The Boys on the Rock is a novel by John Fox, which follows the coming out and first love of a gay sixteen-year-old swimmer.

Set in the Bronx against the historical backdrop of United States Senator Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic presidential candidate for the 1968 elections, the novel focuses on Connors's "rocky relationship that fared no better than McCarthy's campaign", in the words of critic Wayne Hoffman (author of the novel Hard), who described it in The Washington Post as a "classic".

[1] Kirkus Reviews called it "a slight first novel with an uneasy blend of graphic sex, a faux-naif Y A tone, and gay-pride preachiness."

"[4] The popularity of Boys on the Rock is evidenced in the substantial quantity of editions to which it ran, having first been published in 1984 by St. Martin's Press in New York.

This article about a novel of the 1980s with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer theme is a stub.