as it is today.

A Timeline of Queer YA

Spring Fire by Marijane Meaker, a novel now considered to have launched the genre of lesbian pulp fiction, was published in 1952. It became an instant sensation, selling over 1.5 million copies. The book focuses on a college freshman who falls for her sorority sister, and ends the way most early portrayals of queer people did — in tragedy. When their love affair is discovered, one girl is sent to a mental institution and the other rejects her homosexual feelings.

Meaker always disliked the ending, but her publisher felt it necessary in order for the book to be sent through the mail when people ordered copies. Had homosexuality been portrayed in a positive light, Spring Fire would have been deemed obscene, and post offices across the country would have confiscated it.

The Medium article I mentioned above explains that though Spring Fire isn’t a work of young adult fiction, its circumstances — the tragic ending; the publisher’s underestimation of a queer readership — bear similarities to those of many early LGBTQ+ YA novels. But Spring Fire is also significant because its author, under the pseudonym M.E. Kerr, later wrote Deliver Us From Evie (published in 1990), a YA novel groundbreaking for its positive portrayal of a butch lesbian and for its ultimately happy ending. The contrast between Spring Fire and Deliver Us From Evie is stark, and echoes a larger cultural shift that was quickly reflected in — and even propelled by — queer fiction.

The first YA novels with gay content weren’t much fun either. The earliest one, called I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip by John Donavan, was published in 1969. In the book, 13-year-old Davy moves in with his alcoholic mother and develops a relationship with a classmate at his new school. After a kiss and a sexual encounter, Davy’s pet dog is killed in a hit-and-run, and Davy wonders whether his intimacy with his classmate was the cause — though he maintains that he isn’t ashamed of what he did. The book ends in ambiguity, and perhaps it needed to in order to find a home on the shelves: the ambiguous ending meant that homophobes and queer activists alike could read it as confirming their own, very contradictory views. Its very brief, minimally described sexual incidents between two boys must have seemed shocking to a lot of people, but the book had a primarily positive reception.

When this book was published in 1969, it was weeks before the Stonewall Riots. The treatment of LGBTQ+ people in the US was bleak. Homosexuality was still considered a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. LGBTQ+ Americans were barred from government positions, as they were considered a security threat. And in every state but Illinois, homosexuality remained criminal. So it makes sense that books with gay themes being published around this time might not shine the most positive light on those themes — not necessarily because the author didn’t want to, but because it might not sell (or could even be banned or confiscated, as was seen with Meaker’s book, Spring Fire).

In 1970, Barbara Wersba’s Run Softly, Go Fast saw teenage protagonist, David, recall a pivotal scene in which his father “accused” his straight best friend, Rick, of being gay. The boys’ relationship deteriorates after that, leading to Rick joining the army and being killed in action. Homosexuality isn’t particularly an important theme in this book; however, it does kind of depict the idea that being gay as so terrible that “accusing” someone of it can have tragic results. The consequences of spreading false rumours of homosexuality appeared in a number of early queer books for both YAs and adults.

Just to add to the misery in queer books at this time, there seemed to be an correlation between a character’s same-gender attraction and the death of a loved one, or the idea that gay people are doomed to be “punished” with tragic results if they act on their feelings. In 3 books — The Man Without a Face by Isabelle Holland (1972), Trying Hard to Hear You by Sandra Scoppettone (1974), and What’s This About Pete? by Mary W. Sullivan (1976) — the queer character or their close friend dies. Many of these early novels also depicted queer attraction as temporary and shameful.

In Trying Hard to Hear You, the straight female protagonist learns that her best male friend and a boy she likes are lovers. The boys are teased, and in the end, trying to prove he’s straight, one of them gets drunk with a girl, takes her out in a car, and they’re both killed in a car crash. Car crashes were perhaps the most popular punishment endings, but suicide runs a close second, along with commitment to a mental hospital or forced psychiatric treatment.

Although punishment in these books is usually seen as a warning that being LGBTQ has tragic consequences, some authors used it to show that ignorance and cruelty from heterosexuals can lead to tragic endings for LGBTQ people.

Things started to turn around slowly. In M. E. Kerr’s I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me (1977), the best friend of the straight protagonist is an openly gay teen. Even though his parents don’t accept his homosexuality, Charlie remains cheerful, humorous, and firmly out—which was a huge first step. (Obviously, ideally, his parents wouldn’t be against it — but it’s a first step, all the same.)

Another book to reverse this trend was Nancy Garden’s 1982 novel Annie on My Mind, about two girls in New York City who develop a romantic relationship. Not only do the characters survive to the end of the novel, but so does their love — which at the time was a revolutionary idea in queer YA literature.

However, in retaliation, the book was frequently banned. In 1993, parents in Kansas objected to the book’s placement in local high schools, and copies were burned on the steps of the school district headquarters. Fearing controversy, the district removed all copies of the book, leading to a court case in which a federal judge ruled that the school system had violated students’ First Amendment rights, and ordered that the books be returned to library shelves.

Over the next couple of decades, many gay teen novels didn’t end tragically. However, gay stories started to be confined to the genre of the “problem novel”, in which protagonists either learned to deal with their own queerness, came out of the closet to family and friends, or grew to accept the gayness of a friend or family member. Acceptance and coming out are of course important themes to explore, but the issue with novels like these is that they turn gayness into a problem that has to be dealt with, and make it something to overcome rather than something to embrace.

The Man Without a Face by Isabelle Holland is an example of one where the character determine whether their same-sex attractions are situational or permanent, and Ruby by Rosa Guy (1976) is an example of one of the many novels that see a teen's sexual orientation as the central problem of the plot.

