Let’s Save Some Lives, Shall We? Asexuality in Mainstream YA
We’re thrilled to bring you our first guest post for Asexual Awareness Week! We reached out to bloggers who identify somewhere on the asexual spectrum to write posts related to asexuality and YA. Check back every day this week for more posts from other great guest bloggers!
by Teresa Santos
How many mainstream YA books have you read with canon openly asexual characters? None? Don’t worry, you won’t be the only one. After all, the number of such books is a shiny, round zero.
But, you might say, what about Liraz in Daughter of Smoke and Bone? What of Raphael in The Bane Chronicles? Or Charlie Weasley in Harry Potter? Or, you may add, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and the Hunters of Artemis in Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus?
Well, those would probably be headcanons. Saying that Liraz wears “asexual armour” doesn’t quite strike me as clearly saying she is asexual. Raphael, well, Cassandra Clare only said he was asexual in a tweet and not everybody follows an author’s twitter account religiously. And while I would agree that Charlie and Katniss read as being in the asexual spectrum, it’s not written down word by word. Besides, Charlie is a secondary character, and people often overlook Katniss’s discomfort with relationships in favour of “the love triangle” side plot. As for the Hunters, their oath reads “I turn my back on the company of men.” It does not say “I am asexual” or even “not heterosexual.” So they may not help that much in raising awareness.
Yes, there are a handful of other YA books featuring asexual characters, but, to my knowledge, none of them are mainstream. When libraries and bookshops in big and small towns are mostly populated by books they’re sure to sell, when people will rush to buy the “book version” of the most recent YA film adaptation, when everyone wants to read that book people won’t stop talking about, there’s very little time or space left to read non-mainstream books for the majority of people. And if there are no asexual protagonists there then…well, there’s nearly no visibility impact. And visibility is something asexuality sorely needs.
After all, relatively few people know it exists, including teenagers.
Being a teenager is never easy. Now imagine that, on top of all changes that come at such an age, your friends’ behaviours towards their crushes are puzzling, that you’re not shying from your “first time” because you’re not ready but because you have never wanted to do it, that you don’t understand the point of sexual jokes, maybe even that you’re the only one who finds the whole ordeal nauseating. Now imagine that books, the one place where you found refuge since childhood, won’t show you someone brave, witty, and friendly who doesn’t feel sexual and/or romantic attraction. Someone like you. Imagine that every book you read tells you that “love will win all,” “there’s nothing like being in love,” “everyone finds the one,” and so on.
Imagine that the whole world expects you to be something you’re not, something you could never be, and you don’t know why you’re so different. Because you don’t know of anyone, of any character quite like you, because speaking out your feelings might lead to ridicule.
Homosexual teens have YA books to turn to, to rely on when the world chooses to be unkind. Asexual teens have, well, nothing.
Can you imagine how lonely that feels? How broken one starts to think oneself to be? Having been there myself I can assure you it’s not easy. As an aromantic asexual, reading stories where the protagonist saved the world without once caring for non-platonic relationships would have made it all the more bearable. Even if others still thought me a freak, I would know I wasn’t. It would have meant the world.
By having asexual characters in mainstream books, books which might even be turned into films in the current YA Hollywood craze, thousands upon thousands of people all over the world would know we exist, teenagers, children, and adults alike. Surely hundreds of them would finally see their reflection and know it is okay to stop pretending. Because there are plenty of others like them out there. Others who live happy lives without sexual and/or romantic relationships. Perhaps that would give them hope too.
Otherwise, asexual teenagers who don’t know asexuality exists will trod on doing whatever they can to fit in, only to feel more broken with each lie they speak.
It’s high time we stop this from happening. Asexuality awareness has been growing exponentially, but there is still a lot of work to be done and a lot of people to reach. With NaNoWriMo just around the corner, it sounds like a great opportunity to sharpen pencils and start scribbling. I’ll keep you company. Shall we go save some lives?
