Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff is a story of friends lost and families found, place sought and love gained, but the book will be remembered for more than a heartbreaking and moving story. But I wish you would stop reading this review now and read the book yourself. Right now. This will be here when you get back.

Because what makes this book so remarkable is the way in which Brezenoff takes a fairly typical story of angst and trauma, a story no less powerful despite its archetypal structure, and puts it in a form that forces the reader to confront deep seeded notions about the idea of gender.

The reason I wish you would all read the book before reading this review is because the teacher in me wants to know what your initial, uncoached reactions to the protagonist, Kid, and Scout are. I won’t say “unbiased,” because the structure of this novel is designed to uncover and challenge biases with regards to gender.

You see, Brezenoff does something few writers have attempted. He presents a novel in which genders the main character and the main character’s love interest are not revealed, leaving it to the reader to decide. Brezenoff gives Kid, the protagonist, love interests of both genders, so the reader can’t assume Kid is gay or straight and thus boy or girl.

I made assumptions based on the characters. I won’t tell you what I assumed about Kid and Scout, but I did a lot of thinking about my choices, and more than anything, I realized that gender is more than boy/girl. And freeing characters of the expectations of gender takes a lot more than leaving off gendered pronouns and assigning characters gender-neutral names. At the end of the story, the reader is left with this question: why did I assign the genders to Kid and Scout that I ultimately chose?

My choices were undoubtedly marked my personal history and experiences. If a person behaves in this way, then it is highly likely this person is a boy or vice versa. But another reason I made the choices I did is the connotation one of the names evoked for me, a name tied in my mind to a long literary tradition — I don’t want to say it outright lest it influence your reading, but you can probably figure it out, you smarty smart pants readers you. Does the connotation I noted make me right about this character? Certainly not, but what it tells me is that gender is more than pronouns and names and preferences. The concept of gender is reinforced by hundreds of years of cultural history, and even the most careful scrubbing of pronouns from a text will not leave the story truly open. Ideas we didn’t even know we carried will make their way into our work and our world. There is always a choice to be made.

As I read the story, I was always mindful that the choices I was making as a reader were based on assumptions both surface of my thoughts as well as deeply internalized cultural information. And I really I wished that I could teach this book in schools. Alas, language and content mean that I could probably never (well, definitely never, here in my home state) teach this in secondary schools. However, I do believe that Brezenoff’s book opens the door for more artists to take up the challenge to create stories, songs, movies, paintings, etc. that challenge long-held notions of gender, of what it means to be normal, what it means to love, what it means to belong. I don’t think gender differences will ever be neutralized — our bodies are different, and face it. Sameness is boring. What I hope it that our differences — differences in gender, in taste, in choice, in life and love — will remind us all how awesome it is to be alive and to share this world with one another.

Debra Touchette is an assistant librarian, grad student, blogger and wanna-be teacher. She blogs about her reading at Library Lass: Adventures in Reading, and is @threelefthands on Twitter (but mostly just to see what shenanigans @maureenjohnson and @realjohngreen are up to). She is often accused of being to serious and thinking too much, but she figures there are worse things, like awkwardly writing about herself in the third person all the time. But maybe someday she’ll lighten up, get a puppy, lay off the coffee. Or not.

When was the last time you saw a character in a tv or book whose entire life revolves around their heterosexuality?

Never? Me too. Admittedly, heterosexual people have not gone through the horrible atrocities the LGBTQ community has dealt with over the course of history. Straight people do not have to deal with the potential of being kicked out of their homes once they come out. Obviously, the LGBTQ community does need novels about coming out.

But why are the vast majority of LGBTQ YA books only about the beginning of a queer person’s identity? These books tend to revolve exclusively around the protagonist’s coming out struggle. In certain TV shows and books – like Glee’s Kurt for instance – it seems that the main character’s only reason for existence in this world is to be gay, and they have no other wants, motivations or desires.

