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| Hall, Radclyffe | The Well of Loneliness |
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When it first appeared, The Well of Loneliness outraged two continents with its poignant account of homosexual love. It tells vividly, sympathetically of the tortured existence of a woman at odds with her conscience and her world--a woman whose only crime was a painful and hopeless longing that she couldn't explain even to herself. Widely praised for its artistry and honest, The Well of Loneliness stands today as the unrivaled classic of its kind. A wholly moving novel as haunting as any you will ever read. |
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| Hartinger, Brent | Geography Club |
| Russel
Middlebrook is convinced he's the only gay kid at Goodkind High School.
Then his online gay-chat buddy turns out to be none other than Kevin, the
popular but closeted star of the school's baseball team. Soon Russel meets
other gay students too. There's his best friend, Min, who reveals that
she's bisexual, and her soccer-playing girlfriend, Terese. And there's
Terese's politically active friend, Ike.
But how can kids this diverse get together without drawing attention to themselves? "We just choose a club that's so boring, nobody in their right mind would ever in a million years join it. We could call it Geography Club!" |
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| Hines, Sue | Out Of the Shadows |
| Ro thinks her
family is totally unlike anyone else's. Jodie is afraid of herself. So
they spend a long time stepping carefully around the truth, hiding secrets
that they know are too terrible to reveal.
These shadows from the past just won't go away, and in a hostile society Ro and Jodie end up with only each other -- and that grab bag of feelings that make up a friendship: love, hate, guilt -- and forgiveness. |
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| Holland, Isabelle | The Man Without a Face |
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Charles didn't know much about life ... until he met The Man Without a Face "I'd never had a friend, and he was my friend; I'd never really, except for a shadowy memory, had a father, and he was my father. I'd never known an adult I could communicate with or trust, and I communicated with him all the time, whether I was actually talking to him or not. And I trusted him ......" Fourteen-year-old Charles desperately wants two things: a father and a way out. Little love has come his way until the summer he befriends a mysterious scarred man named Justin McLeod, nicknamed ""The Man Without a Face." Charles enlists McLeod's help as tutor for the St. Matthew's school entrance exams, his ticket away from the unpleasant restrictions of his home life. But more important than anything he could get out of a book, that summer Charles learns from McLeod a stirring life lesson about the many faces of love. |
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| Homes, A. M. | Jack |
| In Jack, A. M. Homes gives us a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal -- even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack's father takes him out in a rowboat on Lake Watchmayoyo and tells his son he's gay, nothing will ever be normal again. Out of Jack's struggle to redefine what "family" means, A. M. Homes crafts a novel of enormous humor, charm, and resonance, the most convincing, funny, and insightful novel about adolescence since The Catcher In The Rye. | |
| Kendrick, Mark | Desert Sons |
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Scott Faraday is sixteen and has no idea that his world is about to radically change. Scott is fun-loving, in a small-town rock band, and out—but only to a select few. Isolated in a high desert town, Scott doesn’t know anyone else who is gay. When Ryan St. Charles, a troubled 17-year-old, moves to Yucca Valley, Scott’s world tilts on its axis. Ryan is a brash seventeen-year-old who has just severed a long relationship with a man, but still considers himself straight. As Scott and Ryan’s friendship develops, Scott begins to suspect that Ryan might be covering up that he’s gay. When Scott comes out to Ryan, their friendship is transformed into his first real relationship. |
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| Kendrick, Mark | Into This World We're Thrown |
| New
challenges face the boys when they come out to family and friends in
Into This World We’re Thrown. As their relationship becomes
public, Scott and Ryan deal with heartache and jealousy.
