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

[minoanmiss]

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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.)

[ethelmay]

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

[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.)

[conuly]

:)

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

[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.

[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!

[hippogriff13]

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