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Teresa Santos is a biologist, a writer in the making, and an aromantic asexual. When she isn’t busy eating chocolate or trying to catch up on reading, she can be found prowling Twitter @tessalsantos or babbling about books, photography and whatever tickles her fancy at http://tessellatedtales.wordpress.com/. Approach with caution to avoid second-hand embarrassment for she is prone to geeking out and singing in the middle of the street.
Review: Pantomime by Laura Lam
by Georgie Penney
Compared to my usual reading choices, this was the furthest out of my comfort zone that I’ve read in a long time, and I’m so glad that I decided to give it a go.
Pantomime starts as the tale of two apparently unlinked young people: the young would-be trapeze artist Micah Grey, and the noblewoman who calls herself Gene who’s about to be married off, should her parents get their way. These boy-girl dual storylines are increasingly common in YA so I assumed something along the lines of a love story, albeit an unusual one. But Laura Lam weaves her first surprise of many into the opening chapters, and we realise that Micah and Gene are the same person.
Pantomime by Laura Lam (Strange Chemistry, 2013)
Micah is intersex, and this was exceptionally well demonstrated throughout the novel. The alternating stories got closer and closer to each other as the narrative continued. It also felt very natural to me: the fact that Micah is intersex didn’t stick out to me, and although it was obvious from things he said, it didn’t feel forced by the author. Instead, Micah’s character simply unfolded: rather than seeming like Laura Lam just fancied writing about an intersex character, Pantomime had the rare yet wonderful concept of a protagonist that has been discovered instead of being created. As someone who is cisgender, it still felt extremely relatable, which can sometimes put people off reading queer books but needn’t do so.
The story itself is gripping, getting more and more intense as it goes on and building to an almost explosive climax that is so unexpected I literally had my mouth open. (Sorry for the cliché. Sorry. I had to). Supporting characters are also very well drawn, and there is a love triangle that for once isn’t annoying and ridiculous and with a no-brainer decision at the centre of it. For my taste, the writing in the first couple of chapters was (for want of a better word) too dense, meaning that it took some pages before I felt fully absorbed in the story, but once I was past that point I was absolutely hooked to Micah’s story. And the worldbuilding was truly impeccable. Not all the details are explained, which can be frustrating (in a good way!) but makes for a much better story – rather than chunks of explanation, we have constant action and character development with a world being set up rather cleverly in the background.
I now have to mention the high point, which was the way I felt after I finished the book. It’s left me inspired: both in a literary sense, and also in a more abstract way – full of ideas and emotions and awareness of bigger issues that I hadn’t previously considered. Pantomime gets two thumbs up and I absolutely recommend that you give it a go if you’d like something to read that is challenging, intense and hugely enjoyable.
Georgie Penney is a teen writer and bookworm from England. At the moment she’s working on a gay YA novel of her own and can be found procrastinating on Twitter (@missgeorgie) or else ranting on her blog (georgiepenney.weebly.com).
How about NO?
Your fave is problematic; deal with it.
Disclaimer:
- I’m not here to bash authors or to tell you not to pick these books up. I’m just being honest about what I believe is not good LGBTQIA+ representation at all.
- Spoilers for WINGER.
- When I say queer I mean LGBTQIA+.
We have all been there. You hear about this AMAZING BOOK, everybody in the blogosphere/BookTube/Twitter is talking about it and giving it 5 stars left and right…so you decide you have to read it! And you do. You spend money on a book you feel is going to rock your socks off, you get comfy in your favorite reading spot, you have some snacks handy, and then you get down to the reading part. Except, the book sucks. Or, more accurately, is making you very very angry. Oh boy, wasn’t that a horrible decision?
Winger by Andrew Smith (Simon & Schuster, 2013)
It’s like being excited about a flight to a foreign country you have heard incredible things about. But then, when you actually get there: everything’s too expensive, the people are rude, you get food poisoning, and on your way back home the plane crashes…you were incredibly excited which somehow turned into being incredibly disappointed. And isn’t it worse when it happens with a book you picked solely because it of the ~QUEER REPRESENTATION~ you so badly need in your life and that’s exactly the part the book completely ruined?
