The Love that Does Not Know Its Name
by Elizabeth Wein
Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein (Hyperion, 2013)
Occasionally, in the heat of a conversation and unable to quickly recall this week’s in-favor politically-correct acronym, I find myself saying, “So, I heard about this new LGBT-QRST book…” Then I think, OMG, that’s not right! What did I forget? Someone is going to be so offended!
My problem with labelling is that I don’t like boxes. I don’t like age-banding of books, and I don’t like genre categorization – I don’t like being branded. I write historical/fantasy/adventure/spy/Arthurian/mystery/war novels. The hero of four of my early books is mixed-race – half British, half Ethiopian. I was as astonished as anyone else to learn that my novel Rose Under Fire had been honored with the Schneider Family Book Award, which “embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience.” At the lunch given for the winners, I confessed to a committee member that it had never occurred to me to think of the characters in Rose Under Fire as disabled. Her answer was, “That’s what makes them so wonderful.”
The same holds true for the sexuality of my characters. I don’t think of them as one thing or another. All my invented characters hold their cards very close to their chests, and that’s because they, like their creator, consider their sexual orientation to be a private thing. To me, what matters most of all in the sexuality of the characters I write about and read about, is not that they fall into any particular category, but that they be open and able to make their own choices – and to be able to make new choices. Not just one choice for all time, but appropriate choices as long as they live.
What I’d love to impress on young readers is that sexuality is not always clear-cut. I spent a healthy part of my teenage years in the headspace of my fictional male characters, to the point of dressing like them in daily life. It never occurred to me I was cross-dressing; if I wanted to be a boy, in my head I was a boy. One of my characters, a young magician, literally changed sex according to his or her current mission. It is true that people thought I was a little wacky when I’d come to school dressed as Norélon Enlé or Twill Devon or Mordred or whatever, but curiously, my own sexuality never came into question.
I have been in a heterosexual relationship for over twenty years, don’t really think of myself as gay or bisexual, and yet don’t feel I can ever rule out the possibility of a same-sex relationship. My grandmother, who died earlier this year at the age of 98 and was happily married to the same man for 46 years, said to me several times throughout her life, “I think we all have the potential for attraction to either sex.” My father, who was happily married to my mother for eight years and unhappily married for a further two, lived the last ten years of his life in an openly gay relationship with a considerably younger man. My father was Jewish, his partner African-American. Their relationship defied categorization. They made a sensational team.
Alice + Frida Forever: A Murder In Memphis by Alexis Coe (Pulp/Zest Books, 2013)
But – it’s understandable that we keep trying to define ourselves, because it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t even have the freedom or the language to talk about these things.
Alexis Coe’s Alice and Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (San Francisco: Pulp, 2014) is an unusual work of non-fiction aimed at young adults, beautifully illustrated by Sally Klann. It looks at the passionate and ultimately doomed relationship between two young women in the late nineteenth century. An extract from the jacket flap tells you what an incredible situation this must have been at the time: “Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell had planned to pass as a man in order to marry her seventeen-year-old fiancée Freda Ward, but when their love letters were discovered, they were forbidden from ever speaking again. Freda adjusted to this fate with an ease that stunned a heartbroken Alice… On January 25, Alice publicly slashed her ex-fiancée’s throat.” A trial ensued and was sensationalized in the press; Alice was imprisoned and eventually remanded to an asylum. Don’t come to this book expecting a happy ending.
But what I find so amazing about this true story is the resource of the two young women before their relationship went wrong. They met at school, decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, and formed a plan that they thought could make it work. It’s easy to write them off as being delusional. But how incredibly brave of them to try! Without any kind of political, intellectual or emotional support for their love, without even the language to define themselves, how I admire them for their determination! I leave you to read the book yourself and make your own judgment as to whether, in our changed world over a hundred years later, they could have been happy together.
Just remember: words don’t define who you are. YOU define who you are. You don’t need a category to make true and right decisions about who to love. And don’t forget to stay open-minded about other people’s decisions as well.
(P.S. By way of happy contrast with this tragic love story, try Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith – dystopian YA fiction with a range of appealing characters who are comfortable and diverse in their sexuality. We’ve come a long way.)
Have You Ever Considered Writing About Straight People?
by Robin Talley
Last week I spoke to a group of middle schoolers about what it’s like to be a writer. It was an all-girls school, and the students were earnest, smiling, and full of questions. For the most part, they asked the same sorts of things everyone else asks ― how do you deal with writer’s block, when did you first start writing, what made you want to write a book about school integration ― but quite a few girls also had questions about the fact that my books star QUILTBAG characters.