Why aren’t there more books with gay protagonists who have bigger worries than their sexuality – like saving the world – on their mind? Bisexual characters who have to deal with the biases in their community? Transpeople who are total badasses and polyamorous teens coming into their own? The BTQ in LGBTQ needs to be better represented if LGBTQ lit is going to evolve in the way that will get consumers – queer and straight alike – reading.

What I want most to see as a reader who loves stories with narratives our heteronormative society rarely sees, is LGBTQ literature evolve from a genre of fiction into a secondary thought on the dust jacket. Because just as YA isn’t really a genre so much as a label for the protagonist of the story, LGBTQ lit is much the same thing. It’s time for the mainstream industry to start acting like it.

My desperate hunger for these kind of YA novels is not being completely ignored. Authors like David Levithan are known for writing books about characters who deal with love and politics, and happen to be gay. Books like Hex Hall and The Mortal Instruments Series too, have characters whose sexuality is less important than their personality.

I love LGBTQ fiction. It has provided me with the kind of tender romances that make me believe love is possible. But if YA is ever going to truly satisfy me and plenty of others as readers, it’s going to have to diversify in all directions, and give YA readers the fresh narratives they deserve.

Are there any particular LGBTQ stories you’ve been itching to see in YA fiction? I’d love to hear about them.

Emma Allison blogs at http://bookingthrough365.blogspot.com/

By Karen Kincy

I’m not qualified to blog about LGBTQ characters and pairings. This was my first reaction to being asked to write for Gay YA. My second reaction: Why not? Am I more qualified to write about boys, werewolves, men, shapeshifters, and anyone much older than me? Who says I’m able to understand the inner thoughts of a small-town sheriff, or a murderer? Many more people in my life identify themselves as LGBTQ rather than werewolves or serial killers. In all seriousness, I want to know why I still felt like this was something off-limits.

In my debut novel, Other, I explored what might happen if paranormal people were real, and everyone knew it. Of course the differentness of these Others would be obvious, and would inspire prejudice in many Americans, even fear and hate. The protagonist of Other, Gwen, is a half-pooka shapeshifter, and hasn’t told anyone outside her family and best friend, not even her human boyfriend. She’s afraid his conservative upbringing will trump his feelings for her. Obviously, Others can be seen as a metaphor for people facing prejudice in the real world.

If I had been writing about LGBTQ teens instead of paranormal ones, Other would be an issue book. The issue being that a character’s sexual orientation or gender identity isn’t considered mainstream, and this differentness becomes the story’s conflict. Similar issue books focus on characters whose racial identity or religion—or fill in the blank—is considered different. Anyone who isn’t a “default” protagonist, who isn’t white, straight, etc. This is a book about a girl’s blackness, or this is a book about a boy who falls in love with another boy.

Yes, I wholeheartedly believe we need books like this. But I think we also need books where LGBTQ teens are part of a bigger story, like a fantasy adventure where the heroine falls in love with a huntress, like Malinda Lo’s Ash, or Dumbledore being gay in Harry Potter—though I do find it interesting how J. K. Rowling chose not to mention this fact in the books themselves. On the one hand, it’s Dumbledore’s business; on the other hand, Rowling likely knew the controversy that would result from her making this an unavoidable fact on the page.

I don’t think authors can pretend there isn’t any controversy surrounding LGBTQ themes in YA—or in real life. But I also don’t think LGBTQ characters should forever be pigeonholed into issue books, always explored and examined by what makes them different, rather than what makes them the perfect character to crack an ancient mystery, or fall in love in outer space, or have an ordinary, boring life until the author throws some adventure their way.

LGBTQ characters aren’t off-limits for my YA. I might need to fight some preconceptions of my own, and force my brain not to travel in the ruts created by “mainstream” thoughts. But I know that there’s nothing else stopping me.

Karen Kincy’s debut, Other, came out last July, and her second novel, Bloodborn, will hit shelves on September 8. You can find Karen online at www.karenkincy.com