YA Bloggers Want...Diversity with their Adventure: Lee Wind

Ack, not sure how this happened but blogger ate today's post featuring my friend Lee Wind, who is an author, blogger, and all-around generous guy and advocate for teen lit.

Lee is another one of the amazing folks I met at the Portland Kidlit Conference a few years back, and I'm very pleased to be welcoming him today.Take it away, Lee!
*****

I love adventure books (like Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games") and fantasy books (like Kenneth Oppel's steampunk "Airborn") What I crave are teen books with these big adventure arcs where the romantic arc is gay. While there are a handful of GLBTQ Teen books released in the past few years that are genre books - stories not about the character's being Gay, but rather a Gay character who has an adventure - I want more. There's Perry Moore's "Hero" and Hayden Thorne's "Masks" series about gay superheroes, but I want the teen gay vampire books (they don't even have to sparkle in the sunlight! Where's The LGBTQ Teens save the world book? The Teen adventure where Katniss falls for another girl? The Gay Teen Dragonrider of Pern? (How I loved Anne McCaffrey's books when I was a teen!) I like my stories big and my teens heroic - and I'd love to read more stories where the heroism is accompanied by a teen-guy-falling-for-another--teen-guy romance.

I cover all YA books with significant GLBTQ Characters and Themes on my blog, "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read? And while there are over 230 books out there, there are so many stories still to be told! It's why I'm a writer... and it's what's going to keep us all reading!



***** Thank you, Lee, for dropping by! (And I'm sorry about the blogger snafu, everyone...!) Readers, what kinds of characters and character traits do you look for in an adventure? Do you relate more to characters who are like you, and/or do you enjoy reading from the point of view of someone different? Prize info is coming soon, comment to enter! (US)