“There’s no market for a story about gay teens.”

In the mid to late 1990s, when my agent and I were trying to find a home for my teen novel, Geography Club, we must have heard that from twenty different publishers.

Geography Club is the story of a group of high school students who form a secret gay-straight alliance; because they don’t want anyone to know their true purpose, they call themselves the “Geography Club,” thinking the name sounds so boring no other student will join. Complications ensue.

Many editors loved the book, and a number of them tried to convince their publishing houses to buy the damn thing.

No go. Even if there was a market for a story about gay teens, the accountants all said, libraries wouldn’t buy the book, bookstores wouldn’t carry it, and newspapers wouldn’t write about it.

In early 2001, HarperCollins finally did buy it. It was released in early 2003. Within a month of the book’s hardcover release, my publisher had had to do two more printings to meet the unexpected demand. When the paperback was released a year later, the first printing sold out in less than a week. And this was all despite the fact that the two biggest bookstore chains, Barnes & Noble and Borders, did completely ignore the book, at least initially.

In other words, there was a market for a book about gay teens! All those publishing houses and their accountants were dead wrong. Nah, nah, nah.

I’d like to think that the success of my book was due solely to its delightful wit, heartfelt storyline, and outstanding literary quality. But alas, a number of other books about gay teens were doing unexpectedly strong sales at the same time as mine, including Alex Sanchez’s Rainboy Boys (2001) and Rainbow High (2003), and David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy (2003).

More recent titles include David LaRochelle’s comic Absolutely Positively Not, and (shameless self-promotion alert!) my Geography Club sequel, The Order of the Poison Oak, which came out earlier this year.

The gay teen lit genre is now hot, hot, hot.

In other words, boy, is there a market for stories about gay teens!

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