Navigating through the intolerant world of the early aughts and their own insecurities, three teenage boys find each other and the confidence to come out of the closet in this seminal queer coming-of-age novel, now celebrating its 25th anniversary!
RAINBOW BOYS
by Alex Sanchez
It's not an exaggeration to say that, without Alex Sanchez, we would not have many of the most recognizable queer YA novels we have today. RAINBOW BOYS broke new ground and broke down barriers upon its release in 2001 and has since gone on to be a foundational queer text. The book was named a Time Best YA Book of All Time and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and has sold 120,000 copies to date.
Jason Carillo is a jock with a steady girlfriend. He’s on track to play ball, marry his high school sweetheart, and get as far away from his abusive dad as possible—but that’s if he can get into college with his shaky math grades...and if he can stop dreaming about having sex with guys.
Kyle Meeks is definitely gay, but he’s not planning on telling anyone, least of all his parents. All he wants is to keep his head down and get through high school without incident—until Jason asks him for help in math and all of a sudden, Kyle is spending long hours with a boy he’s always found cute and it’s getting harder and harder to keep his feelings under wraps.
Nelson Glassman is out and loud about it, but being proud of who you are doesn’t mean things don’t get lonely. He’s got a target on his back for the school bullies to kick, and while his mom supports him, she doesn’t entirely understand him. To make things worse, he and his best friend—and longtime crush—Kyle have been spending more and more time apart, and he doesn’t know how to deal.
Messy, honest, and raw, Rainbow Boys follows these three boys as they come of age and come out of the closet in the early aughts in one of the most revolutionary young adult novels in the last quarter century.
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Rainbow Boys 2026 Author’s Note
All the odds were against this book ever existing.
When I began Rainbow Boys in 1993, I had no idea how to write a novel. I spent hours alone outlining books and transcribing scenes, trying to teach myself what worked and what didn’t. All the while, the bullying voice inside my mind yelled that I was wasting my time.
To make things harder, there was no model for the book I was trying to write—a story about teen boys attracted to each other, not only as friends, but also romantically and sexually, with an upbeat finale.
At the time, the bare handful of young adult (YA) books that dared to portray gay or bi teen boys depicted them as sad, solitary, pitiful victims who either died tragically, committed suicide, or languished without hope. Only straight teens got to be healthy, empowered heroes who found love, friendship, and happily-ever-afters.
Yet in the real world, 1990s queer teens were making headlines as true-life heroes, risking rejection, abuse, and violence as they challenged unjust social norms and spoke truth to power. For the first time, high schoolers were coming out publicly in sports, fighting school boards to start gay–straight alliances, and finding the courage to go to proms as same-sex couples. They were the teens I wish I could’ve been.
I grew up in an earlier generation, when doctors treated queer people as psychopathic and mentally ill deviants needing to be institutionalized, castrated, lobotomized. The government and courts codified us as criminals to be arrested and jailed. Churches condemned us as abominations, destined for eternal punishment. To a kid like me, that swirl of shame and hate was terrifying.
It took everything I had to get through it. It wasn’t until after high school that I came out, met other gay and lesbian people, and eventually began to write. Writing was a way to heal the inner scars of shame and self-hatred. But finding my voice wasn’t easy. Battling inner bullies was too hard to do alone. I reached out for help. Friends gave me courage.
When I shared doubts about my writing skills, my friends suggested a writing workshop. No way, I thought. What if my classmates rejected my stories, and by extension, rejected me?
“Phone the instructor,” my friends insisted. “Tell her you’re writing about gay teens and find out her attitudes.” I squirmed as I called Barbara Esstman. But when I told her what I was writing, she screamed, “I’d love to have you in my workshop!”
In her class I shared the first chapter of what would become Rainbow Boys. No one shamed or rejected me. They actually liked it. One student offered to help edit my prose. Barbara asked me to keep in touch and let her know when I finished the novel. Five years and two dozen revisions later, my friends told me, “You’ve revised enough. You’re done.”
