Book with gay themes for young readers take off

Link to June 23 San Jose Mercury News article.

Excerpt: Reads that speak to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning teens have traveled light years since John Donovan's "I'll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip" led the way in 1969, now long out of print. The book on the confused world of 13-year-old Davy and the jock he kisses will be reissued in September from Flux, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide.

 "This book made Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) very nervous," said Brian Farrey, editor of the new edition. "They weren't sure how people were going to take to it. It was the one that said it can be done for teens and there won't be people with pitchforks and torches waiting for you at the door. It opened the closet to teens and said you are not alone."

Well before gay characters began popping up in the mainstream on TV and at the movies, librarians embraced "I'll Get There," said Kathleen T. Horning, director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Another important forerunner was Nancy Garden's 1982 "Annie on My Mind" and its unabashedly happy ending for two 17-year-old girls who fall in love.

"Previous to that, there would be some awful car accident or one of the gay characters would die," Horning said, acknowledging that thread in "I'll Get There." "There was a sense that the gay character had to be punished somehow. They were kind of depressing."