The Diverse Families bookshelf was created and funded through numerous grants. Due to lack of additional grants and the loss of key personnel, the project has come to an end. We have tremendously enjoyed creating this database and hope that it can help bring readers and books together.
Browse by LGBTQ:
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Hidden
Tomas Mournian
Based on a news article written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. When 15-year-old Ahmed inadvertently outs himself to his parents, they take him to a residential treatment center in the Nevada desert, Serenity Ridge, where he's tortured, molested, and put through a straight rehabilitation program. After 11 months, Ahmed manages to escape to a safe house for runaway gay teens in San Francisco.
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Highly Illogical Behavior
John Corey Whaley
Agoraphobic sixteen-year-old Solomon has not left his house in three years, but Lisa is determined to change that--and to write a scholarship-winning essay based on the results.
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History Is All You Left Me
Adam Silvera
Secrets are revealed as OCD-afflicted Griffin grieves for his first love, Theo, who died in a drowning accident.
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Hit the Road, Manny
Christian Burch
As the Dalinger family travels across America in a rented recreational vehicle, Keats grows more accepting of the attention-getting behavior of their "manny"--Male nanny--especially after a visit with the manny's parents on their Wyoming ranch.
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Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story
David David Levithan
Larger-than-life Tiny Cooper finally gets to tell his story, from his fabulous birth and childhood to his quest for true love and his infamous parade of ex-boyfriends, in the form of a musical he wrote.
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Holly's Secret
Nancy Garden
When she starts middle school, eleven-year-old Holly decides to become sophisticated and feminine, change her name to Yvette, and hide the fact that her two moms are lesbians.
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Home After Dark
David Small
A savage portrayal of male adolescence gone awry, like no other work of recent fiction or film. Wildly kaleidoscopic and furiously cinematic, Home After Dark is a literary tour-de-force that renders the brutality of adolescence in the so-called nostalgic 1950s, evoking classics such as The Lord of the Flies. Thirteen-year-old Russell Pruitt, abandoned by his mother, follows his father to California in search of a dream. Forced to fend for himself, Russell struggles to survive in Marshfield, a dilapidated town haunted by a sadistic animal killer and a ring of malicious boys who bully Russell for being "queer." Rescued from his booze-swilling father by Wen and Jian Mah, a Chinese immigrant couple who long for a child, Russell betrays them by running away with their restaurant's proceeds.
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Home At Last
Vera B. Williams
After Lester is adopted from his foster home by Daddy Albert and Daddy Rich, he can't fall asleep in his new bed. What will it take to make Lester feel home at last?
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Honestly Ben
Bill Konigsberg
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.
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Honor Girl
Maggie Thrash
Maggie Thrash has spent basically every summer of her fifteen-year-old life at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, set deep in the heart of Appalachia. She’s from Atlanta, she’s never kissed a guy, she’s into Backstreet Boys in a really deep way, and her long summer days are full of a pleasant, peaceful nothing . . . until one confounding moment. A split-second of innocent physical contact pulls Maggie into a gut-twisting love for an older, wiser, and most surprising of all (at least to Maggie), female counselor named Erin. But Camp Bellflower is an impossible place for a girl to fall in love with another girl, and Maggie’s savant-like proficiency at the camp’s rifle range is the only thing keeping her heart from exploding. When it seems as if Erin maybe feels the same way about Maggie, it’s too much for both Maggie and Camp Bellflower to handle, let alone to understand.
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How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity
Michael Cart
Presents twelve stories by contemporary, award-winning young adult authors, some presented in graphic or letter format, which explore themes of gender identity, love, and sexuality.
