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Young Adult Books Move Beyond the Coming-Out Story, But Still Face Hurdles

Since December 2003, when AfterEllen.com last reviewed the representation of lesbian/bisexual girls in YA fiction, the number of books including lesbian/bi main characters has continued to increase.

A survey of WorldCat, a worldwide catalog of library content, shows that 20 books with lesbian/bi characters were published in the last five years. Given that only 200 young adult novels with gay and lesbian content were published between 1969 and 2004, the last five years have seen quite a leap.

Julie Anne Peters, National Book Award-nominated author of Luna and Keeping You a Secret, told AfterEllen.com via email: “There are so many queer characters in YA lit now, including manga and graphic novels, that the topic doesn’t seem nearly as controversial as it once did. At conferences and conventions where educators and librarians gather, there are always sessions with LGBTQ topics. Inclusiveness is all the rage.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t still room for improvement. Books about gay male teens continue to outnumber those about lesbian and bisexual girls, and books about bisexual girls and queer girls of color number in the single digits.

Despite these current shortcomings, the rising number of queer-themed YA novels has led to a very positive development: Queer teen characters are no longer limited to coming-out stories. They are now able to deal with ordinary teen issues like dating without the added angst of struggling with their sexual orientation.

Coming Out and Beyond

Author Ellen Wittlinger Photo credit: Sonya Sones

Ellen Wittlinger‘s Love & Lies: Marisol’s Story, published in 2008 and recently nominated for a Lambda Book Award, is written from the point of view of 18-year-old Marisol, who originally appeared in Wittlinger’s 1999 Printz Honor Book, Hard Love.

“When I wrote Hard Love there were very few, if any, GLBT books that didn’t deal primarily with the issue of coming out,” Wittlinger told us in an email interview.

“We’d gotten past the era when the gay character dies, or at least his dog dies, but GLBT books were kind of stuck at coming-out stories. That was the main reason I wanted to have a gay or lesbian character in my book, so I could show her having gotten past that moment and just living the kind of life any teenager lives. I wanted to write a character that was comfortable in her skin.”

In Love & Lies, Marisol has been an out lesbian for two years. The book chronicles the year she takes off between high school and college, during which she falls for an older woman.

“Now there are many books in which … a character’s sexual orientation is known, but it isn’t the central concern of the book,” Wittlinger wrote.

Among those books are several by Canadian author Carrie Mac, including the Triskelia fantasy trilogy and the lesbian coming-out tale, Crush. “My world is populated with queers, so I do the same with my books,” Mac told AfterEllen.com.

“I know for myself that I can’t leave queer characters out of my writing, even if they’re gay and only I know it, or I don’t spell it out,” she continued. “For example, if a secondary character of mine is a dyke, and she’s busy slaughtering the bad guys with her machete, I’m not going to work in a train-of-thought sequence mentioning her lover, or lack of one, just to articulate that she is, in fact, a dyke.”

Author Carrie Mac Photo credit: Jamie Griffiths

Mac’s first novel, The Beckoners(2006), included several queer characters without focusing expressly on gay identity.

“The Beckoners … has a strong couple of gay boys in it, and they are part of the story line,” Mac explained, “but there’s also a girl, Lindsay, who is very secondary and doesn’t have a lot of face time in the book, who I know is gay, but I’m not sure if even she knows yet.”

Mac has gotten the most amount of reader feedback for Crush, a YA lesbian coming-out story, showing that even if post-coming out tales are increasing in number, teens are still drawn to books about discovering one’s sexual orientation.

“I hear from teens all the time after they’ve read it,” Mac reported about Crush. “Some of them just tell me how much they loved the book, but most of them email me about their own stories. Some of them come out to me when they’ve only just come out to themselves. I value those emails, and I think about those kids a lot. I was a little dykelet in a Bible-thumping town, so I know what it’s like to be going through that as a teen.”

San Francisco Public Library librarian Nancy Silverrod, who also serves as co-chair of the American Library Association’s GLBT Round Table, thinks that coming-out stories still play an important role in YA fiction about queer teens.

