In the 1970s, author Sandra Scoppettone did something radical: She announced, to a rather large audience of librarians, that she was a lesbian.

“I remember my heart pounding--really pounding--and my mouth getting dry when I knew I was going to say it,” she recalls. “…There was no real reaction, until afterwards, when many of them came up to me, and secretly whispered in my ear, ‘Thank you for saying that.'”

Born in 1936, Scoppettone has, in her long and varied writing career, often said things others could not.

Her first two works were the picture books Suzuki Beane and Bang Bang You're Dead. Both were illustrated by author Louise Fitzhugh (best remembered today for Harriet the Spy). Suzuki was about a little girl living in Greenwich Village, while Bang Bang dealt with war. But Bang Bang was not exactly right for its young audience, says Scoppettone, since “playing war when you're a kid is fun [and] what we were doing was telling kids not to have fun, in a way.”

Scoppettone's debut novel, Trying Hard to Hear You, was published in 1974. It was one of the first queer novels for young adults. The book was inspired by an experience Scoppettone had directing children in a musical.

“There were two boys, who were clearly gay, and were having a relationship,” she says. “And the other kids sort of sneered at them and said bad things. Unlike the teacher in the book, [though], I stepped forward and--I don't know--I probably made some speech or something. But I stopped it before it got out of hand.”

In an interview on author Ellen Hart's Web site, Scoppettone says that “Trying was pretty well-received. … But it was also misunderstood by some. One of the gay boys
die[d] in the end and some people took this to be punishment for being gay. I'd meant it a completely different way; I had him die because he wasn't being true to himself.”

In 1976, Scoppettone tackled alcoholism in her second young adult novel, The Late Great Me.

“I had done my research,” she says, in the book Authors and Artists for Young Adults (Volume 11), “because I'm a recovered alcoholic. When I wrote it, I was sober, but I have had years of being an active alcoholic. This was not my story, however--I didn't write about myself. … I do think I was a teenage alcoholic, though, in the sense that I think I was an alcoholic the first time I picked up a drink. I didn't get sober until I was in my thirties.”

She ventured into the adult genre in 1977 with Some Unknown Person. The book was a mix of fact and fiction, based on the life of Starr Faithfull, who had an affair with her uncle, the mayor of Boston, and died mysteriously a few years later. Some Unknown Person “was a huge financial success--huge--at the time, and a huge critical failure,” Scoppettone says. “…It still happens to be one of my favorite books.”

Happy Endings Are All Alike, published in 1978, was a lesbian young adult romance in which one of the main characters gets raped.

Because of its (ironically) bad ending, Happy Endings got a mixed review in the entry on young adult literature in glbtq, an online encyclopedia. “…A horrifying subplot undermines the positive message, though it also effectively exposes the violence that often accompanies bigotry,” Melinda Kanner writes. But Scoppettone--obviously--didn't mean anything negative: She simply wanted to write a book exploring the topic of rape.

When it first came out, Happy Endings was ignored by many critics. Scoppettone believes this was precisely because of the lesbian content. She remembers, she says, getting a terrible review from a woman writer, only to find out later that before this woman wrote her review, her daughter had married--and been dumped by--a gay man.

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