Across the country, June marks the annual Pride celebrations, where people hit the streets — and the clubs — to dance, party, and wear bright colors to celebrate LGBTQ identities. Pride is a purposefully joyful tradition, a revolt of long-standing stereotypes painting queer life as inherently sad or tragic. The whole point is to drive home the message that having an identity outside of straight and cisgender is not and should not be an impediment to a happy, fulfilling life.
But for some reason, much of pop culture hasn't gotten the message. While there's been some improvement in queer representation in books, TV, and movies, these characters are still all too often marginalized within the narratives. Mainstream pop culture products often balk at opportunities to portray LGBTQ characters living their lives in ordinary ways as the central focus of the story. Tragic narratives like "Brokeback Mountain" have a place in mainstream culture, but the "Star Wars" sequels won't let Poe and Finn have the happy romance that Han and Leia got to have.
There's one corner, however, where times are changing: young adult fiction. In the past few years in what is affectionately called "YA", there's been a surge in reader interest and in books themselves for stories about queer characters that aren't focused on homophobia or tragedy, but are instead the same range of stories that have always been available to straight characters.
"We are seeing way more LGBT+ books where the characters are living their lives and their identities aren’t an 'issue,'" Jenna Friebel, a librarian at the Oak Park Public Library, told Salon in email. "They want to see these characters living, growing, and thriving. They want to see them experiencing adventure and romance."
“They don’t want to see queer characters as sidekicks anymore," said Candysse Miller, the director of marketing and communications at Interlude Press, a publisher that focuses on LGBTQ character. "They don’t want to see queer characters as the tragic friend who dies.”
“Everything for me growing up was, if there was an LGBTQ character, it was either going to be a tragic story, it was going to end in death, it was going to be sad," said YA author Julian Winters. His new book, "Running With Lions", is a more light-hearted romp, however, a story about teen romance with a backdrop of a youth soccer league.
Same-sex romance ends in tragic death so often in pop culture that that the page at TV Tropes for "Bury Your Gays" is extensive, with dozens of examples. And even if queer characters get to live, often the story is focused on the closet, with tension driven by the choice to stay in or get out, to the exclusion of other kinds of stories. But YA authors are conscious of those tropes and trying to tell different kinds of stories.
Philips, the author of same-sex romances "Perfect Ten" and the upcoming "Sometime After Midnight," said she often speaks to readers who are excited to read "a tale about me or someone like me, but without all of it being so concentrated on the coming out or making it an issue out of the sexuality."
Author CB Lee, whose books "Not Your Sidekick" and "Not Your Villain" feature LGBT protagonists living in the world of superheroes, said, "I wanted the conflict not to be focused on their identity, but the conflict instead to be the fantastic part of the story, the superhero plot and all that.”
"I wanted kids to be able to see themselves in any type of genre possible, whether it’s in space or having a romance or getting to have superpowers or just discovering who they are," she added.
What's crucial to understand is that these stories are not being imposed on young readers. On the contrary, people in the field argued that reader demand is really shaping what gets written and sold in the YA world.
“YA readers are very vocal about what they want to read," Miller said, adding that the student activism around gun laws is a similar trend that shows that teens these days feel very empowered to speak out and make demands on their own behalf. "Teen readers are driving the narrative, and they want to see themselves in books.”
Hal Patnott, another librarian at Oak Park, said that when he's doing outreach programs about LGBTQ representation, he has a hard time collecting books for the program, "but not because we don’t have the books, but because we have them and they’re all checked out. And we have multiple copies of these books!"
Lee credits this shift, in part, to the rise of social media, which has created a "grassroots force from readers to bring visibility to books" and that a "community has really sprung up in the last few years" of "teenagers who are reviewing books" and creating an alternative to "the Kirkus Review or Publisher’s Weekly."
"You always have that moment of wishing I had this growing up," Winters said, "but you know, I’m grateful for where I am, as an adult, to be able to look at these teens and be their support system and say, you’re doing things that are amazing."
But while young, passionate readers are clamoring for books that feature LGBTQ stories outside the silos of tragedies or coming out dramas, that doesn't mean they have completely rejected the more traditional kinds of stories or what are known in the industry as "issue books."
"They’re looking for books where the queer characters can do other things, where it’s not just all about them being queer," Patnott said. "And then they’re also looking for books where the main character is queer, and that is the whole plot. I think what they’re really asking for is a range of choices."
“It’s important in queer literature that we have these coming out stories," Lee noted, “but I don’t want that to be the only kind of story that we see.”
Visiting the blog LGBTQ Reads demonstrates that, for readers of YA fiction, diversity in queer stories is quickly becoming a reality. The multitude of titles cover all genres and range from picture books for little kids to middle school and young adult titles. The stories, which is also in response to reader demands, also feature characters from a broad range of racial, religious, and familial backgrounds.
While the young adult book reading public seems incredibly chill about LGBTQ representation — so much so that libraries, even in Arkansas and Oklahoma, host Drag Queen Story Hour for little children — the rest of pop cultures struggles to catch up. Animated features, adventure-oriented blockbusters, and light romcoms are relentlessly straight. Despite the seemingly bottomless number of superhero products that are being made for both TV and movies, for instance, almost no caped crusaders in either DC or Marvel are queer.
(One of the few exceptions — Marvel's "The Runaways" on Hulu, which features a lesbian romance — is interestingly rooted in the YA world, being based on a teenage comic and focused on high school drama.)
But the popularity of queer characters in YA literature, with both LGBTQ and straight readers, suggests there is really no reason for other pop culture producers to worry about mainstreaming such characters. Put a gay romance in "Star Wars." Have a Marvel hero be trans. Make the lesbian version of "When Harry Met Sally". Audiences are more open-minded that studios often think and, as the popularity of queer fiction shows, may even be hungering to see their romantic leads and action heroes be someone other than the same straight, cis people dished up as characters in every story.
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