Scott and Ryan’s relationship is challenged further when Ryan’s grandmother dies. This sends Ryan into a downward spiral, causing him to re-evaluate his decisions, including his life with Scott. While Scott is dealing with the possible destruction of his first relationship, he learns about a secret admirer at school who will stop at nothing to make Scott his. Will this secret admirer ruin Scott and Ryan’s relationship? Will Ryan pull himself from the depths of his emotional turmoil? Can the boys uncover and express their love for one another before it’s too late? All of this is revealed, explored and concluded in Into This World We’re Thrown. |
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| Kerr, M. E. | Deliver Us From Evie |
| Told by her brother Parr, this is the story of 18-year-old Evie, her Missouri farm family, and the turmoil created by Evie's love for the local banker's daughter. | |
| Kerr, M. E. | "Hello," I lied |
| When sixteen-year-old Lang has the chance to spend the summer at the ritzy East Hampton estate of retired rock star Ben Nevada, he's pretty sure that it will be the summer of a lifetime. But what Lang doesn't expect is that in addition to hobnobbing with the rich and famous of the rock world, he'll find himself coming out about his homosexuality to his childhood friends, reevaluating his relationship with his boyfriend, Alex, and--most surprising of all--falling in love with a girl. | |
| Kerr, M. E. | Night Kites |
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What do you do when your best friend's girlfriend makes a pass at you? Erick Rudd isn't sure how it happened -- he did nothing but look. It was Nicki who made the first move. And if that doesn't complicate things enough, Erick is about to get some news that will blow his safe world apart: Pete, his older brother and idol, has fullblown AIDS. I'm a night kite, Pete once told Erick. I go up in the dark, alone, on my own, and I'm not afraid to be different. Nicki is a night kite, too. Together, she and Pete will teach Erick that sometimes it's best to keep your feet on the ground. |
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| Koertge, Ron | The Arizona Kid |
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From
Publishers Weekly Billy, 16, spends the summer in Tucson with his uncle, who is gay, working at a racetrack; he has his first sexual relationship with a girl, Cara Mae. These strands are easily woven together in a story that is fast (told mainly in dialogue) and often humorous. At the heart of it is Billy's growing sense of his own masculinity. His macho co-worker, Lew, is a survivalist and a constant source of sexual cliches; he makes a good foil for Billy. Billy's considerate uncle, meanwhile, offers him guidance in appropriate doses. |
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| Larson, Roger | What I Know Now |
| Dave Ryan's
mother has hired Gene Tole to build a garden at the old home she is moving
back to, away from her failed marriage. A handsome, thoughtful man,
Gene seems to be the father Dave's own silent, brooding dad could never
be. "Sometimes when you build a garden," Gene explains,
"you build a gardener, too." But a garden contains both
beauty and secrets.
As Dave's feelings for Gene grow, he peers around the edges of his own life, seeing his brother, father, and mother in new ways. What I Know Now is a beautifully written evocation of a boy's dawning sexuality that shows how his emerging feelings help him to become a young man. |
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| Levithan, David | Boy Meets Boy |
| This
is the story of Paul, a sophomore at a high school like no other: The
cheerleaders ride Harleys, the homecoming queen used to be a guy named
Daryl (she now prefers Infinite Darlene and is also the star quarterback),
and the gay-straight alliance was formed to help the straight kids learn
how to dance. When Paul meets Noah, he thinks he’s found the one his heart is made for. Until he blows it. The school bookie says the odds are 12-to-1 against him getting Noah back, but Paul’s not giving up without playing his love really loud. His best friend Joni might be drifting away, his other best friend Tony might be dealing with ultra-religious parents, and his ex-boyfriend Kyle might not be going away anytime soon, but sometimes everything needs to fall apart before it can really fit together right. This is a happy-meaningful romantic comedy about finding love, losing love, and doing what it takes to get love back in a crazy-wonderful world. |
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| Leavitt, David | The Lost Language of Cranes |
| When Philip falls in love with Eliot, he realized it's time to come out to his parents, Owen and Rose. But they are experiencing life changes of their own. Owen spends his Sunday afternoons in gay porn theaters, and as he and Rose are threatened with the loss of their longtime apartment, they must confront both his latent homosexuality and their son's stunning admission. | |
| Malloy, Brian | The Year of Ice |
| It is
1978 in the Twin Cities, and Kevin Doyle, a high school senior, is a
marginal student in love with keggers, rock and roll, and-unbeknownst to
anyone else-a boy in his class with thick eyelashes and a bad attitude.