That’s what happened to me when I picked up Winger by Andrew Smith (Simon & Schuster 2013). The book is VERY popular all over BookTube, which I frequent, and I decided to give it a try because it sounded interesting. Winger is not sold as a queer book at all; it’s a coming-of-age story of a white cishet boy in a boarding school, but every person who I saw recommending this book praised the fact that it had a gay character, and my brain thought, “Hey it must be an important part of the story if everyone keeps mentioning it, right?” Wrong. Well, sort of. There IS a gay secondary character, Joey, who becomes best friends with Ryan Dean, the protagonist, and that’s pretty much how far Joey’s story goes. He’s there to counsel and help Ryan Dean, while Ryan keeps reminding us that no matter how much they hang out HE’S SO NOT GAY OKAY, and to assure us that TWO DUDES HUGGING IS INCREDIBLY GAY BUT HE’S NOT GAY NOPE NOPE (just in case you forget he tells you every two pages or so, hahaha so funny!). Ryan is a 14-year-old boy, he’s immature, and we are reminded by him and others of this fact all the time. But that’s NOT the problem here. The problem is that by the end of the book we know almost nothing about Joey, who by then had turned into Ryan’s best friend, besides the fact that he’s gay. And in the last ten pages or so, to shock us, Joey is beaten to death in a hate crime. Are you going to tell me this is a story queer kids are supposed to be happy about? Are we supposed to be happy about a gay character who’s clearly just a prop in the story, that was simply put there to further the protagonist’s pain, and for this to be called representation? What message are you sending to queer people out there? Are we just here to make straight people feel better about themselves and then get beaten to death because that’s just the way the story ends? Because we don’t need or deserve happy endings, right?
LGBTQIA+ people are complex human beings who are more than their sexuality, and if your story does not get that across, then I’m sorry but why have queer people in there at all? (Or women for that matter, who in the case of this particular book are just other props in the story, only there to be liked and/or criticized by Ryan and the other boys.)
Shine by Lauren Myracle (Amulet Books, 2011)
And this is not the only occasion where something like this has happened. I’ve found or been told about similar cases regarding other books, where a cishet character gets the front seat, telling the story about the queer character the book is supposed to be about (Luna by Julie Anne Peters and Shine by Lauren Myracle), and that’s where this turns problematic: queer voices are silenced while heterosexual voices are raised. The experience of a queer kid is told from the point of view of a straight character, who shares their “traumatic” experience, and it turns into how much this affects the “ally” instead of the actual person who’s going through this, and don’t we have enough of that in our daily lives?
You also have stories about sexuality where one orientation is respected and another is not (or maybe we should call it the case of the slutty, indecisive bisexual because god forbid your orientation is not seen as black or white). Examples of this: The Bermudez Triangle (Razorbill 2007) by Maureen Johnson, also called On the Count of Three (Penguin Young Readers Group 2013), and The Difference Between You and Me by Madeleine George (Viking Children’s 2012).
While I’m sure these authors were not trying to be harmful with their books, the result was. And I for one am sick of the many amazing LGBTQIA+ stories out there being ignored, and the problematic ones praised. I know everything and everyone can be problematic or offensive one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean we should stop being critical about the media we consume. After all, representation matters, but shouldn’t it be accurate in the first place? In the words of Emily, we are not just a diversity checkbox.
And, if you are wondering about books that DO get minor queer characters right, you NEED to check out Georgie’s post. Books like that do exist, and it’s just as important to highlight those as it is to critique the ones that got it wrong.
So now I ask you: Have you read any of these books? What did you think about them? Any other problematic faves you know of?
