“I am writing a short story about a lesbian main character … and almost had it finished when I had a panic attack. I was at a conference talking about my story when a lesbian told me she would never take it seriously because I wasn’t a lesbian and I can’t know what that feels like. But to me that love is love and normal and just like love between anyone else except for that one guy back home and his sheep. I don’t want to do this wrong. I want their love to be the reason my MC survives this ordeal but I don’t want to offend either. What can I do?”

First off, I think it’s great that you’re writing a story about a lesbian character, and that you understand that love is love.¹ That’s wonderful!

Our girl Sappho

As for the comment made by the lesbian at the conference, well, some lesbians are going to think that way, and they have every right to. For a long, long time (virtually all of history, except for Sappho!), representations of women who love women were made by people who were not women who love women. Some of those representations were perfectly fine; many of them were (and still are) offensive or badly done.

Now that we live in a time period in which lesbians are more freely able to represent themselves — in books, art, the world at large — I think you can understand why many lesbians might prefer to read/watch/experience stories about lesbians created by lesbians. They may in fact be more accurate in their representations, or they may simply seem that way because the reader/viewer knows the creator has been through it, to some degree.

Also, there’s a matter of pride. Sometimes we like to support our own kind.

BUT: Representations of lesbians are not only done well by lesbians, and I think it’s a bit limiting to believe that. I’ve certainly read books about lesbians that were written by non-lesbians, and they’ve been great! Most recently, I adored Tripping to Somewhere by Kristopher Reisz. It wasn’t until someone mentioned (on Twitter? I can’t recall) that she didn’t usually read books about lesbians written by men that I even thought about the fact that Reisz is a man.

Obviously, sometimes men get it so, so wrong when it comes to lesbians. Sometimes straight women get it wrong, too. But that doesn’t mean that (1) you will get it wrong; or (2) lesbians always get it right.

It’s a good thing for a writer to be concerned about getting it right when s/he is writing about a group of people s/he is not part of and which has historically been oppressed. That is the first step in the  direction of getting it right.

What else can you do? Well, you might read “Transracial Writing for the Sincere” by Nisi Shawl, which is a great primer on writing about “the other.” You can also read Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other: A Practical Guide.

And, you probably know this already, but do your research. You can start with reading about queer people. Take a look at my series of posts on Avoiding LGBTQ Stereotypes. Go to the library and read up on LGBT history and culture. Go online and get lost in AfterEllen or AfterElton, where you’ll get a massive dose of contemporary pop queer culture. And, of course, talk to your queer friends. You might ask one of them if they’re interested in reading your story, just to gut check whether you’re “getting it right.”

And remember: Every queer person has a different life story — just like every human being. If you think of your character as a human being first, that’s a great place to start.

1. No comment about the sheep!

“Setting aside the tangled web of labels of low, dark, high, heroic, etc. fantasy (or speculative fiction) — do you consider yourself to write ‘lesbian’ books, or books that happen to be about lesbians?”

Source: www.strangesisters.com

I’ve been thinking about how to answer this question for some time now. It’s about categorization, and I think that writers are sometimes the worst people to ask about what kind of books they write, because they may be too close to the story to tell. Usually, I think that categorizing is best done by the book’s publisher, because it’s basically about marketing: Where does the book fit best in the bookstore, so that it can be found by people who would want to read it?

However, there are some problems with that theory, too. Because often books about minorities are categorized as minority books even when they might fit into a broader genre. That has the detrimental effect of limiting their audience and ghettoizing the writer. (For a great analysis of why this is a problem, read N.K. Jemisin’s post, “Don’t Put My Book in the African American Section.”)

I think that with the increase in online and e-book buying, categorizing books becomes both more important (for discoverability through search) and more flexible, because more than one category can be applied. Many books, after all, fit into multiple categories. I think that my books do.

Both Ash and Huntress are fantasy novels, but there are other categories they could fall into: young adult, most obviously; fairy tales (for Ash); high fantasy (for Huntress); speculative fiction. They also could be categorized as lesbian books, but that depends on what you mean by “lesbian books.”

Are they books about lesbian main characters? If so, we need to ask the question, “What do you mean by ‘lesbian’?” On the surface this might sound rather simplistic, but it’s a complicated and politically charged issue. In Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801, Emma Donoghue argued: “Certainly, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the sexologists cemented a selection of such elements into the stereotype called ‘the lesbian’ (tall, flat-chested, intellectual, frustrated); however, a wide variety of lesbian types had been described in texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

Donoghue’s point is that even if the contemporary words we use to describe lesbians were not common before the nineteenth century, that certainly doesn’t mean that women who who loved women (sexually) did not exist before then. Similarly, while I don’t believe that any of the characters in my first two novels would self-identify as lesbians, that doesn’t change the fact that they do, in fact, engage in same-sex relationships.

