Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Young Adult Fiction: January-June 2026
I, in the Shadows by Tori Bovalino (January 13th)
Maybe this is possession; maybe this is truly what it is to be haunted.
There’s a ghost hanging out in Drew Larpin’s new room. He’s a fellow Pine Hollow high schooler named Liam, and technically, it’s his old room. Now he’s stuck haunting it―unsure of how he died or why he hasn’t moved on to the afterlife. Drew knows she has to help him. . . .…
The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities around the World by Lee Wind
Racism and the Making of Gay Rights by Laurie Marhoefer
Voting ended onMay 16
Book summaries below:
The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities around the World by Lee Wind
Author Lee Wind takes the reader on a journey around the world and through history to debunk the idea of a gender binary―including 4,500-year-old third-gender burial sites in the Czech Republic; the Bugis people of southern Sulawesi, Indonesia, who recognize three physical sexes and five genders; and people who identify as gender queer and gender fluid today. Using primary source materials including images of featured historical figures, Wind presents a multi-gender reality that is deeply rooted in history.
Nonfiction, history, gender
Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love by Laurie Marhoefer
In 1931, a sexologist arrived in colonial Shanghai to give a public lecture about homosexuality. In the audience was a medical student, and after the lecture concluded, he introduced himself. The sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, fell in love with the medical student, Li Shiu Tong. Li became Hirschfeld’s assistant on a lecture tour around the world – the first time in history that a renowned expert defended homosexuality to so many people in so many countries.
Racism and the Making of Gay Rights shows how Hirschfeld laid the groundwork for modern gay rights, and how he did so by borrowing from a disturbing set of racist, imperial, and eugenic ideas. Yet on his journey with Li, Hirschfeld also had inspiring moments – including when he formulated gay rights as a broad, anti-colonial struggle and as a movement that could be linked to Jewish emancipation.
Following Hirschfeld and Li in their travels through the American, Dutch, and British empires, from Manila to Tel Aviv to having tea with Langston Hughes in New York City, and then into exile in Hitler’s Europe, Laurie Marhoefer provides a vivid portrait of queer lives in the 1930s and of the turbulent, often-forgotten first chapter of gay rights.
What can you do when you see unfair things happening to other people?
Eleanor’s not sure, but she wants to make things more fair, like her namesake Eleanor Roosevelt.
Robin’s excluded from a boys-only soccer game.
Bryce is left out of a girls-only conversation.
And nonbinary Star can’t even use the same bathrooms as everyone else.
Eleanor collects friends but doesn’t know how to help.
But when their teacher leaves Star out of a classroom game, Eleanor stands up for her friend by sitting down in just the right spot...
And that changes everything.
Like THAT Eleanor.
From award-winning author Lee Wind, whose social justice-inspired picture book Red and Green and Blue and White (illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky) was called “beautiful” by The New York Times, in a review that praised it as, “a message the world can use, throughout the year.”
I processed "The Gender Binary is a Big Lie" by Lee Wind at work today and here were some of my favorite pages
In order from left to right:
- grave sites discovered from a neolithic group of people all the way back in 2800 BCE displayed very specific and gendered burial practices. However, one individual appeared to be a male buried in the fashion of a woman. This may be one of the earliest examples of transgender people.
- Tumtum, individuals mentioned in the Talmud (text of Rabbinic Judaism) who had neutral or unclear sex characteristics. For Tumtum/androgynous individuals, the rules for certain traditional adornments are different.
- a very important clarification is made on a verse from Deuteronomy (5th book of the Torah), which describes men wearing the apparel of women or women wearing the apparel of men as "an abomination before God". The actual meaning was interpreted in a few different ways, but in summary, it was meant to communicate that you should never conceal your gender or pretend to be a different gender specifically to cause harm to others. This includes using it to disguise yourself to commit infidelity, or to sneak away to worship idols.
- Hijras, a South Asian 3rd gender which encompasses trans people, intersex people, and eunuchs, will sometimes be voluntarily castrated in an act of ritualistic rebirth. Should a Hijra choose not to go through with this, they will not be considered any less of a Hijra. Hijras are encouraged not to rush this ceremony, usually taking several years to form their decision.
- in Hawai'i, māhū (those who embody both the male and female spirit) and trans people struggled through an extremely oppressive period, leading them to be disowned by families, drop out of school, or turn to sex work. "Māhū" was used as a slur, and the unfortunate circumstances that māhū and trans people found themselves in as a result of societal rejection only contributed to the stigma.
- an important PSA about the distinction between transgender people and intersex people, and how the transgender experience has often been used to justify the mutilation and abuse of intersex people. Just because transgender people make their own informed choices to chemically/surgically alter their bodies and to present as another gender does not mean that you can force chemicals or surgeries or social transitioning onto intersex people and it will magically change their sense of their own gender or self. Intersex people are who they are, trans people are who they are.
