Queer Generations: Queer YA with Queer Parents

This novel is packed full of queer people, which is always a plus. Simone is a teenager who has been HIV positive since birth, which is managed well with medication. It’s not a coincidence that she has two dads: after seeing so many of their friends go through the AIDS crisis, they wanted to be able to help raise a kid with HIV, knowing the stigma she would face. This is primarily a M/F romance, but it’s also about living as an HIV-positive teen, deciding who it’s safe to tell that to and when she has to hide it to keep herself safe. She’s surrounded by not only her two dads as support, but also a queer friend group: one is also bisexual and one is an asexual lesbian.

Logan’s dads have a ghost hunting TV show that always has them on the road. When they stop into her dads’ hometown, though, Logan is on edge. She knows how homophobic it was for them to grow up there, and it hasn’t seemed to change much since. She resents the town for hurting her dads and is now facing that discrimination herself as a lesbian. This is a paranormal thriller/horror story with an F/F romance.

While this is a completely different genre than The Dead and the Dark, they do have something in common: they’re both about queer teenagers returning to their queer parents’ homophobic hometown. Like Logan, Chloe resents the town for being cruel and bigoted to her parent. Unlike Logan, though, this isn’t a temporary pit stop. Chloe has to live here until graduation, and she’s funneled her anger into showing up the school’s golden girl Shara Wheeler and attempting to snatch valedictorian status from her. But then Shara kisses her, disappears, and leaves a series of coded notes behind her. Now Chloe will have to find her — just out of a sense of competition, of course.

While the previous three books I listed all have some connection between the parents’ identities and the main characters’, it doesn’t have to be that way. I haven’t read This Poison Heart yet, but as far as I can tell, Briseis has two moms and is also queer, and that’s not a plot point. Considering that queerness is at least somewhat heritable, it makes sense! So I’m hoping we soon see more families like this depicted in fiction. This is a story about magic and poisonous plants and Greek/Roman Mythology — with an F/F romance in there as well. I’ve heard only amazing things about this series!

Putsata Reang was born in Cambodia, where she and her mother fled when she was just a baby. She barely lived through the experience and spent her childhood trying to live up to being a good Cambodian daughter. That carefully built dynamic between her and her mother crumbles, though, when she marries a woman.

If you’re looking for a sweet sapphic YA romance to read this summer, you can’t get better than this. Fallon and Chloe used to be best friends. Then they kissed, and Chloe left for college, and now they aren’t speaking anymore. But to make this messy situation a lot worse, their moms are best friends who own an ice cream truck together, and Chloe and Fallon have been tasked with taking it on a road trip through state fairs this summer. Yes, it’s a friends to lovers to enemies ice cream truck road trip romance. And look at that cover! Who could resist? I’m a few chapters into this one and loving it so far.

I was already excited to read this book from the title and cover alone, but then I saw this tweet from the author describing it in the style of a Reddit post: “I (16F) got sent to a Catholic school with my brother (15M) after getting outed at my old school. I’m not out at the new school, but there’s this openly queer girl (16F) there who makes my gay heart do happy little flips. How do I date her without letting her know I’m gay?” That last line made me cackle, and I can’t wait to dive in.