(Why wouldn’t they self-identify as lesbians? Because that concept does not exist in the world of Ash and Huntress. They’re fantasy novels set in an alternate world where there is no word to describe same-sex relationships, because they are not considered abnormal. Things that are normal become default and are not marked as other or called out as exceptional. Their love is not “gay love,”; it is love.)

So … while none of the characters in my first two novels would identify as lesbians, I wouldn’t object to categorizing them as lesbian books, given Donoghue’s point.¹

But the whole question was: “do you consider yourself to write ‘lesbian’ books, or books that happen to be about lesbians?” Putting aside the debate about what a “lesbian book” is,² my answer is no, I don’t consider myself to write “lesbian” books, but nor do I believe I write books that happen to be about lesbians.

The reason I don’t believe that I write “lesbian” books is because I don’t actually set out to write books about being lesbian. I guess even though there’s plenty of room for flexibility in discussing what a “lesbian book” is, personally I believe a “lesbian book” is about the lived experience of being a lesbian: coming out, dealing with the real world’s homophobia, telling insider lesbian jokes, going to lesbian bars, etc. I’ve definitely lived this kind of lesbian life before (especially when I worked at AfterEllen), and my books are so far from that experience. So far. That’s why personally, I can’t see them as lesbian books. I’ve read books that I consider to be lesbian books and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. But I haven’t written any.³

Secondly, the idea that a book could be about a person who happens to be a lesbian doesn’t work for me. I know that plenty of readers are seeking books featuring minority characters but aren’t about the experience of being a minority, and sometimes those books are identified with the “happens to be” tag. (E.g., “This is about an awesome demon/werewolf hunter who happens to be Asian!”) But I don’t believe that sexual orientation (or race) just “happens to be” to anyone. I think it’s very deeply ingrained in a person’s whole being, and it is in all of my characters. I have read books in which a character’s minority identity feels tacked on as a “happens to be,” and those books disappoint me. (No, I won’t name them.)

So, in conclusion … it’s complicated. I’m fine with others identifying my books as lesbian novels, even though I don’t personally believe I’ve written any lesbian novels. I know that the lesbian label does help my books find new readers (often, lesbian readers). I know that it also turns some people off (usually people who are uncomfortable with lesbians), but that’s inevitable. I hope that the benefits of the label outweigh costs.

1. There’s another way to think about “lesbian books.” There’s a whole category of publishing devoted to LGBT fiction. It has its own conferences, its own LGBT-focused publishers, its own awards and superstars. These books tend to be shelved in the LGBT sections of bookstores, and I think this category of publishing arose out of a time when mainstream publishers did not widely publish books about LGBT people. So there’s a real history of activism and community support in LGBT publishing. My novels are not published by these LGBT-focused publishers, and I haven’t been an active part of that community of writers, but I know that my books were able to be published partly because of the work that these publishers have done in the past.
2. Or, are “lesbian books” books written by lesbians? If so, my books do qualify, because I identify as a lesbian. But there are so many books about lesbian characters that aren’t written by lesbians, and vice-versa, that I don’t believe this is the right definition.
3. That doesn’t mean I won’t!

“A band of gypsies tramped across the earth, sweeping the bonds and boundaries of the modern world away with a brush of a hand. Nobody knew where they came from. Nobody knew where they’d turn up, but the Witches’ Carnival was always headed somewhere. They moved on the edge of your vision and melted away like fog the moment you turned to look.”

Gilly is a Birmingham, Alabama, teenager with a major self-esteem problem. Her dad’s a crooked cop. And she’s in love with her best friend, Samantha, who sleeps with her sometimes, but is straight. Sam has her own problems: a bad relationship with her mom, a creepy stepdad, too much love for Xanax. They both have plenty to run away from.

“The Witches’ Carnival was the name and shape given to every fantasy of running away and leaving it all behind. It was the fantasy of the open road, the fantasy of motion and speed until all your problems became a blur. But most importantly, it was a fantasy.”

As Gilly and Sam follow a homeless man’s hint to Atlanta in search of the Witches’ Carnival, their lives turn upside down. First, they steal $50,000 of previously stolen money from Gilly’s dad. Then they crash a nightclub where they believe the Witches’ Carnival is partying — and fantasy becomes reality. The Witches’ Carnival exists.

