So. David Levithan.

He’s pretty amazing, right?

Honestly, his books pretty much send me spiraling into fangirl glee. Boy Meets Boy gets most of the accolades, and rightly so. It’s a lovely and wonderful book, joyful and hopeful. But for my money, Wide Awake is not only his best book but one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s hopeful in a different way, a love story to possibility and to connection.

Wide Awake is set “in the near future,” on the eve of the election of the first gay Jewish president of the United States, and Duncan Weiss is proud and happy and a part of it all. But Stein, the president elect, won the election by one state’s worth of electoral votes, and in a move reminiscent of the 2000 presidential election, the opponent’s party calls the results into question.

The world of the book isn’t an ideal America. It’s an America that’s worked hard to make strides towards equality and justice but still has a long way to go, and Duncan, his boyfriend Jimmy and their friends, like every teenager before them, have to figure out when they should stand up, how they should make themselves heard and what they have to say.

So why is this book awesome? Sure, Levithan is a genius writer, but what I loved best about this book is that he so clearly captures the struggle teens face in figuring out what they believe, to what lengths they will go to support their beliefs, and how to integrate their beliefs about politics, life, love and friendship must all fit together into a life.

Against the background of a momentous political decision, Duncan and Jimmy have to figure out how to navigate the first serious bumps that arise in their relationship. What happens when idealism and reality meet, and what happens when they clash? What happens when one person’s expectations, realistic or not, fair or not, are not met? What happens when they are met? What happens when we grow up?

I love the many facets of this story. I read this book shortly before the 2008 presidential election, and though I was long out of my adolescence, that election marked the first time I got caught up in the process, the first time I allowed myself to hope that things really could change, that they really were changing. Wide Awake tapped into those feelings of hope.

As an adult reading this novel, I had to try and do the math and see if I how old I would be in the course of these events, and I figured out that I would be a sassy senior citizen (or maybe a cool high school librarian like Ms. Kaye), and that my little cousins, who are 5 and 3, would be about the age of the president. So, if I want my cousins to have the opportunities to be a president like Stein (or however they choose live), me and my fellow adults, we have a lot of work to do and a lot of changes to make. And I hope the teens who read this book can take some encouragement from Duncan and his friends as they navigate paths between the comparatively small worlds of their adolescence and the greater social and political worlds in which they find themselves to become the really cool adults who round out the secondary characters, not the jerk faced losers who still exist.

I could rhapsodize about this book endlessly, but really, just read it.

Debra is an assistant librarian, grad student, fledgling blogger and wanna-be teacher. She blogs about her reading at Library Lass (Adventures in Reading), and is @threelefthands on Twitter (but mostly just to see what shenanigans @maureenjohnson and @realjohngreen are up to).

Sara Zarr is the author of Story of a Girl and the forthcoming How To Save A Life. You can visit her online at her website.

A couple of years ago, I was speaking to a bunch of young readers at a book festival, and during the Q&A, one girl shot up her hand and asked, “Why did you decide to make Michael gay?”

The question caught me off guard.

Michael is an adult character in my first novel, STORY OF A GIRL. He runs the pizza dive where the main character, Deanna, has a summer job. On her first day, she learns that a boy from her past, Tommy Webber, works there, too. She nearly quits, hinting about her history with Tommy to Michael:

“I watched Michael watching me. If he was going to be around most of the time, it might be okay. He seemed like the kind of person I could trust. He took another drag of his smoke and it hit me—something about the way he flicked his ash or the way he was talking to me in hushed tones like a girlfriend—Michael was gay. For some reason that made me feel better, like maybe he’d be on my side.”

That was about the extent of me “making” Michael gay—not a conscious choice, but something that just sort of happened in the creative process.

There are some nice scenes between Deanna and Michael. He doesn’t solve any of Deanna’s problems, but he’s there with an ear at a couple of key moments.

When I was in junior high and high school, there was this man I knew through church, a friend of the family. I’ll call him Brian. At the time, his sexual life or orientation never occurred to me, though in retrospect it’s kind of obvious that Brian was gay—certainly in orientation, if not in practice. (I know that sounds like I’m dancing around something, I’m not, but I do have a number of gay friends who are celibate for religious reasons, and he very may well have fallen into that category.)