I was delighted. When I was in middle school, I never would’ve said the word gay out loud to anyone, and certainly not to an adult. I had only the vaguest sense at that point in my life of what it meant to be gay in the first place, but I definitely knew it wasn’t something you talked about out loud.
These girls, though, were perfectly happy to talk openly about sexual orientation, and they clearly knew a lot more about it than preteen-me had known. Most of them asked about why I enjoy writing gay characters (we didn’t get to talking about the rest of the letters in the acronym, unfortunately). Then one girl raised her hand to say, “Have you ever wanted to write a book about straight people?”
Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley (Harlequin Teen, 2014)
This actually wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question. (And, by the way, I’m totally fine with being asked about this. It isn’t as if there aren’t plenty of QUILTBAG authors who have written about characters who are straight, cisgender, and well outside our universe of acronyms.)
So I gave the girl my standard answer ― “Never say never” ― and went on to explain that, although I’m not opposed to the idea of writing a straight, cisgender protagonist someday, pretty much every book idea I’ve had so far has starred at least one character who fell somewhere under the QUILTBAG umbrella. My first book had two decidedly non-straight leads, and my next two books both star entirely gay, bi, and trans casts in the major roles.
At the moment, those are the stories I’m most interested in telling. It’s partly because I’m trying to make up for the historical lack of those stories, and I’m sure it’s also partly because my writing reflects aspects of my own experience growing up as gay/bi (I used to oscillate between those two labels when I was younger). But the truth is, these are just the characters I find fascinating. I want to read about queer kids coming out, or making trouble, or falling in love, or fighting crime. I want to write about those things, too.
There are plenty of books I’ve loved that star straight, cisgender protagonists. I don’t want to rule out the possibility of ever writing one of my own.
But for now ― I’m going to stick with writing about my QUILTBAG teens. I still have a lot of stories to tell about characters dealing with every facet of their lives, including these aspects of their identities. Eventually, I suspect, as the number of titles on shelves starring non-cishet protagonists keeps growing, we’ll start hearing complaints that there are “enough” of these stories already. (We’re already hearing that about “coming out” stories ― which always makes me grumble loudly.) But we’ve still got a long way to go to make sure kids and teens who aren’t straight and aren’t cis are represented in literature.
So, for me, it’s never say never ― but not right now.
Blogathon Schedule: Week 1
May 1st: I’ll Write Queer Characters Forever by Francesca Lia Block
May 2nd: I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It but not in a Vapid Katy Perry Way Justina Ireland
May 3rd: They Turned My Gay Teen Novel Into a Movie. Here’s What I Learned. by Brent Hartinger
May 4th: Have You Ever Considered Writing About Straight People? by Robin Talley
May 5th: DOUBLE POST
- The Love That Does Not Know Its Name by Elizabeth Wein
- Booktube Needs You! by Danika Leigh Ellis
May 6th: Guest Blog by Kimberly Derting
May 7th: Guest Blog by Tanuja Desai Hidier
May 8th: On Building a Better Tomorrow by Ellen Hopkins
Stay tuned for Robin Talley’s post…
They Turned My Gay Teen Novel Into a Movie. Here’s What I Learned.
Geography Club (HarperTeen, 2003)
They’ve turned my 2003 gay teen novel Geography Club into a movie. It came out in 2013 (and it’s on Netflix now if you’re curious). Since then, people have asked me how it all happened and what I’ve learned from the whole experience.
The story starts when I graduated from college and decided to try to make a career writing novels and screenplays. It was the early 90s, and one of my first books was a young adult novel about a gay teen named Russel Middlebrook and his misfit friends. It was an extremely personal topic for me, because I had been a gay teenager, and I had also co-founded what we have since determined was the world’s third gay teen support group ever, in 1990.
For ten years, I (and later my agent, Jennifer DeChiara) tried to sell the book to publishers. A lot of editors wanted to buy it, but ultimately I heard the same thing over and over again: “I really like this, but the accountants at my publishing house tell me there’s no market for a book about gay teenagers.”
Author Brent Hartinger and actor Cameron Deane Stewart who played Russels on set.
Maybe, but the fact is, if certain people hadn’t been willing to move heaven and earth for me and my projects at key points in my career, my book and the movie never would have happened, and right now I’d probably be asking, “Would you like fries with that?” That’s kind of sobering when I think about it.
But if I’ve learned anything at all over the years about selling books and making movies, it’s this: there are really only two ways books get published and movies ever get made:
On the Geography Club set.
