So Many Books... - Post a comment

jadelennox

01:05 pm

See, the thing that makes me weep with frustration is that gay representation in YA was better 20 years ago

I'm not sure I agree that things were better 20 years ago. For one thing, there are finally starting to be books where gay is not The Issue. And it's not Tragic. They are flawed, but they exist. 20 years ago we had a lot more of I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, in which the big exciting gay kiss is punished by the dog dying, or Annie on My Mind and Deliver Us from Evie (both of which I like a lot), in which coming out is tied to a major disaster outside of the relationship.

Now we have, oh, Boy Meets Boy, which takes place in its odd little fantasyland, and we are starting to have incidentally gay protagonists and secondary characters in YA fantasy. 20 years ago, outside of Mercedes Lackey, gay characters in fantasy were at best effeminate or dysfunctional, and at worst evil pedophiles (Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, Katherine Kurtz).

So I do think he gay representation in young adult fiction is getting a lot better than it used to be.

Right now I feel like representation of bisexuals is where representation of gay characters was 20 years ago. I'm getting really sick of seeing bisexual characters show up as villains in gay stories, where "bisexual" is actually code for "I was experimenting but now I am straight". We are starting to have a few good ones -- thank you, Brent Hartinger!

TG is up at, what, about 3 books by now? A few more? Luna (which is formulaic but totally adequate), Parrotfish (which I haven't read yet), Debbie Harry...

It's a tricky thing authors need to do, walking the line between saying "TG doesn't necessarily mean gay" and saying "thank goodness, because there is something wrong with gay". It's like watching Barak Obama deny being a Muslim, which would be funny if it didn't matter so much. Actually, it's exactly like watching Barak Obama deny being a Muslim.