I stopped at 62%, because every story in there is a lesbian, gay or transgender one. I can’t finish a book that calls itself The FULL Spectrum, yet mostly centers on the L, G and T sides of LGBT+. Check out The Full Spectrum if you can - I, of course, would recommend it.

And thank you, Goodreads community, for your love and support. Thank you to Billy Merrell and David Levithan for working so hard on this collection, and thank you to all the other writers who shared their stories with such courage and style. Each writer's story is really just beginning. The best part, for me: because The Full Spectrum features such young voices, you know that there is more to come after each narrative's end. These writers touch on a wide range of experiences, ranging from religion to family to sex to disability to mental health. But youth also brings vibrancy and intensity, a rawness of emotion that shines with rainbow colors in this collection. With youth comes inexperience, and you can see that lack of honed prose skill in these essays. And it uplifts the voices of often marginalized sexual minorities by allowing us to share our real lived experiences.

Part of its proceeds go to support GLSEN, a fabulous organization doing life-saving work. It captures a wide range of young identities and intersections, in particular with the addition of seven new narratives in the expanded edition.

This book deserves five stars for many reasons. There have been other gay/lesbian anthologies, such as Sutton's Hearing Us Out (BCCB 11/94) and Heron's Two Teenagers in Twenty (BCCB 7/94), but this is the first to push existing boundaries to include the 'trans' set-transgendered, transsexual, transitioning-making this a welcome addition to GLBTQ collections everywhere.I am in the expanded edition of this book, friends! The time has come: my first five-star Goodreads rating based only on my bias for my own writing. Readers will be disappointed that there's no information on the contributors either in the book or the associated website, and the essays' cumulative density makes the collection best suited to a sequential rather than a single-sitting reading nonetheless, GLBTQ and other gay-friendly teens will embrace this volume eagerly and appreciate the hard-won self-knowledge of the contributors. Hope rises in these resilient youth, who are finding their way to what they see as their truth, expressed through voices raw, funny, lonely, sometimes profane, and often anguished. Through the writers' eyes, readers see the reactions of family, friends, teachers, and even doctors to teens who find themselves attracted to the 'wrong' sex, trapped in the wrong body, or generally looking for understanding. Forty young adults between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three have exposed themselves on the pages of this 'queerthology' of personal essays and poems, culled from hundreds of offerings sent to a website set up by the editors.

The full spectrum david levithan