Gay Characters Persona Non Grata in Young Adult Books?

When you think of the young adult books capturing the attention of America's adolescents and pre-teens, predominately-white, predominately-straight novels like the Twilight and Hunger Games series come to mind. In a post on Publishers Weekly's website, two writers argue that the reason most YA books don't include LGBT characters, especially ones of color, is because book agents don't have the guts to sell manuscripts with them.

Rachel Manija Brown, author of the memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India, and Sherwood Smith, writer of the YA novel Crown Duel, say that fear is running the YA book industry. Brown and Smith wrote an unpublished novel together called Stranger, featuring a young Asian gay male character with a boyfriend.

"An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us," Brown and Smith write. "The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation."

Brown and Smith turned down the offer. They note in their commentary that the practice of turning LGBT characters straight is common in the publishing industry, and that this sends a dangerous message: "When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can't even be allowed to exist in fiction."

The problem is widespread within the industry, claim Brown and Smith, though gay author David Levithan (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) disagrees.

"While I have no doubt that the authors' experience is real, I don't think it is indicative of YA publishing in general," Levithan tells The Advocate. "All it really shows is that there are some agents (and, I'm sure, some editors) who are out of touch with the audience -- which is hardly surprising news, especially as the body of YA literature has changed so much in such a short amount of time. It's a 1991 concern being voiced in 2011. Most of the agents and editors I know in YA publishing, myself included, are eager to bring a diversity of good voices to our literature, LGBT and otherwise. The bar is very high -- as our literature has boomed, so too have the standards of what we publish. But to say that having an LGBT character would in some way disqualify you from being in the running is patently false, at least from what I see at present in the industry."