The most recommended books about gay teenagers

Spalding’s book is such a fun read! It focuses on white blog writer and fashionista, Abby, who also happens to be plus-sized and wins the opportunity of a lifetime at her favorite local boutique. It’s there that she meets fellow intern and photographer Jordi Perez, a Latinx teen who makes that Los Angeles summer so much more romantic, creative, and sweeter. Add in Abby’s surprising bro-bestie Jax for some hamburger adventures and be prepared to swoon (and get hungry!) all around. It’s a great story of love and art, art and love, and how two creative spirits learn to intertwine their gifts and their goals.

I love this book because gay teen Henry keeps getting abducted by aliens. He’s trying to have a normal life as a high school student in Florida, but people think he’s a flake because he keeps going missing when the aliens take him.

The aliens give him a button to push if he wants to save the world from getting destroyed. Henry’s classmates f*ck around with him so much I wanted him to find something to give him hope not to destroy the world. His new boyfriend seems to be helping, but during a visit, Henry is taken by aliens and goes missing for a while, messing up his new romance.

It’s hard enough to be a gay teen, but to be a gay teen who is abducted by aliens on a weekly basis is something that I love about this book.

Jon Allen’s coming out and growing up story in his ongoing Ohio Is For Sale series, The Lonesome Era is, so far, his most complex and affecting work, but that’s not saying much for a cartoonist who expands his abilities and repertoire with each new book. The Lonesome Era is a rites-of-passage tale that showcases Allen’s customarily bleak outlook and dry wit, and it is, by turns, hilarious and poignant. I’ve called his work “Kafkaesque situation comedies” in the past, but that description belies the mordant emotional and observational sophistication on show here. He is simply one of the best young visual storytellers around.

This book is almost 400 pages long, but it absolutely does not feel like it. It’s one of the most riveting and absorbing books I’ve ever read, in part because of its relatively simple art style and small number of words per page.

It stars Aiden, a teenager who struggles with homophobia and suicidal thoughts as he comes to realize that he’s gay. So much of the dialogue and behavior in this book resonated with my own teenage experiences dealing with toxic “bros,” who made me feel like coming out would be an unsafe thing to do.

Curato creates an incredibly sympathetic character in Aiden, and his two-color artwork—grayscale with well-placed pops of orange and red—deftly supports the book’s thematic and emotional content. 

This was one of my favourite books of 2018. This one deals with the impact of suicide on a tight-knit community, while quietly following Shane as he discovers his sexual identity and love for his best friend, David. The author, Adam Garnet Jones, is an Indigiqueer screenwriter, director, bead-worker, and novelist from Edmonton Alberta. While his Indigenous identity includes Cree, Métis, and Kahnawake

Mohawk, his traditional ancestry is complicated by the fact that his home reserve no longer exists. The land and community were forcibly enfranchised by the Canadian government in 1958.

I love summer camp books, and I was not disappointed. The vibes were excellent in this book and I wanted to attend this camp! (Not in reality; I am NOT an outdoorsy person!)

The poor choices that were made (lying is bad, kids) made me cringe hard, but it made me realize that I was incredibly invested in the characters and didn’t want them to have their relationship explode in their faces. I forgot that I was reading, not inside the book.

The message of self-discovery and exploration of what it means to be queer was incredible and really helped me in my own journey. Great variety of queer rep, too.

To say I enjoyed this is an understatement to the highest degree. From the first paragraph, Doyles' prose grabbed me, slapped me, and demanded to be appreciated. I laughed out loud, and I loved it. Doyles' ability to turn a phrase had me in love with his prose so much that I immediately ordered it in paperback for my shelf since I had originally purchased it as an eBook.

Speaking of "in love," that’s what happened as I got to know Dean and Ben. Two very different boys with two very similar problems – both liked boys, and neither was ready for that to be known.

Coming out stories aren’t new, but Simon Doyle makes it feel new for me with expertly drawn characters, tightly plotted storylines, and strong dialogue. I really loved getting to know Ben, Dean, and even the prick Alex in Snow Boys!

I’ve been a big fan of James Tynion IV since his prolific run on Batman. He has a really strong understanding of how to write compelling characters while still exploring an interesting world.

In Wynd, he has created a wildly innovative world of magic creatures and political conflict. The love story is adorable and creates an interesting parallel to the exploration of Wynd’s character.

Most books with a 13-year-old protagonist tone reality down to get the story past gatekeepers, but this one digs into the gritty mess of what middle school life is actually like, and it’s so refreshing. I’d been searching for a book that accurately reflected my middle-school trans kid’s experience of gender exploration and social interactions that didn’t make eighth-graders sound like fourth graders, and this was it. Pubescent kids talk rough. They are rough. And they laugh constantly to cope with the mobius loop of disasters that is life in the 2020s. I loved how Eli’s experience of gender didn’t fit neatly into a box, and how it was presented as one facet of Eli’s complicated, resilient personality rather than as a single defining feature. 

Here’s another book that I love because it’s a story about love, the love of two boys who are unlikely companions: one is a former football player, taciturn and withdrawn; the other is openly gay, a short, slender, fine-boned boy who idolizes the poet Walt Whitman, whose words become a leitmotif of this remarkable novel. Told in the form of. letters that the two boys exchange, it follows their emerging friendship as it gradually turns into a love that’s as poetic as Whitman’s well-chosen words. The relationship of the boys – who are characters to die for – is riveting and their story, unforgettable. Another terrific addition to gay literature for teens.