“First of all, I’m twenty and I’ve never slept with anyone. I’ve been in AA for three years. That’s how I ended up in San Francisco. I moved here from Southern California to seduce my philosophy teacher from community college, Irene. Whenever I imagine having sex with a woman, I picture myself drinking goblets of wine in dimly lit rooms and touching her clavicles as if they were the original pages of the Bible, so old and sacred, thin and transparent. Was the Bible written on stone or scrolls? Regardless, you know what I mean; lightly, as if her clavicles were the thin, almost transparent pages of a very old Bible, and I was the archaeologist who’d fallen into this glorious excavation.”

The narrator of The IHOP Papers is named Francesca, although her new friends in San Francisco call her Goaty because she stinks when she first arrives. This revelation — like most everything in The IHOP Papers — is delivered with a kind of flat straightforwardness that hurts as much as it makes you laugh. The whole book is like that: painful, hilarious, real. (And I should note that it’s not YA, though it is about a young adult.)

I don’t read too many novels like The IHOP Papers — brutally honest stories about coming of age — and in the months between reading them I tell myself it’s because I don’t like this kind of story about someone who’s living on the edge of everything (poverty, mental health, emotional breakdown). But after finishing this book, I realized I don’t read too many of these kinds of books because they strike too close to home.

It’s not that I’ve had the exact experiences that Goaty has. But Goaty’s dysfunctional relationships, her depression, her blind faith in someone who is clearly not right for her — this kind of coming-of-age, coming-out narrative is something I’ve definitely experienced. I think many people go through this period of messed up messing up when they’re coming to terms with their sexual orientation. And it hurts to read about it.

But I think it’s good, sometimes, to remember what it felt like. Not because I’m a writer and I want to mine those experiences for my novels, but because as a human being, it’s good to remember what I’ve gone through, to gain perspective on where I am now. That’s one thing that makes fiction so powerful. It connects you not only with the person telling the story, but with the person you once were or the person you wish you could be.

Anyway, I’m glad that I chose to read The IHOP Papers. I’m making it sound like it was totally depressing, but really, it’s not. It’s also very funny, and the main character is an aspiring writer with a big heart, and it’s set in my favorite city. Here’s one of my favorite sentences from the book:

“This was the street I’d dreamed about my whole life, this doorway, this cold San Francisco wind, these nail-bitten hands, this mouth on my mouth.”

Beautiful.

I started out with a couple of preconceptions. I thought that traditionally “sci-fi” looking covers would be rare, because I have the impression that YA publishers are pretty wary of the category. (Instead, books that would traditionally have been categorized as science fiction are positioned as “dystopian” since that’s the hot trend right now.) Also, I thought there would be a lot of covers with pretty girls on them, because that’s what a lot of YA looks like.

Turns out my preconceptions were both right and wrong. In one clear example of moving away from the “sci-fi” look, Robin Wasserman’s trilogy about robots (or are they cyborgs?) has been repackaged completely — the books even have all-new titles. Here’s the trilogy as they were originally published:

And with their new look:

The new version does look very cool (especially lined up like that), but does it say “science fiction”? I don’t know. It definitely doesn’t say “robots” (or “cyborgs”) the way the original trilogy did.

But those are just three books. Let’s take a look at what else is out there in YA sci-fi cover land, shall we?

Dystopian Romances

There seem to be a lot of these coming out these days. Many do have girls on the covers, and in my opinion, they don’t really look like traditional sci-fi. They look like YA romance, but to be fair, that means their covers are pretty accurate.

Boys Adventuring

Plenty of YA sci-fi titles are plenty masculine, in color, font, or even in manly figures on the cover. To me, these all say “adventure,” but not necessarily “science fiction.”

Post-apocalyptic Wastelands

There also seems to be a vast number of post-apocalyptic novels, mostly about survival after a virus wipes out humanity, or humanity wipes out humanity, or global warming destroys everything, etc. You get the picture. And I think these covers convey that element of survival (another result of The Hunger Games‘ popularity, I think) perfectly.

Er, what kind of book is this?

I did find a bunch of books that had covers that confused me. I didn’t think these looked “sci-fi” at all, even though the stories definitely have sci-fi premises.

As sci-fi as it gets

And yet, my belief that there wouldn’t be many “sci-fi”-like covers actually was false. I think there are plenty. Here’s an assortment:

Space!

There are even a few books that prominently feature the starry heavens. (Singing the Dogstar Blues and Earthseed are both repackaged books that were published earlier.)

My conclusions? I think that I need to start re-thinking what “sci-fi” looks like, because this is how it looks in young adult fiction today. I realized that my concept of “sci-fi” on book covers is pretty much limited to space and spaceships, but science fiction as a genre encompasses way more than simply space and spaceships.

And most YA sci-fi isn’t about space or spaceships. Right now, it’s mostly about post-apocalyptic or dystopian societies, and the covers convey that pretty well. Also, YA in general is about blurring genre lines; you don’t get the strict delineation between romance and mystery and science fiction that you have in adult fiction. So it makes sense that YA sci-fi covers contain elements of other genres as well.