A few books throughout the 1980s were coming-out stories, in which the protagonist suspects they’re LGBT, realises it, and finally accepts it, then maybe faces the task of coming out to people. But more books of this decade were those that focused on a straight teen’s struggle to accept an LGBT friend, relative, or other important adult. 

At the start of the 1990s, around 60 queer YA novels had been published. Many of these books had only a lesbian, gay, or bisexual side character; if the definition of “queer YA” required a queer protagonist, that number would drop significantly. However, it seemed that the stories people wanted were those through the eyes of young queer characters themselves, rather than side characters. But did that mean concentrating primarily on coming out stories? Should stories include more universal issues than the basic LGBT rite of passage?

Even though in the 1990s there were still coming out stories and straights-adjusting-to-gays stories, it was then that LGBTQ YA literature increasingly addressed other issues as well. Some of the authors from earlier decades wrote books in the 90s that did just that.

A few examples: in 1994, M. E. Kerr’s Deliver Us from Evie was the first novel to feature a butch lesbian character (even if Evie was still the sister of Parr, the straight protagonist). Although the book is Parr’s story, much of it concentrates on Evie and her determination to dress and act as the strong, self-assured lesbian she truly is. In 1997, Kerr’s “Hello,” I Lied was potentially the first to introduce the subject of bisexuality. Then, in 1999, The Year They Burned the Books is about a young lesbian, her gay best friend, and a few other kids who try to use their school newspaper to counter the censorship attempts of their local school board.

The 1990s also introduced Jacquelyn Woodson, whose books feature the first characters of colour Rose Guy’s Ruby. Despite this, an issue with queer YA literature in the 90s was that it was still overwhelmingly white. The number of protagonists of colour increased slightly with the publication of books like The Necessary Hunger by Nina Revoyr (about two female basketball rivals — one black and one Japanese-American — who fall for each other) and The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson (about a biracial girl in a small town struggling with her sexuality) later in the 1990s. This is still an issue today, not just in queer YA but in publishing in general.

The early 2000s saw an explosion of LGBTQ+ YA literature by some of the genre’s most prolific authors of today, including Alex Sanchez, Nina LaCour, David Levithan, and Malinda Lo. When Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan came out in 2003, it shattered expectations of queer YA. It imagined a world where being gay wasn’t a tragedy; where the quarterback could also be gender-nonconforming, and no one takes issue with that. Where the main character could be out since kindergarten. Other characters do deal with anti-queer discrimination, however. Boy Meets Boy includes both the hope in the idea that it might be easy for someone to be queer, but also the crushing disappointment of not having that be true personally.

The rest of the 2000s and especially the 2010s gave us so many amazing LGBTQ+ books that have been popular bestsellers, not just within queer circles: books like The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth, Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour, Simon vs. the Homosapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, several books by Adam Silvera, several books by Alice Oseman (including Loveless which deals with asexuality), and so many more. 

Just in the last few years, we seem to be entering a golden age of queer YA. We are seeing far more titles getting published than ever before, and a much broader array of stories being told. But we still have a long way to go, with literature only just starting to properly expand to other identities other than just gay and lesbian. Trans YA continues to be in its infancy, and many other queer people have to scrounge to find even a handful of titles to represent them, including asexual, aromantic, intersex, two spirit, nonbinary, gender-fluid, and a myriad of other people whose identities fall outside of “LGBT.”

Trans YA was virtually nonexistent until Luna by Julie Anne Peters (2004), which is told through the eyes of Regan, whose sibling is coming to terms with the fact that she is a trans girl. This setup — putting a cisgender character at the center of a trans story — has become a common trope that many in the trans community have taken issue with. Luckily, in recent years, mainstream publishers have released YA novels in which trans authors tell their own stories through their characters — among them Lizard Radio by Pat Schmatz, If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo, and The Unintentional Time Traveller by Everett Maroon. Some other books with trans or non-binary characters that I personally love are Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender, Pet by Akwaeke Emezi, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, and Wonderland by Juno Dawson.

Asexual characters are also becoming more present: books like Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire and Deadly Sweet Lies by Erica Cameron have teen characters who self-identity as asexual. Again, some of my personal recommendations are Loveless by Alice Oseman which I already mentioned, Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman, and Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand. 

This trend holds true for explicitly bisexual characters as well. Some recent books with bisexual characters are Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli, Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar, and Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett. There are so many more — if you just Google “bisexual YA books” or “asexual YA books” or whatever you want to find, you’ll get tons of recommendations.

Of course, queer YA books are still disproportionately white, and they still rarely represent identities past lesbian and gay. But the push for more inclusive queer literature seems to be finding success. When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore is a magical realism novel about the love between a trans boy who paints moons and a cis girl who grows roses on her wrist, both of whom are people of color. Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee features a queer Asian-American girl who scores an internship with a supervillain. And Beast by Brie Spangler is a contemporary “Beauty and the Beast” retelling where Belle is trans.

Some amazing diverse authors are Alice Oseman who is aro-ace, Juno Dawson who is trans, Simon James Green (who recently had his latest book Gay Club banned from a Catholic school in London), and of course, Rosiee Thor who we had on the podcast a few weeks ago. And some of my favourite authors of colour who write queer books are Camryn Garrett, K. Ancrum, Leah Johnson, Misa Sugiura, Elizabeth Acevedo, Kacen Callender, Dean Atta… I could be here all day. (If you want to chat about queer books, find me on Instagram!)