The coming out story represents probably the largest portion of stories in LGBTQ young adult literature. It’s an important topic, to be sure, in part because trying to figure out who we are and who we want is a major part of adolescence, and Nick Burd’s novel is one of the best of the genre. The Vast Fields of Ordinary takes place during the summer of Dade Hamilton’s last summer before college. Things aren’t looking great. His parents’ marriage is failing, his closeted jock boyfriend Pablo treats him like crap and he has a soul-killing at a grocery [...]

Today's featured author is Robin Talley, who writes here on Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series. While the Harry Potter series was still being released, I kept crossing my fingers one of the kids would turn out to be gay. It didn’t seem that far-fetched an idea. After all, the series was otherwise doing a great job of representing diverse characters. But more importantly, when I was reading the books for the first time, I was in my early 20s, and I was still getting used to the idea that this whole being-gay thing might indeed be a [...]

Sometimes I wonder why I started questioning my sexuality. If it was because my father called me a dike when I told him I preferred stud earrings to hoops; or the few years my mother was half convinced I liked girls because my best friend was bisexual; or if it was when my doctor asked my sexual orientation and I hesitated. But then, maybe it was because I actually liked a girl. Before then, my sexuality wasn’t in question. I had no interest in my sex.  So I wore my stud earrings, spent every day with my bisexual [...]

In 1778, a community in Massachusetts incorporated itself into a town called Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin. Seven years later, the leaders of Franklin, Massachusetts contacted their namesake. Pointing out how they had honored him, they asked if he would buy a bell for their meeting house. Instead, Benjamin Franklin sent a crate of 116 books from his personal collection and asked them to build a library instead, "Sense being preferable to sound." The town leaders took his advice and created the first public library in America. It's still open, with Benjamin Franklin's original 116 books on display. America [...]

To some people, I guess it'd be a mystery as to why I would choose to come out as a bisexual for the first time here and now. (God, writing this is so scary. Bear with me!) It took me a couple of days to figure it out myself. Sure, I've told my husband, and my best friend, and my mother during one especially passionate screaming match. But I never really felt the need to bring it to attention before, so I just treated it like some intensely private thing. I'm a happily married, twenty-three year old woman [...]

Ellen Wittlinger is the author of Hard Love, Parrotfish, and many other novels for young adults. She can be found online at her website. In 1997 when I began writing the novel Hard Love, most (if not all) of the YA novels with GLBT characters dealt with the process and difficulties of coming out. But when I looked around it seemed to me that there were a lot of teens for whom coming out was no longer such a big deal—they were past that stage already. I thought it was important to look at the question, “What comes [...]

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 [...]