I think my favorites are Void and After the Snow (and, you know, they kind of have the same look). (And I really want to read Losers in Space just for the title.) Which ones do you like or dislike?

1. The cover images I’m including in this post are not an exhaustive collection. I tried to be representative of what I saw, but I didn’t include every book in each series, and I omitted some covers if they didn’t fit anywhere.

Then I watched the most recent episode of Once Upon a Time (that TV show on ABC), in which there was a black fairy godmother. Wait, you say, what black fairy godmother? Well, she appeared, said her two lines, and died within the first two minutes of the episode. Poof. (I have to say I called it. As soon as she showed up on-screen, I said, “I bet she dies.” Sometimes, it hurts to be right.)

And, of course, yesterday I saw this amazing clip of an interview with (black) British director Steve McQueen, where he asked a lineup of six white male directors why they so rarely cast minorities in movies. They had nothing to say in response.

Color me shocked.

And then there was Cracked.com’s totally unfunny list of 5 Old-Timey Prejudices That Still Show Up in Every Movie. The list includes No. 5: They still can’t show a black man dating a white woman (unless that’s what the whole movie is about); and No. 4: Only the pretty girls are allowed to live.

All of this left me a little down in the dumps. So I was really heartened to come across the YA Sisterhood’s Tournament of Heroines, which celebrates awesome YA heroines. Currently, the Tournament of Heroines is open for nominations.

What do they mean by “heroine”? Here’s what they say:

A heroine is a female character who is admired for her noble qualities. We think it’s someone who meets the world head on. This doesn’t mean she has to be a hardcore girl who can beat up anyone who crosses her path (though those girls certainly qualify). Your favorite can be anyone you admire, for any reason. The important thing is that she is extraordinary in some way or another– be that the way she handles other people, her inexhaustible humor, or her skill with a crossbow. We encourage you to think outside the box! Search your bookshelves for the female characters who inspire you, who make you want to be better, who prove that our world doesn’t have to be a man’s world.

Nominations are open until Nov. 24th, and the running list of nominated heroines is already pretty long! I love that YA readers are going to be talking about the qualities of a heroine.

There are already a few non-white characters on the initial nominee list (which is going to be updated daily, so that might have changed by the time you read this), but you know what would make me super thrilled after a week of such depressing news about how the wider world isn’t really that accepting of minorities (or, frankly, girls)? To show that YA readers are.

So I’ve gone through my bookshelves and pulled out 10 heroines who aren’t white and/or aren’t straight. These are the awesome girls I’m going to nominate for the Tournament of Heroines (in alphabetical order by first name):

Ai Ling from Silver Phoenix and Fury of the Phoenix by Cindy Pon

Billi SanGreal from Devil’s Kiss (and sequels) by Sarwat Chadda

Bridget Liu of Possess by Gretchen McNeil

Esme Rocket from Sister Mischief by Laura Goode

Hanna from Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

Jael from Misfit by Jon Skovron

Keri from The Shattering by Karen Healey

Micah from Liar by Justine Larbalestier¹

Nimira from Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore

Sin from The Demon’s Surrender by Sarah Rees Brennan

There are my 10 ladies. But wait … there’s another!

Kaede from Huntress

Yes, this is my own book. Is it bad form to mention that a character I created qualifies? I mean, seriously, I think Kaede could totally take Katniss in a fight. And you know Katniss is going to make it to the final round. But Kaede’s archery skills are, I dare say, as good as Katniss’s. Plus she likes to throw knives for fun. Winner!

I think it’s going to be fun to see what YA readers think a heroine should be. (You can nominate your heroines here.) Who are your favorite YA heroines who are of color or queer?

1. OK, yeah, Micah may not quite fit the definition of “heroine” above since she’s, you know, a liar. But she’s definitely “extraordinary,” and I love her! I have to include her!

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Cas Lowood is a ghost hunter with a twist: He actually kills ghosts who are harming humans. He moves to Thunder Bay, Ontario, with the goal of killing a ghost known as Anna Dressed in Blood. Anna still wears the dress she wore on the day she was murdered in 1958 (hence the “Dressed in Blood” part), and ever since that day, she has been killing every person who enters the Victorian house (now abandoned and definitely haunted by her and the ghosts of everyone she’s killed) where she used to live.

If you’re looking for a ghost story with some real meat to it, look no further. There are some genuinely horrific scenes, but there are also some genuinely awesome characters, starting with Cas, who is one of the coolest guys I’ve encountered in fiction lately. In fact, I liked this book so much that I’ve written up a blurb for the paperback edition. Here’s the blurb:

“Anna Dressed in Blood is a deliciously creepy ghost story, starring a ghost hunter so cool he deserves a fan club. If you love haunted houses, atmosphere so thick you can cut it, and romance with a morbid twist (who doesn’t?), this is the book for you.”

It’s perfect reading for this time of year!

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

There’s a short list of subjects that, when put together, create a book I absolutely cannot resist. They include:

• A U.K. setting
• Boarding school
• Girl detectives
• Supernatural hijinks

The Name of the Star checks all of these boxes. It’s like Maureen Johnson wrote a book especially for meeeee (don’t disillusion me!).

