This Book Is Gay cover

This Book Is Gay

by Juno Dawson

Everything LGBTQ+ teens aren't told — told plainly

For you if

you're queer, questioning, or want the info nobody gave you

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$12 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

The guide to being LGBTQ+ that nobody gave anyone: frank, funny, and without apology. Covers identity, relationships, sex, coming out, finding community, and what to do when people in your life aren't ready.

In effect right now

Somebody decided you shouldn’t read this. Read it this week.

It only works if nobody notices. Get a copy, pass it on, and tell the people who made the call that you did.

A frank, funny guide to being LGBTQ+ — aimed at teens. Challenged for "sexually explicit content" (it discusses sex ed in an LGBTQ+ context). The threat: actual information given to queer kids who have often been told nothing except that they shouldn't exist.

The record

  • Iowa

    2023

    Removed statewide (state law or state board rule) · Iowa K–12 school libraries

    Public libraries

    Initiated by: government or statute

    In effect nowLast verified Oct 2, 2026Source ↗

Where This Book Lives

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe poster

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)

dir. Aitch Alberto

One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.

In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.

Letterboxd ↗

Funny Boy poster

Funny Boy(2020)

dir. Deepa Mehta

Coming of age while a country comes apart.

A Tamil boy in 1970s-80s Sri Lanka comes to understand his own sexuality just as ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority escalate toward the violence of Black July. Adapted from Shyam Selvadurai's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to separate Arjie's queerness from the ethnic violence closing in around his family — both are treated by the world around him as things to be hidden or punished. Pedagogical in showing how personal and political repression reinforce each other in a household desperate to appear "normal."

Letterboxd ↗