Friends,

I know some of you have received your preorders early, and some stores are getting stock in as well!

We made a Barnes and Noble table! 🍄❤️🍄

Hi friends!

I’m delighted to share my interview with Alex Sanchez, author of Rainbow Boys. Rainbow Boys is a “a coming-of-age novel about LGBTQ+ teens finding friendship, first love, and hope.” On September 29, we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Rainbow Boys with a special edition featuring a “brand-new look, a note from the author, and an introduction by Gender Queer author Maia Kobabe." Rainbow Boys is also an excellent read for Latine Heritage Month! 🌈

Alex Sanchez (he/him/his) spent almost fifteen years working with youth. He is
the author of the teen novels Boyfriends with Girlfriends, Bait, The God Box, Getting It, Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, and Rainbow Road, as well as the Lambda Award–winning middle grade novel So Hard to Say. Lambda Literary honored Alex with a Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize. He lives in Thailand and Hollywood, Florida. Visit him at AlexSanchez.com.

Q: In Rainbow Boys, you tell the story of three queer teens—Jason, Kyle, and Nelson. Each boy’s background, support system, insecurities, and phase in their coming-out journey are different. How did you approach developing their vibrant perspectives and using their distinct viewpoints to depict a variety of queer experiences?

A: As Walt Whitman famously said, “I contain multitudes.” Each of us does. To breathe life into a character, I ask myself, what aspect of me is like this character and how is this character like me? That’s how I connected with each of the three boys and gave them life. Jason embodied my teenage struggle to accept myself. Kyle personified my yearning for someone to love. And Nelson is the flip side, longing to be loved by someone. Those are universal aspects of all of us. They provide access points through which any reader—queer or nonqueer—can connect with the characters and live through them.

Q: On September 29, 2026, we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of Rainbow Boys. Would you expand upon your experience writing what would become the revolutionary Rainbow Boys during a period in which most queer stories ended in tragedy, and what has been one of your favorite parts of seeing Rainbow Boys reach its 25th anniversary?

A: Since until the 1970s homosexuality was widely regarded as both criminal and a mental illness, it’s little wonder that the first queer YA stories ended in tragedy. But by the 1990s the world was quickly changing. Real-life queer teens were making news headlines: coming out at schools, going to proms with same-sex dates, getting elected homecoming kings and queens. Their courage inspired me. In 1993 I set out to write a book that combined my own joys and struggles of growing up gay with the courageous breakthroughs of a new generation. I determined that in my story nobody would end tragically. Instead the teens would experience something I hadn’t seen in YA books: queer joy. One of my favorite parts of watching Rainbow Boys reach its 25th anniversary is seeing how it helped to open the door for many more books that include joyful queer teens.

Q: Rainbow Boys is a humorous, vibrant, and uplifting coming-of-age story of queer joy, love, community, belonging, and pulse-fluttering crushes. It also discusses heavier topics such as homophobia, bullying, HIV, eating disorders, and feeling afraid to be queer. How did you approach balancing the lighter and darker themes to craft an overall hopeful story?

A: To be sure, combining the light and dark was a balancing act. Achieving it took heaps of trial and error, many revisions, and a lot of editing and feedback. Writing is both art and craft—art in the sense of intuiting when a story needs either more levity or more depth, and craft in the work of figuring out how to evoke lighter or darker emotions.

Q: You started writing Rainbow Boys in 1993. Since its publication in 2001, it has garnered numerous accolades from magazines and foundations and has sold more than 120,000 copies. What did writing Rainbow Boys teach 1990s Alex, and what has it continued to teach you as it has reached and changed the lives of thousands of readers?

A: Struggling to write Rainbow Boys in the 1990s taught me the importance of reaching out and getting support. Without a support system I couldn’t have completed the manuscript, found an agent, and gone on to write other books. What Rainbow Boys has continued to teach me is that in addition to getting support, much of my success has been due to grit, grace, hard work, humility, luck, other people, accepting the multitudinous factors that are out of my control, and constantly reminding myself that the only thing I have some slight control over is sitting myself down and writing.

Q: Rainbow Boys has been challenged and banned numerous times since its publication, with the American Library Association including it on its “Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books: 2000–2009” list. What advice would you give to aspiring queer authors, especially when facing book banning and queerphobia?

A: We can’t stop the haters, but we can challenge them by writing the stories they don’t want us to write. When I wrote Rainbow Boys, I doubted it would ever be published. I wrote the manuscript for the joy and challenge of it. I wrote it because of a fierce passion, because I had to do it, for me. In the same way, if you have a story you need to get onto the page, DO IT. Do it because you have to, for you. Build a support system. Focus on the journey. Enjoy the process. Let go of the outcome. And maybe, if you’re outrageously lucky, you’ll write a book that will be celebrated in 25 years.

Thank you so much to Alex for joining me in discussing Rainbow Boys and to the Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Team for sharing Rainbow Boys with me! 💕

There is a difference between a book containing a sapphic character and a book a sapphic romance.

The first describes representation. A woman or nonbinary character experiences attraction to women or nonbinary people. The second asks where the story places its emotional weight. Whose desire shapes the narrative? Which relationships receive time, tenderness, conflict, and growth? Whose interior life matters?

A character might identify as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or queer. Their presence matters. Representation matters. Yet identity alone does not tell us what the book centers.

What makes a book feel sapphic to you? Is the feeling rooted in romance, desire, community, identity, perspective, or some combination of all five?

Sapphic is an Umbrella, Not a Checklist

First let’s get this out of the way, sapphic does NOT mean lesbian. The umbrella includes lesbians, bisexual and pansexual women, queer women, and some nonbinary people whose identities connect with the term. Protecting the meaning of sapphic should never require excluding bisexual, trans, or nonbinary people.