No Way, They Were Gay?: Hidden Lives and Secret Loves Book Review
★★☆☆☆ ~ 2 out of 5 stars
One of my favorite pastimes is wandering through the nonfiction section of my local libraries to see what we’re passing off as the truth these days. This is how I stumbled upon No Way, They Were Gay?: Hidden Lives and Secret Loves by Lee Wind, a book that immediately intrigued and exasperated me in equal measure when I saw pictures of Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln on the cover. Further compelled by the back blurb that makes the (in my opinion, accurate, but sorely misused in this instance) claim that history is not as simple as a rote statement of facts but more like a series of events and circumstances interpreted and reinterpreted by various people over time, each coming from their own specific contexts and biases and contributing those to their interpretations, I checked it out.
No Way, They Were Gay? is broken into three broad sections: men who loved men, women who loved women, and people who lived outside the gender binary. It also contains a short introduction to terms and explains some of the choices that the author made when describing historical people - such as the wildly questionable choice to refer to Charley Pankhurst (who was assigned female at birth (AFAB) but lived as a man) and Anne Lister (who is a well-known and well-documented woman who loved women but had a butch gender presentation) with they/them pronouns. I was so taken aback by this particular choice that I kept track of the pronouns used for everyone mentioned in this book and was uncomfortable to find that they were only used for masculine-leaning people who were assigned female at birth - despite the presence of a nonbinary assigned male individual.
I understand the complexities of trying to figure out what historical figures would have identified as and what they language they would’ve used if they lived in the modern world, but I find it uncomfortable to make assumptions that are clearly rooted in a combination of assigned sex and gender presentation; nonbinary people come in all combinations of these characteristics, and they use all kinds of pronouns. I am of the opinion that it is usually most respectful to use the pronouns for people that they used for themselves, if known. And I feel that we know what Pankhurst and Lister used for themselves.
I go in-depth about this pronoun issue not just because I care about this on a personal level (though, obviously, I do), but because it is indicative of just how pervasive and stark Wind’s biases are throughout the course of this book. Clearly, he thinks they/them pronouns are for masc AFABs. He also presents very cherry-picked evidence for his arguments about a few famous and well-documented individuals being gay - such as Abraham Lincoln. I don’t have a strong opinion on Lincoln’s sexuality, but what I do have a strong opinion on is the choice to present a friendship between two men that met the platonic standard of the time as inherently “gay” (with the strong implication here of “gay” being synonymous with a romantic relationship) while simultaneously being dismissive of/barely getting into the men’s relationships to their wives.
This is extremely frustrating because this book covers actual historically important queer people, too, so you have to weed through the author’s fringe theories about Lincoln alongside actual facts about Bayard Rustin and Christine Jorgensen’s lives. And I want children to learn about Rustin and Jorgensen and dozens of other important queer people, but I don’t want them to learn about someone who is incredibly biased at best and incredibly sloppy and rude to certain portions of the community at worst. And additionally, because I can't trust this book, I don't know how accurate portions of it that cover individuals and topics I'm less familiar with (such as two-spirit identities or the nature of relationships between Mosotho women) are.
That is why, although I found most of the book more or less surface-level accurate, I cannot recommend it in good faith. I give it 2 out of 5 stars. Yes, it could be a basic starting point, but it’s misleading and not fully-fleshed out - look, the intended audience is children, not idiots. You can explain more complexity than this to fifth graders, and frankly, you should. This book is an attempt at validating historical queer existence that falls so embarrassingly flat because it was trying to do too much with too little information. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. There is no need to feed into this conspiracy theory that historians are hiding queer people from us when the truth is more complicated than that. There is no need to claim someone so well-known and studied is queer, when we really don’t know, just so kids recognize the name and pick up the book. They can learn a new name. In my experience, they’re generally more interested in learning about new people than adults are.
Illustrator: Paul O. Zelinsky
Inspired by a true story, this is a tale of a community that banded together to spread light.
It’s a holiday season that both Isaac, whose family is Jewish, and Teresa, whose family is Christian, have looked forward to for months! They’ve been counting the days, playing in the snow, making cookies, drawing (Teresa) and writing poems (Isaac). They enjoy all the…
This post is sponsored in honor of Soon By You by Dahlia Adler, out today from St. Martin’s Griffin! (Soon By You is a spicy m/f romance with an MMC on the ace spectrum.)
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | The Ripped Bodice | Lovestruck Books | The Last Chapter | The Well Red Damsel
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Picture Books
Our Guncle by Steven Rowley and Eda Kaban
After the loss of their mom, siblings Grant and Maisie have…
Exclusive Cover Reveal: A Different Kind of Enemy by Lee Wind
Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome back queer YA icon Lee Wind to reveal the cover of his upcoming YA, A Different Kind of Enemy, which releases May 19th from Interlude Press/Duet Books! Here’s the story:
Perfect for YA fans of Heartstopper and Red, White & Royal Blue, A Different Kind of Enemy is the sequel to the Gay teen globe-trotting adventure Kirkus Reviews called “Thrilling.…
