A Little Gay YA(-ish) Fantasy

~ Cheryl

Accepted wisdom in the blogosphere these days seems to be that diversity simply didn’t exist in SF&F prior to 2014 (or prior to the advent of YA, depending on which theory you subscribe to). Before that all of SF&F was written and read by Old White Men like me.

Well, people can believe what they like, but I seem to remember people like Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ and Rachel Pollack. There was plenty of other LGBT content as well, if you knew where to look. Sometimes I ran across it, and sometimes I even read and reviewed it.

The sad death of David Rain has reminded me of his wonderful fantasy series, The Orokon. It contained gay characters, and as they were teenagers it would probably class as YA if it were written today. Details of how to get the books are in my obituary for David.

In addition there was the Outremer series by Chaz Brenchley. As you might guess from the title, these were set in the lands of the crusades, or rather a fictionalized version thereof. They too featured young people, some of whom happened to be gay. Chaz also demonstrated his expertise as a romance writer. The books were published as three (fat) volumes in the UK and six (more sensibly-sized) volumes in the USA. Here are links to my reviews.

Finding these books is a little more difficult, partly because they are not available as ebooks, and partly because it isn’t always easy to tell if a book being offered second hand is part of the 3-volume UK series or the 6-volume US series.

Chaz sweetie, you wouldn’t happen to need someone to do ebook editions for you, would you?

Anyhow, these are two good fantasy series, each featuring gay boys, and each written by people who have an intimate knowledge of what being a gay boy is like. And if they were published today I’m pretty sure they would be packaged as YA. Why not give them a try?

And yes, I know I described a 5-book series and 6-book series as “a little” fantasy. It’s not like this is Robert Jordan territory now, is it?