The heroine of the book is 17-year-old Louisiana native Rory Deveaux, who moves to London to attend Wexford (a private school). Unfortunately for Rory, just as she’s getting acquainted with life at Wexford (dorms! roommates! going to the pub!), a Jack the Ripper copycat killer begins to terrorise (honorary British spelling) London with a series of vicious murders.

Of course, things are not as they seem! The Jack the Ripper copycat killer cannot be caught on camera. And Rory is the only person who has seen him. You know what this means? OK, maybe not, but I will tell you: It means that Rory can see ghosts. And that there is a whole police force out there in charge of managing said ghosts. How can you resist? Read it now!

Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore

While Texas Gothic is not set in a U.K. boarding school, it is set on a Texas ranch, which, honestly, is practically just as good! It also involves a girl detective undergoing supernatural hijinks, but this time with Clement-Moore’s trademark snappy dialogue. It reminds me very much of the best of Elizabeth Peters’ romantic suspense novels, and I mean that as a huge compliment. Those books are like candy for me, and I’m always looking for more of them. Thank you, Rosemary Clement-Moore!

The book is about 18-year-old Amy Goodnight, a girl who comes from a long line of witchy women. Amy herself would rather be normal, but unfortunately her tendency to attract ghosts kind of puts a crimp into her plans. She’s hoping for an ordinary summer while ranch-sitting for her aunt, but instead she encounters a dead body — or at least, a skeleton, which promptly involves bringing in the local university’s archaeology department — an unfriendly (or is it?) spirit, and a sexy cowboy next door.

If you like witty repartee, smart girls, archaeology (come on, who doesn’t? This is another of those elements I always love to find in books), and Wild West mythology, I bet you’ll love this book.

Happy (early) Halloween!

P.S. If you’re keeping score, here are things I LOVE AND CANNOT RESIST in books: (1) U.K.; (2) boarding school; (3) smart girl detectives; (4) supernatural hijinks; (5) archaeology; (6) witty repartee; (7) spooky atmosphere. Can somebody please write a new book¹ that includes all those elements for me? Thank you.

1. Yes, this is many an Elizabeth Peters novel, but I have read them all!

I react to these kinds of essays with a mixture of resignation and indignation, because generally they’re characterized by a glaring blindness on the part of the authors. Most of the people who write these essays don’t seem to have much of any familiarity with today’s young adult book market.¹ They tend to base their conclusions on personal experience of the dated kind: what they read when they were teens (usually 20-30 years ago), and how today’s bestsellers (typically Twilight or The Hunger Games) compare. Usually, The Hunger Games is more cold-bloodedly violent, and Twilight is a bad example for girls.

I think that author Andrea Cremer said it best in her tweet about the Salon.com piece:

I absolutely agree. This debate about YA’s qualities or lack thereof is clearly a way for adults to express their anxiety about adolescence today: whether it’s coming on too soon, whether it’s ending too quickly. The world in general seems to be an increasingly brutal place, not only in real terms (the war in Afghanistan, uprisings in the Middle East, etc.) but in virtual ones as well (the American entertainment industry contributes substantially via everything from crass TV to first-person shooter video games).

Books have traditionally been seen as “good for you,” and I think that the commercialization of young adult fiction — pushed by the success of the Harry Potter series, Twilight, and, yes, The Hunger Games — strikes a certain kind of terror in the hearts of the predominantly upper middle-class literary types who eat up these articles. If the books (which are supposed to be virtuous and moral) are going to hell, what’s next?

As a writer of young adult novels, I’m sometimes amused by the fear that these articles seem to express. Books: So powerful! So influential — possibly in horrible ways! And yet, of course they can be. That’s why they’re so wonderful.

On the other hand, these articles often express a snobbery about YA that is a bit more difficult to brush off. YA books: So trashy! So poorly written! So simplistic! Though yes, of course that can be true, too.²

What frustrates me about this whole debate, I think, are the assumptions that people who don’t read YA make. I get this not only in these articles (which are, at least, not personal), but in person. I’ve had good friends say to me, “I tried to read Ash, but it was so hard! I thought books for teens were supposed to be easy to read!”³ I’ve had other friends look at me in bewilderment when they realize my books are young adult novels. I can practically see all their assumptions whirling through their mind: These books are for teens, so I probably won’t be interested. They’re probably dumbed down and not worth it. What is my friend doing writing for teens, anyway? She’s better than that!

As a writer, my own path to young adult fiction was an unexpected one. Some stereotypes about YA fiction are based on the idea that a YA novelist is deeply nostalgic for her teen years and wants to relive them through fiction.

The poster for Charlize Theron's next movie, already chock full of YA stereotypes.

Well, I can tell you for sure that I am not nostalgic about my teen years. I hated them, and I’m very glad there’s no such thing as time travel so that I never have to go back.

Many YA writers I know came to write YA fiction because they enjoy reading it. But I didn’t read YA until after I sold Ash. I think that’s why Ash has a kind of old-fashioned feel — it’s based in the reading experience of my own teen years, approximately 20 years ago. However, once I started reading YA, I quickly realized that as a writer, I absolutely belong in this category of fiction.

