The realest queer YA novels about living in community

I don’t usually love coming-out stories, since the coming-out narrative tends to replace anything else that happens for trans people, but this one shines—in part because Sasha Masha’s emergence precedes her contact with queer community, but only starts to actually makes sense in the context of knowing other gay and trans people.

It’s one of the only trans girl YA novels I know of, and it feels like it’s written for someone who is, like Sasha, half-out and tripping down the final steps. This is a fantastic book about how we may find our most real selves alone, but it might take a one-sided romantic friendship, a community showing of Querelle, or a couple old drag queens showing you their hallway of photos of Queer Icons to feel like you aren’t going crazy. 

This is the spark that lit me on fire and showed me that all the features of queer adolescence I thought were impossible to write about in “books for teens” are totally possible to write about.

Juliet, Puerto Rican teen from the Bronx, feels the weight of her community’s and family’s homophobia, and attempts to build her resume and find a wider world by interning for her favorite feminist writer—a thirtysomething eccentric, woo-woo white Oregonian, who despite having friends and exes of color and apparently genuinely hoping to offer Juliet wisdom, care, and research opportunities, is lackadaisical, irresponsible, and more than capable of shrewdly using Juliet to market herself and her books.

Juliet’s encounters with racist microagressions, feminist approaches to menstruation, weed, heartbreak, and the problem of regionally-specific queer buzzwords pull no punches. Rivera asks us to look at what responsibilities might be involved in “community”, including the responsibility to demand better of our role models and to apologize to people we’ve hurt.

It’s a bestseller and hardly needs my rec, but I need to tell you right now to check out every book Mariko Tamaki has written, from her Harley Quinn and She-Hulk comics to Cold, Skim, Roaming and This One Summer (the latter three are collaborations with her astonishingly talented illustrator cousin Jillian Tamaki).

Laura Dean is a beautiful, self-absorbed gay girl who is a terrible texter and likes thinking about her own passing desires far more than Frederica’s hobbies, friends, or dreams, though she’s happy to make out with and snuggle her between spontaneous text-based breakups.

Valero O’Connell’s dreamy art, complete with talking stuffed animals, complements Frederica’s angst, but the best part of this story is the fact that Freddy is surrounded by other queer teens, whose problems are just as important as hers, as well as a few gay adults whose lives serve as alternative models and a sympathetic non-gay advice columnist who allows Freddy to see a place for herself outside the toxic yearning ecosystem.

I don’t know if most librarians would understand or shelve this as YA, but Lowrey’s cast of eighteen-year-old trans punks and squatters have more in common with most trans kids, in 2006 or the present day, than many YA-marketed idyllic stories about teens with accepting families and limited substance use issues.

From nonprofits where suburban children pick fights with homeless teens to squats where young punks pressure each other into conforming to their own specific dysfunctional microculture in Portland, Oregon, this book resonates for me as tracking a moment in history—the youth of all the trans people who were in their twenties when I came out in my early teens, and were trying to devote themselves to the same community projects they had benefited from when they were runaways and train-hoppers.

A space opera with both cosmic sensibility and directly applicable lessons for 21st-century teens, this follows a group of rebels working against a galactic empire, and a pilot whose paramilitary upbringing jars with the pacifist anti-empire commune their long-distance pen pal resides in.

The ethics of terrorist acts against oppressive imperialism, the flaws and traumas of older trans mentors and varied elders with experiences that may or may not apply to new generations, the personhood and agency of artificial intelligence—all factor into this epic (but tight and readable) graphic novel that centers on friendship rather than romance.