One step forward, six steps back (Say Yes to Gay YA)

[pameladean]

sartorias and rachelmanija have an essay up on Genreville (a site well worth the attention of readers of sf and fantasy in general) about sending a collaborative YA fantasy novel to an agent and being told that the agent would represent and expect to sell it if they would just remove a gay viewpoint character, or make the character, at least apparently, heterosexual -- one suggestion was that, should the series the book is part of be a huge hit, the character could be revealed to be gay later on. Ugh.
I am frankly astonished that anybody should have such an experience in 2011, but that just shows my naivete, and my enormous good luck in having an editor who told me that the same-sex relationship in my forthcoming novel was one of the things she liked.
The article is set up so that other authors who have had similar experiences can comment pseudonymously if they like. I am curious but alarmed to see how many more writers have had this happen to them.
Pamela

ETA: The agent not named in the original Genreville post has responded:

http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-blogger-joanna-stampfel-volpe.html

sartorias and rachelmanija have responded in turn:

http://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/969918.html

And Malinda Lo, who has published YA novels with gay characters, produces some statistics, which demonstrates that really, there is a serious problem here:

http://www.malindalo.com/2011/09/i-have-numbers-stats-on-lgbt-young-adult-books-published-in-the-u-s/

Having known sartorias for the better part of 25 years, and having known rachelmanija for a much shorter but non inconsiderable amount of time, I am inclined to look askance at the agent's version of events.

Comments

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Something about this doesn't smell right. I didn't have any trouble selling "Secret Identity" back in the day. Google "gay YA novels". You'll find many.

[pameladean]

This isn't back in the day; this is now. Things are, maybe not worse overall, but much more all over the place, I think. Backlash, whatever, I don't know.

And yes, sure, there are certainly gay YA novels, but this is not a gay YA novel, not a niche book. It's a dystopian fantasy that happens to have some gay characters.

P.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Just a little googling:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/10478

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=YA%20fantasy&rh=n%3A301889%2Ck%3AYA%20fantasy&page=1

[pameladean]

Nobody is saying there are no YA novels with gay characters.

P.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Well, apparently an unnamed agent is saying you can't sell them.

[pameladean]

If you want to argue with the reasoning, fine. If you are impugning Sherwood and Rachel's honesty, get that the hell out of my LJ.

P.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Which is, as I told sartorias and rachelmanija, exactly what I looked in vain for when my kids were young--not regarding (though certainly open to) GLBT characters, but Asian American, or in adoptive families, or in multiracial families, or with disabilities: I wanted books that weren't about that aspect, but it was just taken for granted, part of the background of the story--like it was in our lives.

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

Stupid nerts.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

There has been infinite progress, yes. But lots of progress still means that there's institutional problems.

To be honest, I would /way/ rather have someone saying it explicitly than just the Big Freeze. (The Big Freeze is very common in so many walks of life.) It's way easier to deal with explicitness (as is obvious from Rachel & Sherwood's post), and sort of paradoxically, I personally tend not to find it as hurtful, long term.

[pameladean]

I think I know what you mean. If it's all implicit and done with coding and plausible deniability, one starts feeling as if one is inventing the problem, and there is nothing to get hold of or to fight, just a general sick sense of wrongness.

P.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Yep. And having no solid ground to stand on, to use a different metaphor.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I have invented the term "collaborative clusterfuck" elsewhere for this type of situation. Pretty much everybody is behaving relatively rationally, perhaps a bit conservatively, but of course people's livelihoods are on the line. Or, possibly, there's a rhinocerous in the corner that nobody is bringing up. (In this exact case, the two authors who started this with their public statement are NOT behaving a bit conservatively, they're pushing fairly hard for their (and my) preferred outcome, at some risk to their careers. But I'll bet quite a few other authors have accepted some pressure against gay YA protags.)

It's hard to know where to start, and pretty much everybody so far seems to have either some rationality, or at least plausible deniability (lots of the questions are hypotheticals on which reasonable people can differ). Unless there really IS a rhinocerous, there's nobody who can solve the problem (no single actor). General raising of consciousness is probably useful, if among the most wearing things to work at.

[pameladean]

Not that many authors would even have to accept the pressure, though I expect some did. They'd just refuse and the agents would represent somebody else who didn't have those pesky gay characters. There are lots and lots and lots of aspiring writers and comparatively few agents and publishers.

