Discusses the history of homosexuality, the position of homosexuals in society from ancient times to the present, and their struggle for equal rights and acceptance.
A fatherless fourteen-year-old boy develops an unusual relationship with the man living near his summer home who helps him prepare his entrance exams to boarding school.
Fourteen-year-old Jamie Bridger is determined to find out who her real parents were in spite of opposition from the grandparents who raised her, but her search ends in a bittersweet discovery.
Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year's Day to find he has been admitted to the psychiatric ward after trying to kill himself and is offended that anyone would think he has anything in common with the other "crazies" in the hospital with him, but as his stay lengthens he begins to see he is more like them than he thought.
Fifteen-year-old Abby Savage hopes that her five rules for falling in love will keep her from making the same mistakes as her mother and two older sisters--all unwed mothers who have slept with the same man, among others--while she also tries to help her best friend Cody admit that he is gay, and decide how she really feels about Cody's older brother, Jackson.
Seventeen-year-old Will's behavior has been getting him in trouble at his all-boys school in Sydney, Australia, but his latest punishment, playing in the band for a musical production, gives him new insights into his fellow students and helps him cope with an incident he has tried to forget.
TJ, a sturdy teenaged girl with little self-confidence, becomes best friends with a new, gay student in her high school, and when he is bullied and she tries to convince him to tell the authorities, he refuses.
When two of sixteen-year-old Pete's childhood classmates disappear from a carnival the same night, he is a suspect, but his own investigation implicates other old friends he was with that evening--and a tough, knife-wielding enemy determined to keep him quiet.
