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

Entry tags:

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

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

Stupid nerts.

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.

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

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

P.

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.

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

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

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.

I've known Sherwood and Rachel to interpret things differently than I did; I would not say that made anyone dishonest. It just means humans interpret things differently. Since we can't get the agent's story, we're stuck with theirs. That there's a homophobic agent out there wouldn't surprise me. But if anyone's saying it's impossible to sell a gay fantasy or science fiction to the YA market because of publishing homophobia, I gotta squint at them.

Isn't Francesca Lea Block still in print?

Why, yes, she is: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Francesca+Lia+Block++&x=0&y=0

I'm pretty sure no one is saying that; they're saying that there's a lot of subtle, behind the scenes "take it out and it'll sell," or "take it out and make more money." I was part of an anthology that was canceled due to that issue.

It's like "gay YA" is okay, but "genre YA that happens to have gay people" isn't.

Are we talking more than one agent or editor here? Because if there's a publishing house to be blamed, it seems to me it should be. A whisper campaign helps no one, imho.

And I hope someone's compiling the list of gay YA fantasy that's been successful. Diane Duane preceded modern YA fantasy, but she ought to be on the list. Doesn't Francesca Lia Block count? If this is a problem, the way to change it is with examples that have worked.

*fx: mutters about one side of one sheep being black*

I believe all that they reported the agent as saying was that this particular book was significantly less likely to sell because one of the main characters was gay.

(More precisely, all we know is that they would not represent it with the gay character, but would represent it if the character were retconned to straight. I think it's reasonable to assume that is because of their beliefs about its prospects in the two cases, but even that is not a known thing.)

This is very different from "no books with gay main characters sell". YA, as a broad genre, has a large crop of "issue" books, in which the plot of the book is an exploration of an issue that is of concern to young adults, such as menstruation, loss of faith, death of a parent -- or homosexuality. Thus, there are quite a number of books about gay young people (or young people with gay parents, or...) who are dealing with the various social and emotional repercussions of that homosexuality, and the focus of the book is on those social and emotional struggles.

That is something that all of the books that you have referred to have in common: They are not merely "books with gay protagonists", they are "gay books". They have plot summaries like "She explores everything, like coming out to your friends and family and questioning whether or not you are actually gay." (To quote from one of the summaries on one of the links you posted.)

There is a second level of othering, beyond what happens when there are no books about gay people at all, and it is when the only books about gay people are about the gayness of those gay people. They don't get to have the same adventures that straight people do, or have the same stories -- if they are the protagonist, then the only story that is told about them is the story of their gayness.

And that is the position that it appears this agent is taking: That a book that is not an issue book about gayness will not sell when it has a gay protagonist.

Edited 2011-09-13 02:04 (UTC)

I quote from the original article: "This isn’t about that specific agent; we’d gotten other rewrite requests before this one. Previous agents had also offered to take a second look if we did rewrites… including cutting the viewpoint of Yuki, the gay character."

Further, this presumably cannot be about only one publishing house, as a problem with only one publishing house would not really make a significant difference to an agent's chances of selling the story, would it?

The claim -- which I don't have the evidence to support or deny, but I think regardless we need to accept it as the thing being claimed -- is that this is a common thing and that narrowing it to only one or two agents or editors misrepresents it as a problem with specific people rather than a broad systemic problem.

I don't think that has anything to do with what I would call a "whisper campaign".

Block and Duane wrote issue books? It's been a while since I read them, but they didn't strike me that way.

If there are more, name them all. It should be easy enough to look at publisher's lists and see who has gay protagonists and who doesn't.

Fair enough; I'm not familiar with Block's work to say, nor am I that familiar with Duane's. I was primarily referring to the lists of books in the first pair of links you provided.

http://tanuki-green.livejournal.com/329393.html

A different list compiled from a hashtag started by Elizabeth Bear: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/210641.html

Nobody is saying "it's impossible to sell a gay fantasy or science fiction to the YA market because of publishing homophobia." That is your straw man.

Which Duane do you mean? Because not all of her stuff would be categorized as YA even if she was publishing it all for the first time today.

You can tell because some of it she is publishing for the first time today--this year, at least--and it's still not YA.

Even with today's supposedly more open YA climate, any novel which inspires

matociquala and

carbonel to shout, "What are you doooooing?" "We're fuuuuucking!" at a convention is unlikely to be published as YA. Handy rule of thumb, that.

Excellent!

Then why did the unnamed agent refuse the book?

Edited 2011-09-13 03:51 (UTC)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 4

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject