2SLGBTQIA+ Reads

Told in two voices, when Arthur, a summer intern from Georgia, and Ben, a native New Yorker, meet it seems like fate, but after three attempts at dating fail they wonder if the universe is pushing them together or apart.

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

After a bewildering encounter at her small town's annual summer festival, seventeen-year-old biracial, queer Nima plunges into the world of drag, where she has the chance to explore questions of identity, acceptance, self-expression, and love.

Felix Love, a transgender seventeen-year-old, attempts to get revenge by catfishing his anonymous bully, but lands in a quasi-love triangle with his former enemy and his best friend.

Although they have been friends and neighbors all their lives, straight Naomi and gay Ely find their relationship severely strained during their freshman year at New York University.

In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam's mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster.

When two teens, one gay and one straight, meet accidentally and discover that they share the same name, their lives become intertwined as one begins dating the other's best friend, who produces a play revealing his relationship with them both.

A good friend will bury your body, a best friend will dig you back up. Dino doesn't mind spending time with the dead. His parents own a funeral home, and death is literally the family business. He's just not used to them talking back. Until Dino's ex-best friend July dies suddenly--and then comes back to life. Except not exactly. Somehow July is not quite alive, and not quite dead. As Dino and July attempt to figure out what's happening, they must also confront why and how their friendship ended so badly, and what they have left to understand about themselves, each other, and all those grand mysteries of life.

Liz Lighty has always done her best to avoid the spotlight in her small, wealthy, and prom-obsessed midwestern high school, after all, her family is black and rather poor, especially since her mother died; instead she has concentrated on her grades and her musical ability in the hopes that it will win her a scholarship to elite Pennington College and their famous orchestra where she plans to study medicine--but when that scholarship falls through she is forced to turn to her school's scholarship for prom king and queen, which plunges her into the gauntlet of social media which she hates and leads her to discoveries about her own identity and the value of true friendships.

In Vancouver, British Columbia, two teenage dressage riders, one a spoiled rich girl and the other a closeted gay sixteen-year-old boy, come to terms with their identities and learn to accept themselves.

Alice believes she is asexual, after breaking up with her girlfriend, and has sworn off dating but ends up having feelings for her co-worker Takumi.

Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali is looking forward to going to Caltech and getting away from her conservative Muslim parents' expectation that she will marry, especially since she is in love with her girlfriend Ariana--but when her parents catch her kissing Ariana, they whisk Rukhsana off to Bangladesh and a world of tradition and arranged marriages, and she must find the courage to fight for the right to choose her own path.

Ben Carver returns for the spring semester at the exclusive Natick School in Massachusetts determined to put his relationship with Rafe Goldberg behind him and concentrate on his grades and the award that will mean a full scholarship--but Rafe is still there, there is a girl named Hannah whom he meets in the library, and behind it all is his relationship with his distant, but demanding father.

Tired of being known as "the gay kid", Rafe Goldberg decides to assume a new persona when he comes east and enters an elite Massachusetts prep school--but trying to deny his identity has both complications and unexpected consequences.

Three New York City teens express their reactions to the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and its impact on their lives and the world.

Ellie Gold, an orthodox Jewish teenager in the 1980s, struggles to cope with her newly-discovered homosexuality and her strict religion's rules against homosexuality, until her mother and sister offer her an alternate concept of God that helps Ellie accept her lifestyle.

1954, in San Francisco's Chinatown, seventeen-year-old Lily Hu falls in love with Kathleen Miller.

Maeve, a sufferer of severe anxiety, moves in with her recovering alcoholic father and her very pregnant stepmother and falls for a girl who is not afraid of anything.

The gender fluid thief Sal Leon enters a competition to become a replacement member of the Left Hand--a quartet of the Queen's personal assassins--but must first survive the training and the contests while putting the reason for auditioning into motion--revenge.

Eighteen-year-old Simon Peters wants to stand up for the truth about who he is, but he has been banished from his church and sent to Waverley Christian Center to learn how to be "normal" again, and it takes Simon's mute twin bother to show him how to be himself.

A story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal told from different points in time, and in separate voices, by artists Jude and her twin brother Noah.

When Lei, seventeen, is stolen from her home to become one of nine Paper Girls, the Demon King's concubines, she proves to be more fire than paper.

This revised edition of Alyson’s groundbreaking anthology for gay and lesbian teens features new original fiction which reflect both the tension and relief of being true to oneself. Contributors include Gregory Maguire (Wicked), Brent Hartinger (The Geography Club), Claire McNab (The Wombat Strategy), Michael Thomas Ford (Last Summer) and Bonnie Shimko (Letters in the Attic). These stories provide hope and inspiration to gay and lesbian teenagers as they take the first exciting, often difficult steps toward accepting their sexuality and emerging from the shadows as open and proud individuals.

