When Franklin Dell lived in Denver Colorado he and his group of friends sold candy in their middle school, fought gang violence and enjoyed a nearly peaceful seventh grade year. Franklin has always bragged about Winston-Salem, North Carolina was his dream home. He enjoyed the predominantly African American city and wants nothing more than to leave the thuggish, ruggish gangster ways of Denver behind. Upon arriving in Winston-Salem, he finds that the city is nothing how he imagined it being from his summer visits from Denver.
This should be the best year of Scott's life: It's his last season of varsity ball, his team is about to go to the city championship, and a pro career is on the line. Instead, everything he always counted on comes crashing down at the same time, and his whole life is like one blazing hot corner—full of deadly line drives and crazy "bad hops."
The first day of Stephanie’s junior year is a step into the underworld. Led into desire, depression, and alienation by the intoxicating yet strangely distant figure of Denny Pistill, Stephanie must cope with a series of fears and crises. Denny and Stephanie are drawn to each other through writing and reading poetry, and author Liz Rosenberg’s own poetic sense gives truth to Stephanie’s ability to make art out of the darkest things.
Darkness: Where light is not. Light: Brightness or illumination from a particular source. Absolute brightness: The mystery of Leonard Pelkey. This is the story of a luminous force of nature: a boy who encounters evil and whose magic isn't truly felt until he disappears.
Steven's a 16-year-old boy with two obsessions: sex and getting his driving license. The problem is, Steven's not thinking girls when he's thinking sex. Could he be -- don't say it -- gay? Steven sets out to get in touch with his inner he-man with Healthy Heterosexual Strategies such as "Start Hanging Out with the Guys," and "Begin Intensive Dating." But are Steven's tactics going to straighten him out, or leave him all twisted up?
Adam is the 16-year-old most parents would love to have: he doesn't do drugs, comes top at school and regularly practices his cello. But there is another side to him, which comes to the fore when he falls for laborer Sylvain and gets sexually involved with two friends. The results are explosive in this passionate story of illicit romance and teenage angst -- a combination that is eternally popular with gay readers.
The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend’s lives, the world opens up for them. D comes from a world vastly different from their safe Queens neighborhood, and through her, the girls see another side of life that includes loss, foster families and an amount of freedom that makes the girls envious. Although all of them are crazy about Tupac Shakur’s rap music, D is the one who truly understands the place where he’s coming from, and through knowing D, Tupac’s lyrics become more personal for all of them.
A kid visited by memories of his dead cousin and tortured by his decision not to take a leap. A twin tormented by his monstrous brother. A couple blown apart by an unintended pregnancy. A personal discovery that threatens disaster. A bitter anger whose object is beyond the reach of revenge. A longing to live a forbidden life.
Susan Callaway, whose weight has kept her a shy, lonely outcast, narrates the story. Only Brendan, a gay classmate in the group, knows what landed her there. Susan is more than the sweet girl everyone thinks she is. She's had to cope with a lot more than anyone realizes. When the crank calls start-a male voice asking her to go out on a date-she's sure the calls were made by one of the guys in the group. But why is her brother never home when the calls come?
Marshall only wanted to help his friends, to undo the pain of the past, but a few moments of thoughtless action changed everything. Altered Realities is the tale of a changed world. All bets are off. Nothing is as it was and what is to be is transformed too. Mark, Taylor, Ethan, Nathan, Brendan, Casper and nearly the entire cast of the Gay Youth Chronicles come together in a tapestry of tales as they all try to deal with the consequences of Marshall’s actions.
Original stories by C. S. Adler, Marion Dane Bauer, Francesca Lia Block, Bruce Coville, Nancy Garden, James Cross Giblin, Ellen Howard, M. E. Kerr, Jonathan London, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Lesléa Newman, Cristina Salat, William Sleator, Jacqueline Woodson, and Jane Yolen.
Mark is an eighteen-year-old boy who wants what we all want: to love and be loved. His dreams are realized when he meets Taylor, the boy of his dreams. The boys struggle to keep their love hidden from a world that cannot understand, but ultimately, no secret is safe in a small Midwestern town.
Liza never knew that falling in love could be so
wonderful . . . and so confusing.
"'Liza,' Mom said, looking
into my eyes, 'I want you to tell me the truth, not because I want to
pry, but because I have to know. This could get very unpleasant...
Now--have you and Annie--done any more than the usual
experimenting...'
For Alex Ford, dressage is an oasis. In the stable, he can slip into his riding pants, shed the macho cowboy image, and feel like himself for a change.
I was in the West. The Old West. The Wild West! A whole summer in a new place: a place away from my parents, a place so hot the girls probably wore bikinis to church, a place where I'd take a giant step toward my dream: becoming a vet. A place where — who knows? — anything might happen.
Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916 -- Ireland's brave but fractured revolt against British rule -- At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O'Neill.
In six tense, exciting short stories, athletes face up to more than sports in tales of love and death, of bigotry and heroism, of real people doing the best that they can, even when that best is not enough.
Dirk MacDonald, a sixteen-year-old boy living in Los Angeles, comes to terms with being gay after he receives surreal storytelling visitations from his dead father and great-grandmother.
