Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  The most important thing that Stone has done, however, is to posit and then prove, in the bitter events of Alice’s existence, the truth of the girl’s own formulation of her “three life lessons,” which are “1. No one will see you. 2. No one will say anything. 3. No one will save you.”

  One hopes that young readers who meet the Alice that Stone has made visible in the pages of this searing book will make it their mission to change the world of their futures to ensure that in it there will be no more Alices.

  Notes

  1. Of Human Bondage, Wuthering Heights, The Cruel Sea, Love Is Eternal, Winter Wheat, Gone with the Wind, Bridge to the Sun, and Three Came Home.

  2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “YRBSS: Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System,” www.cdc.gov/yrbss.

  3. National Center for Victims of Crime, “National Center News,” www.ncvc.org.

  4. Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, www.rainn.org.

  5. KidsHealth, http://kidshealth.org.

  6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res /DatingAbuseFactSheet.pdf.

  7. Sexual Assault and Relationship Abuse Prevention and Support, “A Resource for the Stanford Community,” www.stanford.edu/group/svab/.

  8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/ preview/mmwrhtml/mm5926a1. htm?s_cid=mm5730a1_e.

  lesbian,, gay, bisexual,

  and transgender

  literature

  The Controversies Continue

  Though John Donovan’s I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip (Harper), the first YA novel to treat the subject of homosexuality, may have appeared in 1969, only two years after The Outsiders and The Contender, no more than eight others about this subject followed over the next eleven years. Worse than their paucity, however, was the fact that, though well intentioned like I’ll Get There, they were equally riddled with stereotypes, a subject that is addressed at some length in The Heart Has Its Reasons, a critical history of young adult literature with gay, lesbian, and queer content that I coauthored with Christine A. Jenkins (Scarecrow, 2006). Suffice it to say that these early efforts perpetuated the stereotypical view of homosexual lives as unrelievedly bleak, lonely, danger filled, and—as often as not—doomed to a tragically early end, usually in a car wreck, because all these books were crowded with the worst drivers this side of my grandmother.

  It should also be mentioned that virtually every one of the central characters in these books was white and middle class. The first black character, Rosa Guy’s eponymous Ruby, had appeared as early as 1976, but no other blacks would appear until the 1991 publication of Jacqueline Woodson’s The Dear One and no Latinos until 1995.

  Though the world of GLBT teens remained an all-white one, an otherwise more realistic—and positive—picture of homosexuality did begin emerging in the eighties, starting with Nancy Garden’s classic Annie on My Mind (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), the first YA novel to acknowledge that homosexuality was about more than sex(uality): it was also about love, a love that should dare to speak its name.

  A year after the publication of Annie, another first expanded and enriched the field: the first literary novel with gay content, Aidan Chambers’s Dance on My Grave (Harper, 1983), appeared; this was also the first of many gay-themed novels from Great Britain that would be published in the United States.

  Other notable firsts from the eighties include Norma Klein’s Breaking Up (Random House, 1980), the first to include a gay parent; then Gary W. Bargar’s What Happened to Mr. Forster? (Clarion, 1981) became the first to include a working gay teacher (I say “working” because Isabel Holland’s Justin McLeod, in The Man without a Face [1972], was also a teacher but a retired one). Unfortunately, the eponymous Mr. Forster established a new stereotype, the self-sacrificial gay teacher who quietly gives up his job rather than cause distress to his students. An exceptionally important first appeared in 1986, M. E. Kerr’s Night Kites, the first YA novel about AIDS. Even though the pandemic, which in its early years principally affected gay men, had been around since 1981, nervous publishers had been notably reluctant to address the subject in books for teens. Indeed, Kerr, in her Margaret A. Edwards acceptance speech, acknowledged that she felt she might have committed a form of professional suicide in writing the book, especially because her AIDS sufferer is a young gay man. She explained: “It seemed to me that not to have a homosexual be the AIDS sufferer would be a way of recognizing the illness but not those who have it . . . a sort of don’t ask/don’t tell proposition, where the reader can know the nature of the plague, without having to deal with those personalities who threaten the status quo” (Cart and Jenkins 2006, 63).

  Unfortunately, in the years since there have been only a handful of other YA novels dealing with this issue, even though more than 45,400 persons between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four have been infected since 1981 and AIDS continues to be a major cause of medical concern in America. As noted earlier, the number of cases among fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds increased 34 percent in 2006, and in 2007 a total of 2,462 new cases were diagnosed among thirteen- to twenty-four-year-olds.1

  And yet, other than Night Kites, only two other novels addressed the issue in the eighties—thirteen were added to that number in the nineties, but since the millennium, there have been only four or five more. One that addressed the pandemic in Africa—Alan Stratton’s Chanda’s Secrets (Annic Press, 2004)—was selected as a Printz honor title in 2005.

  In addition to being a decade of firsts, the 1980s also saw a significant increase in the number of GLBT novels: forty titles compared to a mere eight in the seventies. However, only half a dozen would prove to be of enduring literary value. In addition to Annie on My Mind, Dance on My Grave, and Night Kites—all mentioned already—three others offered notable contributions to the gradually emerging field: Ron Koertge’s Arizona Kid (Joy Street, Little, Brown, 1988), A. M. Homes’s Jack (Macmillan, 1989), and Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat (Harper, 1989).