Fifteen-year-old Regan's life, which has always revolved around keeping her older brother Liam's transsexuality a secret, changes when Liam decides to start the process of "transitioning" by first telling his family and friends that he is a girl who was born in a boy's body.

In a near-future New York City where a service alerts people on the day they will die, teenagers Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio meet using the Last Friend app and are faced with the challenge of living a lifetime on their End Day.

Secrets are revealed as OCD-afflicted Griffin grieves for his first love, Theo, who died in a drowning accident.

Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong.

Having faced teasing that turned into a brutal attack, Christianity expressed as persecution, and the loss of his only real friend when he could no longer keep his crush under wraps, seventeen-year-old Billy Bloom, a drag queen, decides the only way to become fabulous again is to run for Homecoming Queen at his elite, private school near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Evan Panos's strict immigrant Greek mother sees him as a disappointment. His workaholic father is a staunch believer in avoiding any kind of conflict. And his best friend, Henry, has somehow become distractingly attractive over the summer. His only escape is drawing, in an abandoned monastery that feels as lonely as he is. And Henry makes Evan believe that he deserves more than his mother's harsh words and terrifying abuse. As things escalate, Evan has to decide how to find his voice in a world where he has survived so long by being silent.

Yadriel, a trans boy, summons the angry spirit of his high school's bad boy, and agrees to help him learn how he died, thereby proving himself a brujo, not a bruja, to his conservative family.

A.J. Brandiosa becomes the bad boy of the Cyclone hockey team, and learns that his best friend is gay, as he tries to cope with his own sexuality during his senior year in high school.

In Berlin on the cusp of World War II, eighteen-year-old Hilde leaves her orphanage and takes a job at a vibrant cabaret full of expressive customers where she finally finds a place to belong until seeds of unrest force her to decide what's best for her future.

Grady, a transgendered high school student, yearns for acceptance by his classmates and family as he struggles to adjust to his new identity as a male. Angela Katz-McNair never felt quite right as a girl. So she cuts her hair short, purchases some men's clothes and chose a new name: Grady. While coming out as transgender feels right to Grady, he isn't prepared for the reactions of his friends and family. Why can't they accept that Grady is just being himself? Grady's life is miserable until he finds friends in unexpected places the school geek, Sebastian, who tells Grady that there is a precedent for transgenders in the natural world, and Kita, a senior, who might just be Grady's first love.

Some secrets never die... Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn't know is that in moving, Priya is running from her past - from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it's once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash discovers Priya online and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship - or its tumultuous end. Prakash's sudden arrival at their home reveals cracks in Priya and Alex's relationship and brings into question Priya's true intentions. Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge. It asks readers: Are we ever free from our pasts? Do we deserve to be?

Teeming with life and crackling with energy--a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood. Follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

Pop star Leontyne Blake might sing about love, but she stopped believing in it a long time ago. What women want is her image, not the real her. When her father has a stroke, she flees the spotlight and returns to her tiny Missouri hometown. In her childhood home, she meets small-town nurse Holly Drummond, who isn't impressed by Leo's fame at all. That isn't the only thing that makes Holly different from other women. She's also asexual. For her, dating is a minefield of expectations that she has decided to avoid. Can the tentative friendship between a burned-out pop star and a woman not interested in sex develop into something more despite their diverse expectations? A lesbian romance about seeking the perfect rhythm between two very different people--and finding happiness where they least expect it.

Cynical twenty-three-year old August doesn't believe in much. She doesn't believe in psychics, or easily forged friendships, or finding the kind of love they make movies about. And she certainly doesn't believe her ragtag band of new roommates, her night shifts at a 24-hour pancake diner, or her daily subway commute full of electrical outages are going to change that. But then, there's Jane. Beautiful, impossible Jane. All hard edges with a soft smile and swoopy hair and saving August's day when she needed it most. The person August looks forward to seeing on the train every day. The one who makes her forget about the cities she lived in that never seemed to fit, and her fear of what happens when she finally graduates, and even her cold-case obsessed mother who won't quite let her go. And when August realizes her subway crush is impossible in more ways than one--namely, displaced in time from the 1970s--she thinks maybe it's time to start believing.

As the son of the president of the U.S. Alex is cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. When he gets into an altercation with the British prince, both nations decide to stage a truce to keep U.S./British relations. But what started out as a fake friendship, developed into something deeper for Alex and Henry. With a relationship that could upend both nations, they both must find their courage and learn to let their true colors shine through.

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages - and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home for his step-father's funeral, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.