If something so crazy is real, you’ll do crazy stuff to make sure you can be a part of it. And Gilly and Sam do exactly that.

This book is SO worth a read. The language is sharp, the story is vivid, the characters are completely, heartbreakingly human. I’ll warn you: There’s lots and lots of strong language. There’s (gay) sex. There smoking and drinking and drugs and lots of awesome nightclubs. There is tragedy, and there is coming of age. It’s not for everybody. But if you liked Holly Black’s Tithe, if you like your fantasy gritty, and if you don’t mind having your heart ripped out, read this book.

A note on where to get it: Tripping to Somewhere was originally published in 2006, and I don’t know if you can buy a new paper copy anymore. I actually read an ebook on my iPod, so get yourself an ebook (Barnes & Noble, Amazon), or check your local library. Highly recommended!

“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.

And it is one of my favorite books of 2011.

The book is about Esme Rockett, a 17-year-old girl in Minnesota, and her three friends Marcy, Tessa, and Rowie, who form a hip-hop¹ collective called Hip Hop for Homos and Heteros (4H for short, in a brilliant move). It’s also about Esme’s first romance, with her friend Rowie, who (both incidentally and not incidentally) is South Asian.

Some readers might find Sister Mischief a little challenging to sink into at first, because there are footnotes. I was a bit confused by them initially, but as the book continued, I realized that the footnotes were actually genius. Most of them are text messages that the girls send to each other during the action in the main narrative, so you get this secondary commentary on what’s going on right when it’s happening. It is just like real life. I’m actually jealous that I didn’t come up with this idea myself.

Another thing to know about this book is that it’s totally unabashed about its political message. The girls of 4H are clearly liberals, and the book is flavored with many discussions about President Obama, race, and gender, as well as the politics of hip-hop. When I started reading, I was afraid this would date the book, but as I got to know the characters, I realized that this is the world these four girls live in. They care deeply about these issues, and of course they would rap and talk about these issues. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they are real about what they believe.

My favorite part of this book? This is a love story about two girls that struck me as, again, very real. Falling in love with your best friend is something that has happened to plenty of queer girls. Like all first loves, it can be heartbreaking, but it can also be life-changing, and Sister Mischief conveys those conflicting experiences with beauty and vivid honesty.

Also, the relationship between Esme and Rowie is just plain sexy. I’m always looking for YA books that portray romantic relationships between girls without shame, by allowing their desire to be written on the page with just as much charge as any heterosexual relationship. Here is one of my favorite passages:

It gets easier once we’ve done it a few times, once it starts getting dark earlier. I can’t even tell you how much it isn’t like with Charlie Knutsen. I’ve never felt big before. When I’m with Rowie, I feel enormous — God, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not like feeling fat or anything. I’m just, I don’t know, aware of my magnitude in a way I wasn’t before Rowie happened, or aware of hers. I bend over to kiss her and she feels so small beneath me, fine-boned, pebble-smooth, a feline thing, a fuse. I lack the ability to deny her anything; the way I feel when we’re in the same room is like she’s electricity and I’m water. (page 108)

People are always asking me for recommendations of YA novels about queer girls. Honestly, there aren’t that many. I’m trying to read as many of them as I can, not only because I write these kinds of books, but because I am a queer woman, and reading these stories speaks to me in a way I want to speak to others. Sister Mischief did all that: it is a story I have lived metaphorically; it is a story I can see others living.

It’s available now at many a fine bookstore.

1. Have I ever mentioned how much I love hip-hop? I LOVE IT. I know there is plenty of misogynistic hip-hop, but there is also plenty of great hip-hop that speaks to the concerns of minorities. Sister Mischief actually could be a great hip-hop 101 for anyone who’s interested in learning about 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.

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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.

If you’re a teen writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m going to be judging a writing contest on Figment.com for Teenquake, the teen portion of Litquake, which is a giant literary festival coming up in October. I’ll be judging the fantasy portion, but you can also write realistic fiction, poetry, or mystery. The winners will be announced on at the Teenquake Awards Ceremony on Oct. 14 in San Francisco, where I will be one of the presenters! I am assured that the winners will receive prizes and, of course, the adulation of many.

All you have to do is: (1) Be a teen in the San Francisco Bay Area; (2) go here to enter by 7 p.m. EST on Sept. 18th! Hurry!

Say yes to gay YA!

Yesterday, authors Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown (both of whom I’ve met and, I assure you, are standup individuals), blogged at Publishers Weekly about the frustrating experience they recently went through in which a literary agent asked them to de-gay a gay character in the YA dystopian novel they had submitted. This led to a mini-eruption of #YesGayYA enthusiasm on Twitter, which of course I thoroughly support (though by “gay” I really mean LGBTQ … however I realize #YesLGBTQYA is an alphabet soup of a mouthful).

