Malinda has statistics! I have theories!

[rachelmanija]

You may recall YA fantasy author Malinda Lo's statistical breakdown of how many YA books have any LGBTQ characters, out of all YA fiction published in the USA in the last ten years. It turns out that it is a depressing 0.6%That 0.6% includes books in which the LGBTQ character is a minor supporting character

Comments

[marzipan_pig]

TAPIR ANSWER SYNDROME:

"Of the total 1.6% of all YA fiction, 70% is mainstream/realistic, and only 30% fantasy/sf. Someone more mathematically minded than me will have to do a breakdown on what percentage of the total that is."

Breaking 1.00% down into 70% and 30% is easy, .70% and .30% respectively.

If we round 'up' to 2.00%, that's 2 x .7 and 2 x .3 = 1.4% and .6%

We know 1.600% should be b/w those two!

1.6 x .70 and 1.6 x .30 = 1.12% YA fiction is mainstream/realistic queer, and .48% YA fiction is fantasy/sf queer

Re:

[rachelmanija]

Thanks. Also, sheesh! 0.48%! That is pathetic.

Malinda has statistics! I have theories!

[livejournal]

User raeraesama referenced to your post from Malinda has statistics! I have theories! saying: [...] Originally posted by at Malinda has statistics! I have theories! [...]

[tool_of_satan]

Your theories seem reasonable to me.

I suspect there are some YA editors who are all for acquiring books with LGBTQ protagonists, but who are wary (consciously or unconsciously) because of what might happen if they buy such a book, give it a big push, and then it doesn't meet expectations. There are of course all sorts of reasons why a book might not perform well, but if a book has anything unusual about it there are people in the industry will seize on that aspect as an explanation: "YA fantasy with gay characters doesn't sell - X House tried it last year and it flopped" - that sort of thing. (The people giving this explanation might not even be uncomfortable with LGBTQ protagonists - people like having explanations for things.)

[rachelmanija]

I bet you're right. I can even see people thinking, "If I buy this book and give it a big push and it fails, it will set the cause back by twenty years. So I just won't buy it."

I had someone tell me, during Yes Gay YA, that I had set the cause back by discussing it: because I had broken the silence on That Which Shall Not Be Names, editors and agents would now reject all queries which mention LGBTQ content lest they be falsely accused of homophobia when they rejected an LGBTQ manuscript which was simply bad.

[tool_of_satan]

One of the many things about the situation which sucks is that ANY action whatsoever which does not have an immediately obvious beneficial result can be claimed by someone to set the cause back. One can always hypothesize a bad scenario. (For that matter, even an action which DOES have an immediately obvious beneficial result can pretty much always be spun negatively, since again someone clever enough can always come up with a hypothetical scenario of DOOM.)

In other words, you can't win with people like that. Or in other other words, haters gonna hate.

[tool_of_satan]

I must be tired, because it took me until now to realize that this person's position is completely illogical (in addition to being ill-founded). If someone is going to accuse an agent or editor of homophobia because they reject an LGBTQ manuscript, wouldn't they also accuse them if they reject an LGBTQ query? Especially if they reject all such queries? It makes no sense.

[mrissa]

Hence, the never-ending whitewashing of fantasy novels with protagonists of color. I don't think that's caused by someone thinking, "I hate black people! Make her white!" I think it's a combination of the thought that readers are racist and won't buy the book if the hero is accurately depicted, and the thought that if a person of color is on the cover, readers looking for fantasy will incorrectly perceive it as a novel about how much racism sucks, and not buy it.

This rings sadly true to me.

I think one of the reasons it does is that I used to have to talk people out of books with female protagonists being all about how sexism sucks, and by people I really do mean people, both teen-boy-people and teen-girl-people. And so the idea that teen-white-people and teen-non-white people would be going, "I don't want to read another book about how racism sucks, I just want swords," strikes me as sadly plausible.

Also this gives me hope that we will be getting past it soon. So there's that.

[rachelmanija]

Yes, this all used to apply to female protagonists as well, and now (so long as they're white and straight) it usually doesn't any more. At least in YA. In adult (non-urban) fantasy and sf, it still seems to be a big issue.

I wonder what changed with girls in YA? There must have been some tipping point. I don't think it was Hunger Games; the trend predated that by at least five years and probably more like ten.

[sartorias]

I think a lot is owed to the discovery of anime and manga, which pays no attention whatsoever to what used to be the hard and fast rules of USAn YA. At least, I saw the discovery of Japanese graphic and filmic art overlying these changes, though it could just be me, and no one else sees it.

[rachelmanija]

Interesting. I think the boom in girl protagonists in American YA predated the boom in manga and anime in English translation, though. Someone will have to chime in who recalls dates better.

Twilight also undoubtedly helped but, again, it didn't start the change.

[mme_hardy]

I think your "any novel with a minority character is automatically a problem novel" insight is bang on the head. In my own case, I shamefully put off reading a particular book by a black author (which, when I got to it, I enjoyed very much) because I expected that the book would make me feel guilty. Not that the author would *intend* to make me feel guilty, nor that that was the purpose of the book, but that I would feel guilty. And then I read the book, and (of course) it wasn't about me and my issues at all

[rachelmanija]

That is a very interesting point. I think you're on to something there.

What's more, I have heard people saying basically the same thing, but in more veiled language, to explain why they don't read books with anything but straight white non-disabled and, in some cases, male protagonists: "It will be depressing!"

Really? Zahrah the Windseeker is depressing? Hero is depressing? Well - if thinking about the very existence of people who are oppressed in the real world depresses you, then maybe they are

[mme_hardy]

List all the comic-book females who have never been threatened with rape... And, in the 1980s, any gay character anywhere who didn't eventually come down with AIDS. It was an even worse version of the Magical Negro: the Saintly Dying Sexless AIDS Guy.

[rachelmanija]

To be fair, a lot of the '80s "gay man with AIDS" stories (and plays, and films) were written by gay men, some of whom were HIV positive themselves.

But in general, yeah. (Speaking of the 80s, Chris Claremont was very good at coming up with non-sexualized sources of angst and danger for his X-Men women. No idea what happened to those characters in the hands of other writers, though.)