Brian was good friends with my mom and took an interest in my sister and me. He got me in ways other adults didn’t, he appreciated my sarcastic sense of humor and could dish it out as well as take it, he rolled his eyes at the same things I did, he could understand why certain things about my mother mortified me as a teen. He was an excellent listener—he didn’t ask the questions adults usually did that either seemed prying or stupid.

Brian was the adult who first introduced me to Hitchcock movies, the pleasures of cooking and entertaining well, and why bad, over-the-top art (aka “camp”) was fun in small doses.

I realize my description of Brian could be read as one big confirmation of a certain kind of stereotype. But this was my experience of him, and all I know is that for a girl who didn’t have a father figure, it meant a lot to me to have this adult male take an interest in me and my life. His friendship, his stand-in parenting, in a way, had a great and positive effect on my life and is forever part of who I am.

Let’s face it: There’s always been a special kind of dynamic between teen girls and older men, and I’m not being wink-wink or gross about it when I say this. (The book I’m working on now will explore this in depth.) There are real father issues for a lot of teen girls. And even with great dads, girls are often further along emotionally and intellectually than the boys their age, and an older man—often a teacher, or family friend—who acts as a mentor can be a particularly powerful influence. Or a destructive one, if there’s confusion about the boundaries.

For Deanna, who (like me as a teen) has a lot of issues with men and boys and mistakes sexual attention for love because at least it’s attention, and (again, like me) doesn’t always know how to maintain friends with girls, Michael is exactly who she needs at a crucial point in her life. There’s no danger of anything happening between them, but she gets that specifically male affirmation she so needs, as I needed Brian’s twenty-give years ago.

by Gillian Chisom

Almost two years ago, I was sitting in a bookstore café working on my embryonic vampire novel. Its premise, at that point, went something like this: 20-year-old Eric has a great life: budding career as a pianist, fiancée with whom he’s madly in love, etc. All of this changes when vampire Gregory waylays Eric on his way home from a rehearsal one night and turns him into a vampire. Eric struggles to adjust to his new life. Meanwhile, he and Gregory develop an intense, complicated relationship which includes some romantic tension, but that never develops into actual romance.

And then.

And then, Gregory kissed Eric, and Eric kissed him back. Without my permission. Without even having the courtesy to warn me.

Those of you who are writers can probably relate to the vertigo of that moment. I had reached that perfect zone in which the story flowed out of me without conscious thought. I almost was Eric. And then Eric told me that Gregory was about to kiss him. In all honesty, my reaction at that point was something along the lines of oh crap oh crap oh crap. Not because I was ideologically opposed to this development so much as because I felt that I was in way over my head. Even so, it didn’t occur to me not to write the kiss. The kiss had happened, and I couldn’t do anything about that. For my writing process to work, for me to feel that I have any integrity as an author, I have to get out of the way and let the story happen. This is not to say that I don’t think long and hard about the messages I might be sending with my fiction, but that kind of analysis and soul-searching usually happens later in the process. When I’m working on the first draft, I try to let the characters take me wherever they want to go. I write because the story demands that I tell it, and I realized pretty quickly that, in this case, the story I had to tell involved Gregory and Eric kissing.

If I had paid more attention, I might have seen the kiss coming. The story was already moving in that direction, with or without my knowledge or consent. Early on, though, I had considered the possibility of Eric and Gregory developing a romantic relationship and rejected it, ostensibly because I felt that mixing gayness and vampirism might read as a negative comment about gayness. In all honesty, though, the thought of writing gay characters terrified me. I instinctively felt that, as a straight person, I couldn’t write an authentic gay character, and that if I tried I would only offend people. Of course, I quickly realized that I had already gone well outside my comfort zone by writing a main character who was male and a vampire, and that there was no reason for me not to let Eric and Gregory be who they were, as long as I took care with how I handled their story.

