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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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-19 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-19 07:13 am (UTC)I can think of a single queer book about working class young men that I read in my teens (so, let's pin it at 1987) which is Dance on Your Grave by Aiden Chambers. Fails the 'part of a series though. Which is me agreeing with you, in a round about way. Mind you, I don't think I encountered any books about lesbians at the time.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-19 06:33 pm (UTC)Now, we have information at a click of our fingertips. But back in the 20th Century, even the early 00s, you kind of had to hunt a bit for stuff.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 01:34 pm (UTC)I'm in Australia, and I didn't encounter The Colour Purple until the movie, which I was either in my last year of high school or a year or two after. And my book access was limited to the school and community libraries, which also meant that I missed a stack of supposedly formative science fiction that was out at the time. But the school did have the VC Andrews books and the Jean M Auel books.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-16 01:34 am (UTC)Jean M Auel and VC Andrews were very popular - both hit best-seller lists and fairly main stream. VC Andrews was the Collen Hoover of her day.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-17 12:24 pm (UTC)I've heard of Colleen Hoover, but I have no reference for what they write. There was possibly also Jilly Cooper, who was also popular at the time, but they weren't in the library so I didn't read them.
We got a lot of US television, but I wouldn't have had a feel for how current it was. Although by the early 90s the delay wasn't always ten years, but for the more popular stuff it was maybe six months? I was going to make a claim about X-files, and then realised I don't remember what years I was watching it. I was mostly watching late night BBC shows, because I was dreadfully insomniac through my early 20s.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-17 03:59 pm (UTC)In the 21st Century - with the internet - and streaming, foreign distribution is much faster. And there's less lag time. We also can market books better and faster. Colleen Hoover wouldn't have been read that widely in the 1990s, but now yes. So, is not a good example.
VC Andrews is more like...Stephanie Meyer's Twilight novels? Or say Stephen King?
no subject
Date: 2025-10-18 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-18 09:55 pm (UTC)