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

(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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

sovay

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.

While agreed on the not explicit, Carl and Tom are so barely subtext that I have never met anyone who didn't take them as read as a couple.

From:

minoanmiss

From:

sovay

Carl and Tom's obvious marriage descended upon little fundie me like an earthquake of delight. I tend to credit Lackey and Renault for busting apart the homophobia TPTB bridled with me; thank you for reminding me of Duane's Carl and Tom whom I read two years earlier.

You're welcome! I think that's wonderful.

(I wonder if they were the first gay couple I met in fiction. I read the book so early, it's hard for me to imagine who I could have encountered sooner.)

From:

ethelmay

The doctors in Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, 1936. Annie On My Mind, by Nancy Garden, 1982. And IIRC there are homophobic portrayals of lesbians in Pippa Passes by Rumer Godden, 1994, and A House Like a Lotus by Madeleine L'Engle, 1984.

From:

sovay

The doctors in Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, 1936.

As so splendidly underlined by Harriet Walter and her monocle in the 2007 film.

(I appreciate the suggestions. I would not have encountered any of those books sooner than So You Want to Be a Wizard if I read them at all. I did read the Streatfeild in elementary school, but not as early as the Duane.)

Edited Date: 2025-04-18 05:31 am (UTC)

From:

ethelmay

Right, I should maybe have put my post elsewhere. I was mostly just emphatically agreeing that such books existed.

From:

sovay

Right, I should maybe have put my post elsewhere. I was mostly just emphatically agreeing that such books existed.

Understood. My apologies if I was overreactive.

(The House Like a Lotus was one of the L'Engles I was never able to get into, so it sounds like a bullet dodged.)

From:

conuly

:)

There's just so many if you actually take half a second to look!

From:

kengr

So You Want To Be A Wizard? is from 1983.

But The Door Into Fire from 1979 *explicitly has homosexual relationships. It's a point that if you are gay, you just have to arrange to father a child or bear a child to ensure bloodlines continue.

From:

sovay

But The Door Into Fire from 1979 *explicitly has homosexual relationships. It's a point that if you are gay, you just have to arrange to father a child or bear a child to ensure bloodlines continue.

No argument as to its existence. I would have been about six years old when I read So You Want to Be a Wizard for the first time, so it preempted many of the other titles under discussion!

From:

hippogriff13

Was that marketed as YA? I thought it was targeted at adults.

From:

conuly

I didn't as a kid... but then, to be clear, I also didn't fucking realize that Narnia was about Jesus, so.

From:

sovay

I didn't as a kid... but then, to be clear, I also didn't fucking realize that Narnia was about Jesus, so.

That's fair. I read the resurrection of Aslan as a solstice story long before the Christianity occurred to me. I did for whatever reason assume about Carl and Tom.

From:

magid

I didn't realize Narnia was about Jesus when I read them as a kid, then ran into that info as a college student, so reread them, and still barely noticed, other than the resurrected Lion For Your Sins bit in book 1. If there was anything else, it still blew past me.

From:

conuly

From:

sovay

(And just to re-bring up The Shuteyes, that book is about as obviously about gays as Narnia is about Jesus, and I didn't figure it out until an adult re-read! Though at least nobody had to tell me. I had to be told about Narnia.)

I am happy to have you re-bring up The Shuteyes, because I don't know it at all! How does it work?

From:

conuly

I haven't re-read it in a decade, and there is a lot going on in that short book (which I will classify as SF-flavored middle grade weird with added LGBTQ themes) but to just hit on the most obvious part of the obvious, our protagonist ends up whisked away to the planet of Alert, where everybody is human but they don't sleep. Sleeping is slack, no, they work and play all day, and without actually admitting that they're conformist freaks they brutally scan each other all the time for signs of slacking.

Except some of them do sleep, including his foster family's neighbor's daughter, whose parents torment her constantly over this and then claim to be hurt and bewildered when she finally escapes to live with her mother, a radical napper. After all, didn't they give her everything, including a cubby behind the washer so she could take her little naps without disturbing people too much?

Also there's a sapient parrot, an earth people zoo, and M&Ms. And back on Earth the protagonist's mother is very clearly written as very loving and hippy, very freethinking.

Shoebag also turned out to be about gays. I thought it was about a cockroach going on his own weird kafkaesque adventure in NYC, but nope, it was a metaphor for being in the closet.

From:

sovay

(which I will classify as SF-flavored middle grade weird with added LGBTQ themes)

Honestly kind of already sold.

Also there's a sapient parrot, an earth people zoo, and M&Ms.

I have no idea why I didn't read this book, but I'll look for it!

Shoebag also turned out to be about gays. I thought it was about a cockroach going on his own weird kafkaesque adventure in NYC, but nope, it was a metaphor for being in the closet.

It could have been both! Also on the list.

From:

conuly

Middle grade weird, in whatever flavor, is honestly the best type of middle grade fiction. Even when it's didactic (The Phantom Tollbooth, aka "middle grade weird crosspollinated with a portal fantasy") it's worth a read.

And yeah, those books are amazing, and the subtext may have gone whoosh over my head as a kid but there is no way that nobody saw it when they were published! It's... very close to text.

From:

kengr

Oh yeah, I got saddled with accompanying my (6 years younger) brother to the movie of The Phantom Tollbooth. Which resulted in me buying a copy of the book first time I saw it in the wild.

From:

conuly

Ah! You can read it at Archive.org. You have to sign up for free, though.

From:

sovay

Ah! You can read it at Archive.org. You have to sign up for free, though.

FUCK IN A BUCKET IT'S M. E. KERR

. . . Excuse me, the thing you have to know is that M. E. Kerr was one of the numerous pseudonyms of Marijane Meaker who was one of the earliest authors of American lesbian pulp fiction, any queer subtext in her work is 110% intentional. I read some of her children's fiction at the relevant age and then discovered her lesbian pulp as an adult about ten years ago. She wrote most of it under the name of Vin Packer. A legend.

[edit] SHE DATED PATRICIA HIGHSMITH. THIS I HAD NOT KNOWN.

Edited (only be sure always to call it please "research") Date: 2025-04-18 05:03 am (UTC)