“People could say coming-out stories are overdone, but I don’t think for teenagers they really are,” Silverrod said in an interview. “I really think that that’s where it’s at. If you’re coming out as a teenager, that’s what you’re thinking about.”

Julie Anne Peters’ lesbian coming-out story, Keeping You a Secret, remains her readers’ favorite. “That book just keeps going and going,” Peters wrote via email, “and I still get letters from young readers who are scared to death of coming out, fearful of their parents’ reactions, and embracing of a positive portrayal of lesbian love. Coming out will always be a revelatory and defining experience in a queer person’s life.”

A Need for More Racial Diversity

Though many coming-out books these days tend to focus on the positive – Crush in particular was luminous in its positivity – the experience can still be torturous, especially for teens raised in conservative cultures.

Mayra Lazara Dole‘s debut novel, Down to the Bone, which was set in the conservative Catholic Cuban-American community of Miami, pulled no punches when it came to the consequences of coming out for the main character, Laura.

Author Mayra Lazara Dole

“Coming out for some Latina or black lesbian teens can be as soothing as getting run over by a Mack truck!” Dole told AfterEllen.com. “Young adults usually have a blast, but some deal with issues of self-esteem and self-acceptance, along with intellectual expansion, new ideas, questioning of belief systems and of our parents’ and societies expectations of us. Coming out as a young teen in Hispanic cultures is huge for most of us and takes tremendous courage to fight against rigid traditions that date back to biblical times.”

Down to the Bone is one of only a handful of YA LGBTQ books with minority characters, and is also unique because of how deeply the story is embedded in the Cuban-American culture. “My book has true sexy Latina flavor because I was born in Havana and raised in hot Miami’s Cuban-American community,” Dole explained. “I’m an authentic Latina lesbian writing from real experiences.”

Very few books have been written about African-American lesbian/bisexual teen girls, though interested readers can turn to author Jacqueline Woodson’s The House You Pass Along the Way (1997) or Nina Revoyr’s The Necessary Hunger(1997), which also includes an Asian-American lesbian teen.

Brent Hartinger‘s Geography Club (2003), The Order of the Poison Oak (2006), and Split Screen (2007) continue to be the only YA books including a bisexual Asian-American girl as a main character.

Let’s Not Talk About Sex

Although young adult as a category of books must fall within certain parameters to pass parental approval, YA books have tackled issues as complex as sexual assault, teen pregnancy and even plain old-fashioned teen lust. But queer YA fiction tends to gloss over actual sex – a subject that teens coming to terms with their sexual orientation might be considerably interested in.

Some YA authors and experts believe that books about gay boys are given more leeway than those about lesbian/bi girls when it comes to the details of sex.

“One of the interesting things that I’ve noticed, aside from the fact that there’s more stuff about boys than about girls,” said librarian Nancy Silverrod, “is that [with] stuff about boys – there seems to be much more freedom about … showing actual sexuality in the story.”

Peters concurred: “In my opinion, gay guy writers have much more freedom to detail sexual situations than gay gal writers, at least in mainstream YA fiction. I do think my book Grl2Grl: Short Fictions pushed the envelope farther toward the edge of ‘sexuality’ in homosexuality, but the one story I’d included where the girls went ‘all the way’ was, sadly, cut in the end. The good news is that the story will be coming out in a mainstream anthology of queer lit this coming October.”

When Silverrod was asked why she thought books about gay boys were sometimes more explicit than those about girls, she answered: “I’m guessing it has to do sort of with this really old-fashioned idea that women are less sexual and two women together are going to be less sexual. There are definitely romantic stories about girls, and you know that they’re girlfriends and they’re doing something, but who knows what?”

Dole told AfterEllen.com that she was asked to “tone down the juicy Latina love/sex scenes” in Down to the Bone, but she attributed that to being cautious because the book was targeted toward young adult readers.

