What do you do when you realize that the thing you loved growing up is actually not as great as you remember? Whether it’s a drop in quality, realizing that the messaging/content doesn’t mesh with who you are now, or finding out that your favorite director/author/creator is just not a great person, a lot of adults are having to look introspectively to figure out what to do next. This is the story of how I had to have my own reckoning with the Queer YA books I loved as a kid.

Like so many other LGBT people, I grew up thinking I was alone. This was a time where the only decent representation for gay people was Ellen, Queer slurs were used on TV frequently, and same-sex marriage was a fantasy that could only happen in Massachusetts. I was an effeminate little boy who was always more interested in painting my nails and reading books then doing whatever the other boys were doing. Since I wasn’t great at sports or didn’t like running around, for a long time growing up I was “othered” and the kids I grew up with kept their distance from me or bullied me. When that started happening I dived deep into reading. For a couple hours every day I was able to escape the bullshit I was dealing with by opening a book.

From Goosebumps and The Shining, to Stargirl and the Boxcar Children, I would tear through a couple different books a month. Then I moved into middle school, and this was around the time we started getting those “your body is changing” talks in gym. Not long after that, I began realizing just how different I was from other boys. Living in Texas, especially rural pre-internet-being-everywhere Texas, kids start dating young cause there wasn’t anything else to do. While a lot of my classmates were pairing up two by two, I was off hanging out at the library and just trying to make it to the next day.

More often than not I would spend my lunch period walking through the aisles of the too-small library, not really searching for anything, just trying to kill time until the bell rang. Then on a random day in the middle of the semester I found a book that would end up having a huge impact on my life.

I had found a shelf full of books that looked, and smelled, like they needed to be replaced soon. I remember looking through the books for anything interesting, and it was then that I saw something tucked away behind the row of overstuffed, dusty books. It looked like someone had purposely tried hiding the book from anyone’s view, and that only made me more curious. Reaching into the stacks, I pulled it out and was greeted with a bright baby blue color. On the cover were those chalky conversation hearts you only see around Valentine’s Day, and they spelled out the title of the book.

Boy Meets Boy.

My heart felt like it had stopped as I read the title over and over again in my mind. My pre-teen brain was wheeling from seeing this, and I remember feeling like I had found a combination of the Holy Grail and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. What I held in my hands was special but forbidden, especially in the Deep South of Texas in the mid-2000’s. But for as scared as I was, it was like someone had spoken to that growing part in my heart that I couldn’t keep ignoring. That part of me that watched Fantastic Four over and over again just to see Chris Evans shirtless, or how I would go dumb in the brain anytime the handsome guy I shared English with asked to see my homework. The part of me that felt unlovable.

I know this may sound overdramatic to anyone younger than me who may be reading this, or maybe you were raised in a more open-minded area. But growing up, especially in a very conversative Latin household in rural Texas, there was no mention of being Queer in any sort of positive way. The ways in which everyone in my life talked about being gay, from the people I went to school with to my own family, I knew that in their eyes being gay was wrong and irredeemable. So, for a while I tried to push it down inside me as far I could.

But all of the sudden, there was this book, and it was like the universe was confronting me with my truth and telling me I needed to come to terms with it. Flipping the book over, the back synopsis made me feel every emotion I could as I read about an idyllic town that welcomed anyone. Where a gay teen could go out with boys and have his parent’s support and love, and he was well liked by everyone around him without anyone calling him names or anything. It was like I had found a book that was speaking right to my deepest gayby dreams.

Setting my bag down, I sat on the library’s carpet and read as much as I could until the bell rang. I was then faced with an impossible decision. I could check the book out and have it on record that I checked out a gay book, or I could set it down and just never come back to it again. (I realize there were plenty of other options now, but back then my dumb kid brain was so dramatic about everything).

Panicking as I realized I had to get to class soon, I stuffed the book in my bag and ran out of there like a bat out of hell. I’m sure the librarian thought I had fallen asleep and was late for class, but on the inside, I felt like I had just gotten away with the heist of the century. For the rest of the day, I waited for a call to the principal’s office, or for everyone to suddenly turn and point at me like they knew what I had in my bag. By the time school was over and the bus was taking me home, I held my breath anxiously waiting until I was safely in my bedroom and able to continue reading.

As I kept on reading, it was like a switch had been turned on inside me. For the first time, even though I was lonely, I didn’t feel alone. From there I went on to search for any other sort of Queer YA book I could find. From books about young Queer athletes, to Queer religious kids, to Queer kid’s dealing with depression like me, I was reading as much as I could at any given moment. It was like I had found a lighthouse beacon to others like me, and while I was still dealing with bullshit every day, I could read about (fictional) people like me dealing with similar shit, but they came out on top in the end.

