All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages

Overview

All Out gathers seventeen writers working across the spectrum of queer identity to build a single anthology of historical short fiction for teen readers. Each contributor sets a story in a different era, ranging across centuries and continents, and each centers a young queer protagonist navigating the particular constraints of their moment.

Rather than presenting one continuous narrative, the collection functions as a mosaic: readers move from story to story, encountering different historical settings, narrative voices, and emotional registers. The connecting thread is the insistence that queer young people have always existed, in every period, whether or not the historical record made room for them.

Editor Saundra Mitchell assembled the anthology with an eye toward range — of geography, of time period, and of experience within the broader queer spectrum — so that no single story stands in for the whole.

Reframing Historical Fiction

Historical fiction for young readers has traditionally centered heterosexual, cisgender protagonists by default, with queer characters, when present at all, relegated to subplots or contemporary settings. All Out pushes against that convention by placing queer teens at the center of period narratives, treating their experiences as integral to the history being depicted rather than as a modern lens imposed on the past.

The anthology format also allows the book to avoid flattening queer experience into a single story or trajectory. By working with multiple authors across different backgrounds, the collection resists the idea that there is one authoritative way to tell a queer historical narrative, instead presenting a range of tones, from romance to hardship to quiet self-discovery, set against distinct historical backdrops.

Why All Out Has Been Challenged

According to records maintained in this catalog, All Out has been challenged or restricted in 2 states and 2 districts. Objections to the anthology have generally centered on its LGBTQ+ subject matter itself, with challengers arguing that stories depicting queer romance, attraction, or identity are inappropriate for a young adult or school-library audience regardless of historical framing.

Because the book is a multi-author collection, challenges have sometimes focused on specific stories within it rather than the anthology as a whole, citing scenes of physical intimacy or frank emotional content as unsuitable for teen readers. In other cases, objections have reflected broader efforts to limit LGBTQ+ representation in school and library collections, treating the presence of queer protagonists as inherently controversial independent of how any individual story is written.