Representing sexual diversity in YA - David Levithan, Malorie Blackman, same sex marriage and a long way to go

Tomorrow, the debate on marriage equality in the UK moves to the House of Lords. It's been an agonising wait for many, and given the coverage it's getting and the politicians who are coming right out (no pun intended) and saying that they don't see a need for marriage equality, I imagine (and fear) that those people might find themselves waiting a while longer.

Quite obviously, given the amount of time I spend talking about John Green here, this is not a blog on politics. But it is a blog about fiction for teens, and here's where culture and politics are mixing in a way that you hope can only mean better things for the next generation of adults.

A favourite author of mine, David Leviathan, has a new book coming out in August (hurry up, August!) called Two Boys Kissing. The cover looks something like this:

Two Boys Kissing is the story of Harry and Craig, two 17 year-old boys determined to break the Guinness World Record for the longest ever kiss. All 32 hours of it, to be more precise. And it's well timed, too, being published a decade after Boy Meets Boy, David's debut.

Many YA writers, when asked about the issues, sex and violence they put in their books, argue that books are an important and safe way for children and teens to explore the world. I completely agree, but I also think that books are an important reflection of the world, and that when books fail to represent significant parts of our culture, children and teens are being failed. Of course, that doesn't only go for sexual inequality - it goes for all sorts of diversity issues, and the growing representation of LGBTQ teens is only one way in which diversity in books is increasing.

A while back, I read a great article on Atlantic Wire, written by Jen Doll. In it, Levithan says:

"Every now and then there's a moment when people are grumbling and saying publishers are still scared [of books featuring LGBT characters], but from my point of view that’s 100 percent false. I have not had any experience of people not wanting to share these voices and stories. Any perceived resistance is from people who aren't plugged in, whose ideas of what the publishing marketplace is are 10 or 20 years out of date."

I feel there's a bit of a dichotomy here. Whilst I do read quite a number of American books featuring LGBTQ characters, I would say that although the numbers of similar characters in UK books are increasing, they aren't increasing very much.

One memorable British book I read recently, though, is Malorie Blackman's Boys Don't Cry, in which the main character's brother is gay, and suffering at the hands of other (school)boys for it. It's a beautifully written book, and the culmination of that particular storyline is in equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful. I read another, simply stunning book a few weeks ago that I'm dying to talk more about here but, alas, it would give the entire plot away. (Sorry. But not really. It was an awesome read.)

Doing a bit of research for this post, I found a piece on the Guardian website from a couple of years ago. It's reporting some news from the States - two authors who were advised to 'straighten out' their gay main characters in order to be published. I can't imagine that this is something that happens very often these days, but the article was of particular interest, because of a mention of Malorie Blackman in the same article:

"Although Blackman experienced only positive reactions from her agent, publisher and readers at her inclusion of a gay younger brother in her novel Boys Don't Cry, she said that, when she was starting out as a writer 20 years ago, she was asked to make a black character white."

She goes on to say (very succinctly!):

"Are we still not over this nonsense?" 

Now, I haven't written this blog because of personal experience. This is not a case of somebody getting up on a soap box to shout about something because they feel it is unfair to them personally. But nevertheless this is something that I feel passionate about.

I look at people very dear to my heart, and I think: when you grow up, I want you to be able to choose. I want you to feel free to love whomever you love, and to be able to celebrate that in the same way as anybody else.

And quite honestly, the more diversity of all kinds is represented in literature for teens, the better off we'll all be.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars and Sick Lit

Some months ago, when John Green's The Fault in Our Stars was finally published in the UK to great hoorah and much tumblring, there was a bit of backlash in the press.

It all started with a piece in the Daily Mail, calling TFiOS "mawkish at best, exploitative at worst". It was a typically brow-beating and spectacular piece of journalism and accomplished very little except to earn its very own backlash, including this piece in the Guardian, and this piece on the Strange Chemistry blog and quite frankly I could go on here forever. Some contemporary teen authors even agreed with the Daily Mail - for the responses from Meg Rosoff and Anthony McGowan, see this blog from author Keren David.

I am late to the party, largely because it's taken me this long to gather my thoughts. For the most part, it's not worth responding to anyway, because it's something of nothing, but still, it's been bugging me.

So after several months of thinking, of losing sleep and pulling my hair out and generally not living life to the full because I'm always thinking about the question of whether 'Sick Lit' is right or wrong or, indeed, anything else, what conclusions have I come to?

I just DON'T CARE.

I think if a book is well-written and engaging and creates an emotional response because as a reader you connect with the characters and the situation they're in, then I'll read it and think it's a good book. I might not like it; it might not be my sort of thing, but that's a different matter, and has nothing to do with whether a book is good or not.

And whether the central characters have cancer is not one of the factors I use to determine a book's placement on a scale of sucky to total genius. It just isn't. It's like saying you don't like a book because it's set in Philadelphia. (HINT: the book isn't going to be about Philadelphia.)

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a section in Waterstone's with a garish sign reading "Cancer Section", and I've never recommended TFiOS by saying "You should read this. It's got awesome cancer."

Besides, we've always liked a bit of death with our romance. The death scene in Romeo & Juliet is only catastrophically heart-breaking because it involves the loss of unlived love. I'd have loved to have seen the Daily Mail put Romeo & Juliet on their list of sick lit. Perhaps there are letters written to head teachers every day begging schools to ban such radical examples of teen sex, murder and suicide, all in the name of love.