Time continued to march on, and before I realized it, I was in high school. I spent the first two years of my high school experience being bullied more horribly than before, not getting help from administrators, dealing with rumors being spread about me, and being outted my freshman year. Then the summer before my junior year, something flipped. I started hanging out with people, I had a car so I could go into the city, and I was able to have the people I was friendly with at school turn into actual outside school friends. I had finally found my people, that Queer found family I had wanted for so long.

Slowly I started reading these books less and less, because I was out there actually living the life I wanted. Driving for day trips to the beach, having all night slumber parties, and hanging out at the mall like we were the actors in an Avril Lavigne music video. I was happier than I had been before, and I didn’t need the fictional safe haven these books created for me. I had found people like myself, and in turn was working on finding out who I was as well.

Fast forward to a few years ago. I had just graduated college and secured a full-time job. Now that I had expandable income, I decided to treat myself and buy a lot of the books that brought me comfort in that difficult time of my life. It was like an easter egg hunt of going online and seeing what I could remember, using internet search groups, and just asking my Queer friends if they remembered any books that fit what I was looking for. It was a long process, but as the books came in and filled out my shelf, I was proud and happy. I was out, living with my fiancé, and if I wanted to have a library of Queer YA books from my youth, I was damn sure going to make that happen.

I began with the book that had such an effect on my life as a gayby and reading Boy Meets Boy again still made me feel happy and was a total nostalgia trip. Then I moved on to the next book, and it was like walking straight into a brick wall. While Boy Meets Boy still held up, I would soon realize that a lot of the other books didn’t. It wasn’t that they were written poorly or anything like that, but as I read one after another after another, something hit me like the first brick thrown at Stonewall.

Many Queer books for teens written pre-2010 were centered on LGBT kids being subjected to trauma just because of who they were. That’s all it was. There wasn’t a whole lot of variety. No LGBT YA sci-fi. No stories with gay kids dealing with spooky-ooky ghosts. No apocalyptic fantasy epics with a trans main character. Your choices were: A gay/lesbian/trans character comes out and/or dates a person of the same gender and then their parents would disown them/they try to hurt themselves/they would have a hate crime committed against them or a combination of all of the above. The ending would wrap up with some “even though I’ve experienced some horrible life events, I am now stronger because of them” nonsense and that was that. Taking a step back, that was all bullshit and probably explains why I had so much anxiety around coming out.

I remember before I sat down and had my “talk” with my parents, I would have these horrible nightmares about what could happen to me. What if I was forced into conversion therapy? Or what if I was the next Matthew Shepard? So much of what we saw about being Queer during this time period was about the collective amount of harm we “have” to endure just to be happy. Whether it’s being bullied at home or school, dating people in secret because they’re ashamed of you/themselves, not allowing yourself to express your gender however you want for fear of living a happy life. Everything from books, movies, and tv shows at the time were all about “well… your life may suck now, but one day you’ll be okay”. It was in that moment when I realized this, that I was feeling really emotional.

I had just dropped a pretty penny on a lot of books I didn’t want anymore, but also, I was just mad that this is what I grew up with. Nothing but secondhand trauma, re-packaged as hope. But I couldn’t be mad at these authors, because a lot of their lives were like the characters in the books they wrote. They had seen things I didn’t even know about at the time. Horrific hate crimes that went without justice, the AIDS epidemic, gay penetrative sex being illegal, and the list could go on and on. It makes a lot of sense that their views of life as a young Queer person were filled with struggle, because that’s what theirs had been. On that same note, I was talking with an older Queer person the other day and they couldn’t believe where we are now while I was talking about how we still have so much further to go. That really shifted my perspective into place.

Then I was left asking myself, where do I go from here? How do I sit with the uncomfortable feeling of what I loved as a kid turning out to not actually be that great? That those books, for as much as they helped, also helped fuel a lot of my anxiety surrounding life as a Queer adult. Two things may be able to be true at the same time, but that doesn’t really help.

Then last year happened and I, like so many others, had way too much free time on my hands than I knew what to do with. I already knew how to make bread, and I’m much more of a workout in a nice, air-conditioned gym type of person, so those were out. Then I got a notification that a book I had wanted to read was available for check out on my local library’s app. Opening it up, I started scrolling through the YA section just to browse and I saw that there were a lot more books with Lambda Award stamps on them, or rainbow flags, or even two people of the same gender on the cover holding hands. I didn’t end up checking anything out, but after spending most of the first quarter of the year reading nothing but fun-but-trashy romance novels, I wanted something that was a change of pace.

