I Am J by Cris Beam - This is a story about an eighteen-year-old boy, J Silver, as he comes out to his family and friends, falls in love, runs away from home, starts his transition, and begins to find a chosen family among other trans people. It was written by a cis author - who seems to be GNC and some variety of multisexual - but she's clearly done her research.
Representation: The main character is a straight, biracial trans man with a Puerto Rican mother and non-practicing European Jewish father (I know there's debate in the Jewish community on whether or not European Jewish people are white and I'm goy so I shouldn't get involved). He's light-skinned, but not white-passing. His best friend for the first half of the book is a cishet biracial girl, Melissa, with a black mother (who is pagan, though this isn't a big factor in the story) and white father. In the second half, he makes friends with a straight black trans woman named Chanelle, who is in her early twenties, and a white trans man, about twenty-three or twenty-four, whose sexuality is left ambiguous (for some reason, I'm pretty sure he's bi) named Zak. There's also a Latina trans woman, Marcia, who acts as a sort of mentor to J when he first runs away.
Perfect by Ellen Hopkins - Ordinarily, I'm not a big fan of Ellen Hopkins. Her only LGBTQ representation consists only of cis white characters, there's very little disability representation, and her book
Tricks is wh*rephobic. There's also a lot of slut-shaming in pretty much everything, even from the protagonists. But this was pretty decent, actually. It's a novel in verse about three teenagers who face parental pressure to be perfect, and how they handle that pressure. Cara's parents are wealthy and successful, and her mother is positively anal about making sure that Cara and her twin brother, Connor, are just as flawless as she is. Cara fulfilled those expectations, but ended up socially stunted; Connor rebelled, fell in love with a teacher who took advantage of him, and attempted suicide; Andre is the son of a plastic surgeon and a lawyer who are determined for him to be just as successful and upwardly mobile as they are, but he just wants to be a dancer; Kendra is a perfectionist, body-conscious teenage beauty queen with a rebellious little sister, Jenna (who is, for most of the book, Andre's girlfriend), and feels obligated to not disappoint her parents the way Jenna has.
Representation: Cara, 17, is cis, white, and abled, but quickly discovers that she's a lesbian (this isn't really a spoiler; she makes it pretty clear in the first few pages that she was attracted to her female teacher) so there's that. Also, Cara's girlfriend, Dani, obviously. Dani, who is probably about 19, is also a lesbian. She's also androgynous and could be seen as GNC. Andre, 17, is black and Latino (his paternal grandmother is Belizean), and seems to be abled, straight, and cis. His girlfriend, Jenna, 15, is an addict but is straight, cis, and white. There's a minor black girl character, Shantell, who is friends with Cara. Both Kendra and Cara are rape survivors, and Kendra has an eating disorder.
Freak Show by James St. James - I've
reviewed this book before, actually. Just click the link.
Representation: Billy, the main character, is seventeen and a GNC gay boy who may or may not be nonbinary (he doesn't like labels). He's white and abled. Flip is cis, white, gender-conforming, and abled, and is either gay or bisexual. Everyone else is apparently straight, white, abled, and cis. Except this one guy in their science class, but he's a terrible person so we don't talk about him.
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green - Say what you will about John Green, but he has some quality books. This is the story of two teenage boys who are both named Will Grayson and what happens after they meet.
Representation: One of the Will Graysons is gay and mentally ill. His boyfriend, Tiny, is androgynous, gay, and fat. Besides that, nothing really.
Every Day and
Another Day by David Levithan - These two books are the same story, told from the point of view of two different characters. A's spirit is transferred into the body of a new person each day, always the same age as them. One day, they end up in the body of a sixteen-year-old boy named Justin and fall in love with his girlfriend, Rhiannon. After A leaves Justin's body, they try to stay as close to Rhiannon as possible, end up telling her their secret, and the rest of the story is basically just A and Rhiannon struggling to stay together when A is in the body of a new person - sometimes a girl, which is hard for her because she's straight - every time they see her.
Representation: A says that they only think of themselves as a "boy or girl for a day". Sometimes their mind doesn't match up with the body they're in and this results in gender dysphoria. They've dated boys and girls before, and don't seem to care about gender at all. Many readers, including me, believe that A is genderfluid and bi. Throughout the book, A takes over the bodies of several marginalized characters: a lesbian with a girlfriend, a Hispanic gay boy, a nonbinary trans boy, a working-class Latina girl, and a black girl.
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray - I've never actually read this book, but it sounds incredible. It's a modern, gender-switched, feminist retelling of
Lord of the Flies, where the characters are teenage beauty queens instead of British schoolboys.
Representation: According to
TV Tropes, one character is an abuse survivor who probably has PTSD. Out of the twelve girls who survive the plane crash that strands them on the island, there's also a canon trans girl, a butch lesbian, a bi girl, a Jewish girl, and two girls of color - Nicole is black and Shanti is Indian - who fight over who gets to be the token PoC because Libba Bray is lowkey calling out the lack of representation for black and brown girls in YA and they all know it's weird that there's more than one. I've been told that the feminism in this book is pretty intersectional, as well.
Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin - This is the story of Riley, a closeted genderfluid sixteen-year-old whose father is a senator running for reelection. After Riley has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide following their assault at their old private Catholic school, they transfer to a public high school, start an anonymous blog about what it's like to be a genderfluid teenager, and set out to dress as androgynously as possible so no one can tell their assigned sex and they won't stand out as much. This plan quickly backfires and they're bullied by cis classmates who are creepily obsessed with their genitalia, but manage to befriend Bec and Solo, who are apparently two of the only people at this school who are actually nice. Then someone finds out who "Alix", Riley's online alias, actually is and outs them, putting Riley in danger and potentially costing their father his reelection. This forces Riley to come out to their parents, and when they initially don't take it well, they run away from home and are assaulted again, this time by the football team of their public high school. When Riley is hospitalized, Bec doesn't show up to see them and they assume that she's ashamed of them, but really she just blames herself for what happened and feels too guilty to face Riley. After Bec and Riley talk this out, they kiss. Eventually everything works out and there's a happy ending.
Representation: Riley is white, rich, and able-bodied, but is also genderfluid, bisexual, and mentally ill. Bec is probably bisexual and gender nonconforming, but also white, cis, and abled. Solo is fat, Samoan, and possibly poor, but is also cishet. In Riley's LGBT support group, the leader is a trans woman named Michelle. There's also another trans woman named Bennie, a trans man named Chris, and a genderqueer person named Morgan. While she's never actually featured as a character, Bec's sister Gabi had been a trans girl.
Also, Marina Watanabe has a
video in which she reviews comics and graphic novels with feminist aspects, several of which have LGBTQIA characters.