For me, there are some very specific things about YA that make creative sense. YA is particularly story-based. Think TV and film: you are drawn in to a story immediately, or at least, that’s the goal. Story, story, story. This is YA.

I’m the first to admit that I’ve never been especially drawn to adult literary fiction. I very rarely connect with it, although I have read and loved the odd literary novel. This is because I generally value story over literary affect. I tend to prefer an arresting tale over a pretty sentence. If I want a pretty sentence, I will read poetry, and I do enjoy poetry when I read it (even if I don’t understand it!).

Another thing I enjoy about YA is the fact that it allows the writer to mash together many genres. Adult fiction is fairly divided when it comes to genre: science fiction does not usually cross over into mystery, which does not usually cross over into romance. There are exceptions as always, but typically, a book is published in one genre, and the book must obey that genre’s conventions or risk alienating the genre’s readers. YA, on the other hand, lets me combine mystery and romance and science fiction into one glorious hybrid whole.

I think this is a reflection of the fact that adolescence is about trying new things. Teens aren’t fixed in their personalities yet, even though they have very definite ideas about what their personality is. They’re not afraid to smush things around a little and see what results. That kind of freedom is what I find so endearing and so liberating about YA. It enables me to tell the story I want, using many of my favorite tools (mystery! romance! intrigue! magic!).

Of course, there are some limitations to the YA category, and anyone who says YA can cover any subject is not telling the whole truth. You won’t find navel-gazing books about middle-aged people in YA, and you’re unlikely to find explicit sex or truly extreme evil. This is not because teens can’t handle these subjects or because they don’t encounter them in real life — they do. It’s because YA is, at its most basic level, a marketing category, and libraries and schools are hesitant to buy books that are likely to upset parents. Parents, not teens. I’m pretty sure teens want to read about sex and death.

This is where that debate flares up: adults expressing their anxiety over teens’ incipient adulthood.

I’m sure that someday I will want to write something that involves explicit sex and/or extreme evil⁴, because as a writer, I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly drawn to telling stories about the highest highs and the lowest lows. I want to tell Big Stories (again, emphasis on story). So, I’m sure that someday I will write an “adult” novel. I’m not sure, though, whether I will ever really fit into the world of adult fiction. I do enjoy adult genre fiction; I’ve been a mystery and scifi/fantasy reader for decades. But what if I want to mash up those genres? I’m pretty sure I will. How will that work in the adult fiction market?

I don’t know, and I’m not that concerned about it. I’ll write the story I want to write, and I’ll go from there. For now, I’m happy to be writing young adult fiction, even if I do get that weird shifty-eyed look from my (adult) friends every once in a while. I like the creative tools that I get to use when writing YA. They make sense to me as a writer, and that’s why I’m writing young adult novels.

1. Yes, the infamous Wall Street Journal article is an exception, and I think that’s why it engendered such a heated backlash from the YA community.
2. I want to note that it can be true of all fiction. Plenty of adult fiction is trashy, poorly written, and simplistic. But somehow that’s accepted as obvious, whereas YA is often held up to a higher “moral” standard.
3. I don’t actually mind that my friend said this to me, though it was startling. She’s a really good friend.
4. I’m not saying that a book must include explicit sex or extreme evil to be worth reading or writing. Plenty of wonderful books that I love don’t include any of it.

To get my data, I used this bibliography of LGBT YA compiled by librarian/researcher Christine Jenkins, which lists books published in English from 1969-2009. I supplemented that bibliography with information for 2009-2011 kindly given to me by researcher Michael Cart, who specializes in LGBT children’s and YA books. Mr. Cart’s data for 2011 was incomplete because the year isn’t finished yet, but because I’ve been keeping track of LGBT YA novels for Diversity in YA, I topped off the list with a number of books I know have been published or will be published this year.¹

The ultimate list of 371 titles is, therefore, as accurate as I could make it. I’m sure I missed some titles, but hopefully not too many.

The data showed that from 1969 to 2011, the number of LGBT YA novels has risen somewhat steadily, with a few dips in various years.

Click to enlarge

The most notable recent dip occurred in 2010, in which only 11 LGBT YA titles were published, compared to 36 in 2009 and 25 in 2011. This might be a reflection of the economy, which crashed in 2008, and most publishers shrank their lists in 2009. It’s nice to see, however, that the trend continues upward once again this year.

Then I took a closer look at LGBT YA published from 2000 to 2011, first splitting it up by publisher.

Click to enlarge

The category “Other Publishers” includes independent presses like Foglight Press and Alyson, as well as medium-sized publishing houses such as Disney Hyperion, Bloomsbury/Walker, Amulet, Candlewick, and Flux.

When the number of books published from 2000-2011 are added up, this is the distribution of LGBT YA among American publishers:

Click to enlarge

As you can see, 30% of LGBT YA is published by non-big 6 publishers, with Simon & Schuster leading the pack of the big 6. However, this data doesn’t conclusively prove that S&S is the the most gay-friendly publisher, because it doesn’t take into account the percentage of LGBT YA published by a publisher in relation to the total number of YA titles published by that publisher.

