Best gay books for young adults
Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome Rebecca Bendheim, author of the upcoming lesbian Middle Grade When You’re Brave Enough, which releases April 7, 2026 from Viking Books for New Readers! Here’s the story:
A heartfelt, gorgeously written debut middle grade novel about best friends, first crushes, and coming out—perfect for fans of Kyle Lukoff and Jake Maia Arlow.
Before she moved from Austin to Rhode Island, everybody knew Lacey as one half of an inseparable duo: Lacey-and-Grace, best friends since they were toddlers. Grace and her moms were practically family. But at school, entity lumped together with overeager, worm-obsessed, crushes-on-everyone Grace meant Lacey never quite fit in—and that’s why at her fresh middle school, Lacey plans to reinvent herself. This period, she’s going to be cool. She’s going to be normal.
At first, everything seems to travel as planned. Lacey makes new friends right away, she finds a rabbi to help her prepare for the bat mitzvah that got deprioritized by her parents in the chaos of the move, and she even gets cast in the lead role of the eighth-grade musical. Which is when things start to get stressful, because it turns out
The best LGBTQIA+ YA books to study right now
There is no better feeling than the pleasure of racing through a good manual to figure out how it’s going to end. This is especially accurate when the manual is a comical, twisty-turny, or pacy story of mishaps and (mis)adventures with a main traits you can consider in, a admire interest to lust after, and a cast of out and proud gender non-conforming characters. In recent years, the selection of YA novels with just those ingredients has joyfully expanded and diversified – and it’s not just teenagers who have been enjoying all the reading fun.
In the list below, you’ll find seaside romances, road trip misfortunes, nightclubs to swoon over, and revelations to shock and delight. Throughout them all, queer characters abound as they fall in like, stand up for what they accept in, or study something new about themselves. I Kissed Shara Wheeler, the latest from Casey McQuiston of Red, White, and Royal Blue and One Last Stop fame, brings together so many of these elements with a bisexual protagonist and a small town much queerer than initially meets the eye. It’s the delight in evidence these stories – and ourselves – that keeps readers coming advocate for more.
I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures. I even used to run a pop culture blog centered around the fact that they shouldn’t be a thing—we should never include to feel guilty about something that brings us pleasure. Growing up queer, it can be really easy to be made to feel guilty about what you might secretly love, because it might not fit the rigid yet contradictory gender norms you never really adhered to. Therefore, it can also accept a long time for you to feel comfortable enjoying what you enjoy without shame or ridicule—from other people or from yourself. Internalized homophobia at its finest!
As a teenager, I rarely felt comfortable reading YA books, let alone gay YA books, because I felt so disconnected and rejected by my age group—having never really mutual the same interests or ideals of people my own age, and often being bullied for it—that I did anything I could to subtly and inaudibly set myself apart from kids my age. Adults called me an old soul, which I was, but I also didn’t feel free to live my own life, and I faced the consequences of acting more grown up than I actually was when I reached prior adulthood.
There’s a notion in same-sex attracted culture that we actuall
Many of you ask: what are some good books about LGBT teens in addition to my own?
Years ago I put together the below list. Since then, every year has brought more and more books. For a more up-to-date list, visit the popular blog: I'M HERE, I'M Gay, WHAT THE HELL Perform I READ? at https://www.leewind.org/
Also, below is a bibliography, compiled with the aid of James Howe, composer of The Misfits and Totally Joe with some of the best teen novels, poetry anthologies, and nonfiction books with LGBT characters and themes.
Thanks, Jim!
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Absolutely Positively Not by David LaRochelle (Scholastic, 2005)
Steve is a 16 year old with two things on his mind: sex and getting his driving license. However, he's not thinking about girls when he's thinking about sex. Could he be gay?
Alt Ed by Catherine Atkins (Penguin Putnam Books, 2003)
Participating in a special after-school counseling class with other troubled students, including a sensitive male lover classmate, helps Susan, an overweight tenth grader, expand a better sense of herself.
Am I Blue? Coming Out from th