We’re starting a series of weekend giveaways, with great books featuring LGBTQ characters or authors! We’ll be posting Twitter polls to determine what we give away, so keep watching our feed to make sure we’re picking your favorite books.

First Up: Ink Exchange(print) and Old Habits (eBook) by Melissa Marr, featuring the m/m couple Niall and Irial.

On Ink Exchange:

“Unbeknownst to mortals, a power struggle is unfolding in a world of shadows and danger. After centuries of stability, the balance among the Faery Court has altered, and Irial, ruler of the Dark Court, is battling to hold his rebellious and newly vulnerable fey together. If he fails, bloodshed and brutality will follow.” (Read More….)

On Old Habits:

“Melissa Marr returns to the ravishing world of Faerie with a story set between her bestselling novels Ink Exchange and Fragile Eternity.

Recently anointed king of the Dark Court, Niall struggles to forge a new relationship with his subjects—and with the former Dark King, Irial, his once-friend, once-enemy, and now possible-advisor.”

To Enter to win Old Habits:

Post your favorite Niall/Irial quote in the comments! Haven’t read the books? No problem, you can also enter with the title of the book featuring your favorite m/m pairing in YA.

To enter to win a signed copy of Ink Exchange:

Tweet us (@theGayYA) with one way Gay in YA has been important in your life or someone else’s.

Contest Rules:

Ink Exchange drawing open to US residents only, Old Habits drawing open to anyone. Entrants are allowed one entry per drawing, ie one entry in the Ink Exchange drawing and one entry in the Old Habits drawing. Winners will be chosen at random and announced Tuesday, May 17th.

Contest Closes: Monday, May 16th at 11:59 PM CST.

The coming out story represents probably the largest portion of stories in LGBTQ young adult literature. It’s an important topic, to be sure, in part because trying to figure out who we are and who we want is a major part of adolescence, and Nick Burd’s novel is one of the best of the genre.

The Vast Fields of Ordinary takes place during the summer of Dade Hamilton’s last summer before college. Things aren’t looking great. His parents’ marriage is failing, his closeted jock boyfriend Pablo treats him like crap and he has a soul-killing at a grocery store. The plot follows a fairly predictable arc, but it’s Burd’s characters that make his book engaging and heartbreaking.

It was really difficult for me to read this book at times because I didn’t want to see Dade, or any of the characters, getting hurt. God, the way Pablo treats Dade. Even though Burd shows Pablo’s actions coming from a place of pain and confusion, it’s still so hard to watch the story unfold. I wanted to get into the story and alternately yell at and hug these kids.

To take a brief detour, I really love Burt Hummel on Glee, and I think the scene where he and Kurt have “The Talk” is one of the most beautiful and brilliant scenes in all of television. Every kid needs to hear this speech, every kid needs to know that she or he matters and that sex is important. Dade and Pablo need to hear this speech.

Why should you read this book? I’m certain not enough kids hear that they matter, and the actions of this play out in this story, with devastating consequences, because of it. I hope that the teens who read this book see that it’s not that they should remain celibate because they can’t handle the consequences of romantic relationships — not at all. I hope they see that they deserve to be treated with love and respect and if they’re not getting that, whether it’s from parents or lovers or friends, then something is wrong.

I think I’m making this book sound like an after school special, and it is so not as simple as that. It’s an elegant book. Burd takes the common coming out trope and turns it into an emotional sucker punch. I’m not even sure there is much catharsis, although I’m hopeful that Dade will find the love and respect he deserves

This book truly is heartbreaking, and it’s important to have good, well written and solid stories that address this aspect of adolescence, of life really, because even adults don’t get this right all the time, and Burd delivers with a story that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

Debra is an assistant librarian, grad student, fledgling 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).

Today’s featured author is Robin Talley, who writes here on Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series.

While the Harry Potter series was still being released, I kept crossing my fingers one of the kids would turn out to be gay.

It didn’t seem that far-fetched an idea. After all, the series was otherwise doing a great job of representing diverse characters.

But more importantly, when I was reading the books for the first time, I was in my early 20s, and I was still getting used to the idea that this whole being-gay thing might indeed be a lifelong deal. I was eagerly looking around for representations of people like me. Seeing gay characters and gay celebrities made me feel normal. It made me feel like someone had noticed I was there.

