Alex Sanchez is the author of the queer coming-of-age novel Rainbow Boys, which was named a TIME Best YA Book of All Time. Simon & Schuster is celebrating the 25th anniversary with a special edition, due on September 29, featuring a foreword by Maia Kobabe. Here, Sanchez reflects on his journey in seeking and writing LGBTQ+ stories.

As a gay teen in the early 1970s, I longed to read about someone like me, to know I wasn’t the only one. I had no idea that YA’s first widely cited queer teen characters had just recently appeared in John Donovan’s puzzlingly titled novel I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969). That book wasn’t on my high school library shelf. Nor, I suspect, was it on many others. Homosexuality was taboo, widely regarded as a mental illness. I’d heard that same-sex intimacy could lead to arrest and imprisonment. Those very real dangers terrified me.

Given the era’s grim reality, it’s little wonder that the few YA books breaking ground to portray queer teens did so by depicting unhappy, often tragic outcomes. Even in Judy Blume’s landmark novel Forever (1975), the arc of the “coded” gay character Artie ends with his suicide attempt. And yet, at least such flawed characters let queer young people know they weren’t alone.

In 1977, when I discovered Sandra Scoppettone’s Trying Hard to Hear You (1974) during a children’s literature class in college, I was ecstatic to read about someone like me. Even though the queer character ended up being killed in a car crash (the common punishment trope), he showed that someone like me existed and was worth reading about—was worth caring about.

Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind was met with wide acclaim on its 1982 release—and also censorship. Both reactions sprang from the same reason: the story presented a loving, tender romantic relationship between two teen girls: a major step forward in queer teen literature. And it gave them a hopeful ending that I was thrilled to read.

Soon afterward, AIDS put a new damper on optimistic portrayals of queer teens. In their place, novels like M.E. Kerr’s Night Kites (1986) presented a compassionate hetero teen’s experience with a dying queer older relative. When a friend shared the book with me, I loved the protagonist’s sympathetic point of view, but it saddened me that, once again, queerness was associated with tragedy and death.

By the 1990s, HIV treatments had progressed and real-life LGBTQ teens started to make news headlines: coming out at school, going to proms with same-sex dates, and getting elected homecoming kings and queens. Their courage inspired me. In 1993, I set out to write a book that melded my own joys and struggles of growing up gay with the courageous breakthroughs of a new generation. For my story, I was adamant that nobody in it would die and that the teens would experience something I hadn’t seen in any of the YA books I’d read: queer joy. The manuscript became Rainbow Boys, published in 2001.

Watching how the novel helped to open the door for other queer YA books has been one of my greatest rewards. Two years after Rainbow Boys, David Levithan’s feel-good romantic comedy Boy Meets Boy boldly broke from themes of real-world bullying and oppression into a fantasy world that took queer joy to a whole new level. Not only does the protagonist find love in the story’s hate-free utopian town; the high school’s star quarterback/homecoming queen is a trans girl and the Gay-Straight Alliance teaches straight kids to dance. I wish that as a teen I could’ve stepped into that magical story world.

In 2004, Julie Anne Peters blazed the trail for trans teen characters with Luna, albeit from the perspective of the trans girl’s cisgender brother. Since then, an ever-growing list of trans-centered titles written by trans authors has evolved, including Kacen Callender’s Stonewall Honor book Felix Ever After (2020), in which a trans boy’s hunt for a cyber bully leads him to find true romance right in front of him.

As a boy, some of my favorite reads were adventure stories, during which I imagined having a secret romance with the hero. In 2017, I finally got my queer swashbuckling adventure-romance with Mackenzie Lee’s The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, about an 18th-century bisexual British lord and his massive crush on his best friend. A very different historical novel, Malinda Lo’s Stonewall and National Book Award–winning Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021), centers on the slow-burn love story of a Chinese American girl during the 1950s Red Scare. Such historical queer characters help young (and older) readers recognize that LGBTQ+ people have existed throughout time.

Like many kids, I also loved reading comic books. It’s a gift to now be able to read openly queer graphic novels and memoirs like Gender Queer (2019), in which Maia Kobabe depicts growing up exploring eir nonbinary and asexual identity.

If there’s a unifying thread in these evolving queer YA trends, it’s the yearning to love and be loved. As a boy, I wanted so badly to read about a boy who finds love with another boy. When I read Becky Albertalli’s email romance version of that story in Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015), I thought of all the teen readers who would get to experience finding love through Simon.

One last development to note is the diverse intersectionality of authors and characters that has evolved in queer YA, with books like All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto (2020), in which George M. Johnson brings together their journey through the intersection of Blackness, gender, identity, and sexuality.

I’m excited to celebrate the flourishing of queer YA over the last quarter-century with an anniversary edition of Rainbow Boys. I used to puzzle over the title of Donovan’s pioneering novel. But reflecting on how far we’ve come since I was a teen, it makes sense: We’ve gotten there, and it’s been worth the trip.