More seriously, though, while there may be more YA with female protagonists than male at the moment, there really are far, far, far more YA novels with straight male protagonists than with gay male protagonists. A statistical study of all YA novels published in America over the last 40 years showed that less than 1% had any LGBTQ characters whatsoever, even minor supporting ones. A follow-up study, looking only at 2011, showed that 1.5% of all YA novels published in the USA had any LGBTQ characters at all, even minor supporting ones. http://www.malindalo.com/2011/09/i-have-numbers-stats-on-lgbt-young-adult-books-published-in-the-u-s/

Speaking of positive male role models, the reason Percy Jackson has ADHD and dyslexia is that Rick Riordan wanted one for his son, who also has those conditions.

Is it so hard to imagine that anyone would want to read or write about a kid with ADHD, unless it was “a bribe for the PC police?” Some real people have learning disabilities. Do only heterosexual boys without disabilities deserve to read about boys like themselves?

I see that you feel very strongly that straight boys need to have at least as many YA novels as straight girls do. Try to put yourself in the shoes of kids who aren’t straight. They get far, far fewer books than straight boys do. If straight boys deserve to have as many books as straight girls, shouldn’t the non-straight kids get some representation too?

I wrote a post about censorship in the publishing industry that touched on this, it was published at the Plenitude magazine blog[1].

[1] http://plenitudemagazine.ca/a-brief-history-of-queer-publishing-in-canada-and-censorship/

You’re probably thinking of “The LEft Hand of Darkness”.

“And I seem to recall John Varley wrote stories of a future where sex change overnight was routine.”

While I don’t recall the process being overnight, it was certainly was routine.

His 4 collections are well worth tracking down, even if there are duplicated stories: The Persistence of Vision (1978)
The Barbie Murders (1980) (republished as Picnic on Nearside, 1984)
Blue Champagne (1986)
The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction (2004)

For more recent YA novels with straight male protagonists, I suggest the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, the Kane Chronicles by Rick Riordan, the Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan, the Artemis Fowl series, The Maze Runner, the Gone series by Michael Grant, the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld, the Knife of Never Letting Go series, The Keys to the Kingdom series, all YA novels by Walter Dean Myers, Wolf Mark by Joseph Bruchac, Ship Breaker, Thirteen Reasons Why, Octavian Nothing, The Monstrumologist, Rot and Ruin, The Obsidian Blade, Unwind, The Hunt, Incarceron, I Am Number Four, A Confusion of Princes, Going Bovine, and many more which you can find by browsing the shelves of any bookshop.

I am surprised that you weren’t aware of any of those – most of the ones I named were bestsellers.

Was it le Guin who wrote an SF series where the humans could voluntarily changes sexes? Or were BOTH sexes?

And I seem to recall John Varley wrote stories of a future where sex change overnight was routine.

And I vaguely recall other stories from way back which were far more progressive about alternate sexuality than in other genres. So this seems like an expansion of a long-standing nascent use of LGBT motifs.