This applies to other aspects of identity too, of course. When I was a kid, my favorite Smurf was Smurfette and my favorite Thundercat was Cheetara ― because I was a girl, and they were the only female characters on those shows.* When you’re in the process of defining your identity, you can’t help but look for examples in the world around you.

After the release of Goblet of Fire, I held out hope that either Dean Thomas or George Weasley, both of whom appeared to be conspicuously dateless for the Yule Ball, might be somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. And after Order of the Phoenix came out, introducing us to Luna Lovegood and Nymphadora Tonks, well, it seemed like J.K. Rowling was just taunting me. **

But ultimately all four of those characters were shown to be hetero. And then Deathly Hallows came and went without any acknowledgement of other sexualities.
And I thought, “Ah, well.” It certainly didn’t keep me from enjoying the books. Plus, by that point several years had passed, and I’d stopped eagerly seeking out gay characters at every turn. But I was disappointed that the opportunity to show queerness among such a broad and interesting cast of characters had been missed.
And then, a few months after that last book’s release, J.K. Rowling casually dropped the news that Dumbledore was gay, and had been in love with the dark wizard Grindelwald.

My first thought on hearing the news was, “Wait. What?”

My seconds was, “Oh. This makes so much more sense now.”

The relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald was one of the most interesting subplots of Deathly Hallows. But it was a little hard for a reader like me to relate to. I’ve never had the Crazy Lust For Power that those two apparently shared. I have, however, had the Crazy Lust For The Absolutely Wrong Person, and have found myself doing really stupid things as a result.

But I didn’t get to know about that dimension of Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s relationship when I was reading Deathly Hallows for the first time. Because it wasn’t included in the book.

We don’t know exactly why the HP books failed to mention Dumbledore’s gayness, and I don’t think it’s really worth speculating about here. It might’ve been the publisher’s call. It might’ve been authorial self-censorship due to concerns about the potential public response. It might’ve been the result of tough decision-making about how much content include in an already-very-long book. We’ll probably never know all the answers on this point.

But oh, how I wish it had been included in the book. I wish Dumbledore had casually mentioned it to Harry during one of their many long chats in books 1-6. “You know, I always did think that Hamish McFarlan of the Montrose Magpies Quidditch team was quite fit,” or some such thing. They could’ve left it at that, as a non-issue. Or Rita Skeeter’s 900-page expose of Dumbledore’s life in book 7 could’ve discussed his sexuality along with all his other supposed secrets and lies.

Outing Dumbledore would have had two key benefits:

1. It would’ve made Deathly Hallows a stronger book, because readers would have had better context for understanding Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald.

2. Readers of the book ― kids and adults alike, gay and straight alike ― would’ve seen a major gay character in the biggest book series of all time.
When people talk about gay visibility? This is what they’re talking about.
Dumbledore is the biggest badass of all time. He eats dark wizards for breakfast. He dictates battle strategy and mentors orphans and invents gadgets and writes public policy and runs a school full of ornery teenagers, all at the same time.

And he’s a great big homo.

Imagine how different things might have been if the millions of people who read the Potter series ― the entire generation of kids around the world who grew up on it ― all knew that.

As authors, we always have to make decisions about how much detail to include and how much to leave out. These are not easy decisions to make. I always think of that line from Wonder Boys about how writers don’t need to include the genealogy of everyone’s horses.

And yet, if you have a character who’s LGBTQ, I think you have an obligation to your readers to tell them that.

There aren’t enough LGBTQ characters in children’s lit right now. And we’re the ones who can do something about it. We’re the people writing the books the next generation of teenagers will read.

Of course it isn’t always easy to find a way to work it in. It can be challenging if your LGBTQ character isn’t the protagonist, and especially if the character’s sexual orientation or gender identity isn’t directly relevant to the plot.

It can also be intimidating. We all live in fear of being accused of tokenism, of writing to stereotypes, of conforming to trends. Often, it’s just a lot easier not to put openly LGBTQ characters into our books.

So it might take some work. But it’s worth the effort.