“I think that LGBT sex in YA fiction should be handled responsibly,” Dole wrote. “Normally, when a young adult manuscript has explicit sex, it automatically crosses over to an adult label. Sex in YA books is a touchy subject for mainstream publishers. Nominated and award-winning teen YA books end up in important reading lists for high schools. Teachers and librarians purchase these books for schools and libraries, and I’m sure most won’t recommend YA books with explicit sex.”

David Levithan, who has written books about gay teens (Boy Meets Boy) and is executive editorial director at Scholastic, feels that sexuality in queer YA books is “about equal.” “I think the books about gay boys have the same range as the books about lesbian teens,” he told AfterEllen.com.

When asked whether he, as an editor, felt that same-sex sexuality should be handled in any particular way, Levithan responded: “I feel the same way about same-sex sexuality as I do about heterosexual sexuality in YA fiction – namely that it has to be realistic in showing not just the emotions involved but also the context. It can’t just be thrown in there to titillate or scandalize; instead, it needs to be grounded in both the story and the characters. Again, this is true no matter what the characters’ genders are.”

Book Challenges and Self-Censorship

Unfortunately, even if a queer-themed YA book has no actual sex in it, the fact that it is about homosexuality can still make it a target for book challenges. In 2007, Maureen Johnson’s Bermudez Triangle was challenged and ultimately moved to a “reserve” section of the library in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, requiring parental permission for access.

“I read the original complaint, the one which stated that the book was a ‘sexual free-for-all,'” Johnson told the Bartlesville Community Examiner-Enterprise. “Since the book has no sex in it at all, it would seem that the whole issue started off on very shaky ground. The only reason this book has been restricted is because it discusses homosexuality in a positive light.”

Author Maureen Johnson Author pohoto credit: Heather Weston

A recent report in the School Library Journal revealed that even before a book is formally challenged, some librarians and booksellers will self-censor by not acquiring it if the book seems likely to be challenged in the future.

Looking Ahead

The rising number of YA books about queer teens shows no sign of slowing down, and one can hope that as more are published, bisexual characters and teens of color will also be more widely represented.

Another problem that must be addressed is the fact that far more books about gay male teens are published than books about lesbian/bi girls. This disparity is particularly unusual for YA fiction, which skews heavily toward books about and for girls.

When asked why this imbalance continues, Levithan answered: “This is honestly one of the most confounding questions I face on a day-to-day basis. I genuinely have no idea. If there’s one submission I would love to get as an editor, it’s a great girl-meets-girl story. Because the inequality on the YA LBGT shelves is astonishing.

“I think I can genuinely say it’s not for a lack of looking; I am far from the only editor who is looking for a fantastic YA lesbian book. But for whatever reason, they just aren’t being submitted to us. I see many, many more submissions about gay boys. So it’s not that we’re getting amazing lesbian YA and turning it down (for whatever reason), it’s because writers for some reason aren’t writing it.”

But for every librarian or bookseller who chooses to not buy a queer YA book for their collection, there may be others who do so secretly. During Silverrod’s first job as a children’s librarian in a conservative suburb of Detroit, “I was buying what few titles there were at the time and just slipping them in and hoping nobody was going to make a big fuss.”

In some places, the tide may be shifting in a completely opposite direction.

Silverrod said that the San Francisco Public Library recently received a book challenge in which someone wanted to remove a graphic novel from the collection because it contained anti-gay material. “As far as I know, this is the first situation where this has come up,” Silverrod said, “and I don’t know what they’ll decide.”

This year, several new books that include lesbians and bisexual girls will be published: Megan Frazer‘s Secrets of Truth and Beauty (July); Lauren Bjorkman‘s My Invented Life (September); Kirstin Cronn-Mills‘ The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind (September); Julie Anne Peters’ Rage: A Love Story(September); Catherine Gilbert Murdock‘s Front and Center (October); and my own novel, Ash (September).

These six books mark a slight increase in the average number of books about lesbian/bi girls published each year since 2004. They can’t fill all the gaps in the ways that lesbian/bi girls are represented in YA fiction, but hopefully they are only another sign of more books to come.

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