Would Barbara remember me? She did, and recommended me to her agent, Miriam Altshuler. When Miriam’s assistant, Elissa Nelson, said they loved the manuscript but asked for some revisions, I balked. I’d revised my story enough already.
“Make the changes,” my friends encouraged me. So I did, grudgingly, and sent the revised manuscript.
“I love it,” Miriam said. “I want to see this story published so my kids will read it when they get to be teens.” She offered to take the manuscript to YA publishers, but once again, I resisted. Although I loved to read YA, I didn’t want my book to only be shelved in the Teen section. I wanted adults to read it too.
“Let her do her job,” my friends told me. Despite my qualms, I listened.
One publisher after another rejected the manuscript. They didn’t know how to handle Jason, Kyle, and Nelson. In contrast to the solitary characters in prior novels, these gay and bi boys connected with each other. They lived typical teen lives with family conflicts, crushes, and healthy hormonal urges. They tackled serious issues like HIV, bullying, and gay bashing, but often did so with humor. And none of them died. The story was too much of a risk. Until . . .
Simon & Schuster fell in love with the story. They saw the book as groundbreaking. Even so, they worried if there would be enough of an audience to make the book profitable. Queer teens were a minority. None of us foresaw what would become the book’s biggest audience: straight teenage girls. In retrospect, it makes sense: teen girls are YA’s largest readership, many love to read about teen boys (that the boys are gay is a bonus), many girls are social justice champions, and many have LGBTQ friends and family. Putting cute boys on the cover also helped.
And yep, that was film and TV star Matt Bomer on the original cover. A soap opera heartthrob at the time, Matt was a friend of the book’s editor, Kevin Lewis. As Rainbow Boys went into production, the book’s designer, Paula Winicur, was searching for a hot model to portray Jason. When she saw Matt, she knew she’d found their hottie. He didn’t exactly fit Jason’s description, but he was sizzling!
Leading up to the book’s publication, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. Waves of shame and self-hate from growing up queer came flooding back. Once again, I was terrified. Then editor Kevin phoned with the first review.
Betty S. Evans in Springfield, Missouri, wrote in the School Library Journal: “There will no doubt be challenges to Rainbow Boys, much like the challenges of Judy Blume’s Forever (Turtleback, 1975) when it was published in the 1970s. But please, have the courage to make it available to those who need it—it can open eyes and change lives.”
My book? Change lives? I realized I’d written the book I’d longed for when I was a teen. A book that would’ve told me: It’s okay to be who you are.
It turned out to also be a book that many young (and not so young) readers had wished for. With the novel’s release, a trickle that grew into a flood of emails poured into my inbox. “It’s nice to know I’m not alone,” many readers wrote. “Thanks for helping me accept myself.” Others wrote how the book had indeed changed their lives: “I told my mom to read your book so she could understand me” and “After reading what gay and lesbian teens go through, I decided to start a gay–straight alliance at my school.”
Along with comments about the book, readers shared their own real-life stories of rejection, loneliness, and hope for one day finding someone to love and be loved by, for who they were. I’d known that writing about Jason, Kyle, and Nelson had helped to heal me, but I hadn’t foreseen how much their stories would help to heal others, too.
The inspiration I drew from these emails propelled me to write more books. At the same time, Rainbow Boys’s success opened doors for other authors’ books about queer teens, as well as more queer characters in all stories. Given the magnitude of the cultural shift, the resulting backlash of book bans is unsurprising. But Rainbow Boys has endured, as have the many other queer stories that have come out since.
In 1990 educator Rudine Sims Bishop coined the idea that stories can serve as mirrors into ourselves and windows into others. For many readers, Jason, Kyle, and Nelson are mirrors. For others, they serve as windows. That my characters serve as both gives a purpose and meaning to my life I never imagined.
Thank you, dear reader, for helping to make Rainbow Boys a success. Thank you for twenty-five-plus glorious years!
Wishing you peace, joy, and love,
Alex
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