For example, let’s say a hypothetical Big Publishing House published 300 YA titles in 2010. If only 5 of those YA titles were LGBT-inclusive, that amounts to 1.6% of its entire YA list. On the other hand, if Medium Publishing House published 150 YA titles in 2010, and 5 of those titles are LGBT-inclusive, that’s 3.3%. If I had about a zillion more hours, I’d try to figure out the proportion of LGBT YA published by each of the major publishers in order to get a more accurate picture of how gay-friendly they are.²

I was also very interested in seeing the proportion of LGBT YA books that focused on boys, girls, and trans characters. The common wisdom is that books about gay boys vastly outnumber those about gay girls, and the numbers prove this:

Click to enlarge

I also discovered that a number of LGBT YA books weren’t actually about an LGBT teen, but rather were about a straight teen and his LGBT parents or adult guardians.

Adding the 2000-2011 YA titles together and splitting it out by gender brings us this handy pie chart:

Click to enlarge

This shows us that 50% of LGBT YA books are about boys, with only 25% about girls. I find this extremely depressing, especially considering the predominant readership of YA is female.

Even more depressing is the fact that only 4% of LGBT YA books are about transgender or genderqueer characters. The only light at the end of the tunnel about this statistic is that since 2007, every year has seen publication of at least one trans/genderqueer title, and in 2011 we have three (including one book that includes both trans and lesbian characters).

Finally, according to Harold Underdown’s YA Books Are Booming–but not That Much, there were approximately 4,000 YA titles published in 2010. That same year, only 11 LGBT YA titles were published. That amounts to 0.2% of YA books. That fraction is frankly too small to make a pie chart out of.

The numbers aren’t much better for this year. If we assume no growth and stick with 4,000 YA titles, we have 25 LGBT YA titles within that, which amounts to 0.6%. That means:

Less than 1% of YA novels have LGBT characters.

My takeaways from this number crunching are:

1. I often hear people saying that publishers aren’t willing to publish LGBT YA, or that each publisher only publishes one LGBT YA per year. This, statistically, isn’t true. Every one of the big 6 publishers (and plenty of smaller ones) publish LGBT YA titles, and several of them do publish more than one per year.
2. However, the proportion of LGBT YA to non-LGBT YA is so tiny as to be laughable.
3. The good news is, the numbers have continued to increase over time, and other than the dip in 2010, the increase has sped up since 2000.
4. The bad news is, the G in LGBT far outpaces L, B, or T.

I think, overall, it’s a two steps forward, one step back kind of situation. And I think that true growth in the number of LGBT YA novels will only come through active effort on the part of agents, editors, and publishers, to seek out and acquire LGBT YA novels.³ I know that change happens one person at a time, but simultaneously, it’s hard to not be discouraged by the stats.

Updated 9/15/11:

Several people have asked me to share the bibliography of books I used to make these lovely pie charts. The bibliography for books from 1969-2008 is available online here at Christine Jenkins’ site. For 2009-2011, Michael Cart shared his list of books with me, and then I supplemented it with my own list. I combined our lists into this handy PDF of 2009-2011 LGBTQ YA titles that you can download.

I can guarantee you that this list of probably not complete. Someone on Twitter yesterday told me I’d omitted the Pretty Little Liars series, and after reading her tweet I realized I’d also omitted the Gossip Girl series. This is true! My question is: Does every book in those series count? Do they all contain LGBTQ main or secondary characters? Also, sadly I should note that even if I double the number of titles on the list, the total percentage of LGBTQ YA will still only be approximately 1% of all YA books.

1. After I compiled all these lists together, I sorted through it to identify trends/gaps. The bibliographies provided by Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Cart feature LGBT characters as main characters, as supporting characters, as parents, and sometimes they feature LGBT issues as a backstory. But I noticed when going through the original 1969-2009 bibliography that it omitted several major fantasy series that include LGBT secondary characters. I think this is because LGBT characters have only recently appeared in genre YA. In the past, they only appeared in realistic “problem novels.” Since the bibliographies already included books with secondary LGBT characters, I went ahead and added in those major series, as well as a few contemporary YA novels from the past few years that I’ve read and know contain secondary lesbian characters, but were omitted from the original bibliographies. Finally, when I went through the books from 2000-2011 to determine the percentage of books with boy vs. girl main characters, I removed the few middle-grade books and books published by non-American publishers that I found.
2. I’ll note here that I’m published by Little, Brown, which in 2011 has published 4 LGBT YA titles, three of which are about girls, and one which is about an FTM trans boy.
3. Some people will see that negatively as affirmative action or quotas, which is also disheartening because that misunderstands the purpose of affirmative action entirely.

NOTE: There will be SPOILERS in this post!

Original 1982 hardcover jacket

I’m the first to admit that I generally do not enjoy young adult issue novels, and it’s kind of a strange experience to read an issue novel in which the issue is, well, people like you. When I first started the book I read it sort of with one hand over my eyes because I could just sense the badness coming. I actually had to read the last page very early on to reassure myself that the girls would both still be alive at the end.

