Taking Pride in Queer YA: An Exclusive Guest Post from David Levithan, Author of Boy Meets Boy
Paperback $10.99
Boy Meets Boy (B&N Exclusive Edition)
Boy Meets Boy (B&N Exclusive Edition)
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Paperback $10.99
For a queer YA romcom full of finding, losing, and pursuing love, you’ll want to pick up Boy Meets Boy! It follows Paul who attends an atypical high school and who believes that he’s met the love of his life when he meets Noah, but when he blows it, he decides that no matter what, he’s not giving up on their love. A must-read, this book will linger in your mind long after you’ve finished it! David Levithan has been an influential author in the YA community for years, and below, you’ll find what he has to say about queer representation in YA and the way it’s evolved over the years!
For a queer YA romcom full of finding, losing, and pursuing love, you’ll want to pick up Boy Meets Boy! It follows Paul who attends an atypical high school and who believes that he’s met the love of his life when he meets Noah, but when he blows it, he decides that no matter what, he’s not giving up on their love. A must-read, this book will linger in your mind long after you’ve finished it! David Levithan has been an influential author in the YA community for years, and below, you’ll find what he has to say about queer representation in YA and the way it’s evolved over the years!
The weekend it came out, I spent four hours watching Heartstopper from start to finish. Most of the time I was smile-crying or cry-smiling, not just because of what the happy, sweet, honest, tender gay love story meant to me or would have meant to my teen self. Part of being a queer YA author is also having a consciousness of the needs and wants and hopes and desires of current teens . . . and as I watched, I was moved and joyful for what I knew it would mean to many of them.
To be queer in America right now is to constantly behold things you don’t believe would have been possible twenty years ago.
Alice Oseman, the creator of Heartstopper in both printed and televised form, also has this caring consciousness for LGBTQIA+ teens, and one of the marvels of my career so far has been to see how such feeling, conviction, and empathy is shared by so many other YA writers. When my first queer YA novel, Boy Meets Boy, was published in 2003, the number of queer YA novels per year was measured by the dozens, if we were lucky; now it is measured by the hundreds. A body of literature that started narrowly with representation that was primarily white, primarily gay and lesbian, and primarily tragic has grown into a body that not only includes but celebrates voices, perspectives, and stories across the full spectrum of our experience.
To be a queer writer in America right now is to constantly discover a wide audience for stories you wouldn’t have believed could be published twenty years ago.
When asked to look back on the past twenty years of LGBTQIA+ books for kids and teens and to choose to the most influential books or authors, I have to admit, it’s nearly impossible to isolate the waves—all I see is the tide. Some books have sold more than others. Some have been turned into movies, or found popularity because fans posted about them and the word spread. Some authors have been fierce advocates and others want to stay home and write, and let their novels do the talking. The thing is: We’re all in this together. We open the way for each other, and open the way for our readers, all the time.
Part of this comes from an intergenerational mingling—I’m happy to be on panels with authors I’ve influenced who, with their work, influence me right back. Part of this comes from that common consciousness, of trying to make the world a more accepting place and life a more self-accepting place for LGBTQIA+ kids and teens. And part of it, sadly, comes from having a common enemy, all the people working very hard to keep our books out of kids’ hands. This won’t work—because of the moral choice of booksellers like the one you are currently visiting as you read this. As I write in my new book, the people trying to erase our books and our identities are trying to turn off a faucet, not understanding that we are an ocean. That is our tide.
The new book, Answers in the Pages, is about first love, the blurry line between friendship and romance, and the importance of defending our books and the teachers who get them into the hands of the students who need to read them. When I wrote it during the early days of the pandemic, I didn’t know that when it came out in 2022 there would be so many politicians trying to use censorship as a political tool. They want to strengthen the undertow and pull our readers under. But we won’t let that happen. We’ll keep writing our life rafts, and we’ll keep gathering more and more waves to fuel us.
Twenty years from now, this won’t look like a pause. It will look like us pushing even harder to get to where we need to be.