Award-winning gay author Patrick Ness has called for more depiction of gay romance and sex in literature. He has warned that gay teenagers risk being abandoned to “porn and Grindr“.
The British-American author, best known for his young adult books Chaos Walking and A Monster Calls, said in an interview this week with The i that, for same-sex relationships, “authors tend to shy away from anything much beyond a kiss or a fleeting reference”.
“A book with two boys being intimate, still – still! – in 2017 feels risky,” he said. “Why should that be? Why doesn’t the 17-year-old me deserve to see himself in a book? And there are a lot of 17-year-old mes around. A lot of us.”