Western Australian author Holden Sheppard is enjoying a wave of success. His fourth novel, Yeah the Boys, has been embraced by readers, the television rights have been sold, and the STAN adaptation of his debut novel, Invisible Boys, is set to begin screening in the United States.

Yeah the Boys, catches up with the characters from Invisible Boys, eight years after the high school action of his first book. Not only are Charlie, Zeke and Hammer back, many of the characters from Sheppard’s other books The Brink and King of Dirt are also featured. OUTinPerth co-editor Graeme Watson sat down with Sheppard to discuss his latest work.

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You started writing this story, and then you went to write a back story, which ended up being Invisible Boys. I’ve seen you talk about how people say this is the sequel to Invisible Boys, but really Invisible Boys is the prequel?

Yeah, that’s right.

Has the story of Yeah the Boys just been percolating there for the last five years?

For my whole life mate. For 15 years, I’m not even kidding.

I was at university, I studied at ECU, and I did an honours thesis about a novella about a gay football player. Once I left uni, I was like, this is the plan, I’m going to write a whole book about Kade. Kade became Hammer, and that was the plan. This book, it was called Dead Straight at the time, obviously it’s got a better title now with Yeah the Boys.

In 2017 I sat down to write about this bloke in his 20s who plays footy, happens to be gay, and it occurred to me that he would have known in his adolescence, probably, that maybe, he was gay in some form. So I quickly dashed off a short story. That short story was 100,000 words. It’s not a short story. It became Invisible Boys. So my whole career just took a little side turn, and very happy accident. Invisible Boys obviously went great guns.

It’s been a successful book, but also it’s been a TV series, which gets a whole new audience.

It’s gone huge, and we’ve reached a lot of people kind of nationally, Australia, New Zealand, but also it recently got the Peabody Award nomination, so now kind of we’re on the United States kind of map, which is cool. I’m very proud of that book. It’s a very, very happy accident.

People in the USA will be asking, Aussie Rules?

I think they can get their heads around kind of ice hockey, but I don’t know how AFL will go down over in the states. But I’m very proud of this book, as you say, this was this is my plan the whole time. I’ve had 15 years of wanting to get here, so I feel very kind of satisfied that I finally did it.

What I found surprising is that characters from all of your books are now in this one world, there in the same universe. Was that a just something happened naturally?

I’m trying to get away with calling it the Sheppard verse. I don’t know if that’s catching on, but, but no one’s told me off for it either. So kind of like the MCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe, but gay and depressing.

I had the idea that I wanted the books to all exist in the same universe, and it was when I was first drafting or planning for Yeah the Boys I realized that Zeke’s storyline needed a whole football team of gay footy guys. That’s AFL nines, which is what I’ve played with the Perth Hornets, so you have kind of three backs, three mids, three forwards, so I needed nine or close to nine guys as part of this team.

I’ve already created so many gay football player characters, this is going to get really boring really quickly. I have to create another eight? Then it hit me, just use the ones you’ve already created, you’ve got Mason from The Brink, you’ve got Jack and Brick from King of Dirt, I had Tommo from my novella Poster Boy years ago, and I just thought, just chuck them all in, they realistically would join a gay football team, so they all just converged in one storyline.

It made me think of Armistead Maupin and his Tales of the City stories, and I thought, is there going to be a story about these three boys in their late 50s, 30 years from now?

I have been joking about this, because I’ve been saying, I don’t know if you know Spaceballs, but I’ve been making a Spaceballs reference, saying one day I’ll do Invisible Boys Three: The Search for More Money, which is what they jokingly called the Spaceballs sequel for years.

Maybe, I just think of a third one, it could go either way, it could be really good, or it could be like The Godfather III. I always had the plan for Yeah the Boys, so I feel very solid that there’s a story I wanted to tell. It’s about gay men in the city, it’s about footy, it’s about masculinity, it’s about men’s mental health. It’s about all the stuff I care about. The next one I’d need to have an idea before I dive into writing it. I do like the idea, though. They’d have to be in their 30s or 40s, so I’m talking like a decade or two down the track from now.

And you need to experience it as well.

I’d like to just go live my life, and then write about being a gay bloke in your 30s or 40s.

For people who live in Perth, there’s a parallel world in this novel, because we recognise the locations, the clubs and pubs, but I also feel like we know some of the new characters. , It’s not anyone particular, but I know those people.

Which character are you thinking of when you say that?

Definitely Xander.

It’s so funny to me how many people have commented on Xander. Xander is being called a gay-fluencer. Someone called him a vapid gay-fluencer, and I thought, what a great term, I’m gonna start stealing that. His initials are his name, Xander Sullivan, his initials are excess, because I wanted to make a character where you take all the good advocacy, like all the stuff that that LGBT people are doing every day, and there’s a lot of people doing really good work. We know them. We work with them. We’re friends with them.

There’s some people who are maybe not doing it for the right reasons, or they’ve maybe gone a little bit too excessive. We see the gay community like eating its own, they’ll burn everything down, and you look at the rubble after the fight, and you’re like, cool. Which homophobes did we take down today, guys? Oh, none of.. we just destroyed ourselves.

That’s what Xander represents. Is there is a certain type of personality, in the age of social media particularly, that will burn everyone down without thinking, is this the right thing to do?