As it turned out, Gregory and Eric’s romance saved the novel. They showed me that, in spite of the difficult circumstances that led to their intimacy, their love could grow into something beautiful and tender and unexpected. Telling their story stretched me, as a writer and as a person, in ways I never could have imagined. I am twenty-five years old and I’ve been attempting to write novels since I was fourteen, but until Gregory and Eric I had never felt so committed to a story, so convinced that it needed to be out in the world.

In retrospect, I know that this particular story found me when I was ready to tell it. At the time, I was part of a close-knit community that included a lot of GLBTQ folks, many of whom had become—and remain—dear friends. Knowing them helped me realize how much I take for granted as a straight person, and made me want to fight for a world in which everyone can live and love openly and without fear. I still wasn’t ready, though, to consciously write a story with gay characters, so Eric and Gregory had to smack me over the head when I wasn’t looking, and the experience of telling their story became the most fulfilling of my writing life thus far. Every time I catch myself worrying about getting negative feedback for writing a gay love story, I remind myself that any prejudice I might experience can’t begin to compare to what my friends in the GLBTQ community deal with every day of their lives.

I’m not going to say that I don’t worry about what will happen when I’m ready to send Eric and Gregory out into the world, but I worry about different things now than I did two years ago. I worry that people will have negative reactions to the their romance, but I worry more often that I won’t shock anyone out of his or her comfort zone, in which case I’ll feel that I’ve failed to do my job. Most of all, I worry that I’ll disappoint my friends in the GLBTQ community. I realize, though, that in most important ways it isn’t about me. It’s about the story, which is bigger than me, and deserves to have a life of its own. And it’s a story about love, plain and simple.

This post is a part of our reader submissions program. To find out how you can contribute to posts on the Gay YA, click here.

I just released my debut novel, The Dark Wife, which comes out of the closet immediately when I tell you what it’s about: a YA, lesbian retelling of the Persephone/Hades myth. When sharing my happiness for the book release, I get the shifting from foot to foot, the nervous tapping of the fingers together, and–if they’re brave–the person will ask me the following question:

“Can straight people read it?”

To which I respond, yes, straight people absolutely need to read it. Not just my book, or maybe not even my book–but straight people need to read gay books.

When you see the gay rights struggle on the news, it’s often easy to relegate the GLBT to a small counter culture that’s not immediately relevant to you, or even important. People have admitted to me before that they never cared about gay rights, or even thought about gay issues, because they didn’t know anyone who was gay.

That’s not true for everyone, but it’s an important trend to notice. They didn’t care because they didn’t know. And not everyone is going to know a gay person, and last I checked, we’re not heading out on a campaign with a slogan of “A GAY IN EVERY HOUSE.” (If we are, why am I always the last to know about these things? ;D)

That’s where books come in.

A book is something that becomes personally important. Within a story, the main character (usually, hopefully) becomes someone you identify with, love, struggle with every moment they struggle.

The simple truth is: how will you know what being gay is like if you never read a gay story? How will you know what we feel, what we think, how we love and live? How are we ever going to get the rights we need, the rights we’re denied, if people think we’re completely alien to everything they understand? If you read a gay story, and you are not gay, for a few days you step into the story’s space, and you learn what it means to love someone the world might think you shouldn’t be with, how love can be so beautiful no matter who loves who, how our hearts are just the same as yours.

Books lead to culture which leads to people. Literature, at its very essence, is something that can change an entire culture. In the YA community, especially, people become deeply impassioned about books, fall in love with books. Gay, YA books have the potential to bring about an entire movement of acceptance and love. Nothing could be better.

Slowly, but surely, every day it gets better for gay teens, it gets better for gay adults, it gets better, but the world is not going to change completely unless we are heard and understood. A book, a simple, beautiful book, is the most subversive thing on the planet, because–between front and back cover–you could begin to love someone who is gay, someone you never thought about before, but someone you will now never forget. Gay rights will, in that moment, become something personal to you.

The world needs straight people to read gay stories.

Sarah Diemer is the author of The Dark Wife, released today. She blogs at muserising.com and is offering a free, pay what you can version of The Dark Wife online here. Be sure to check out her book & the gorgeous book trailer!