My favorite example of an offhand inclusion of a queer character’s queerness is in How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalastier.*** This (awesome) story includes a best friend character, Rochelle, whose non-straightness is completely irrelevant to the story, but is nonetheless is specified in a totally organic way in the middle of an unrelated scene:

“Cassie-Ann was in final year A-stream basketball. … Rochelle’d had a crush on her for as long as I could remember and was mournful that the odds of being promoted from B-stream to A-stream basketball while still only a first year were vastly low, in the vicinity of zero, in fact. She would have to wait until she graduated and hope that some day they wound up on the same team.”

When I read that paragraph, it really stood out to me both as an author and as an LGBT reader. Suddenly Rochelle was much more important in my eyes than she had been in the 95 pages preceding this paragraph. Because now, Rochelle and I had something important in common. Smack in the middle of a book about a heterosexual protagonist with a heterosexual crush, there was a major character who was like me. (There are other mentions of minor characters who are in same-sex relationships throughout the book, by the way ― another tactic I love because it does a great job of establishing the book’s universe as one in which sexual orientation is a non-issue.)

But of course, I’m not the audience for your book. Kids are your audience. And that’s why this matters so much for YA writers. That’s why I think you have to tell your readers there are queer people in your book. Even if it means rewriting that scene you’ve already rewritten seven times, if that’s what it takes to work it in.

Because some kid somewhere could pick up your book and see, for the first time ever, a character who’s like her. Or a straight kid could see, for the first time ever, an LGBTQ character he can relate to ― and then realize that LGBTQ people aren’t so different from him after all.

And that’s a goal even Dumbledore would find worthwhile.

———

*Because it was the 80s. Yay for 21^st-century cartoon diversity!

**By the way, lest you think I was alone in these speculations, any cursory examination of the various Potter-related websites from that era will quickly prove otherwise. Which characters held gayness potential was one of the hottest debate topics once upon a time.

***Justine has also written some really interesting stuff on her blog about visibility, especially regarding race. I often refer back to her “Why My Protags Aren’t White” post when I’m trying to figure out how to develop and describe my characters.

Robin Talley always writes about LGBTQ protagonists, so she doesn’t have this problem, but she likes to give people unsolicited advice about it anyway, because that’s just how she rolls. Visit her at www.robintalley.com or on Twitter at @robin_talley.

Sometimes I wonder why I started questioning my sexuality. If it was because my father called me a dike when I told him I preferred stud earrings to hoops; or the few years my mother was half convinced I liked girls because my best friend was bisexual; or if it was when my doctor asked my sexual orientation and I hesitated. But then, maybe it was because I actually liked a girl.

Before then, my sexuality wasn’t in question. I had no interest in my sex.  So I wore my stud earrings, spent every day with my bisexual best friend, and told my doctor I was straight. I meant it when I said it then, and I meant it every other time the words passed my lips.

It wasn’t until I met Dahlia that I started to wonder how true those words were. She shook up every belief that I had of myself, pulling me in, in a way that I thought only boys could. She was taller than any girl I knew and her hair was just as long; the deep mahogany color of an old desk. Her eyes were blue and brown and green all at once, and staring at them was like staring into the very center of the ocean. I could lose myself in her eyes, and I think I did.

I fell in love with her, or as in love as a straight girl can be with another girl. We were friends, and could have been more if it wasn’t for my conflicted feelings about her building a wall between us. For every stray thought about her eyes or the smoothness of her skin, another brick was added. For every time the silence of a million unsaid things filled the air between us, another brick was added. I knew Dahlia was gay, there was never a question about what she wanted. It was me who hesitated, who couldn’t figure out if I was simply enamored with her or if it was something more.

The wall grew, my confliction grew, my unease grew. The more time we spent together, the less I knew what to make of myself. I became two separate pieces.

98% of me belonging to me and the unwavering knowledge that I was straight.

2% of me belonging to her and the uncertainty of what that made me.

Gay? Straight? Bisexual? Was my mother right? Did my father have a point?

But, wouldn’t I have known by now if I was anything other than straight? Wouldn’t I have felt this for some other girl at some other point in my life? I didn’t believe that one person could change my sexual orientation, so I had to believe that this part of me had existed before her. I had to believe that she wasn’t the exception to genetic makeup. She couldn’t change me.

What I couldn’t accept was the fact that this part of me belonged solely to her.