Nathaniel, or Natty as his family calls him, is a young man at a crossroads. His mother wants him to spend time with her family, far better off than his father, who is a poor vicar. His father would rather he do just about anything else, and his cousins have no interest in getting to know him. So what’s a young man with very few prospects to do?
The play of the classic movie.
Growing up as a bona fide tomboy in the shadow of her fashionable, ladylike mother, Bobbie lives for three things: cars, music, and time with her uncomplicated, mechanic dad. She doesn't need much in the way of friends. Her best girlfriends are on the radio—women with names like Aretha, Janis, and Diana. And she loves the cool logic of working on engines—the simple joy of finding the part that doesn't work, of fixing what's broken. But what's broken beneath the shiny facade of her family is something beyond Bobbie's control, a shattering secret that tears her family apart and sends Bobbie into a spiral of anger and defiance that she finds echoed only in the electric pain of rock 'n' roll.
When Belinda sees her mom walking arm in arm with a man who is not Belinda's father, her parent's marriage suddenly becomes the focus in her life. Obsessed with the affair that could break up her family, Belinda ignores the people closest to her.
This new poetry anthology navigates the rocky waters of teenage sexuality and confusion with insight, clarity, and understanding. The poems were written by adults who keenly remember the turmoil and excitement of their own adolescent sexual explorations but now have the perspective and sense of self that come with growing up. They employ concrete details — reaching across car seats, the electric touch of fingertips — as well as more ephemeral concepts, such as facing desire as powerful as a thunderstorm.
"Their friendship went so far back, it bordered on the Biblical-in the beginning, there was Nina and Avery and Mel." So says high school senior Nina Bermudez about herself and her two best friends, nicknamed "The Bermudez Triangle" by a jealous wannabe back on Nina's eleventh birthday. But the threesome faces their first separation when Nina goes away the summer before their senior year. And in ten short weeks, everything changes.
What do the poorest boy in town and the captain of the football team have in common? More than you might think. Casper has nothing, but a trio of bullies who hound him, a distant father and an older brother who makes his life a living hell. Brendan has it all; muscles, money, fame and popularity. The boys come from different worlds, but both share a constant desire.
Nick has a three-legged dog named Lucky, some pet fish, and two moms who think he's the greatest kid ever. And he happens to think he has the greatest Moms ever, but everything changes when his birth mom and her wife, Jo, start to have marital problems. Suddenly, Nick is in the middle, and instead of having two Moms to turn to for advice, he has no one.
Rustle is a young scout in a tight-knit female warrior group of five. They're trained to be aggressive, quick thinking, obedient-though for what exact purpose they couldn't quite tell you. But somehow the group is falling apart now. The leader Shona turns out to be a traitor to them. Roku has disappeared. Rustle has failed to show her killing skills in a crucial test of courage, and is feeling quite separate from the others. Loo is a true warrior, ready and able for action of the most extreme kind, though Rustle's private yen for her has not dimmed. Solomon, the healer of the group, is a steady hand, but not even her stability can save them.
The powerful story of a teenage boy's odyssey, "Billy's Boy" has already been a #1 bestseller on the "Lambda" and "Advocate" lists in hardcover, and has garnered rave reviews from "Library Journal, Lambda Book Report", and "The Washington Blade".
First published by St. Martin's in 1986, Blackbird is a funny, moving, gay coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay in Southern California. The lead character, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, is a high school student upset at losing the lead role in the school staging of Romeo and Juliet; if that weren't enough, his best friend has been beaten badly by his father, and his girlfriend is pressuring him to have sex for the first time.
Thoughtful Pete, tough Pauly, twins Eric and Nicole, strange Raymond: As kids they were tight; now they've grown up--and apart. They agree to get together one last time, but, twisted by personal histories and fueled by pharmaceuticals, old jealousies surface.
When Killian's new friend Seth is brutally murdered and he is seriously injured in the process the police think it's just a random mugging. Killian thinks there may have been a darker motive and, with Seth's father, sets out to uncover the truth behind the possible hate crime. Before his investigation is over he will uncover hatred and corruption in small town America.
Fifteen-year-old Sigurd, son of King Sigmund, is the last surviving member of the Volson clan. His father's kingdom -- the former city of London -- is gone. And his father's knife, a gift from Odin himself, has been shattered to dust.
"Tito doesn't live here anymore." Alex Beekman's best friend Tito has disappeared, and his parents won't say where he's gone--or why. To solve the mystery, Alex joins his father on a summer trip to Los Angeles. As he searches, Alex uncovers clues--Tito's surfboard, abandoned on a beach; the turtle design they once painted on their surfboards, now on display at a tattoo shop--but everyone who knew Tito clams up when Alex demands answers about his missing friend.
David is 15 and the star player of his school's rugby team. Sixteen-year-old Theo is an outsider, attractive but not altogether likable, and not particularly interested in making friends. In this award-winning novel set in New Zealand, initial hostility between the boys turns into an unlikely friendship- which masks a growing attraction that neither boy understands.
Larry, Teresa, and Elliot are so tight, there's no room in their circle for more than three: boy, girl, boy. And when they graduate, they plan to move to California to start their real lives—together.