Around this time the George Floyd protests began, and more Black authors were talking about their experiences in publishing while also highlighting their own work. That led to me discovering A Blade so Black, which I covered for Gayly Dreadful, and after I finished the first book I immediately moved on to the sequel, A Dream So Dark. I’ve waxed poetic about the first book enough, but the second was a treat and a dream. It was stuffed to the brim with action, believable characters, and had some really sweet little baby Queer crushing going on throughout. After finishing both books, I figured that I would spend the rest of my summer reading mostly Queer YA just to see how much it had changed since I grew up. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list of everything I read, just some highlights that maybe if you’re like me you’d enjoy too, but I want to spread the word on these books that I really enjoyed.

After finishing that series, I picked up The Fell of the Dark and was really charmed by its premise. Imagine a world where vampires are common knowledge, and there are certain big cities that are epicenters of vampire activity. The story follows a young, gay boy who is dealing with spooky, prophetic visions in his art, vampires coming to him who may want to date him or use him to destroy the world and trying to get into college. Personally, I’m a sucker for vampire stories. Especially a vampire romance, and this was like if someone made a True Blood/Buffy crossover and kept it bordering on the edge of PG/PG-13.

After that, I picked up a duology of books that were some of the best written (and also most frustrating) I’ve ever read. Dread Nation/Deathless Divide follow a young Queer Black girl in post-civil war America… but the reason the civil war ended was because zombies started popping up from the ground. After that, Black and Native peoples are forced to learn how to fight zombies to protect white people. It was a very heavy book in some moments, and sometimes I was left wanting to scream because of what the main character went through. But the endings to both books leave you satisfied, and when something is so well-written that you get immersed into the world of the book, you don’t care how much frustration you are feeling, at least it’s evoking any sort of response from you at all.

Towards the middle of the summer, I spent my birthday treating myself to a book that I had seen a few reviewers talking about that looked right up my alley. Cinderella is Dead has a gorgeous cover, a really intriguing synopsis, and I personally have a forever love for the Cinderella fairytale thanks to repeated viewings of Brandy and Whitney Houston’s version. But this book seemed like a grimmer and more dystopian take on the tale. In the world of the book, Cinderella’s story is used as propaganda against women, and in a world where women are given to men by order of the king, the lead character makes the choice to fight back against the totalitarian system in place. This book was full of magic, espionage, fighting against systems that harm all people, and had a killer ending that had me surprised. Oh! And if you’re a fan of spooky ghost moments, there were a few of those too for a fun dash of horror.

These next two books made me cry, and I mean ugly, snotty, heaving cry. That may not mean much because I’ve already outted myself as a sensitive person, but these two were the first time I’ve seen myself in what I’m reading, and I mean really seen myself, not just on a surface level similarities. Darius the Great is Not Okay and Darius the Great Deserves Better follow a young Persian-American boy who is dealing with the terminal illness of his grandfather he’s never met before, his distancing relationship from his father who he inherited depression from, and trying to balance feeling like an outsider in both Persian culture and American culture. I’ve never felt more seen by a book I was reading, nor has a book ever caused me to go on a 10+ tweet spree where I gush over it.

Finally, towards the end of summer I was out in Austin a lot visiting my quarantine pod, and I needed something to read when everyone else had gone to sleep and I was the last one awake. I had just finished Mexican Gothic (amazing spooky book if you love elegant/decrepit settings, Mexican culture, and existential horror), and wanted to read more books written by people that share the same culture as me. This is how I found We Set the Dark on Fire/We Unleash the Merciless Storm. It was described as being like The Handmaid’s Tale but Latinx, and I think that really undersells the series. I was a bit worried when I started reading that it was going to be sexual violence and women in pain, but what followed was a really good Lesbian enemies to lovers story, set in a fictional Latinx inspired world where wealthy men are given two wives. The novels follow the wives of the man who will become the future dictator of their country, and from there it spins into a story of blackmail, women bringing down unbalanced systems from the inside, and women going from polite society ladies into cutthroat warriors.

There were a few more books that I liked, but not enough to cover in here, but as I finished the last book and summer changed into fall, I was left sitting there wondering what now? I had just read a whole bunch of modern Queer YA, and it was everything I wished I had growing up. While it does suck that all I had were books on Queer people suffering, reading these modern Queer YA books, and writing this out helped a lot more than I thought it would. For every “I’m coming out and dealing with bullshit” book that releases now, there is a hundred more books about LGBT kids that doesn’t focus on that. I know I’m an emotional person, but it does help knowing that if there’s kids going through situations like I was, they won’t just see themselves hurting before they can be happy. They’ll get scary stories, epic adventures, and happy endings just like their non-Queer peers and that leaves me feeling hopeful for the future.