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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Social Intercourse
Greg Howard
Told from both viewpoints, Beckett Gaines, an out-and-proud choir member, and star quarterback Jaxon Parker team up to derail the budding romance between their parents.
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Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen
Arin Andrews
Seventeen-year-old Arin Andrews shares all the hilarious, painful, and poignant details of undergoing gender reassignment as a high school student in this winning teen memoir.
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Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Peter Cameron
Eighteen-year-old James living in New York City with his older sister and divorced mother struggles to find a direction for his life.
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Some People Have Two Dads
Luca Panzini and Fabri Kramer
This first book from the Some Families series is about Daisy, a happy little girl with two dads. We follow her through the story of her birthday and learn how fathers were helped by a surrogate to bring Daisy into their lives. An increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) couples are having children through surrogacy, co-parenting, donor, and adoption.
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Some People Have Two Mums
Fabri Framer and Luca Panzini
This second book from the Some Families series is about Milo, a happy little boy with two mums. We follow him through his bedtime routine and learn how his mothers were helped by a donor to bring Milo into their lives. An increasing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) couples are having children through surrogacy, co-parenting, donor, and adoption.
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Sometimes the Spoon Runs Away with Another Spoon: Coloring Book
Jacinta Bunnell
Re-creating nursery rhymes and fairy tales, this radical activity book takes anecodotes from the lives of real kids and mixes them with classic tales to create true-to-life characters, situations, and resolutions.
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Sovereign (Nemesis #2)
April Daniels
As the superhero Dreadnought, Danny Tozer is protecting the city of New Port on her own, but after the emergence of a billionaire supervillain, she finds herself attacked on all sides, while she deals with her troubled family life.
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Spacegirl Pukes
Katy Watson
Young spacegirl is especially lucky to have two mothers and a very curious cat nearby when rocket troubles and nausea begin.
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Sparkle Boy
Leslea Newman
Three-year-old Casey wants what his older sister, Jessie, has--a shimmery skirt, glittery painted nails, and a sparkly bracelet--but Jessie does not approve until an encounter with two bullies helps her evolve to a place of acceptance of her gender creative younger brother.
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Sparks: The Epic, Completely True Blue, (Almost) Holy Quest of Debbie
S.J. Adams
A sixteen-year-old lesbian tries to get over a crush on her religious best friend by embarking on a "holy quest" with a couple of misfits who have invented a wacky, made-up faith called the Church of Blue.
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Speaking Out
Steve Berman
Speaking Out features stories for and about LGBT and Q teens by fresh voices and noted authors in the field of young adult literature. These are inspiring stories of overcoming adversity (against intolerance and homophobia) and experiencing life after "coming out." Queer teens need tales of what might happen next in their lives, and editor Steve Berman showcases a diversity of events, challenges, and, especially, triumphs.
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Sprout
Dale Peck
When Sprout and his father move from Long Island to Kansas after the death of his mother, he is sure he will find no friends, no love, no beauty. But friends find him, the strangeness of the landscape fascinates him, and when love shows up in an unexpected place, it proves impossible to hold. An incredible, literary story of a boy who knows he's gay, and the town that seems to have no place for him to hide.
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Star-Crossed
Barbara Dee
When Mattie is cast as Romeo in an eighth-grade play, she is confused to find herself increasingly attracted to Gemma, a new classmate who is playing Juliet.
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Starting from Here
Lisa Jenn Jenn
Sixteen-year-old Colby is barely hanging on with her mother dead, her long-haul trucker father often away, her almost-girlfriend dumping her for a boy, and her failing grades, when a stray dog appears and helps her find hope.
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Stella Brings the Family
Miriam B. Schiffer
Stella brings her two fathers to school to celebrate Mother's Day.
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Stitches
David Small
One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.
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Stork M.I.A.
Sandro Isaack
Dad Dad Mom Mom is a picture book series that features the episodes in the lives of Dad and Dad, and Mom and Mom. Its aim is to create a picture book universe for children of Same Gender Couples. STORK M.I.A. is the first volume of this self-published children's book series. It follows the story of Dad and Dad, who were tired of waiting for the Stork, and decided to find her and ask for a baby. They search for the Stork around the world, with the help of Mom and Mom, turning this story into an adventure, rather than a didactic book for children of same gender couples.