In this delightful young adult novel, high school sophomore Paul says, "There isn’t really a gay scene or a straight scene in our town. They got all mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best." And, as he observes at the end of the story, "It's a wonderful world."
Written with uncanny precision and wild humor, this is the story of Billy Connors, high school student in the Bronx, member of the swim team, and all-around regular guy, who in his sixteenth year has to face the fact that he's a little different from everyone else, a little "weird."
Charlie is a teenage loner. His parents are gone, and except for his older brother, he doesn't need anyone, especially friends. But when Charlie ends up suspended after a school fight, he meets Brandon, and things begin to change. Even though Brandon hangs with the rich kids, Charlie discovers a real person underneath the phony exterior.
BREATHE is the story of a teenage boy's struggle to keep his sexuality a secret from his devout religious family and homophobic friends. BREATHE, which is set against the backdrop of contemporary city life and hip-hop culture, is written with a passion and verve reminiscent of James Earl Hardy.
In 1970s Chattahoochee, Florida, where the main employer is a mental institution, it's sink or swim for Lily. When her mama, a former beauty queen who once dreamt of being Miss Florida, takes Lily and her siblings fishing one morning, Lily nearly drowns while her mother looks on, "weighing her gains against her losses."
To climb the water tower, to dive off the bridge into the Santeetlah River, Chad McClain is unrivaled in his tough country-boy antics. Growing up in a small North Carolina town, Chad at eighteen is coming to grips with the fact that perhaps his future will not include college. That his horizons will not be stretching any farther than the same small-town streets and hay fields that he has been around his entire life.
When the Taylor-Michaelson family - Nikki and Travis and their two moms - buy an old inn in Vermont, they don't expect their first visitor to be the local sheriff with news of a robbery - and their second to be a bedraggled hiker with amnesia!
Seventeen-year-old Phil has felt like an outsider as long as he can remember. All Phil has ever known about his father is that he was Number Three on his mother’s long list—third in a series of affairs that have set Phil’s family even further apart from the critical townspeople across the river. As for his own sexuality, Phil doesn’t care what the neighbors will think; he’s just waiting for the right guy to come along.
Set in the1950s, in a white neighbourhood, Judy falls in love with a young black girl.
Cherokee Bat danced and sang. Witch Baby, Cherokee's almost-sister, pounded the beat on her drums. Raphael played the guitar, and Angel Juan kept the rhythm on his bass. They made music that sparkled like fireworks, and audiences loved them.
The Bampfield School for Girls is housed in a crumbling country estate where "the physical standards are those of Dartmoor, the religion perverted, and the games mistress a sadist"-and where love between students is the ultimate crime. Into this world comes sixteen-year-old Rachel, a young woman who loves the round symmetries of Latin verse and the melancholy beauty of the Somerset countryside.
When Cody heads off to rural Georgia for the gay version of the popular reality TV show, City/Country, he has no idea that things are going to be so disorganized. What starts out as a legitimate offer from network TV dissolves into a farce where Cody and the other four guys who agreed to do the show are being used as guinea pigs for a doctoral thesis.
Set against the dazzling backdrop of Hawaii's Oahu and Kauai islands, Clay's Way seethes with energy and hormonally charged nihilism. For 15-year-old Sam, a wanna-be punk rocker who writes bad haiku poetry, his middle-class suburban life feels like a prison. Mistaking lust for fate, Sam becomes obsessed with Clay, a 17-year-old surfer, outwardly cool but equally adrift.
Set in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the mid-1960s, Common Sons not only anticipates the coming gay revolution, but delineates its fields of battle in churches, schools and society, pitting fathers against sons, straight teens against gay teens, and self-hatred against self-respect.
Phoebe Sharp has long red braids. She wears old beat-up sneakers and clothes from Goodwill. She lives with her father and brother on a small farm in Maine, where she reads fairy tales to her goats and snaps pictures with her Instamatic camera. Phoebe doesn't have a single friend, never mind a boyfriend—that is, not until she meets Melita.
When her best friend dies, Girl, the 17-year-old street-punk narrator of Crashing America, leaves San Francisco for the heartland in search of a place where she can breathe again. Torn between her innate restlessness, an overwhelming longing for a sense of home, and a desperate fear of impending death, Girl seeks to link herself to almost anyone she crosses paths with: a bored housewife in Salt Lake City casting a net for illicit thrills, a born-again Christian punk rocker and his girlfriend, a teenage waitress in a small town with a horizon so endless Girl is terrified to leave her hotel room.
In her final year at a prestigious boarding school, reserved, artistic Jinx is badly hurt by the treachery of the rich, pretty girl she has considered her best friend.
When Cyd Charisse moves from San Francisco to start a new life in New York City, she leaves behind her family -- and her true love, Shrimp. She wants to find a cool job, the city's best caffeination and most perfect cupcake, and a hot new love. But the reality of CC's new life hits some unexpected obstacles, including a broken leg that renders her immobile; the joy and aggravation of sharing an apartment with a roommate who's also an older brother; and a tasty selection of guys -- none of whom measure up to Shrimp.