In 2017 when the same-sex marriage debate came about, it turned very nasty very quickly. I had been slowly making my way through an old list of ‘50 Books to Read Before You Die’, and while more often than not they were excellent reads (Jane Eyre never seemed to want to end but by the time it did I didn’t want it to), the content was almost consistently bleak and exhausting. Escaping one cruel world just to dive straight into yet another cruel world just wasn’t working for me anymore. So I turned to YA.

It felt nice to leave a reality (where a man could go on the radio and praise Hitler for incarcerating gays) to enter another where it was completely accepted that two boys would be kissing for 32 hours to break a record (Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan, FYI). I devoured all of the queer YA I could at my local library, then packed my bags and disappeared overseas, physically escaping as well as mentally.