What Gay Teens Want

Peo­ple keep ask­ing this ques­tion with regard to fic­tion geared toward teens, but who answers it? Adults — writ­ers, librar­i­ans, read­ers — but not teens. Until now.

I’d always enjoyed read­ing, but my pas­sion for it really solid­i­fied when I real­ized I was dif­fer­ent from all of my friends. I felt com­fort­able with books, with the char­ac­ters. I knew that they didn’t care whether I was dif­fer­ent or not. They were just char­ac­ters, after all, and they were too busy telling me their story to care whether or not I was gay. Read­ing was my escape. I felt nor­mal while read­ing. (In most books, the char­ac­ters’ prob­lems were greater than my own, so it gave me a chance to say, “at least my life ain’t that damn bad.”) Read more

Okay, granted that’s one teen’s response, but that’s what we need, isn’t it? Adults have kids’ best inter­est in mind when they sound off on the sub­ject, but to what extent do they really know what teens want? I write fic­tion for them, and I’m still in the dark as to their pref­er­ences. I sim­ply write what inspires me the most, mak­ing sure that the young hero is LGBT with­out mak­ing his sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion the focal point of his story (because that’s the kind of story I want to write), and then toss my books out there for who­ever wants them. It’s a hit-and-miss game that I play again and again and again. With all the atten­tion and lau­rels heaped upon what I call lit­er­ary fic­tion for LGBT teens, i.e., con­tem­po­rary prob­lem nov­els, to what extent do we really know that our tar­get audi­ence is hun­gry for stuff out­side coming-out fiction?

And after Brent’s guest blog, I hope to see more LGBT teens sound off on this sub­ject, whether or not they pre­fer real­ism or escapism.