In early novels about lesbians, often one of them winds up dead. (I’m not joking.) Even more often, both of them wind up depressed and alone. Luckily, that doesn’t happen in Annie, but there is a lot of tortured emotion and homophobia to get through before you arrive at the happy ending.

That said, the romance between the two girls is sweet. I thought the best scenes were about the two of them together and finding connections with each other.

First paperback reissue

You’ll remember that I said there is a happy ending — and there is — but this punishment sort of stuck in my craw. If I were to get all metaphorical on you, it’s as if the girls’ romance is acceptable — love is wonderful, the book tells us — but their physical intimacy is not. And there is significant punishment for their display of physical intimacy.

I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that the book was published for teens in 1982. But I also think that being gay has often been seen as a trade-off. You can get some things (love) but not others (children). That’s clearly the case in The Price of Salt, where Carol gives up her daughter in order to be with Therese. In Annie, too, there is a discussion in which Liza is told that being gay means she’ll never get to have a family of her own. (Liza, who is 17 at the time, thinks having Annie will be plenty.)

In addition, there’s the idea that homosexuality is fine as long as it’s only about love. Sex, on the other hand, should be kept behind closed doors; what you do in your bedroom is your business, and please don’t talk about it to anyone.

In a way, the gay rights movement supported this kind of belief by emphasizing the love aspect of gay relationships to counter the widespread belief that being gay was all about sex. (See gay community’s debates over ostentatious displays of sexuality during Pride parades, for example.) And I agree that being gay isn’t all about sex. But frankly, it is about who you want to have sex with. Being gay is not about having chaste relationships of pure intellectual love with someone of the same gender.

In the 1980s (after Annie was published) there was a big upset in the lesbian community over women’s sexuality that opened the doors to a much more sex-positive mode of thinking, especially for lesbians. Starting in the early 1990s, lesbians began to publicly reclaim their own sexuality as a positive and sexy thing. The early 1990s phase of “lesbian chic” in which k.d. lang’s androgynous (frankly, butch) appearance was glamorized was one part of this phenomenon.

Basically, I think it’s really important that queer girls see themselves, positively, as sexual beings. I think that it’s important to recognize that part of being lesbian or bisexual is appreciating the physical aspects of other women. This is something that I realized when I was working at AfterEllen, when hundreds of thousands of women voted on who they thought the hottest 100 women in entertainment were, in direct response to a hot 100 list published by Maxim, a major men’s magazine.

25th anniversary paperback reissue

[Edited to add: Wow, on rereading this post I just realized I totally slipped into the attitude that YA books are meant to teach teens things. I'm kind of horrified by that, but also I think it's very easy to slip into that mode when talking about an issue novel, which by definition deals with an issue (in this case, homosexuality) and presents various viewpoints on it. Issue novels do, in many cases, teach lessons. On the other hand, my own political beliefs about sexuality aren't necessarily relevant when telling a story about specific characters, some of whom might not feel the same way that I do.]

I do think that some people will find that idea challenging, because it is about a girl entirely owning her own sexuality. The girls in Annie on My Mind didn’t do that, but that’s OK. Annie was on Liza’s mind, obviously, not on, well, other areas. At the time it was published, I do think that’s all that was possible.

And I can still see that some teens might read Annie today and get a lot out of it. In more conservative parts of the country, Annie might even be quite relevant. There are some obviously dated parts to the book (the girls look for a gay newspaper, whereas nowadays they’d just go online), but the feelings are very real and very tender. I felt for the girls, their confusion and their struggles with their identities.

Ultimately, I enjoyed Annie on My Mind and I’m very glad that it was published in 1982. I know it has touched a lot of lives, and it is certainly a significant marker in the progress of the representation of LGBT teens in young adult fiction.

Sidenote: Isn’t the development of the covers interesting? The girls get closer to each other in each iteration, but even in the 25th anniversary edition, which was issued in 2007, they don’t make eye contact.

W.W. Norton paperback edition

One of the four novels I resolved to read this year is Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. I read it while traveling for the Diversity Tour, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since I finished. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It surprised me constantly, for many reasons.

First and foremost, I was stunned that this book was published in 1952. I’ve always envisioned the 1950s as this Leave It to Beaver world of perfect white nuclear families who are very prim and proper, but of course that’s just the upper middle-class myth. Obviously, people in the 1950s had love lives and desires and were just as reckless as people in any decade. And obviously, gay people existed then, too, but I’d always envisioned them as secretive, depressed people in an oppressive, closeted world full of homophobia. The Price of Salt suggests that there might have been an alternative — especially for women who could pass as straight, but who definitely were not.

The novel is about nineteen-year-old Therese Belivet, an aspiring stage designer living in New York and supporting herself by working at a toy counter in a department store. When Therese sees a wealthy housewife across the sales floor, she is immediately drawn to her, and soon afterward they begin a friendship. Carol Aird, the housewife, is in the midst of a divorce, and as her relationship with Therese develops, it becomes clear that both women are interested in being more than friends. Eventually they go on a cross-country road trip together that reminded me a bit of Thelma and Louise, and had kind of a crime caper feel to it.

