Johnny is a black-nail-polish-and-eyeliner-wearing recovering alcoholic who loves The Cure, The Ramones, and, ever since rehab, Blondie. Maria is a Goth-girl-on-the-rocks who dances by herself to Nico, The Clash, and Patti Smith. Neither one thinks anyone will ever love them, until they pogo into each other in a mosh pit at a local all-ages club. It’s Love and Rockets at first sight, except for the troubling fact that Maria initially thought Johnny was gay. Why? Just because he likes to Robert-Smith-it up a little? Johnny knows he’s not gay, or he wouldn’t dig Maria so much. But what do you call it when you like girls, but you secretly want to try on that little white dress from the thrift store that looks exactly like the one Debbie Harry wears on the cover of Parallel Lines? This hip work by newbie author Meagan Brothers encourages readers to explore the meanings of all the shades of gray that exist between gay and straight. Johnny and Maria’s romance is realistic, sweet, and quite unlike any other I’ve read about in teen books. After all, how many girlfriends would encourage their boyfriends to enter a drag contest? If you like Freak Show by James St. James or Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger, you’re gonna love DHSF.
Closet Club
Debbie Harry Sings in French by Meagan Brothers
03.05
Another Kind of Cowboy by Susan Juby
10.16
Alex Ford wanted a horse so bad when he was little that he named his black bike “Del Magnifico le Noir” and fed it hay after he tied it up in the garage at night. Now that he’s a teenager and owns sweet, swaybacked Turnip, he tries to be grateful for the old cow horse. But what Alex really yearns for is dressage, the English tradition of riding, and poor old Turnip just doesn’t cut it when it comes to performing the fancy steps dressage demands. But Turnip isn’t the only one standing in Alex’s way. There’s also his macho alcoholic dad who thinks that dressage is for pretty boys and pansies, and the infuriating Cleo O’Shea, a spoiled rich girl who boards her horse at the stable where Alex works, and doesn’t half appreciate how lucky she is to have everything Alex wants. Adding insult to injury, Cleo develops a crush on him, not realizing that if Alex ever found time for a relationship outside the stable, it would be with a boy, NOT a girl. Will this reluctant cowboy ever be able to trade in his spurs for jodhpurs? Will he ever be able to find both the horse and the boy of his dreams? And if he does, how will he convince his dad that dressage didn’t make him gay, he was always that way? Mixing laughter with heartbreak in equal measure, Canadian queen of funny Susan Juby has penned an original story about being true to yourself and learning how to trot to your own beat. Experience more of Juby’s snort-inducing, offbeat humor online at www.susanjuby.com
Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
10.02
Eighteen-year-old New Yorker James Sveck is happiest by himself. “People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don’t have very interesting lives. So I get impatient.” So now it’s his last summer before college, and James isn’t even sure he WANTS to go to college. He may just chuck it all and use his tuition money to buy a house in Kansas where he can be completely and utterly ALONE. But his divorced parents, worried about his strange love for the Mid-West and the fact that he may be gay (even though it supposedly “wouldn’t bother them one bit!”) send him to a shrink to in order to clear up his issues and go off to Brown like a good boy. Though James is skeptical about therapy at first, Dr. Adler manages to get him talking about all the things he never thought he’d share—his disastrous school trip to Washington D.C., his unacknowledged attraction to his mother’s sophisticated male gallery employee, and what he might have seen from the windows of his downtown Manhattan high school on 9/11. Suddenly, James realizes he is completely and utterly SAD, and has been for a long time. What he decides to do in order to change his depressed status forms the basis of this neurotic, funny, Woody-Allen-film of a YA novel. Its’ twin sister in the world of YA lit. is Garret Freymann-Weyr’s brilliant My Heartbeat
Freak Show by James St. James
09.10