I think Sherwood and Rachel are not just trying to raise consciousness, but to get people who would welcome gay characters to specifically say so, which seems like a step beyond, and, if anybody will do it, should improve the situation a great deal.

P.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that's the basis behind the links on the books going to Amazon. The Tanuki (and hence Rachel) can then track books purchased. (As the financial aspect of the getting people who would welcome gay characters to specifically say so.)

("...it's over there because I'd like to be able to tell how many purchases result, and I can't do that via click-throughs any more because of a sales tax dispute between Amazon and the state of California," she says in one of her posts.)

However, I think if that's what she's doing, then I think it should be stated more explicitly in the post on Tanuki_Green's LJ. For one thing, people might then deliberately purchase stuff that way.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, they clearly are; I was talking about possible broader actions to really improve things. And not saying that's the only thing at all; it's the only simple and clear thing, but rather wishy-washy.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I've always preferred that people make their biases and prejudices known. One is safer knowing than not knowing, I think.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I do think this business of anticipating what 'the public' will and won't accept is very often damaging for everyone involved: in a case like this, the authors don't get represented, the agent loses the chance at what could have been a very successful manuscript, likewise the publishers if the writers can't find another agent with a different set of preconceptions, and the reading public has their reading pre-selected for them and doesn't get a chance to figure out for itself what it likes.

It seems to me like there are (at least) two basic pieces of the problem. The first is that very often, it seems to me, the actual popularity of something depends on the weirdest vagaries, not the big issues that people cite as reasons to accept or decline. I've seen terribly conservative and bigoted people love something that represents viewpoints they abhor because it's a movie with an actor they like, or because it's a novel set in their home town, or because there's a housewife character who's wonderfully funny, never mind that she's not the protagonist. They say, 'There's a gay guy in it, but I really like it anyway, because--' and come up with a reason that an agent couldn't have predicted if they'd made lists of possible selling points for a week. And then they recommend it to their friends.

It sort of makes sense to me. The people who have to gamble on successes need some metric, something more than their personal taste or whim. They can't begin to predict the myriad small things that come together to make something successful or not, so they use the big line items instead, because at least they're something.

The second thing, though, is that another term for the big issues is 'sweeping generalizations', and another word for that is, 'preconceptions.' They don't often seem to be...er, in the jargon of my field, evidence-based practices. Why assume that young SFF readers (and adult readers of YA fiction, of whom there are many, of course) will be put off by having a gay POV character? It seems more like a tenet of faith than anything else - not just an example of playing to the most conservative denominator, but of playing to an /imagined/ conservative baseline.

'Frustrating' doesn't really cover it, even if stretched.

[pameladean]

Marketing books has always seemed to me a very hit-or-miss affair, more art than science, with the reasons given often obviously nonsensical. Some people have good intuitions about it, but I think most theories and reasons given are just rationalization, really.

As for your second point, yeah, in general younger people are much more likely to take gay people for granted, so that seems a particularly stupid assumption on the part of that agent. What I don't know is how much the opinions of the parents are taken into account, as possible buyers of the books. This is a big deal in literature for younger children, but I don't know about YA.

P.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

You must be easily astonished.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Someone left a screen comment to me that I can't reply to. In response to:

I wouldn't say those mentors are minor. Well, unless you think Dumbledore is minor.

Still, my bad. I remembered them as being more clearly out. I completely agree that if this is an issue, the way to respond is to point out the successful writers with prominent unambiguously gay characters.

Their reply was:

"minor" means gets relatively little narrative time and/or point of view compared to MAJOR characters.

"Minor" does not mean "unimportant to the protagonist or the plot."

So you don't mind that Rowling never bothered to say that Dumbledore was gay?

I think you need at least three categories: minor, supporting, and major. Dumbledore and the mentors in Duane's Wizard books are not minor; they're supporting.

[pameladean]

Sorry. I've unscreened it.

I think the step from supporting to major is the sticking point at the moment, as is the step from having gay characters whose gayness is the central issue, as opposed to gay characters who are just there living their lives.

I am not saying there are no books with gay protagonists or with gay characters whose existence is taken for granted, but it's not the way to bet, and there should be more.

P.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Full agreement that there should be more.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Required reading for anyone who cares about this issue: http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-blogger-joanna-stampfel-volpe.html

[pameladean]

Thanks. I'll update the post -- I wanted to put in a link to Malinda Lo's statistics, anyway.

P.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the post is not by the agent in question, but a colleague.

Because white-knighting always works so well in these situations...