I was surprised by how frankly Highsmith wrote about the women’s relationship. Therese’s attraction to Carol is always crystal clear, and there is never a hint of internalized homophobia in her. Therese accepts her attraction and love for Carol from the get-go; she doesn’t seem to have the tiniest problem with it, although Therese is aware that others could object.

Carol’s feelings for Therese are a little more opaque at first, probably because the story is mostly told from Therese’s point of view. But Carol is also older than Therese — perhaps ten years older? — and she has already had one lesbian relationship end. Carol knows that it’s difficult and potentially tragic to fall in love with another woman, and for a time, she seems to resist, although she can’t help being drawn to Therese, either.

I usually find it difficult to buy into love-at-first-sight tales, and I wasn’t entirely sold on it by The Price of Salt. But the fact that it was a lesbian love at first sight (which I hardly ever read about) made me try harder than usual to buy into the romance.

However, it was difficult for me to feel the chemistry between the two women, even though Therese was continually describing Carol in rapturous tones. I think this is because I did not initially like Therese very much. The book opens up with a couple of tedious chapters setting the scene and describing how bland and hopeless Therese’s life is. The moment she meets Carol does not happen until page 39, and by then I’d decided that Therese was a bore. Here is their meeting:

Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression, as if half her mind were on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to her. Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer. (pages 39-40)

An early edition, published under Highsmith's pseudonym

I understood why Therese found Carol attractive: because in comparison to her own life, Carol is the epitome of sophistication and excitement. She is a dream; an ideal. But I did not understand why Carol found Therese attractive. Why would she be interested in a mousey little shopgirl? It wasn’t until well over the halfway point of the novel that I realized that Therese’s apparent timidity hid quite a brave personality: a girl who lived alone in New York, pursuing a career that few if any women had done, who openly and unabashedly knew she was in love with a wealthy older woman and took steps to bring that woman into her life.

I think this illustrates one difficulty of love-at-first-sight narratives. If the romance begins near the beginning of the book (like this one), the reader doesn’t know the main character very well, so it can be difficult for the reader to understand why that character is attractive. If a romance builds over the course of a novel, there is more time for the why of that relationship to come into focus.

Then again, some romances just don’t work for some readers, whether it’s love at first sight or love via lengthy buildup. A lot of it is about chemistry — perceived by the reader, delivered (hopefully successfully) by the writer — and I don’t know if you can ever declare that a particular romance definitively works. It will always not work for someone.

Though I found Therese a bit insipid at first, I did stick with it because I wanted to know why Carol was attracted to Therese. I was genuinely curious. And as the book continued, I did come to understand it. I think I might have understood it a bit more quickly if Patricia Highsmith had been less reserved in her descriptions of their physical attraction. While she was very frank about Therese’s emotional attraction to Carol, she was largely metaphorical about physical desire,¹ and that kept the romance mostly in the characters’ heads. I felt a lack of physical connection with the two women.

But there were some sentences in the book about Therese’s love for Carol other that were utterly perfect. Here’s one passage:

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimming as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered. (page 189)

Many readers will recognize Patricia Highsmith’s name because she also wrote a series of famous crime novels, beginning with The Talented Mr. Ripley. I enjoyed The Price of Salt enough that I think I’ll pick up those books sometime, too.

In the Afterword to the W.W. Norton paperback edition of The Price of Salt, Highsmith writes that she has received numerous letters from lesbian readers over the decades, thanking her for writing a novel in which the women in love did not die in the end, and had the potential for a happy life together. I can imagine how life-changing reading this book could have been in the 1950s and 1960s. Have you read it? What did you think?

1. Perhaps because the book was written in 1950?

1. Talking about race or sexual orientation in a mixed group can be very nerve-wracking, and I think that our audiences along the way did a fantastic job of being respectful and honest in their questions. Believe me, things could have gone a different way, and they didn’t! Kudos to everybody who came out to support us on the tour — and thank you for coming.

For me, the most comfortable panels were the two where I had the most in common with the other panelists: the San Francisco panel, which was composed of four Asian American writers (and all Chinese American, to boot), and the New York LGBT Center panel, which was composed of four queer writers.

L to R: Jon Yang, me, Cindy Pon, Gene Luen Yang at the San Francisco Public Library

L to R: Me, Cris Beam, Jacqueline Woodson, David Levithan, Cindy Pon (moderator) at the New York LGBT Center

I don’t think this is surprising, but it also gave me a renewed appreciation for spaces in which we can connect with people who come from similar backgrounds — or, at least, who are seen by others as being similar. The sense of solidarity was a nice boost for me, since in the YA world I tend to stick out a lot as the sole queer Asian writer.

2. The one question we got at pretty much every location was about covers. What do you think of them, are publishers evil for whitewashing, do people really not buy books with people of color on them, etc. I’ve already said a lot about book covers here.

The one thing I will add is this: If you truly want to see more books with people of color on them, then go and buy the books that already exist that are about people of color. Forget about what’s on the cover now; covers change all the time. But put your money where your mouth is, because that’s what publishers will listen to. That’s the way capitalism works.