His mother Eileen died two years earlier when her car plunged into the icy
waters of the Mississippi River, and since then Kevin's relationship with
his father Patrick has become increasingly distant. As lonely women vie
for his father's attention, Kevin discovers Patrick's own closely guarded
secret: he had planned to abandon his family for another woman. More
disturbingly, his mother's death may well have been a suicide, not an
accident. Complicating the family dynamic is the constant meddling of Kevin's outspoken Aunt Nora-who will never forgive Patrick for Eileen's death-along with Patrick's inability to stay single for very long. His loyalties divided between his father and his aunt, between his internal reality and his public persona, Kevin is forced to reevaluate his notions of family and love as painful truths emerge about both. |
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| McClain, Ellen Jaffe | No Big Deal |
| For overweight Janice Green, or Baby Huey (as class bully Kevin Lynch calls her), the only good things about the junior high in her New Jersey suburb are her best friend--intelligent, beautiful Holly Johansen, who has just moved there--and sixth-period social studies with Mr. Padovano. Then rumors begin to circulate that Mr. P is gay and Janice catches Kevin spray-painting Mr. P's car with anti-gay graffiti. After striking an uneasy bargain with Kevin, Janice finds herself battling her own mother, who joins a movement to get Mr. P fired. As Janice struggles with the growing furor over what she considers "no big deal," she discovers that Kevin's brother is gay and HIV-positive, she begins to understand that prejudice often stems from hidden fears. Padovano is not fired, but he tells Janice that he plans to look for a job in a more accepting district--a bittersweet outcome that reflects an all-too-real situation. | |
| McDonald, Anthony | Adam |
| Adam is the 16-year-old most parents would love to have: he doesn't do drugs, comes top at school and regularly practices his cello. But there is another side to him, which comes to the fore when he falls for laborer Sylvain and gets sexually involved with two friends. The results are explosive in this passionate story of illicit romance and teenage angst -- a combination that is eternally popular with gay readers. | |
| Mosca, Frank | All-American Boys |
| High school seniors Neil and Paul are in love but find that their families and schoolmates have trouble accepting a gay relationship. | |
| Mowry, Jess | Babylon Boyz |
| Mowry allows young readers to hang with the Babylon Boyz, an inner-city posse: Dante, a 14-year-old “crack baby” with a heart condition; Pook, a fearless, gay street fighter; and Wyatt, witty and able to slip a gun past the school's metal detectors by packing “heat” in his rolls of fat. The world these teens inhabit is portrayed in gritty, vivid, and cruelly realistic terms, right down to the drugs, homelessness, and casual gun play. Babylon, situated on San Francisco Bay, has a textbook case of urban rot, and while the novel follows the boys' lives after they chance upon a block of cocaine, it is the milieu and people that take center stage; Mowry's depiction of the boys at home and at school is unerring as they struggle in the predacious environment. He doesn't sugar-coat reality; there is graphic sex (both Pook and Dante are “deflowered”) and violence (a local drug dealer's brains are blown out as Dante watches). While the decision about whether or not to sell the drug is removed from the boys' hands--the white criminals get it back--they do argue among themselves about the money it could provide. | |
| Mullins, Hilary | The Cat Came Back |
| Set in 1980, Mullins's first novel takes the form of a journal kept by 17-year-old Stephanie (Stevie) Roughgarden during her last six months at a posh Connecticut prep school. Stevie copes with the usual concerns, such as grades and where to go to college, and with some less common ones: she is dogged by depression and, since the age of 14, has been caught in a sexually exploitative relationship with a male teacher at her school. Into Stevie's grim world bursts Andrea Snyder, a vivacious student who brightens--but confuses--her days: Stevie finds herself increasingly attracted to Andrea, although she is sure she is "not supposed to feel this way about girls !!! | |
| Murrow, Liza Ketchum | Twelve Days in August |
| Twins Alex and Rita move into Todd's Vermont town just as soccer practice begins. In the days before the first scrimmage, the entire team is affected by Alex's obvious athletic skill. Todd finds himself admiring the newcomer; another player, Randy, is intimidated by his talent--and also by his suspected homosexuality. By name-calling (fag, lover boy) and scheming (bullying other players into isolating Alex on the field so that he can't score), Randy hopes to force his rival to quit. Todd also becomes a target of taunts and of his own insecurity; in an outburst of machismo, he almost gets himself and his girlfriend killed in a car accident. On the outskirts of this muddle is Todd's Uncle Gordo, a near-stereotype of normality, who for the first time informs his nephew of his own relationship with longtime partner Gary. | |
| Murrow, Liza Ketchum | Blue Coyote |
| Deeply disturbed by a bully's sneering insinuations of his homosexuality, and unable to take comfort in the friends he still has, Alex jumps at the chance to move back to California, hoping to track down his best buddy, Tito Perone, and recapture those idyllic days of sun, surf, and big plans. Puzzled by the suddenness with which Tito has fallen out of touch, and by the Perone family's hostility, Alex roams Venice Beach gathering clues, and finds Tito at last--living with a man and still recovering from the vicious beating his father had given him when he came out of the closet. The shock crumbles Alex's inner defenses, and he admits to himself that he, too, is gay. | |
| Myracle, Lauren | Kissing Kate |
| Lissa thought that she and Kate, her beautiful and charismatic best friend, would always be close. Then one summer night Kate kissed Lissa-and Lissa kissed her back. Now Kate acts as if nothing happened and as if Lissa doesn't exist. Suddenly forced to navigate her feelings and her classes without the protection of her more confident friend, Lissa feels truly alone. But with a keen sense of humor, a flaky new friend, and a book on lucid dreams, Lissa finds the bravery to examine her own desires and discovers that falling in love with the wrong person can be one way of finding your footing. | |