Gay YA: a question of intent

[utsusemia]

It takes a lot to make me overcome my inertia and actually make a blog post, internets, but that time has come.

So, you might not have heard the YA blogosphere blow up yesterday, but it did! Here are good summaries:

cleolinda makes an excellent and well-reasoned overview of the situation, complete with many links to the major players that you should

Comments

[cleolinda]

yes, with consumers buying the (0.6% of) books, but also focusing on what agents and publishers can do to solve the problem.

Malinda Lo's number-crunching post is probably the most--I don't even know what it is. It's something. Damning? Because readers and writers are talking and blogging, and even arguing with publications like the Wall Street Journal, that diverse books are important to us, both to read and to write, that they save us, and then along comes a number like 0.6%. I don't know how anyone can look at that number and then say, "Readers are the problem." I know they're afraid people won't buy the books and they'll lose money on it, but you can't buy a book that someone won't sell to you.

[booksforfood]

I'm searching for agents now. My book is finished, polished, and it's risen through the slush of a Hugo-nominated publisher and is sitting on the editor's desk. I queried quite a few agents, yet hardly any of them bit on my book with an intersex main character. In some ways it's even more taboo that gay or lesbian. There's no I in LGBTQ.

[utsusemia]

I know! Thank goodness for her taking the time out to crunch the numbers. It helps make this discussion about something concrete. 0.6% just isn't a number that consumers can meaningfully influence by themselves.

Aside from worrying they won't sell, I'm sure another (possibly even bigger) issue with YA publishers is library censorship and challenges from conservative parents. YA books get challenged all the time for all sorts of baffling reasons, and that atmosphere probably creeps into marketing discussions.

[mistress_infy]

I feel like part of this problem, why there's not a larger number than 0.6% is that publishers haven't realized that straight people will read LGBTQ too. I, myself, am 99.9% straight, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize the value of a good story or be totally invested in great characters just because said characters are non-straight. I know I'm not the only one that feels like this too. I mean, for crying out loud, the gay community reads novels and whatnot about hetero folks, right?

[sarahtales]

This is a great post. Malinda's numbers are so irrefutable and horrifying, and I have been trying to arrange my thoughts into coherency and not just link to Malinda's post forty billion times.

why would MG mean removing all references to the gay character's sexual orientation?

I heard about the changing it to middle grade thing and was like 'Oh I think I see what happened! Because MG is an even harder sell... no, but wait, that doesn't mean it should be...' Oh good job on being homophobic, self.

It'd be an interesting discussion, how gay content is treated as implicitly more adult than straight--how book fairs and some stores refuse to carry such things because of the kiddies and their impressionable minds (which might come away with the idea that love is cool in many forms, horrors). And what can be done to change things.

[utsusemia]

Yeah, I think that attitude is important to focus on, because it's where so much of this starts. It's so unobjectionable as to be invisible for heterosexual couples to appear in children's media. No one claims that having a married heterosexual couple on Sesame Street is forcing children to be exposed to sex, and yet somehow that magically changes when two women are shown to be in a relationship? Rejecting that underlying assumption has to be one of the most powerful tools to combat homophobia. Which then explains why it is so vigorously opposed by those who are homophobic.

[jinian]

This is a truly excellent post. Thank you.

[utsusemia]

Thanks!

[estara]

You articulate the problematic developments so much better than my comments on this. Thank you.

[stevendossantos]

What a wonderful and eloquent post! I've experienced this exact same bigotry from an agent and have posted about it in my blog as well. It's great that this dialogue has begun and hopefully it will lead to change.

[utsusemia]

Thanks! And especially thank you for posting your own experience with this. It helps takes the focus off of two groups accusing each other and into a space where we have to acknowledge that THIS REALLY HAPPENS.

[utsusemia]

Thanks! I figured it's worth pointing out, since I don't think many people who aren't in the industry realize how much of it is driven by marketing. Unexpected bestsellers (i.e. un/under marketed books) are vastly outnumbered by those books the publishers have pushed.