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Nadia spends most of her day tweeting and daydreaming. Lover of books, comics, dogs and chinese food. Find her on twitter @heartless_tree
Interview With Alaya Dawn Johnson: Transcript
We interviewed Alaya Dawn Johnson author of The Summer Prince and Love is the Drug. Find the recorded interview here!
V: Hey everyone, I’m Victoria.
K: And I’m Kathleen. Today we have Alaya Dawn Johnson with us, author of our September book of the month, The Summer Prince. Alaya, thank you for joining us, all the way from Mexico City!
A: Thanks so much for having me.
K: The Summer Prince is a dystopian science fiction novel that takes place many years in the future.
V: We chose it for our September book of the month because it was incredibly well-written, took place in a futuristic world where no one had an assumed sexual orientation, and was polyamory-friendly. We’ve never seen anything like it before, and it was a very welcome addition. My full review is up on the site
K: Alaya, our first question for you is, how did the idea for this book come to you?
A: Well, I have to say that my ideas tend to come from all sorts of directions, so I’d say probably the biggest influences–what I was trying to do, and what ended up becoming the novel–were…well, first, I had taken a trip to Brazil with my sister, who had studied there and learned Portuguese, and I went with my sister and my cousin when she was going to do some research in San Paulo, and basically, that trip was just one of these amazing, eye-opening experiences, I fell in love with Brazil, and I’d already learned a lot about Brazil before I went, but that, it just sort of solidified it for me.
It also kind of brought me to more conscious awareness of the African diaspora community within Brazil, the descendants of former slaves who had integrated in Brazilian society in ways that interested me so much just because of the parallels and the really stark differences I could see between how it had worked in the United States and how the African diaspora community worked in Brazil, because Brazil and the United States were, during the slave trade, two of the biggest importers of slaves and had two of the biggest populations of slaves–and, obviously, of their descendants.
So, how that society had moved past that point and how American society worked past that point were two things that really interested me.
I came back, I didn’t really think about it for a while, but meantime, I was writing other novels, and I was thinking about science fiction and how much I really wanted to write, like, this…super weird, trippy science fiction novel–like a social science fiction novel, kind of like the ones that Ursula Le Guin writes, especially The Left Hand of Darkness, which had a major impact on me.
And at some point this whole thing kind of came together, especially because I had been thinking about how oppressively white those futures were. Ursula Le Guin in Left Hand of Darkness 100 percent was playing around with ideas of gender, and she definitely was doing other interesting things with what we would now call diversity and trying to open up the whiteness of her world, but I kind of felt like aside from that example there wasn’t a lot going on, especially nowadays, especially with the boom of science fiction and what we’re calling dystopian fiction.
Right now there’s a ton of science fiction being published, but so much of it was so white, so much of it so straight. So I kind of got this notion that I could write a science fiction novel that actually took notice of the rest of the world, put black people and the African diaspora front and center, actually open sexually–like, kinda use the power I had to create a whole new world and a whole new future for…a complicated good, I mean, obviously the world in The Summer Prince is not 100 percent wonderful, it’s not a utopia. I mean…In my own thinking of it, it’s a complicated utopia, but anyway.
All these things are wandering around in my head, and then I was watching this program about futuristic building technology. [laughs] And for some reason this really interested me, because they were showing this amazing idea that a Japanese company had had for building…taking advantage, in that particular case, of the waves that come into Tokyo bay. You can have hydroelectric power, and you can have geothermal power, but you can also have wave power. So if you build generators that harness the power of waves crashing against a shore, you can actually power a lot of things with that, and I don’t think that there’s much happening right now in that way, but it’s a thing that this company had thought of, and so they constructed this giant pyramid that was a city, but it was kind of vertical, and so all these skyscrapers hung from the vertices of all these, like, mini-pyramids, and there were these parks, and so obviously you can see, this is exactly where Palmares Tres came from, and I just like, my whole brain exploded when I was reading about that, and all of those things came together until I had the first, first kernel of the book, and of course the book is doing all sorts of other things, too, so it’s not…that doesn’t even really come to it, but that’s kind of like the three main things that were kickin’ around in my head when I was coming up with the idea.
