Book genre grows

June 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

At his Kentucky ele- mentary school, kids taunted Brent on the playground about being gay, whatever that was. By eighth grade, he realized what they meant and came out to a friend — and vice versa.

She was an avid writer, he a voracious reader. They headed to their school library in search of stories that spoke to their lives: gay, gay in the South, gay and fearing stereotypes like “disgusting” and “worthless.”

“There were tons of books about gangs and drugs and teen pregnancy, and there were no LGBT books. I asked the librarian about it and she was like, ‘This is middle school. I can only have appropriate books here,’” said Brent, now 15 and heading into his sophomore year of senior high.

So they went to their public library, where they discovered plenty of romantic gay steam between covers — for adults. “We weren’t complaining,” said Brent, who asked that his last name and hometown not be used.

Turning next to bookstores, they finally found what they’d been looking for — a recent explosion in the publishing world of reads that speak to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning teens.

First came a gem, a book for young people that made them cry: Martin Wilson’s 2008 debut, “What They Always Tell Us,” set in Tuscaloosa, Ala. The story about a troubled year for two brothers, one of whom finds solace in a relationship with a boy, made him feel less like an “alien on your own planet.”

A world of books followed. Brent read his way through Tom Dolby, Robin Reardon, Julie Ann Peters and David Levithan. He soon realized there were lots of coming-out stories but he also craved romance, fantasy and paranormal books with characters who just happened to be gay, like Damien in the “House of Night” vampire series he loves by the mother-daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast.

“I see the characters trickling into the mainstream genres. I really like that,” Brent said. “It makes being gay feel natural, which it is, of course. Books give you hope.”

Reads that speak to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning teens have traveled light years since John Donovan’s “I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip” led the way in 1969, now long out of print. The book on the confused world of 13-year-old Davy and the jock he kisses will be reissued in September from Flux, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide.

“This book made Harper & Row [now HarperCollins] very nervous,” said Brian Farrey, editor of the new edition. “They weren’t sure how people were going to take to it. It was the one that said it can be done for teens and there won’t be people with pitchforks and torches waiting for you at the door. It opened the closet to teens and said, ‘you are not alone.’”

Well before gay characters began popping up in the mainstream on TV and at the movies, librarians embraced “I’ll Get There,” said Kathleen T. Horning, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Another important forerunner was Nancy Garden’s 1982 “Annie on My Mind” and its unabashedly happy ending for two 17-year-old girls who fall in love.

“Previous to that, there would be some awful car accident or one of the gay characters would die,” Horning said, acknowledging that thread in “I’ll Get There.” “There was a sense that the gay character had to be punished somehow. They were kind of depressing.”

Still, until now few LGBT titles became blockbusters. That changed with two boys named Will Grayson and a very large, very GLEE-ful linebacker named Tiny.

“Will Grayson, Will Grayson,” by Levithan and John Green, debuted on the New York Times children’s best-seller list and stayed there for three weeks after its April release. It’s a first for a young adult novel with major gay themes and has delighted hungry teen readers — fanboys and fangirls who were the likely reason the book became a trending topic on Twitter. Penguin has 60,000 copies in print.

In alternating chapters, Green and Levithan write of two 16-year-old boys with little in common, living in separate Chicago suburbs. One’s depressed and struggling to come out, and the other is straight with a flamboyantly gay friend in Tiny Cooper, a football star on the hunt for love — and stardom in musical theater.