3. The other issue that came up repeatedly was the question of who has the ability to write books with diverse characters. Do you have to be a person of color to write about people of color? Do you have to be gay to write about gay people? I think that every single author on all our panels would agree that the answer is a big fat NO. If we could only write about what we’ve experienced directly, we wouldn’t be able to tell very many stories.

I admit I became a little frustrated with these questions, because the answer seemed to be so obvious to me. It wasn’t until I went to School Library Journal’s Day of Dialog, where I was on a panel about diversity, that I realized what the underlying issue was. Liz Burns, the librarian who moderated the panel, asked us to consider the question of authenticity: Who has an authentic voice when writing about people of color?

L to R: Cindy Pon, me, Rita Williams-Garcia, Paul Griffin at the School Library Journal Day of Dialog

As soon as she mentioned “authentic,” I realized that all these questions are actually about anxiety. I actually wrote about authenticity in graduate school, so I had a lot to say about it (nerd alert!). My paper about authenticity is here if you want to read it.

In terms of authenticity and writing diverse YA fiction, I’ll say this for now: When people talk about “authenticity” in this case (e.g., by questioning whether someone can write about people who aren’t like them), they’re actually talking about anxiety and authority. I think it’s much more productive (and accurate) to discuss anxiety and authority rather than authenticity, because authenticity is situational and can never truly be defined.

If I have time later, I’ll blog more about authenticity, because I’m fascinated by the subject in a super geeky way.

4. Unrelated to diversity, but related to touring: this was my first book tour. It was crazy! It’s a weird kind of space to inhabit when you wake up, go to the airport, talk to lots of strangers, sleep in a strange bed, wake up and go to the airport, etc., over and over. And yet, it’s kind of an amazing space. To throw in some old-school anthro terms, it feels like a liminal space: a space between states of being. Before the tour, Cindy and I had talked about diversity a lot online, but it had never felt entirely real — at least not to me. After the tour, it was real.

Blogger Jen Bigheart and Cindy Pon online, after our event in Austin

We had taken our dreams for this tour and this issue that is dear to our hearts, and delivered it straight to people sitting ten feet away from us. It’s a wonderful thing, in this increasingly internet-based world, to turn those nebulous thoughts into three-dimensional experiences.

Next Tuesday, I’ll have an official launch post with some goodies for everybody, even if you can’t come to my real-world launch (at Books Inc in Palo Alto, April 5 at 7 pm!). Today, I’m still in the trenches of finishing up the first draft of my next novel, which is due at the end of this week (so this week I’m going to be a little scarce online).

While I write (and sometimes while revising), I take breaks to recharge my creative juices by reading fiction. Not all writers do this; I know some who avoid reading any books in their genre while they’re writing something new. But I love to get inspiration from other novels, whether or not they’re in the genre I’m writing.

Here are several books I read and totally loved while writing the book I’m currently working on:

Alcestis by Katharine Beutner (adult) — This is a reimagination of the myth of Alcestis, who was known as the dutiful wife who willingly gave up her life for her husband, descending to the Underworld for three days before being rescued and returning to the living world. I had never heard this myth before, and I probably would never have picked up the book on my own¹ because the cover looks so much like a literary historical novel about Ancient Greece. I love literary historicals, but I’ve never been drawn to Ancient Greece.

This is just another lesson in how much I should not judge a book by its cover, because this book is a luscious, lyrical fantasy, full of gods and goddesses and lusty love. And in Beutner’s version of the tale, Alcestis’s three days in the Underworld also involves meeting Persephone, who, as a goddess, has quite a bit of seductive power of her own. This is a beautiful book! I highly recommend it to people who like retellings of myths or fairy tales, especially those in which women fall in love with women. Those are certainly rare. (And this book just came out in paperback! Go get it.)

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (adult) — This is an older book, first published in 1996. I’ve been carrying a copy of the paperback with me from place to place ever since I got it, knowing that I’d want to read it someday, because it has so many themes that I am fascinated by: religion, space, anthropology, first contact with an extraterrestrial species.

The Sparrow is about a Jesuit priest who is among the first group of humans to make contact with an intelligent nonhuman species. It is science fiction the way I love it best: about big ideas and humanity and love and sacrifice, with a backdrop of interstellar travel. If you haven’t read the book before, it’s a gorgeous read. And Russell manages to deliver a lot of specialized, technical information about linguistics in a very fluid, intelligent and even gripping way. It is an amazing book.

Red Glove by Holly Black (young adult) — This is the sequel to the first book in the Curse Workers series, White Cat, and if you haven’t read that one yet, you should read it first because Red Glove is a total giant spoiler for White Cat. What I love about these books is that Holly Black is a master manipulator. The plot she weaves is intricate and tricky and you can’t trust anybody in her books to tell the truth, but you can trust that she will take you on an amazing ride.

At the same time, there is way more than merely plot to these books. They’re also about civil rights, uncomfortable family relationships, the imperfection of romance, and of course, identity. And did I mention page-turner? You will not be able to put them down. Red Glove comes out the same day as Huntress (obviously an auspicious day!).

And now I go back to work …

1. Someone recommended it to me months ago but I didn’t find time to read it until recently.