The number one question I get as an author is “did you encounter homophobia when trying to publish Ash?” So, last spring I wrote a blog post about it: How hard is it to sell an LGBT YA novel?

That post is about my own personal experience, and I’ve heard through the grapevine that other authors have not had it as easy. I wish they all did! Since I read Rachel and Sherwood’s post, I’ve been thinking about how I could get some hard numbers about what is published by which publishers. I’m working on it, and hope to be able to share something with you in the future that will quantify some of these issues.

Meanwhile, as Scott Tracey (author of the newly released Witch Eyes) pointed out, the best thing you can do to support LGBTQ YA fiction is to go out and buy some. So, I encourage you to vote with your wallets.

Diversify Your Reading!

As you may remember, I’m a co-founder of Diversity in YA, and this summer we ran a Diversify Your Reading Challenge to encourage readers and libraries to read more widely. That challenge was initially supposed to end Sept. 1, but now we’ve extended the deadline to Oct. 1, which means that school libraries can also participate. So if you haven’t had a chance to enter yet, please do! You could win 53 fabulous diverse books! Go here to enter.

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?

In my two young adult fantasy novels, Ash and Huntress, the main characters are girls who fall in love with other girls. I admit there’s something different about the love stories told in my books, but it’s not that they’re gay love stories.

The difference is: in the world of my novels, being gay doesn’t matter.

What that means is that the characters are able to fall in love without dealing with homophobia. They don’t have to come out, because sexual orientation is never assumed in their worlds, and falling in love with someone of the same sex is seen as perfectly natural.

A lot of times, I get email from readers or come across reviews in which the lack of homophobia in my novels is described as refreshing or unusual, and I really appreciate that. I’m glad they find it a positive thing. On the other hand, it makes me realize that my approach to writing about same-sex romance is pretty much the exception to the rule, especially in YA.

There are adult novels in which coming out is no longer an issue and characters fall in love without needing to deal with homophobia — but often that’s because they’ve dealt with it already in their pasts. In YA, the characters are teens. They’re dealing with first love, and if their stories are set in our real world, homophobia is unfortunately a reality and coming out usually does have to happen.

But if the novel is a fantasy set in a secondary world, or a science fiction novel set sometime in the future, the author has the option from the get-go to write a world that is free from homophobia.

There’s no trick to this. The author simply has to decide: Are the people in this fantasy world homophobic? Or not?

If yes, then the author has to deal with that if she is going to be writing about gay characters. But if no, that means the gay characters don’t even need to identify as “gay” anymore. They can simply be human beings.

I think that sometimes people have a hard time wrapping their minds around how exactly one would write a homophobic-free fantasy world, because we’re used to thinking about gay identity being inextricably linked with homophobia. (Gay Pride parades can be, for example, positive ways to reclaim many homophobic stereotypes.) So here are a few practical tips I can give writers who are interested in writing worlds free from homophobia:

1. The characters do not need to come out to themselves or anyone else. That means that when they fall in love, they feel no shame about the fact that they’re falling for someone of the same sex; they only feel what a straight person might feel.

2. Nobody in the world needs to comment on the characters’ sexual orientations. When others notice that the character is falling for someone of the same sex, they would not comment on the same-sex aspect.

3. It’s helpful to insert some background characters who are in same-sex relationships, just as walk-on characters that help set the scene. But make sure that the description of those same-sex couples or relationships is presented as perfectly normal.

4. The words “gay,” “lesbian” or “bisexual” do not need to be used to describe these characters. This may feel very weird, but I believe it’s true. If nobody cares about sexual orientation, there don’t need to be words about it in the language, because essentially everyone would be potentially bisexual.

5. The existence or lack of homophobia is not necessarily related to the existence or lack of modern technology or sexism in the fantasy world. I think that sometimes people believe that a fantasy set in a medieval-esque world would automatically be homophobic and sexist, but that’s not necessarily true. It is within the author’s power to control all these elements; they are all part of world-building.

Personally, I want desperately to read more books in which homophobia is not an issue, but people still fall in love with others of the same sex. That’s the kind of world I want to live in, so I’m not surprised that I write those worlds and want to read about more of them.

Being gay, lesbian or bisexual isn’t an issue. Homophobia is the issue. While it’s a significant problem in the real world, I think that leaving it behind in a fantasy world is a wonderful and empowering way to say that being gay really is OK.