I was beset by a sudden desire to know what, exactly, JKR said recently

[conuly]

(It was every bit as ridiculous as I thought it would be.)

And that led me to this thread and the corresponding subthread where he really just gets into it with me, for no fucking reason, on the subject of "no mass produced book series marketed towards children would depict homosexuality in 1997-2007. No publisher would take it on".

This is a factually untrue statement, and I have the booklists to prove it. I'm not saying these books were necessarily available to every kid who might reasonably have wanted to read them, but to say they didn't exist at all? I bought some of them from Scholastic book forms! Bruce Coville? He's a big name! The Skull of Truth came out in 1997! Norma Klein? She's a big name! People absolutely heard of her who read realistic YA fiction. Francesca Lia Block? I never read her, but I had heard about her, I knew people who read her books, I knew her books touched on homosexuality. But here he is, arguing with me about it! Why are we arguing about something so absurd?

At least I figured out why this is bugging me, and if I get another reply I will tell him. When he claims that these books did not exist, that no mainstream publisher would have printed any of them, that no mainstream bookseller would have stocked them in the children's or teens sections, he's buying into the bullshit queerphobic narrative that before X date, everything was hunky-dory and those people either a. didn't exist or b. were happily closeted.

In the a version of this narrative, things were better then, and it is all this publicity that makes people think they're LGBTQ. In the b version, things are immeasurably better now and all those LGBTQ people should just stfu already and be grateful. And key to either version is erasing the proof that it's just not true*.

And part of that proof is juvenile fiction published by mainstream publishers in the dark days of the 20th century that involve LGBTQ themes.

FFS, it's like another flavor of "Women didn't write sci-fi until yesterday" and yes we did. Don't fucking devalue their very real difficulties in getting published and staying published by saying they didn't exist at all.

(And if you're about to tell me that I grew up in a socially progressive part of the country, I know! But according to his claims, so did he, with a liberal family and a bookseller uncle to boot. If he never heard of a single YA book with LGBTQ themes at that age, I imagine that must be because he didn't ask anybody or look very hard. I didn't ask anybody or look very hard either, and I still bumped into them just, like, on the shelves! Neither of us was growing up in a Fundiegelical hellhole, so.)

Note: I would've asked him if he'd ever heard of Heather Has Two Mommies, but that turns out to have been printed by an indie publisher after all. I never woulda thunkit after all the press it got!

* It is measurably better now in some aspects. The important thing is that the past does not just get uniformly more queerphobic the further back you go, and in a way that maps perfectly onto modern bigotry.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Who is gay in the Skull of Truth? (Not doubting you, just apparently have almost no memory of that book despite having read it!)

[conuly]

Mmm... I think the protagonist's uncle? It would've been pretty unlikely for a child in a middle grade book to be LGBTQ themself back then.

[sovay]

"no mass produced book series marketed towards children would depict homosexuality in 1997-2007. No publisher would take it on".

Uh. Nope. Read them. Bought them. Sorry not sorry.

When he claims that these books did not exist, that no mainstream publisher would have printed any of them, that no mainstream bookseller would have stocked them in the children's or teens sections, he's buying into the bullshit queerphobic narrative that before X date, everything was hunky-dory and those people either a. didn't exist or b. were happily closeted.

You're right and he should feel bad.

[conuly]

Uh. Nope. Read them. Bought them. Sorry not sorry.

And the percentage only gets stronger when we add in allegorical works (will never not recommend The Shuteyes, btw) and subtext in various shades of obvious.

You're right and he should feel bad.

It's not even that I care that he didn't know about these books until today, but why the fuck is he arguing with me when he is just wrong? I'm not even trying to say he's wrong about the main point, which is that it was much harder to get those themes into mainstream juvenile publications back then (and if you did, harder to get them into kids' hands) and that an author could've been very well-intentioned and still have been unable to write what they wanted to in this regard. But - it wasn't 1000000% impossible! That's literally all I'm saying! And by the time JKR had ditched all her editors, if she had wanted to write that, she could've written that. She certainly had as much creative control as any of your next five authors.

But she didn't, because she's just generally queerphobic, and that means homophobic as well as transphobic, for all that she sometimes pretends, ineptly, that it's only the last.

[jessie_c]

But here he is, arguing with me about it! Why are we arguing about something so absurd?

Because if he shouts loudly enough he can convince himself that he's right.

[conuly]

I guess, but it’s a dumb thing to want to be right about.

[landofnowhere]

Yeah -- there were real barriers in getting LGBT representation in childrens' books at that time period, I remember the "say yes to gay YA" movement in 2011 but (a) Tamora Pierce did so much better with the books she published then (Lark and Rosethorn's relationship was not made explicit in the text, and I certainly didn't learn about it until after, but at least they were getting to have a healthy living relationship unlike Dumbledore, and I never actually read The Will of the Empress but I hear it had canon F/F), (b) if anyone at that time was in a position to exert pressure on mainstream publishers as to what sort of content could be in childrens' books, it was JKR.