It’s interesting when you think that when you first started creating these characters in these worlds, the issues of masculinity and being gay in the AFL were big stories, but here we are, many years later, and now they’re even more an issue.

I thought it would be old hat by now. I had this idea in 2011 and I would have thought we’d all moved on. I’m a big footy fan, I go for Collingwood. Footy is a big part of my life, and so I’ve always been waiting for a gay player to come out. I thought, by the time I get this book written, everyone will be over it. We’ve got gay marriage and gay sports stuff is all over the place.

For some reason in 2026 this book has landed at a time where, on one hand, you’ve got homophobic slurs from players. Bless the AFL. I just want to give them a hug, because they don’t know how to handle this, they just need a standardised kind of punishment. But every time it happens, they’re like, what do we do? We have to start planning from scratch. So we have these dramas and this discourse around slurs, which weren’t happening years back in the volume that they are now.

At the same time, we now have an openly bisexual player, we have an openly gay player. So we’re starting to kind of break through. It’s interesting.

We know there are so many more gay players in the AFL. I don’t think that’s a secret. It’s just they’re not visible, and they’re still invisible.

They’re still invisible, pardon the pun. I feel like we need to acknowledge that they exist a little bit more, because so much of the discourse is about what if a current gay player to come out, and I’ve had mates who are like, ‘Well, they owe it to us, and they need to do it’.

I don’t feel that way. I’d love to see that. I’d love to see a gay footy player who happens to be gay, he happens to love footy, and whatever. I think we need to acknowledge that some people don’t want to, some guys want to be known as a great footy player, and they don’t want their sexuality to overshadow who they are and what they do, the same as in any job. Like not everyone who has a job comes out at work, and that’s okay.

I found it hard to come out because I started my life as a dancer, and there was an automatic assumption that you’re gay which led to lots of bullying. I resisted coming out because, in my mind, it would validate the bullying. There’s all these different things going on in our heads. I think football would be very similar.

I think football is so loaded, especially I think in the gay imagination it’s fetishised as well. We really want gay players, because that’s exciting to us. I genuinely feel for the closeted players. I feel like we need some kind of messaging out there that says, there’s no pressure, if you choose to just have a boyfriend and not tell anyone and not be the role model and the poster boy, go ahead.

I didn’t like it. I’m a gay author. I’ve been gay my whole life. I’ve been proudly gay. I hold hands with my husband everywhere we go. I didn’t love being made the role model. It wasn’t fun to actually be like one dimensionalised into your sexuality, so I’m like on board with a footy player who doesn’t want to do it either.

You are the gay author.

I am the gay author now. Yeah, it’s like you’re a professional homosexual now. It’s all I bloody talk about now, but there was a long time in my life, especially my 20s, where I’d never talked about this.

Do you think you could write a book with no gay characters? There’s two questions in that. Could you write a book with no gay characters, but would that be accepted now that you’ve been established and, this is your audience?

This is TBC. This is a good question, because people who read my books are reading it because they want great depictions, that are realistic of gay life, and that aren’t sanitized and all of that. So, if I turned around and said, ‘Hey, Book Five is a straight dude’. I don’t know how that would go down. So watch this space, because maybe one day I will.

But just can I just say, around the footy gay conversation before. I think something that happens as well is that we often look at, if there’s a gay footy player, we need to almost like rescue him out of a masculine space or a hyper masculine space, and my book specifically, and my life experience is like, I love being part of those spaces, they’re really fun, and and all you want is to be included and kind of safe to be yourself.

There’s a lot of bold scenes in this book.

Define bold.

Sexual scenes. I was reading in a cafe when I got one of the most full on scenes towards the end. I was looking around to see who I was sitting next to as I read this.

People judging you for being a deviant?

My local cafe in in front of a religious school. Does writing scenes like that come naturally, are they easy to write?

I have always hated watching something where there’s two hot gay guys and we’re about to see them kiss and then the camera just pans away and it forgets what it’s doing, it’s conveniently fake.

You know, the train goes into the tunnel, or champagne cork pops off. It’s just a metaphor, but we don’t actually see the sex and probably because I grew up like I grew up Catholic, I grew up in a country town. I grew up feeling lots of genuine shame about my sexuality. So, when I did come out and started writing about it, I was like, well, there is no reason for me to hold back.

The only reason I can see to not show what gay sex actually looks like is because you’re ashamed of it in some way. So, I just never have. I’ve just been like, here, you know it’s messy, and it’s hot, and it’s rustle-ly, and it’s sweaty, and it’s fun.

I like being like unabashed, it’s very real. It’s raw. It’s definitely R-rated. My book started out as Young Adult, these latest two, Kingdom of Dirt and Yeah the Boys, are very much for adults, so that’s a little proviso, don’t put it anywhere near a school.

They’re very graphic, but I’m generally proud of doing this, I think in an age as well where a lot of what a gay media representation is super sanitised, like we get very, very fluffy kind of Disney, I don’t know, gay hallmark slop, and it is like ‘Let’s make snow angels together’, and they wouldn’t be making snow angels together, that’s not what gay guys do when they’re left alone.

So I’m proud of putting it out there, this is what we’re really like. We’re horny men, we’re dirty men, we’re sexual men, and no shame at all, pride in that!

Yeah the Boys is in bookshops now, alongside Invisible Boys, The Brink and King of Dirt.