On one hand, going with your heart is trickier: do you really want to devote years of your life to a project that a lot of editors and producers won’t even want to read? On the other hand, it’s a lot easier than trying to predict exactly where the crazy pop culture market and zeitgeist are headed. All you have to do is ask yourself: what exactly do I personally feel the most passionate about? What project would I desperately like to see that doesn’t already exist?
If you’d asked me my opinion earlier in my career, in the midst of all the rejection for Geography Club the book and later the movie, I would have said, “Do strategy number one! Go with your brain! Write that dystopian zombie-vampire book! There at least you have a chance for success! Strategy number two is for suckers and fools!” (And then I would have added, “Would you like fries with that?”)
I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It but not in a Vapid Katy Perry Way
by Justina Ireland
The first time I kissed a girl I was fifteen. It was at one of those awkward boy/girl house parties where everyone wants something (beer, weed, sex) but the parents are too near to properly get at it. We played spin the bottle, since this was before the Internet and that’s what we did for fun in the old days, and mine happened to land on a girl I barely knew. For a moment we hesitated, while everyone in the room collectively held their breath. Then I shrugged. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
Secretly, I wanted to.
She shrugged as well. “I don’t care.”
“Do it!” some guy said, while a few others chimed in.
So we did.
It should’ve been completely unremarkable, the kind of kiss that happens and you instantly forget, like kissing your grandma. But it wasn’t. And I found myself spending the rest of the night hoping the Heinz ketchup bottle would land on her again.
Days later I was still thinking about it.
Far From You by Tess Sharpe (Disney Hyperion, 2014
When I told a friend of mine she laughed. “Maybe you’re a lesbian.” But I wasn’t a lesbian. I had a sorta boyfriend, and I liked kissing him, too. Plus, in my mind all lesbians were super butch, like the girls who wore Doc Martens and flannel and shaved their heads and listened to Faith No More. Again, this was the old days, before Pearl Jam became classic rock (sob). Anyway, lesbians. They were cute, but they made me a little nervous, and I knew I wasn’t like them. Well, at least I was pretty sure I wasn’t like them. Because I liked boys, and everyone knew lesbians don’t like boys.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that you could like boys and girls, that you weren’t confused or just easy. But it would be even longer before I read Far From You by Tess Sharpe, the first book I’d ever read with a bisexual protagonist, one who wasn’t portrayed as sexually available or a confused lesbian or a bored straight girl.
That is too long to wait.
One of the challenges with bisexuality is that society works harder to erase it than being gay or a lesbian, and this is obvious in the dearth of bisexual books in YA. When bisexuals do appear on the page in YA it’s usually just to add tension, their (temporary) identity a plot point, before they move on to the inevitable choosing of a boy or girl. Even as people are rushing to write the next gay boy or lesbian girl (but rarely butch lesbians, only the girliest lesbians in traditionally published YA) bisexual characters are still as hard to find as ever.
Part of this is the way people think of bisexuality. It is an easily erasable identity, a stepping stone to somewhere else or just fun experimentation before you settle down. As soon as you choose a partner (assuming monogamy is your thing) you are defined by your choice. If you even get to wait that long. Most of the time bisexual boys are portrayed as just being confused, closeted gay men, while bisexual girls are sexually adventurous at best, promiscuous at worse.
And yet, none of that is true. I’ve been married for a while to a dude, but I am just as likely to watch a cute girl walk by as I am a guy. Being married hasn’t changed what I find attractive. Not one bit.
But I also don’t talk about it. Because being bisexual feels like another burden to shoulder, another cause to fight. Bi-visibility is a real issue, both in books and society, and I am unfortunately part of the problem.
I spend a lot of time talking about diversity and representation, but I don’t talk about my bisexual identity nearly as much as I talk about being black. It’s because when you meet me you can tell that I’m brown, that facet of my identity is written in my features, but my bisexual identity is something people won’t know unless I tell them. I’m forced to confront my blackness on a daily basis, not so much my admiration for both male and female forms. And even now it feels like an uneasy thing to be. There are people on either side of the sexual orientation aisle, both hetero and homosexual, that find bisexuals to just be flighty and immoral.
Not exactly a team anyone is rushing to join.
This is why bisexual visibility, and GOOD bisexual visibility, is so important. Especially in YA, where everyone is trying on identities and seeing what fits. We need more bisexuals whose orientation isn’t illustrated by them being the point in a sexual triangle (as fun as that is, it indirectly reinforces the “slut” label). We need more bisexual characters, characters that are unapologetic for being who they are. Because somewhere out there is a teen playing spin the bottle who would be just as equally happy to land on a boy or a girl, and I’d like to think that maybe reading a book with a character like them will make them feel less afraid to admit who they really are.
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