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Ms. Peters was already an established author more than two decades ago when her editor suggested that she write a lesbian love story for young adults.
“I may have fainted,” she recounted years later to the online magazine Write or Die. “Long, long pause while I hyperventilated.”
Ms. Peters had spent the early years of her literary career writing amusing books for young readers. Her first title was “The Stinky Sneakers Contest,” a book with illustrations by Cat Bowman Smith and published in 1992.
The author addressed bullying and cliques in subsequent books but largely avoided more mature topics until she wrote “Define ‘Normal’” (2000), a novel geared toward adolescents about the friendship between two outwardly opposite girls, one a “punk” and the other a “priss.”
With that book, “I felt she had found her real voice in writing for this older age group,” her editor, Megan Tingley, now the president and publisher of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, wrote in an email.
“It had the sensitivity and accessibility of Judy Blume balanced with a sharp wit and page-turning pacing,” Tingley continued. “There were very few books for young adults featuring LGBTQ+ characters at the time so I asked her if she had ever thought of trying to write one.”
Ms. Peters had lived openly as a lesbian since the 1970s but feared what she described as the “global outing” that a book about gay characters might bring. She answered her editor with a categorical no.
But in private, over a year and a half, Ms. Peters began working on a manuscript about a high-achieving, highly conventional teenage girl who falls in love with a lesbian student who transfers to her school. In what Ms. Peters described as a “moment of lunacy,” she shipped the manuscript off to her agent.
“While I waited to hear from her, fear consumed me,” she told Write or Die. “Physically and emotionally I was a wreck. But then I thought, Chill. She’ll reject it. Too controversial. Too explosive. Of course, my editor wouldn’t spend money producing a book with two girls having sex. Who’d buy it? Who’d read it? There was no market for queer literature.”
The book was published in 2003 as “Keeping You a Secret” — and the reaction was not nearly what Ms. Peters feared. After avoiding her email for days, she opened the inbox to find hundreds of missives — not the hate mail for which she had steeled herself, but letters of thanks.
“Love letters. Coming out stories. Horrible stories. Wonderful stories,” she recalled. “They kept coming and coming,” she said, and left her wishing that she had written the book earlier.
Ms. Peters’s next volume, “Luna” (2004), centered on the narrator, Regan, and her brother Liam, who at nighttime uses his sister’s makeup and clothes to transform himself into the girl he knows himself to be.
“A sigh of resignation escaped my lips,” Regan remarks at one point. “Yeah, I loved her. I couldn’t help it. She was my brother.”
The New York Times described “Luna” — a finalist for a National Book Award — as “the first young-adult novel with a transgender character to be released by a mainstream publisher.” Dozens of books about the transgender experience followed from other writers.
Ms. Peters went on to write books including “Far From Xanadu” (2005), about a butch lesbian teen called Mike, and “Between Mom and Jo” (2006), about a boy torn between his two mothers.
“While Nick and his mothers do deal with discrimination (his third-grade teacher does not hang up the family picture he drew, for example), they have all too normal troubles as well, such as Jo’s alcoholism, Erin’s breast cancer, and eventually Erin’s budding relationship with another woman,” read a review in Publishers Weekly. “The author draws the protagonists as full-blooded characters, and readers will likely find it easy to relate to them.”
Julie Anne Peters was born in Jamestown, N.Y., on Jan. 16, 1952. She was about 5 years old when she moved to Denver, where her father was a middle school teacher and her mother was a university administrative assistant.
Ms. Peters graduated from Colorado Women’s College before starting a job as a fifth-grade teacher.
The classroom did not suit her, she said, and she embarked on a second career in computer programming. She studied computer science at what is now the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1985, and at the University of Colorado at Denver, where she received a master’s degree in 1989.
“After discovering a surprising aptitude for technical writing, I began work on a young adult novel,” Publishers Weekly quoted her as saying. “It never saw the light of publication, but it did illuminate hopes for a career in writing.”
Ms. Peters had been writing for children’s magazines when Tingley pulled her first manuscript — “The Stinky Sneakers Contest” — from the slush pile of unsolicited submissions at Little, Brown.
Ms. Peters’s was the author of “grl2grl” (2007), a collection of short stories about queer teen girls. Her later books included “Rage” (2009), “She Loves You, She Loves You Not” (2011) and “Lies My Girlfriend Told Me” (2014), all about teenage lesbian relationships. She broached the topic of suicide in the volume “By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead” (2010).
The taboo nature of Ms. Peters’s subject matter made her a frequent target of criticism by conservatives, among them Matt Krause, a Texas state legislator who in 2021 called upon school districts in the state to account for any books or other materials available to students that “might make [them] feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” over matters of race or sex. He compiled a list of more 850 suspects books, and Ms. Peters, according to the website Book Riot, was the author with the most titles on the list — nine in all.
“This is so sad to me,” Tingley wrote in her email, “because I know what a lifeline her novels have been for young readers struggling with sexual orientation, gender identity, and depression. These stories are needed now more than ever.”
Ms. Peters and Leggett were partners for nearly five decades and married in 2014. Besides her wife, of Wheat Ridge, survivors include a brother and two sisters.
According to Publishers Weekly, Ms. Peters’s books have sold more than 1 million copies. She wrote them, she told the LGBTQ magazine the Advocate, because “so many stories aren’t being told that need to be told.”
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