I found myself staring at other girls, trying to figure out if I felt anything for them. I quizzed myself every time I saw a girl that I thought was beautiful, trying to pinpoint some kind of attraction that was similar to what I felt for boys or even what I felt for Dahlia. The artist in me always admired any beauty I saw, especially in people, but that was the extent of it. I couldn’t make myself feel more for my gender. It just wasn’t there, and that bothered me. I was sure that if I could call myself bisexual, I could move on from this limbo I was trapped in, I could stop stringing Dahlia along on the false hope that we could be more. Because it was taking a toll on our friendship, and that killed me. No matter what conflictions I had, I knew without a doubt that I needed her friendship. And I didn’t like hurting her. More than once, I thought of just going to her and saying “yes,” yes I like girls, yes I want to try this, yes I love you, too. And yes, I’m sorry.

I never did, though. I couldn’t make myself take that step. Almost like I was standing on the sidelines, I watched as we drifted apart. I watched myself scrambling for an answer like they were scattered puzzle pieces. I watched the friendship that I valued above all else fail because I couldn’t make sense of my feelings.

I regret that the most, the way it had to end between us. I don’t regret anything else from that year, not even the doubts that she brought to my mind. In fact, I would thank her for that. By forcing me to answer those questions, she brought a clarity that had been missing before.

Now, I understand that I’m not straight or gay or bisexual. I understand that it doesn’t matter, that I’m just me.

Brittany Clarke is a YA writer of nine years. She hates to read one book at a time and believes the cure to eluding characters is a good cup of coffee and a doughnut. On the days she’s not staring at a blinking cursor, you’ll find her sitting in the back of a movie theater and laughing louder than anyone else. You can follow her on twitter @balancingbritt or read her blog at www.balancingbrittany.blogspot.com

This post is a part of our reader submissions program. To find out how you can contribute to posts on the Gay YA, click here.

In 1778, a community in Massachusetts incorporated itself into a town called Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin. Seven years later, the leaders of Franklin, Massachusetts contacted their namesake. Pointing out how they had honored him, they asked if he would buy a bell for their meeting house. Instead, Benjamin Franklin sent a crate of 116 books from his personal collection and asked them to build a library instead, “Sense being preferable to sound.” The town leaders took his advice and created the first public library in America. It’s still open, with Benjamin Franklin’s original 116 books on display.

America was founded on the idea that, after a full stomach, the thing a person needs most is a hungry mind. Their curiosity and intelligence and drive should determine how far they go in life, not money, luck, or social status.

That idea is part of why I’m proud to work with Guys’ Lit Wire–a book blog aimed at teenage boys–and its annual book fair. During past book fairs, GLW readers bought books for Indian reservation schools and a juvenile detention facility. This year, we’re helping out Ballou Senior High School, a seriously underfunded school in Washington D.C.

As this video shows, Ballou High’s library is tiny, just a 1150 books for a student body of 1200. (For comparison, the American Library Association’s standard is eleven books for every one student.) Working with Ballou High’s librarian, we’ve assembled a 900-book wish list at Powells.com. Anybody can purchase a book (or more than one) and have it sent directly to the school at:

Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN
Ballou Senior High School
3401 Fourth Street SE
Washington DC 20032
(202) 645-3400

The wishlist runs a wide gamut, from Shakespeare and manga to non-fiction books about science and nutrition to SAT prep books. There are several wonderful GLBT titles including Brent Hartinger’s Geography Club, Steve Berman’s Vintage, and It Gets Better by Dan Savage and Terry Miller. And every single one of them has the potential to be that one book a kid at Ballou High has been waiting for, the one that will help him understand who he is and what he wants out of life. Books change lives. They alter attitudes and expectations.

That’s why, 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin decided the town of Franklin needed books more than a bell. America was a young nation and democracy an untried experiment. To succeed, we needed dreamers. We needed people who could imagine a new kind of nation. Every generation since has struggled and strived toward a more perfect union and a more just society. We will always need dreamers, we will always need books, and every revolution–great or small–will start in a library.

If you can, please consider buying a book or two for Ballou High. There is no gift you can give someone as awesome as a book. Books reshape us, and they give us the power to reshape the world around us.

Kristopher Reisz is the author of Unleashed, Quiet Haunts and Other Stories, and Tripping to Somewhere. He blogs at his personal LiveJournal, and Guys Lit Wire.