The Philippine Online Chronicles

Authors Rachel Manija Brown (All the Fishes Come Home to Roost) and Sherwood Smith (Crown Duel) wrote a blog post entitled “Say Yes to Gay YA” (young adult fiction) last September 2011 in the Publishers Weekly blog Genreville, where they talk about their experiences attempting to publish a young adult novel that featured gay characters:

"The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation."

The post generated over 271 comments (at the time of this writing) and the #YesGayYA hashtag over Twitter. There has been all sorts of comments from various people in the publishing industry, whether it’s literary agents like Dystel & Goderich, authors like Nicola Griffith (Ammonite), and various bloggers.

Joanna Stampfel-Volpe, an agent with Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation, was the unmentioned agent in Brown and Smith’s original blog entry and has disclosed her side of the story in The Swivet:

“Let me repeat this: there is nothing in that article concerning our response to their manuscript that is true. We spoke with the authors on speakerphone in our office, and the conversation we had with them was very different than the experience they describe.”

Stampfel-Volpe’s blog entry also generated a lot of comments, including comments from authors like N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms):

“Because apart from the danger of miscommunication, there's also the fact that this isn't a cut and dried issue, given your description of the conference call. Those of us who are familiar with the dogwhistles of bigotry will often hear X where the speaker intended Y -- often because the speaker may not be aware that Y sounds like all the other instances of bigotry out there. That is, if I'd written a novel with 6 PoVs, three of which were people of color, and you suggested that I make changes that amount to removing all the characters of color and any mention of their existence, it's not going to mean much to me that you didn't intend to whitewash the book. The end result would be whitewashing, and I'd be pissed about it.”

Genreville has since then posted a followup which presents Stampfel-Volpe’s side of the story, as well as Brown and Smith’s reactions:

“We stand by every word we wrote in our original article... This is why we went public: After the initial exchange a month ago, we spoke in private to a number of other writers, without mentioning the name of the agent or agency. There was an overwhelming response of "Me too!" Many other writers had been asked by agents and editors to alter or remove the minority identity of their characters, sometimes as a condition of representation or sale. Sometimes those identities had been altered by editors without the writers' knowledge or permission.”

Malinda Lo (Ash) posted “Stats on LGBT Young Adult Books Published in the U.S.” based on librarian/researcher Chrstine A. Jenkin's bibliography of YA fiction with gay/lesbian content and data provided by researcher Michael Cart and the author herself (A PDF of the combined bibliography can be found here.) Lo came up with the following conclusions:

“1. I often hear people saying that publishers aren’t willing to publish LGBT YA, or that each publisher only publishes one LGBT YA per year. This, statistically, isn’t true. Every one of the big 6 publishers (and plenty of smaller ones) publish LGBT YA titles, and several of them do publish more than one per year.

2. However, the proportion of LGBT YA to non-LGBT YA is so tiny as to be laughable.

3. The good news is, the numbers have continued to increase over time, and other than the dip in 2010, the increase has sped up since 2000.

4. The bad news is, the G in LGBT far outpaces L, B, or T.”

Others have chimed in regarding the issue after Stampfel-Volpe’s disclosure, including Polenth Blake and Marie Brennan (A Star Shall Fall).

Image taken from Earthworm on Flickr. Some rights reserved.