Via
rosefox wearing her PW hat, a piece by
rachelmanija and
sartorias about
what happened when they sought an agent for their collaborative YA novel.Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.
An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.
The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.
The thing that's saddest and most repulsive about this sort of bigotry is that, while some adults might think that they're doing it for the kids,
the kids already know there are gay people in the world. The straight ones are not going to have their heads explode because OMIGAWD teh Gay! and the gay kids, or the ones who really aren't sure where they stand on the great spectrum of sexuality, would get to see their own faces reflected back at them. As would the kids who are not white. This seems to me, even on a programmatic "do it for the children" basis, to be a
good thing.
It shouldn't surprise me when this sort of shit happens, but somehow it does, every time. It should make me angry, and it does.