Feature: Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez

Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez came out in 2001, which means it arrived at a moment when queer YA was not a genre so much as a handful of books that had to fight to exist.

Three high school seniors, three different relationships to their own sexuality, one of the first novels to put gay teenage boys at the center of a story that was not about tragedy.

TIME named it one of the 100 Best YA Books of All Time. It has been challenged and banned regularly since its publication. Rainbow Boys, now in its 25th year, is a formative queer book in the truest sense, not only because of what it said but because of what it made possible. It is the kind of book that opened a door for a reader who did not know the door was there. And to celebrate the new 25th anniversary edition, we wanted to share queer books that opened doors for us!

Rainbow Boys

by Alex Sanchez, Maia Kobabe
Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
on September 29, 2026
Genres: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, Young Adult
Bookshop
Goodreads

This reissue has a brand-new look, a note from the author, and an introduction by Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer.

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021)

Navigating through the intolerant world of the early aughts and their own insecurities, three teenage boys find each other and the confidence to come out of the closet in this seminal queer coming-of-age novel.

Jason Carillo is a jock with a steady girlfriend. He’s on track to play ball, marry his high school sweetheart, and get as far away from his abusive dad as possible—but that’s if he can get into college with his shaky math grades…and if he can stop dreaming about having sex with guys.

Kyle Meeks is definitely gay, but he’s not planning on telling anyone, least of all his parents. All he wants is to keep his head down and get through high school without incident—until Jason asks him for help in math and all of a sudden, Kyle is spending long hours with a boy he’s always found cute and it’s getting harder and harder to keep his feelings under wraps.

Nelson Glassman is out and loud about it, but being proud of who you are doesn’t mean things don’t get lonely. He’s got a target on his back for the school bullies to kick, and while his mom supports him, she doesn’t entirely understand him. To make things worse, he and his best friend—and longtime crush—Kyle have been spending more and more time apart, and he doesn’t know how to deal.

Messy, honest, and raw, Rainbow Boys follows these three boys as they come of age and come out of the closet in the early aughts in one of the most revolutionary young adult novels in the last quarter century.

Kelly’s Pick: Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden

So Annie on My Mind is even older than Rainbow Boys! This sapphic young adult novel was originally published in 1982! There wasn’t even teen sections in the bookstore back then…it was all “children’s” and finding books to read with this representation was actually hard. Of course, that is not when I read it but a girl in my literary arts magazine club in college handed it to me, and said “I think you might like this.” No preface of any kind just handed me her copy. I read it…and I was kind of meh about it to be honest. But then it started to steep into my brain, like I know I say I am bisexual, but maybe, maybe I can just like girls, like that is allowed. That is okay, and then I started on a mission to find out where are all the books like this?!

Sometimes you just need that person to push you into a thought, into the representation and knowing this book existed for basically a few decades before I read it really gave me hope.

Christy’s Pick: Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour

I found Forever Young Adult (Bay Area) on Meetup as I had recently moved and was I was looking for a way to meet people with similar interests. The group, the chapter of a national book club, was reading Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour for their first meeting I attended, and I showed up not knowing anyone, not knowing quite what to expect, and walked out with the beginning of a book community that would eventually lead to blogging, to writing about comic books for Forever Young Adult, and to being here on BookCrushin with you all.

Everything Leads to You is a sapphic YA novel about Emi, a film set designer who finds a letter that leads her to a girl named Ava, and it is warm and Los Angeles-drenched and genuinely romantic in the way that the best Nina LaCour books are. At the time I read it, it was just the book club pick (a very good one. Still a favorite of mine). I did not know it was the beginning of something. But being in a community with people who took queer books seriously, who sought them out and talked about them, did something to me over time. It gave me a context for a part of myself that took almost another 10 years to figure out. The book did not do that alone. The community around it did. That is the thing about formative queer books. Sometimes you do not know what they were doing until much later.