The Importance of Being Earnest
by Ciara Smyth I am a terrible person to write about queer joy because I am cranky and when I smile people think I’m being sarcastic. An anecdote I like to tell, in outraged tones, is about the time my oldest friend read my first ever manuscript and said with genuine surprise, ‘This is [...]
An Abundance of Serendipities
by Lucas Rocha Hi, guys! YA Pride invited me to write something about bookish queer joy, and that’s a subject that makes me so happy because, to me, books + queer = joy. I know that we are not especially joyful right now with all that’s happening in the world, so I want to [...]
A Rainbow Will Literally Save
by NoNieqa Ramos If one were to place the reviews of the DISTURBED GIRL’S DICTIONARY into a word cloud generator, one would see words like brutal, raw, gritty, unflinching ... and one of my personal favorites “move over dead white guys.” What you won’t find is joy, and certainly not queer joy. Yet to [...]
Joy/Pain
by Adam Sass Holy cow, what is the author of queer oppression book Surrender Your Sons doing talking about queer joy? On what PLANET? What BUSINESS do I even have here? In my upcoming debut Surrender Your Sons, Connor Major is sent to a mysterious island conversion therapy camp, where he befriends the other [...]
There’s Magic Out There For All of Us
by Emery Lee I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of moments of queer bookish joy since first joining the book community in 2015. Queer books have become such a prevalent part of the YA community, and they’ve been given a lot more spotlight, opening up more opportunities for queer authors and readers alike. Of [...]
Our well deserved happy endings / Nossos tão merecidos finais felizes
by Vitor Martins In 2016 I was unemployed, binge watching Grey's Anatomy and living through a really dark phase of my life. Then I decided to write a book to make me forget about everything else. A book with a very self conscious gay kid who, just like me, needed to know that he [...]