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“Covering” Contemporary Queer Fiction

At first glance, Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North – a gripping tale of women fighting a repressive government in dystopian near-future Britain – and Jennifer Cody Epstein’s The Painter From Shanghai – a debut novel about Chinese post-Impressionist painter Pan Yuliang – have little in common beyond their authors’ skill.

Look again: both have bisexual heroines, and include same-sex love affairs in their plots.

But you can’t tell that from reading the backs of the books. In fact, if you stumbled on either one in your local library or an online bookstore, you might have no idea they have any queer content.

Lesbian and bisexual readers are used to their lives being invisible in pop culture. But the tremendous surge in visibility of the last two decades has not bypassed bookshelves, and many books with LGBT subjects have had out-and-proud jackets.

Felicia Luna Lemus’ novels of Latina gender-queer life, for instance, pull no punches about their protagonists’ transgender identities, and it’s rare to find a young adult title with lesbian or bisexual content that tries to hide it.

You’d think that the same would be true for adult literature — that it’d be old hat by now to mention a same-sex love affair on a book jacket — but both Daughters of the North and The Painter from Shanghai were published in April 2008 in the U.S. (Daughters was first published in the UK in 2007 under the title The Carhullan Army.) Yet, as with many similar titles, their jacket and flap copy, blurbs and even many reviews omit any mention of their same-sex romances.

This type of marketing is an example of what gay legal expert Kenji Yoshino (Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights) describes as “covering,” the toning down of a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.

Kenji Yoshino

Author photo credit: Beth Kelly

Apparently it’s become acceptable to publish books with bisexual or lesbian characters, but not to call attention to the fact.

Book marketing is all about calling attention to the book, in the hopes that prospective readers will buy it. Publishers want the largest possible audience for the largest possible sales, and may think revealing too much about a book’s contents will scare off straight readers.

At the same time, however, they need to send subtle clues to LGBT readers.

Linda Villarosa’s Passing for Black is a great example. The book description refers to sexual liberation (“a chance meeting leaves Angela consumed with desire for an intriguing stranger”) and transformation in terms most lesbian or bisexual readers would pick up on, but avoids any mention of coming out. It’s the blurb-writers (including E. Lynn Harris and Staceyann Chin) who make the plot explicit, and their words are literally covered – located inside the book.

Author Linda Villarosa

But is such marketing really necessary in 2008? Is it a backlash to recent victories for the rights of same-sex couples, or just another step sideways in the shaky progress of visibility?

Covered books might, in fact, be an inevitable step in the mainstreaming process.

Currently, the walls that have isolated bisexual and lesbian stories from the rest of the literary world are breaking down. Straight authors are beginning to tell stories about lesbian and bisexual characters in books like Julia Alvarez’s In the Name of Salome or Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart.

At the same time, more novelists are creating characters whose queerness is only one facet of their complicated lives. Novels like Nina Revoyr’s Southland and Achy Obejas’ Days of Awe are primarily about family legacies of race and identity; the omission of the main characters’ girlfriends from their back covers is disingenuous but not dishonest.

The bisexual narrator of Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For focuses so tightly on her Vietnamese parents that mentioning her sexuality in the book’s marketing would be misleading. And revealing the queer content in a book like Jackie Kay’s Trumpet would give away too much of the plot.

In other words, some novels may be covered because they can be.

Both Daughters of the North and The Painter From Shanghai explore themes of identity and love in the face of external repression apart from their main characters’ affairs with women. Those experiences are important thematically and to the characters, but it is possible to describe the story arcs without mentioning them.

Is covering necessarily a bad thing? Omitting any reference to the characters’ sexuality might make straight readers more likely to pick them up, and encounter bisexual and lesbian characters with whom they can identify. Marketing like this might change minds, or at least advance the incremental process by which the straight majority becomes comfortable with LGBT people, fictional or not.

On the other hand, images of lesbians and bisexual women are still scarce enough that readers cherish finding reflections of themselves, and there’s clearly a double standard at work when you consider how book marketing presents straight relationships. (When has a book jacket aimed at female readers avoided using the word “husband”?)

As Yoshino argues, as long as the demand to cover exists – if straight people have to be fooled into picking up a novel with an LGBT character – then whatever tolerance we have won is at best provisional.

Moreover, covered marketing seems more pronounced with novels by or about lesbian or bisexual women of color.

Publishers probably think these books already have a barrier in finding a mainstream (in other words, white and straight) audience, and opt to tone down other signs of difference. Bisexual characters are also especially prone to being erased in their marketing. The problem, then, is that covering renders further invisible the people who are most often left out of what visibility the LGBT community has attained.