At the same time, an inclusive umbrella still needs a center.

A bisexual woman remains sapphic when she dates a man. Her identity does not change according to her partner. A romantic relationship between her and a man is still not a sapphic relationship. Both statements can be true at the same time.

This distinction helps us talk about books with greater accuracy. A story about a bisexual woman choosing between a woman and a man might explore sapphic desire. A polyamorous romance involving women and a man might contain a sapphic relationship within its larger romantic structure. Those elements do not automatically make “sapphic romance” a complete description of the book.

What information helps you decide whether a book meets your expectations? Do you want the description to name a male love interest, a mixed-gender relationship, or a male endgame before you begin reading?

When I ask whether a book feels sapphic, I am less interested in counting characters and more interested in following the story’s attention.

Which relationship receives the slow glances, the tension, the vulnerability, and the emotional payoff? Which character gets to be fully known? Whose desire changes the direction of the story? Who becomes the destination rather than a temporary stop along the way?

A sapphic romance should place a sapphic relationship at the center of its romantic arc. A sapphic fantasy or horror novel does not need a central romance, but sapphic identity, desire, relationships, or community should hold meaningful narrative importance. A character mentioning an ex-girlfriend once does not create the same reading experience as a story shaped by sapphic life.

This does not require every sapphic character to receive a happy ending. Sapphic stories deserve tragedy, horror, rage, messiness, obsession, ambition, and moral failure. We should have access to the full range of human storytelling. The concern begins when sapphic desire functions as decoration, bait, or temporary conflict while heterosexuality receives the emotional resolution.

Think about the last book you described as sapphic. What part of the reading experience led you to use the word?

The Sapphic Gaze Matters

A book often feels sapphic through perspective. The story notices women and nonbinary people as subjects of desire rather than objects placed on display.

The difference often appears in small details. A character notices another person’s hands, laugh, confidence, softness, strength, or way of taking up space. Desire grows through attention and recognition. Attraction belongs to the character experiencing the feeling rather than an imagined male audience watching from outside the scene.

Sexual content alone does not create a sapphic gaze. A closed-door romance might feel deeply sapphic because the story understands longing, fear, recognition, and intimacy. An explicit scene might feel disconnected from sapphic experience when written through heterosexual assumptions about bodies, roles, or pleasure.

Which details make attraction feel believable to you? What helps a scene feel intimate rather than performative?

Community Matters Too

Sapphic life involves more than romantic partnership. Friendship, chosen family, intergenerational connection, community conflict, and shared cultural knowledge often shape the experience.

Some books feel sapphic because the characters exist inside a queer world. They know other queer people. They have language for themselves. They argue about identity and politics. They build friendships, attend community events, care for each other, and negotiate belonging. Other stories focus on isolation, closeting, or being the only queer person in the room. Those stories still belong, though isolation should not remain the only version of sapphic life publishers value.

Community also gives characters room to be complicated. One person does not need to represent every lesbian, bisexual woman, trans woman, or nonbinary person. A larger queer cast allows disagreement, humor, desire, jealousy, tenderness, and failure without turning one character into a symbol for an entire group.

Do you prefer sapphic books with a strong queer community around the main character? How does the presence or absence of community change your reading experience?

Who Gets Desired Matters

Questions about sapphic representation must also include race, disability, body size, gender presentation, class, and trans identity.

Publishing often treats white, thin, nondisabled, conventionally feminine queer women as the easiest version of sapphic identity to market. Their stories receive greater permission to feel universal. Black sapphic characters, especially dark-skinned, fat, disabled, trans, working-class, or masculine-presenting Black characters, face a different standard. Their books are more likely to be framed as narrow, educational, or intended for a limited audience.

A story does not become meaningfully inclusive through the presence of a marginalized character alone. We still need to ask whether the character receives interiority, desire, tenderness, agency, and a future.

Who gets to be wanted without needing to become more palatable first? Who receives softness without losing complexity? Who gets to be messy and still worthy of love?

Reader Trust Matters

Genre labels create expectations. A reader choosing a sapphic romance expects the central romantic relationship to be sapphic. A reader choosing an FFM romance expects a man to participate in the central relationship. A reader choosing a bisexual love triangle should receive clear information about the romantic possibilities and, when appropriate, the ending structure.

Clear labeling does not police anyone’s identity. Clear labeling respects readers and gives each story language suited to its actual center. It allows the reader to consent to what they are reading.

Authors and publishers sometimes worry about spoilers, but a romantic structure is not the same as a plot twist. Readers often choose romance based on the relationship promised by the category. Concealing a male partner or male endgame from marketing aimed at sapphic readers does not create a clever surprise. Concealment breaks trust.

What does honest marketing look like to you? Which details belong in a book description, content note, or author post before release?

There is No Single Sapphic Story

Sapphic books do not need one approved tone, genre, relationship model, or ending. We need cozy romances and devastating horror. We need monogamous couples, polyamorous relationships, asexual partnerships, messy breakups, lifelong friendships, erotic joy, and characters with no interest in romance. We need women saving kingdoms, becoming villains, solving murders, raising children, building communities, and making terrible decisions with their whole chests.

The goal is not sameness. The goal is meaningful centrality.

A book feels sapphic when sapphic life shapes the story rather than appearing as a decorative detail. Sapphic desire receives room to exist on its own terms. Sapphic characters hold narrative power. Their relationships matter. Their choices move the plot. Their inner lives receive attention. The story understands them as full people rather than proof of diversity.

So I want to hear from you.

What makes a book feel sapphic to you?

Does the central relationship matter most, or does perspective matter more?

Have you read a book with a sapphic character that still felt centered around men or heterosexuality?

Which book gave you the strongest feeling of being inside a fully realized sapphic world?

What kinds of sapphic stories are you still waiting to read?