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]

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.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

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?

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

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

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

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.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

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.

[brooksmoses]

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".

[kore-on-lj.livejournal.com]

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

[kore-on-lj.livejournal.com]

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

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

I tracked down that story. The post on Jessica Verday's site includes this:

UPDATE - 3/22 - The editor of the anthology, Trish Telep, has replied to this post. Her comment in it's entirety:

Trisha Telep said...

Oh dear. Might as well give you my two cents. Not that it really matters but... Don't take it out on the publishers, the decision was mine totally. These teen anthologies I do are light on the sex and light on the language. I assumed they'd be light on alternative sexuality, as well. Turns out I was wrong! Just after I had the kerfuffle with jessica, I was told that the publishers would have loved the story to appear in the book! Oh dear. My rashness will be the death of me. It's a great story. Hope jessica publishes it online. (By the way: if you want to see a you tube video of me wrestling a gay man in Glasgow, and losing, please let me know).

[kore-on-lj.livejournal.com]

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.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Then why did the unnamed agent refuse the book?

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

If the odds of selling the book are non-zero but still worse that if it didn't have a gay p.o.v. character, the agent just didn't want to mess with it, instead wanting to take on books with better odds--possibly including this book with the p.o.v. removed. That doesn't seem hard to understand or at all implausible.

[pameladean]

I'm sorry, I really can't keep up with you; you are arguing against things nobody has said. Nobody actually called the agent homophobic, either, and nobody actually need be homophobic for this whole thing to have happened: people just have to think that the broad reading public, or the largest possible audience for books of this kind minus a gay character, is homophobic.

I also doubt that people who used to get books with gay characters published are that relevant. Diane Duane hasn't published anything with overtly gay people in it for quite some time, and the Door Into books are not YA. The Young Wizards books have no overtly, unambiguously gay characters.

Again, nobody is saying that nobody will publish YA books with gay characters. The claim is quite specific: some agents are telling writers that their books can be sold if the writers remove gay characters, or their gayness. SOME agents. Your responses seem to be to a much broader and more general statement that nobody has actually made.

I think "whisper campaign" is a serious mischaracterization, also. If you disagree with Rachel and Sherwood's reasons for not naming the agent, fine, but all this innuendo is unhelpful.

P.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the local set of senior wizards are gay. Am I hallucinating? Not protagonists, and full adults, though.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I believe it's strongly implied, but not actually stated; nor are they POV characters.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

They are subtextually signposted as gay, but it's never explicitly stated, nor do we ever see them doing anything (like kissing) that would prove that they are more than very close friends and roommates. Many readers do, in fact, assume they are just friends.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

Then what is the argument? You say, "some agents are telling writers that their books can be sold if the writers remove gay characters, or their gayness." I would say those agents are homophobic or they know of homophobic editors who won't buy the books, 'cause it sure sounds like they're saying the books can't be sold unless they're de-gayed.

[brooksmoses]

*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.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

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

[brooksmoses]

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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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.

[willshetterly.livejournal.com]

You don't think the "So You Want to Be A Wizard" books are YA? If so, they're mid-grade, not adult.

According to the folks on the YA panel I did at Armadillocon, the "fuck" taboo's been thoroughly broken in YA. (When Elsewhere was published, I had to take out a joke with "fuck" in it for the YA hardcover; it went back in for the Tor paperback.) And no one ever complained about the gay guys in Elsewhere having their own room. At least, not that I know.