I have just two words for you, James St. James: LOVE IT! Your unrepentantly outrageous and brutally honest bi-polar portrayal of seventeen-year-old Billy Bloom, drag-queen-in-training-wheels is one of the freshest, funniest YA novels I’ve read in YEARS. My only complaint is that this wasn’t a picture book, so I couldn’t get a gander at all of Billy’s meticulously constructed outfits. Yes, to Billy Bloom, “Being fabulous, being relentlessly fabulous, is damned hard, hard work, I can tell you…It requires more than just…platform boots and an ironic tee to cut it in today’s marketplace.” Billy is determined to bring fashion and culture to the “Stepford teens” who populate his new private school in the depths of swampy red state Florida. But his unrelenting good cheer in the face of apathetic teachers and waves of spitballs is finally squashed by a brutal beating that he suffers at the hands of several football players. After a long recovery and a great deal of soul-searching, Billy comes to the conclusion that there’s nothing wrong with him, it’s the REST of the world who needs to learn how to deal! So he decides to launch his most ambitious project to date—a run for Homecoming Queen. Does Billy have a hope in heck? Or are all his glitter-dreams destined to go up in a poof of lavender-colored smoke? Make no mistake, this book isn’t just for the cross-dressers among us (although, they will love it). It is for every teen who was told he or she couldn’t play, can’t join, or isn’t invited, and who perservered anyway. Even though St. James’s message comes dressed in heels and a tiara, it still rings true: be yourself, no matter what, because at the end of the day, “you must find your own path and live with your own decisions.” And really, can any book blurbed by both Michael Cart AND Perez Hilton be anything short of FABULOUS? Slide into your best pair of feathery pink marabous and RUN not walk to your nearest library branch or bookstore to check out the best comeback-kid story since Justin Timberlake’s post ‘N Sync career!
Dramarama by E. Lockhart
07.06
Oh, E. Lockhart, could I love you more? I thought my love was complete after reading The Boyfriend List 
Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger
05.20
Angela is just your everyday, average teenager. She enjoys hanging out with her BFF Eve, taking care of her aunt Gail’s newborn baby, and shooting videos for the school’s closed circuit cable network. Except Angela’s known forever that the body she was born with isn’t the body she was meant to have. And the time has come to let everyone know that she’s not a lesbian, but a trans-gendered person, a boy named Grady who just happens to be wearing a girl’s body. Angela’s sudden transformation into Grady turns out to be difficult for everyone except Grady. He just can’t understand why his mother is so upset, why his friend Eve can barely stand to say his new name, why all the kids at school, except for the odd but funny Sebastian, make fun of him. Why should they care if he wants his outside to match his inside? What does it have to do with them? It’s only after Grady falls for Kita, one of the coolest girls at school that he understands just how difficult it is for a parrot to change its feathers. Or rather, a parrotfish. Named after the fish that can switch genders, Parrotfish is the kind of novel I have been waiting for since Luna (which, in all honesty, was not my favorite, although I know a lot of my teenage peeps loved it). Ellen Wittlinger, author of the now classic Hard Love has penned a revolutionary novel about what it really means to be a transgendered teen, and folks, I have to tell you, it ROCKS! Especially the hilarious subplot concerning Grady’s dad, an old school kind of guy who just can’t let go of his out of control Christmas decorations.
The Necessary Hunger by Nina Revoyr
05.04
Back in the day (1986), the WNBA was just a twinkle in some future sports promoter’s eye. But girls were still taking the ball to their male counterparts. Nancy and Raina, stepsisters and all-star players, are living out their last year of high-school stardom living, breathing and worshipping the Cult of the Hoop. But the girls are tired of dealing with the college recruiters that dog their every step, and the racism that is leveled at them because of their mixed African-American and Japanese-American household. In addition, both girls are dealing with their emerging sexual identities as young lesbian women of color. Can their already stressed-out friendship take the pressure when their teams come into direct competition–with each other? After reading this sharp and sweaty novel of competition on the riot-grrl level, you’ll be saying, “SHE got game!”
Deliver Us From Evie by M. E. Kerr
05.04
Ever felt like you stood out like a sore thumb, an inkblot on an otherwise perfect page? Well, that’s how Evie feels in a nutshell. he’s stuck in the middle of Small-Town America with a big secret, a secret that her conservative-minded neighbors won’t forgive too easily should they find out. To her brother Parr, it’s becoming more and more apparent that there is something different about Evie. And he’s not sure he wants to know what that something is. Told from Parr’s point of view, this novel shows how sometimes its better stick out and be true to yourself that lose your individuality and join the party line. A challenging read.