Finally, many of us are looking for stories like these, in which characters struggling with other challenges just happen to be lesbian or bisexual, and marketing like this makes them harder to find.

So what’s reader to do? There are ways to find books like these despite their marketing. Read on for tips on uncovering novels.

Nine Tips for Finding Covered Literature

1) Read Reviews. Far and away the best way to find the books in the library closet is to read book reviews, which provide fuller character and plot descriptions, as well as judgments on quality. While traditional sources of book reviews have cut their coverage dramatically in recent years, literary blogs have started to pick up some of the slack, and some (like the UK-based Eve’s Alexandria) regularly include books of lesbian and bisexual interest in their mix.

Websites like this one, and the subscription e-newsletter Books to Watch Out For: The Lesbian Edition also feature books whose lesbian or bisexual characters might otherwise slip under the radar.

2) Read the Blurbs (also known as Spot the Lesbian). Probably the number-one way publishers signal lesbian and bisexual content is by getting out authors to provide a brief promotional paragraph, or blurb, for the back cover or jacket. Dorothy Allison, Sarah Waters, Ali Smith and Octavia Butler may all be tip-offs; so are comparisons of the author to writers like these.

Extra points if the blurb references a book or film with lots of queer content, as in “Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories,” or “Passing for Black is Kissing Jessica Stein meets Good Hair.”

3) Use Word of Mouth. Good books are like good friends you can return to, but good friends can lead you to good books. Talk to your bookworm friends or join a like-minded book club, and above all, return the favor by passing on your own recommendations.

4) Know Your Authors. If you’ve read Canadian poet and novelist Helen Humphreys’ Afterimage, which treats the attraction between a pioneering female photographer and her housemaid and muse, the sexual tension between women in her other novels won’t surprise you. One of the best ways to find queer content is to follow the careers of authors, out or otherwise, who reguarly write it. The American flap copy for Sarah Waters’ most recent book, The Night Watch, doesn’t mention that three of her four main characters are queer, but anyone who’s read her previous books could bet on it.

5) Crack the Code. Like the famous “hanky code” used by gay and bisexual men in the pre-Stonewall era, covered literature has its own set of private signals. Look for code phrases like “bold eroticism and unflinching honesty” (Pearl Luke’s Burning Ground), “explosive new passion” (Passing for Black), or “shocking” (all the rest). Does the jacket avoid using pronouns to describe lovers? You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance they’re a same-sex couple.

The flap copy on The Night Watch, for instance, describes that book as “a novel of relationships” filled with “sexual adventure.” (“Sexual adventure” is a triple-bonus code word. It’s like the bat signal for bisexual women and lesbians.)

6) Keep Your Eyes on the Prize. You can’t tell from the flap copy of Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads that its main characters include two slave women in love on an 18th-century Haitian plantation and a bisexual black courtesan in 19th-century Paris. Hopkinson’s previous works (with the exception of one very sexy short story) are pretty straight. But when a book wins the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel, it’s a big fat clue.

The Lamdba Literary Award is the best-known queer literary prize, but the Stonewall Book Award, the Golden Crown Award and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award (for the best LGBT representation in sci-fi, fantasy or horror) also bring queer books to wider attention. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award (for the best work of speculative fiction that expands or explores ideas of gender) often goes to books with lesbian (Ammonite), bisexual (Daughters of the North) or transgender (China Mountain Zhang) protagonists and significant queer content.

Note that if the prize is too obviously queer (as with Hopkinson’s), the book’s cover and other marketing may not mention it. Daughters of the North’s cover mentions the mainstream John Rhys Llewellyn Prize, but not the Tiptree. It’s more reliable to check the prize websites directly for both winners and runners-up.

Tiptree Award winners

7) Analyze the Author. The skills we use to find allies in daily life also work on authors. Does the author description refer openly to a same-sex partner? Does the book’s dedication seem Sapphic? Or do the author’s previous works include titles like Passions Between Women and the Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories? Hmm …

8) Look for all-female settings. While in real life, lesbians and bisexual women are everywhere, on the shelves they tend to congregate in brothels, prisons, convents, boarding schools and women’s colleges. The nameless narrator of Daughters of the North joins a rural feminist co-op; The Painter From Shanghai’s Pan Yuliang has an affair with a fellow prostitute; Gail Tsukiyama’s Women of the Silk includes a relationship between two women in an all-female silk factory.

9) Crack the Spine. When all else fails, open the book and see what you find, and whether it’s enough to make you want to keep reading.

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