[conuly]

Carl and Tom are happily together on Long Island too, in the Young Wizards books. Couldn’t be explicit, but they were both alive and not evil.

[aurumcalendula]

That's a boggling claim! Like Sara Ryan's Empress of the World came out in 2001 and was published by Penguin's YA imprint, Tamora Pierce's The Will of the Empress was published in 2005, and I swear Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword was marketed as YA when it was released in 2006.

[conuly]

You know, I wonder if part of the problem is that he's a gay man (and presumably cis). Because I'll admit, all the examples that spring easily to mind are by or about girls and women.

[the_siobhan]

It was 45 years ago now, but I remember my gf and I being entranced by a YA book about a same-sex relationship when we were in High School. It didn't end well for the characters and I have no idea if the book was a mainstream publisher or not, but it definitely existed and we encountered it in the school library so it couldn't have been that obscure. I was with my gf 1978-1980.

[conuly]

Annie On My Mind?

[sovay]

I was with my gf 1978-1980.

Elizabeth Levy's Come Out Smiling (1981) is too late, then.

I hope someone in this thread can find the title for you.

[magid]

Apricots at Midnight (Adele Geras) was published (or should I say, came out? :-) ) in 1977, and one of the narrator's stories is about not being picked up after school, so being taken home by two of her teachers, who just happened to be women living together....

[conuly]

To be fair, I bet he didn’t mean examples where you could read them as a same sex couple or you could read them as friends and roommates who are probably straight and nobody can prove are dating.

[elisi]

"no mass produced book series marketed towards children would depict homosexuality in 1997-2007. No publisher would take it on".
My first thought was the Anne McCaffrey and the dragonrider series? Which (checks) started in 1968. Wildly popular and they for sure had gay relationships, even if she disliked it.

FFS, it's like another flavor of "Women didn't write sci-fi until yesterday" and yes we did.
Actually - *flicks hair over shoulder* - we invented the genre. ;) But I guess they don't like being reminded of that!

/God forbid women do anything.

[conuly]

Apparently what women do is write all the juvenile fic gays.

[neotoma]

The Heralds of Valdemar had gay relationships from the start, and they were YA, so this guy is very wrong. Possibly he wasn't going to read a series about girls and magic horses, though.

[conuly]

Ah, I never read those. Not so much into horses.

[spiralsheep]

I added some of these and the list was accurate at that time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lesbian_fiction#Young_adult_fiction

[conuly]

Thank you :)

[chanter1944]

Diane Duane's Young Wizards series comes to mind, as well. Tom and Carl, anyone? Admittedly, that partnership could have been read as either close if platonic or romantic initially, but it's quite evident in later books and newer editions that yes, these two are an acknowledged pair in certain ways.

Heck, the Dragonriders of Pern series has queer men all over its span. Less so queer women, sadly (that's what fanfiction worldbuilding and canon elaboration are for).

[sovay]

Heck, the Dragonriders of Pern series has queer men all over its span.

GET LYTOL A BOYFRIEND.

< / withdraws into the depths of my id >

[sabotabby]

Weetzie Bat came out in 1989 and it was mainstream enough that it came into the small town library where my mom worked. It didn't have just one throwaway line that a mentor character without a romantic interest happened to be gay. It was about two teenagers, one of whom was gay, and had a love interest.

[conuly]

Right!? Like, it’s not all that obscure either! But as I said upthread, maybe the issue is that he’s a presumably cis man and he didn’t read books with cooties as a kid.

[shadowkat]

I wish people would check the internet first before posting on social media threads. Seriously it takes ten seconds? I just did, and discovered: Homosexuality in Children's Literature entry in encyclopedia.com, where it lists tiles going back to the 1960s. While it wasn't necessarily "common" or "popular" in the 20th century and early 21st, or prevalent - these books were published. Has this idiot never heard of "Annie on my Mind" (published in 1982). Also there's Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which I read in high school in the 1980s. (It had a lesbian romance featured in it.)

[shadowkat]

I checked the Reddit thread you linked to, and had to restrain myself from responding to the idiot.
Honestly, they think just because they were raised in a liberal household, they know all the liberal LGBTQA books published or not published during that time period? Really?

I was raised in one too - and I'm a lot older than this individual is - I read queer literature in the 1980s.

Also Scholastic was publishing it, and would have allowed for Queer and LGBTA. Twightlight didn't have it because of the author. Same with Harry Potter. And there's a lot of problematic things with Harry Potter - it's sexist, for one thing, and very traditional male coming of age story trope. Rowling's reminds me of Ronald Dahl, her main emphasis much like Dahl's was classicism, specifically British classicism, and racism, specifically anti-immigrant sentiment. Both were class satirists with traditionalist views of gender and gender politics.

I think the poster was thinking of the television landscape in 1997-2004, or maybe film? And to a degree, maybe, but even then, that barrier wall was already tumbling down, with Buffy, Will and Grace, Queer As Folk, etc.