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Street Dreams
Tama Wise
Tyson Rua has more than his fair share of problems growing up in South Auckland. Working a night job to support his mother and helping bring up his two younger brothers is just the half of it. His best friend Rawiri is falling afoul of a broken home, and now Tyson's fallen in love at first sight. Only thing is, it's another guy. Living life on the sidelines of the local hip-hop scene, Tyson finds that to succeed in becoming a local graffiti artist or in getting the man of his dreams, he's going to have to get a whole lot more involved. And that means more problems. The least of which is the leader of the local rap crew he's found himself running with. Love, life, and hip-hop never do things by half.
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Stuck Rubber Baby
Howard Cruse
In the 1960s American South, a young gas station attendant named Toland Polk is rejected from the Army draft for admitting 'homosexual tendencies,' and falls in with a close-knit group of young locals yearning to break from the conformity of their hometown through civil rights activism, folk music, and gay-friendly nightclubs.
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Suicide Notes
Michael Thomas Ford
Brimming with sarcasm, fifteen-year-old Jeff describes his stay in a psychiatric ward after attempting to commit suicide.
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Summer of a Thousand Pies
Margaret Dilloway
After her father goes to jail, Cady Bennett, twelve, is taken from foster care to spend a summer with her estranged Aunt Michelle, trying to save her failing pie shop.
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Summer of Salt
Katrina Leno
No one on the island of By-the-Sea would call the Fernweh women what they are, but if you need the odd bit of help, such as a sleeping aid concocted by moonlight, they are the ones to ask. Georgina Fernweh waits for the tingle of magic in her fingers-- magic that has already touched her twin sister, Mary. But with her eighteenth birthday looming at the end of her last summer on the island, Georgina fears her gift will never come. She meets and falls in love with Prue Lowry, a visitor to the island. When a three-hundred-year-old bird, Annabella is found violently murdered, suddenly the island doesn't seem so magical. Georgina turns to the Ouija board to discover the dark secrets of Annabella's death.
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Super Late Bloomer
Julia Kaye
Instead of a traditional written diary, Julia Kaye has always turned to art as a means of self-reflection. So when she began her gender transition in 2016, she decided to use her popular webcomic, Up and Out, to process her journey and help others with similar struggles realize they weren’t alone. Julia’s poignant, relatable comics honestly depict her personal ups and downs while dealing with the various issues involved in transitioning—from struggling with self-acceptance and challenging societal expectations, to moments of self-love and joy. Super Late Bloomer both educates and inspires, as Julia faces her difficulties head-on and commits to being wholly, authentically who she was always meant to be.
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Sweet Tooth: A Memoir
Tim Anderson
What's a sweets-loving young boy growing up gay in North Carolina in the eighties supposed to think when he's diagnosed with type 1 diabetes? That God is punishing him, naturally. This was, after all, when gay-hating Jesse Helms was his senator, AIDS was still the boogeyman, and no one was saying, "It gets better." And if stealing a copy of a gay porno magazine from the newsagent was a sin, then surely what the men inside were doing to one another was much worse. Sweet Tooth is Tim Anderson's uproarious memoir of life after his hormones and blood sugar both went berserk at the age of fifteen. With Morrissey and The Smiths as the soundtrack, Anderson self-deprecatingly recalls love affairs with vests and donuts, first crushes, coming out, and inaugural trips to gay bars. What emerges is the story of a young man trying to build a future that won't involve crippling loneliness or losing a foot to his disease--and maybe even one that, no matter how unpredictable, can still be pretty sweet.
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Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
Shyam Selvadurai
Although life for Amrith in 1980 Sri Lanka seems rather uneventful and orderly, things change in a hurry when his male cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith finds himself completely enamored with his new visitor. The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it is the season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life before, when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith's holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school's production of Othello and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky's tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith's ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.