There's a beautiful scene in TFiOS, where the two main characters, Augustus and Hazel, visit the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. It reflects on lives lived in forced and involuntary cages, and the sometimes resentful but mostly OK nature of those lives, and the fact that they are lives lived at all and that's what's important and remarkable. It's a scene between two cancer patients in the house of one of the most famously trapped and short lives, and it's not about death. It's about the other thing.

And I think that's something that anyone can relate to, regardless of their age, but it's something particularly true of teens. There are too many things that make you feel trapped as a teen to bother counting, and there are very few ways out of most of them.

There's a reason that this book is being passed from rucksack to rucksack in schools around the country, and it isn't because it's a story about cancer. Trust me.

The fact is that TFiOS, along with so many other 'sick lit' books, is FULL of life, despite everything that conspires against it. It's quirky and funny and the first love between Augustus and Hazel is the first love that everyone wants to have, because it's smart and sexy and just downright awesome (minus the cancer). This is a story of love against the odds, and battles won and lost, and countless other cliches that could be applied to most famous books in our history.

And you know why they can be applied to most famous books in history?

Because The Fault in Our Stars is nothing new.

(It's just exceptionally well-written.)

Judy Blume, me, and the controversy of YA fiction

Young adult fiction is by its very nature controversial. Why? Well, mainly because it’s written for teenagers but read widely by adults. Teenagers read it too, of course, but adults are buying and reading YA in increasing numbers.

What this means is that books intended for children are judged by adults, and it seems that problems spring eternal when adults judge standards, set by and for kids, against their own. It causes books, even authors, to be banned from libraries and schools, and it allows adults who haven’t read books to form conclusions about them. Sadly, those conclusions tend to add to the controversy, and before long, children are banned from reading the very books that would be most interesting and helpful to them.

Contemporary (and realistic) YA has had more than its fair share of controversy since the market first started growing back in the 90s. These are stories that tend to deal with real issues, and whacking great big ones at that. Sex, drugs, death, hormones, not to mention family, money, violence, relationships and grief.

When I was a teenager, there wasn’t a huge amount of YA fiction around. There was some, sure, but it wasn’t the trend-driving market it is today. I think the first novel for teens I read was probably ‘Blubber’, by Judy Blume. If you look up Blubber on GoodReads or anywhere else, you’ll see it categorised under anything from 9-12 middle grade fiction to YA. Truth is, nowadays it most likely sits somewhere between the two in an ‘early teen’ section. I was around 13 when I read it. During a recent house-move, I unearthed my original copy, and was sadly forced to put off packing whilst I re-read it…

Safe to say, it’s nothing like how I remember it.

The version of Blubber I own, almost re-lost in the house move!

There are similarities, sure. I remember a couple of things distinctly – an overweight girl being nicknamed Blubber by her classmates after reading a report she’d written about whales in front of them, and how she was then ridiculed and bullied almost continually. I remember a scene where she was put on trial by them one rainy lunchtime. I also remember the main character, Jill, having a strange home life (or at least a strange one by British standards), being looked after in part by a French-speaking nanny. Then there is Jill’s best friend, a Chinese-American, who Jill defends as soon as anyone dare make a slur against her race.

These are the things I remember.

I remember knowing exactly how they all felt. I could see these girls in my class, all of them. I remember that the girl being bullied doesn’t let them get the best of her. I remember thinking that I never wanted to become a bully and I never wanted anybody to say bad things about my friends.

What I don’t remember, is the controversial stuff. 

It turns out that Judy Blume is one of the most frequently banned authors in the US. Blubber caused problems for parents mainly because of one thing: it’s written from the point of view of the bully, not the victim (something I hadn’t remembered). God, how that must irk! In this story, the bullies aren’t caught. They aren’t punished, or stopped, or made to apologise, and they certainly aren’t going to turn a new leaf any time soon.

The truth is, Judy Blume knows how to get into a kid’s head. She knows that the problems they face aren’t the same ones that their parents are facing, and even if they were, she knows that kids would deal with them entirely differently.

Re-reading Blubber, I did find it a bit shocking, partly because I don’t remember as much of it as I thought I did, and partly because as I read, it became increasingly apparent how controversial it has the potential to be. The things the bullies do to ‘Blubber’ are terrible – they even lock her in a cupboard in the classroom. She also gets the blame for many of the incedents, the bullies getting away scot-free because the teachers don’t see what’s really going on.

Thing is, though – Blubber is meant for kids. It isn’t meant for their parents. The things adults don’t like about teen and YA fiction are the things they think might put kids in danger. But those same things are what form the fabric of a teenager’s reality.

Re-reading Blubber was so interesting, because as an adult I read it entirely differently. Entirely. The messages are different, the characters feel different, and most importantly, the messages and characters didn't mean as much to me. What I saw this time around was how controversial it is.

The point here, is that this book really is nothing like I remember it, and that's because it wasn't written for me, it was written for me 15 years ago.

As adults, we love to rewrite history. We look upon childhood with rose-tinted whatevers, and forget what an excruciating, alienating experience it all was. And yeah - books like Blubber helped me a lot, and if you go online you'll find a hell of a lot of people saying the same thing.

So why do adults go to such great lengths to ban books from their children's lives?

Well, adults need justice far more than children do. Adults want fairness and goodness and equality, things that don’t exist in the world of a 13 year-old. All a 13 year-old wants to know is how to deal with that, and that is where this kind of story comes in.

So let’s allow children’s writers to write for children, shall we? Let’s reserve adult judgements for books directed at adults, and let kids decide what’s a good story and what isn’t.

After all, they are the readers, not us.