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How It Feels to Float
Helen Fox
A gutting, profound, deeply hopeful portrayal of living with mental illness and grief, this modern-day Bell Jar marks the arrival of an exceptional new talent in the YA space. Biz knows how to float. She has her people, her posse, her mom and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, who loves her so hard, and who shouldn't be here but is. So Biz doesn't tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn't tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was six. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface--normal okay regular fine. But after what happens on the beach--first in the ocean, and then in the sand--the tethers that hold Biz steady come undone. Dad disappears, and with him, all comfort. It might be easier, better, sweeter to float all the way away? Or maybe stay a little longer, find her father, bring him back to her. Or maybe--maybe maybe maybe--there's a third way Biz just can't see yet. In this mesmerizing, radiant debut, Helena Fox tells a story about love and grief and family and friendship, about inter-generational mental illness, and how living with it is both a bridge to someone loved and lost and also a chasm. She explores the hard, bewildering, and beautiful places loss can take us, and honors those who hold us tightly when the current wants to tug us out to sea.
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How It Feels To Have A Gay Or Lesbian Parent: A Book By Kids For Kids Of All Ages
Judith Snow
Children, adolescents, and young adults here talk openly and candidly about how and when they learned of their parent's sexual orientation and the effect it had on them and their families, covering themes of prejudice, harassment, conflict and confusion, as well as hope for tolerance and family harmony.
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How My Family Came to Be: Daddy, Papa and Me
Andrew Aldrich
Examines how to be a family when adopted by a gay couple.
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How (Not) to Ask a Boy to Prom
S.J. Goslee
When his older sister encourages him to ask someone to the prom, things do not go as planned and Nolan ends up fake dating a guy who used to bully him.
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How to Survive a Summer
Nick White
A debut novel centering around a gay conversion camp in Mississippi and a man's reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen.
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How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay?
Ann Heron
Jasmine thinks she's lucky to have three dads--a stepfather, her natural father, and his lover. However, her schoolmates and even teachers find this hard to accept. Jasmine's brother is subjected to name-calling and almost ends up in a fight over his father's lifestyle. At home, the two dads are supportive and understanding, and the children's natural father contacts the principal about it. A special assembly is the result, with a children's counselor discussing different kinds of families. A subplot, featuring a lesbian and her son, speaks nonjudgmentally to the issue of the sexual preferences among the offspring of homosexual parents. This book with a purpose does a good job of raising the issues sensitively and answering the questions reasonably. Scratchy ink drawings depict an African-American family living in an average neighborhood, with the children attending a racially balanced school.
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Huntress
Malinda Lo
Seventeen-year-olds Kaede and Taisin are called to go on a dangerous and unprecedented journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen, in an effort to restore the balance of nature in the human world.
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Hurricane Child
Kheryn Callender
Born on Water Island in the Virgin Islands during a hurricane, which is considered bad luck, twelve-year-old Caroline falls in love with another girl--and together they set out in a hurricane to find Caroline's missing mother.
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I am J
Cris Beam
J, who feels like a boy mistakenly born as a girl, runs away from his best friend who has rejected him and the parents he thinks do not understand him when he finally decides that it is time to be who he really is.
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I Am Jazz
Jessice Herthel and Jazz Jennings
From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl's brain in a boy's body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn't feel like herself in boys' clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way.
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I Am Special: I Have Two Dads
Rachel S. Huey
"I Am Special" shows your child how special they are to have two dads.
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I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Will Walton
For most of his young life Avery has dealt with his alcoholic mother with the help of his grandfather Pal--he immerses himself in poetry and popular music, and now that high school is over for the summer, he makes out with his best friend Luca (who understands about alcoholic mothers), but the death of his grandfather creates a hole in his life that he can not seem to crawl out of.
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If I Lie
Corrine Jackson
Seventeen-year-old Sophie Quinn becomes an outcast in her small military town when she chooses to keep a secret for her Marine boyfriend who is missing in action in Afghanistan.
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If I Tell
Janet Gurtler
Raised by her grandparents, seventeen-year-old Jasmine, the result of a biracial one night stand, has never met her father but has a good relationship with her mother until she sees her mother's boyfriend kissing Jaz's best friend.