Review: My Date from Hell (The Blooming Goddess Trilogy) by Tellulah Darling
by Simren Handa
In My Date From Hell, book two in the Blooming Goddess Trilogy, Tellulah Darling has crafted a perfectly imaginative and witty novel filled with quirky, interesting characters which appeal wonderfully to the YA market. I laughed numerous times at some of the lively one liners and, overall, thoroughly enjoyed reading about Sophie, Kai, Festos, Theo, Hannah and Pierce. Each character was distinctive in their appeal and as a protagonist, I thought that Sophie was believably vulnerable; a sixteen year old with issues and complications, plenty of snark and feisty charm, battling through the trials of growing up in la la land with her friends. And while Sophie and Kai’s romance is the pivotal one (not exaggerating– Sophie and Kai’s romance is literally a main focus to the plot), this is GayYA. I’m going to focus on Festos and Theo who provide a running side romance that is equally, if not more, beautiful, complicated and fun to read about.
My Date From Hell by Tellulah Darling (Te Da Media, 2013)
Tellulah Darling, as a writer, does not fail to disappoint with Theo and Festos’ characters; similar in their pedantic technicalities over Greek names, different in practically every other way and rich in background plot that touches on the theme of a rather painful betrayal on Festos’ part featuring a liver, a vulture and an apologetically bashful Festos. This couple grabbed me and kept me on their ride. Theo’s character: driven, rather moody and insouciant, complimented Festos and his bright, openly fabulous persona. Darling kept her readers on the edge with constant plot twists, sudden, exciting cliffhangers and choppy sentences that kept the pace of the story fairly fast. It worked hand in hand with her explosive romance-driven story-line; where Theo was initially unforgiving of his red haired former lover, it doesn’t take long for him to warm up to Festos and their love story to develop rapidly.
The reader doesn’t have a huge amount of time to investigate the nuances of Theo and Festos’ tumultuous romance, which was a slight let down. Anything that we read is through Sophie’s eyes alone as the book is in first person, however, the rather biased account is in the couple’s favour; as Sophie roots for the two to get together, the reader is drawn in to the energetic, vibrancy of the author’s writing and begins to get drawn into the fast-paced plot.
As a compliment to the story, A Date of Godlike Proportions, is a novella which precedes My Date from Hell, and is perfect for those who want to zoom in a little bit on Theo and Festos, their gorgeous, dysfunctionally perfect relationship. The short, sweet story tells the tale of Theo’s guilt, the reason behind his self-deprecating tightness and gives the relationship more vulnerability and a deeper, more meaningful reason to enjoy the two gods. I would recommend reading it after book one and two.
Tellulah Darling has sparks of talent that run through her story, creating characters that I genuinely began to care for. Even antagonistic characters such as Bethany and Jack had dimensions to them that is difficult for an author to pull off, it surprised me, somewhat, that such a rapid, action based, intensely plot-driven book had the time or the effort to pull off characters that had so much depth and variety in terms of emotions and backgrounds. Of course, the story is not perfect; the book had some excusable typos which detracted me from the plot and made me backtrack slightly, but typos are alright when you’re reading a book as riveting and entertaining as this one. As a writer myself, I find typos annoying but able to look over. And while I hate comparisons, I’ll make a positive one: this book really reminded me of a more adult, less intricately developed Percy Jackson with the Greek theme and the unique, interesting and imaginative take on the idea of Greek gods. I will definitely be reading the last book.
How can I not after that cliffhanger?
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Find out more about Tellulah Darling and her books here.
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Simren is an 18 year old student with a passion for reading and a glutton for romance, adventure and wit. She writes as much as possible in her free time, be it journalism, fiction or reviews.
Find her on twitter @Simren2105, or drop a comment down below.