At last, the LGBTQI+ novel comes of age


Michael Lee Richardson celebrates the best new writing for young LGBTQI+ readers.


2019 marks 50 years since the Stonewall riots, the protests by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people which took place in the early hours of 28th June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Originally a demonstration against violent police raids, the riots are the reason we now have Pride during the summer, and are considered the catalyst for the current fight for LGBTQI+ liberation in the West.


In the same month, June 1969, John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip was published. Widely recognised as one of the first LGBT novels for young adult readers, I’ll Get There follows Davy Ross, a 13 year old who finds himself moving back home with his alcoholic mother following his grandmother’s death.


It’s hardly cheery stuff, and Davy cuts a lonely figure until he meets Douglas, a classmate at his school. The two boys become fierce friends, eventually kissing and hugging while sharing a bed, with other, less easily smuggled past the radar activities hinted at (‘making out’ and ‘doing it’ feature heavily).


LGBTQI+ literature for young adults has come a long way since Davy and Douglas ‘making out’, but some of the key themes – of love and relationships and self-discovery – remain the same today.


My own journey with LGBTQI+ YA began in 2003, with the publication of David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy, a riotous romantic comedy that takes the old trope of ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ and tickles it pink.


Reading it as a 17 year old, Boy Meets Boy was a revelation, a queer story - in more ways than one – where all the tropes of LGBTQI+ YA past were turned on their heads. This wasn’t a world where gay and lesbian characters (bisexual and transgender people barely existed in early 2000s YA) lived sad or secretive lives, usually dying before the last page; this was a world peopled by people like me, where the ‘boy meets boy’ love story was almost mundane against a backdrop of cheerleaders on Harleys, a gay-straight alliance formed to help the straight kids learn how to dance, and a drag queen quarterback named Infinite Darlene.


One of the most exciting things about having my story The Other Team published in Stripes Publishing’s PROUD has been being featured alongside Levithan’s own story, As the Philadelphia Queer Youth Choir Sings Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’…, a playful ensemble story about an LGBTQI+ ensemble, illustrated by Steve Anthony.


Compiled by Juno Dawson, PROUD features a host of UK authors and illustrators who all identify as LGBTQI+ writing and illustrating on the theme of ‘pride’.


The contents page is a good starting point for readers who want to read more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or just plain queer writers, and find more LGBTQI+ stories.


For someone like me, who loves Young Adult contemporary, standout stories include Penguins by Simon James Green, whose novels Noah Can’t Even and Noah Could Never bring some much-needed levity to the queer literary experience; it is, as I’ve often iterated, absolutely excellent being gay.


Green’s story is illustrated by Alice Oseman, whose own books and comics offer up whole casts of queer characters who run the gamut of gender identities and sexual orientations.


Other favourites include Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s Love Poems to the City, a timely story about the fight for marriage equality in Ireland, with a bisexual protagonist; and Fox Benwell’s The Courage of Dragons, about a non-binary teenager and their Dungeons & Dragons group.


Having worked with LGBTQI+ young people for almost a decade – as a youth worker with LGBT Youth Scotland, and now for LEAP Sports, a charity which works for greater inclusion for LGBTI people in sport – the PROUD anthology represents communities I know and communities I’m part of (I’m queer, and I also play Dungeons & Dragons).


This is the type of book that I know the young people I work with will want to read, with characters like them and stories like theirs.


when trans young people don’t find their identities questioned or criticised in national newspapers in a way which echoes tabloid stories of ‘perverted’ lesbian and gay people in the 1980s - it’s more important than ever that LGBTQI+ young people see themselves reflected in the countries cultural life and in our libraries, with positive role models both on and off the page.


6 Books for Keeps No.235 March 2019 In an increasingly difficult climate - not a week goes by


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