Guest post by young-adult novelist Brent Hartinger, whose Three Truths and a Lie comes out tomorrow!—Matt

Boy, what a difference thirteen years make.

In 2003, I published my first LGBT YA novel, Geography Club. It opens with a closeted gay boy being confronted by all the hot naked jocks in the locker room. That was considered shocking at the time.

This summer, I'm releasing a new LGBT YA novel, Three Truths and a Lie. It includes a scene of two teenage boys having sex while listening to the straight guy have sex with his girlfriend in the room next door. That same straight guy has spent the day flirting with the gay guys.

In other words, if I ever need to remind myself how much the world has changed for LGBT folks in the last few decades, all I have to do is think about the difference between my two books.

Back in 2003, no one except my editor at HarperCollins expected Geography Club to do anything at all.

A week after publication, it had already gone into a third printing. It also eventually ended up being adapted as a feature film (co-starring Scott Bakula).

But the book was also very controversial. It was banned and challenged at libraries all across the country.

And while I tried really hard to make Geography Club fun and funny, it was still a book about the struggles of being an LGBT teenager: how it sucked to be bullied, among other things.

Three Truths and a Lie is a horror novel, with lots of tension and suspense. Two of the main characters are gay, but they're mostly concerned about staying alive when the locals starts terrorizing them and their friends as they spend the weekend in a remote rainforest. Or could it be one of the four friends who's secretly terrorizing and killing the others?

The only bullying that goes on is when the straight guy teases the straight guys by flashing them his dick.

In other words, Three Truths and a Lie isn't “about” the gay experience. The gayness is mostly incidental.

Better still, the book is being marketed (by Simon & Schuster) to a mainstream audience.

I think it's fantastic that we live in a time that we can take for granted the fact that heterosexual readers won't be distracted by a gay character, to the point where it gets in the way of the plot.

But I'd like to think that books like Geography Club (and movies like Brokeback Mountain, and TV shows like Glee) are part of the reason why LGBT characters can be “incidental” these days.

For something to be a non-issue, it first needed to be an issue. If the audience couldn't get beyond its own stereotypes, they couldn't focus on the story. So people needed to be educated, to come to understand that LGBT characters weren't any different than straight characters, at least not in any fundamental ways.

Back in 2003, you needed to deal with that somehow, especially with a mainstream audience. In 2016, you can (mostly) take it for granted. That's a pretty huge deal when you think about it.

Then there's the sex.

When it came to sex, Geography Club was pretty discreet, even if lots of people called it smut.

The Truths and a Lie is pretty explicit. You might even call it a psychosexual thriller.

In the book, I'm using sex to explore darker themes, like domination, jealousy, and secret desires—even the connection between sex and death. These themes are right in line with the genre in which I'm writing, but they're pretty unusual in YA, even in non-gay books.

But this book is gay. And it's widely available for any teenager (or adult) interested in horror/thrillers. Whenever I think about all the hassles I went through with Geography Club, all the controversies I endured, statements like that sort of take my breath away.

As a writer, I was proud and humbled to play a tiny little role in advancing the cause of LGBT rights.

But I'm even happier now, being a writer with the kind of freedom that is limited mostly only by my own imagination.

Brent Hartinger's Three Truths and a Lie is available everywhere (after 8/2). Visit Brent online at brenthartinger.com