Gay Male Teen Fiction

Gay Male Teen Fiction

Gay teen fiction is a subgenre that overlaps with LGBT literature and young adult literature. This article covers books about gay and bisexual teenage characters who are male.

The genre of young adult literature is usually considered to begin with Maureen Daly's Seventeenth Summer, which was published in 1942. Seventeenth Summer is often accredited with starting young adult literature because it was one of the first adolescent problem novels. Critics trace the origin of the “new realism” or "problem novel" in teen fiction to the period from 1967 through 1969, during which S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Ann Head’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, and other pivotal titles were published. These young adult novels were characterized by candor, unidealized characters and settings, colloquial and realistic language, and plots that portrayed realistic problems faced by contemporary young adults that did not necessarily find resolution in a happy ending. Because gay young adult novels often center upon problems that gay teen characters encounter because of their homosexuality, these books are often classified as examples of the "problem novel" genre.