  Koertge’s story of the memorable summer a teenage boy spends with his gay Uncle Wes in Arizona is significant not only because it includes the issue of AIDS but also—and even more significant—because it is the first gay-themed novel since M. E. Kerr’s I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me (Harper, 1977) to include humor, a refreshing change in a field more given to the tragic than the comic. Homes’s novel about a boy who discovers his father is gay is notable not only for its wryly humorous voice but also for its realistic depiction of a teen’s journey from anger to acceptance. Block’s novel is notable, like Koertge’s, for its inclusion of AIDS but also—and more significant—for its lyrical celebration and openhearted embrace of love as both an aspect of homosexuality and an ingredient essential to the human experience.

  The field of GLBT literature for young adults continued to expand in the nineties, the number of titles being published—seventy-five—nearly doubling the forty that appeared in the eighties. Unfortunately, once again, advances were more statistical than aesthetic. Too many of the novels in the new decade (fifty-one of seventy-five) continued to focus narrowly on the coming-out experience, and too few dealt with the realities of living as an out teen. Also, the literature’s gender imbalance, a problem since its beginnings, continued apace. Thus, in the eighties 73 percent of the books featured gay males and only 27 percent lesbians. The numbers in the nineties were, if anything, even more skewed, with 69 percent dealing with gays and only 26 percent with lesbians. The remaining 5 percent included both gay and lesbian characters, a notable advance for a literature that had previously been so rigidly divided between genders. Another interesting—but dubious—trend of the nineties was the movement of the gay or lesbian character from the central role of protagonist to that of secondary character. In the eighties 40 percent of gay characters had been protagonists and 60 percent secondary characters. But in the nineties only 27 percent remained protagonists, and 73 percent had become secondary characters. This may have made t
he books more accessible to nongay readers (like the earlier practice of making the narrator straight even when the central character was gay), but demoting the characters to often one-dimensional supporting roles tended to rob them of their individuality, make them token gay characters, and invite the danger of lazy stereotyping.

  Nevertheless, there were a number of 1990s books—at least twenty of the seventy-five—that remain significant either for their literary quality or for the advances they introduced into the field. Sometimes they offered both, as in the case of Jacqueline Woodson’s novels The Dear One, From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, and The House You Pass on the Way, which variously featured characters of color, a mixed-race relationship, fully realized adult lesbian characters, and more. Less successful literarily but equally important in terms of innovation were the two Pride Pack novels of R. J. Hamilton (Who Framed Lorenzo Garcia and The Case of the Missing Mother [Alyson, 1995], a miniseries that introduced gay Latino characters to the field (a nonseries novel that did the same was Gloria Velasquez’s Tommy Stands Alone [Arte Público, 1995]).

  Francesca Lia Block added three novels to her Weetzie Bat cycle in the 1990s: Witch Baby; Missing Angel Juan; and—most notably—Baby Bebop,which gave readers the backstory of Weetzie’s gay best friend Dirk.

  The nineties also saw the publication in the United States of important novels from Australia (Peter by Kate Walker) and New Zealand (Paula Boock’s Dare Truth or Promise and William Taylor’s The Blue Lawn), confirming, for American readers, the universality of the homosexual experience.

  One of the best written and most emotionally satisfying of the novels about AIDS, Theresa Nelson’s Earthshine, was published in this decade (by Orchard, in 1994), and Robert Paul Walker’s The Method (Harcourt) made history by being the first YA novel to include a gay pride parade, acknowledging—in the process—that gay and lesbian teens did not have to live in hermetically sealed isolation but could be part of a larger—and even companionable—culture. As for M. E. Kerr, she continued her long-standing habit of innovation by giving readers the first novel to deal with bisexuality: Hello, I Lied (HarperCollins, 1997), and a second novel by her, Deliver Us from Evie (HarperCollins, 1994), offered an unusual take on stereotyping by offering perhaps the most fully realized lesbian character to date, the titular Evie, who resembles Elvis Presley and enjoys fixing farm machinery, telling her mother, “Some of us look it, Mom! I know you so-called normal people would like it better if we looked as much like all of you as possible, but some of us don’t, can’t, and never will!”

  Important short stories with gay or lesbian content also appeared in this decade: Marion Dane Bauer’s Am I Blue? (HarperCollins, 1994) was a landmark collection entirely devoted to gay or lesbian characters and themes. And two of the most memorable stories in Chris Crutcher’s Athletic Shorts (Green-willow, 1991) addressed gay themes: In the Time I Get featured a character with AIDS, and the unforgettable A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune gave us a teenage boy with not one, but two, sets of homosexual parents!

  Both the growing literary importance of fiction with homosexual content and its increasingly widespread acceptance were evidenced by the 1999 publication of Ellen Wittlinger’s Hard Love, a book that became one of the first Printz Honor Award recipients, setting the stage for significant progress in this field in the decade to follow.

  Sure enough, 2003 would be a singularly important year in the ongoing evolution of GLBT literature. This was the year Aidan Chambers received the Michael L. Printz Award for his extraordinary, gay-themed novel Postcards from No Man’s Land, which subtly and thought provokingly addressed the complications that visit the nature of sexual identity. That same year Garret Freymann-Weyr received a Printz honor for her novel My Heartbeat, which examines two teenage boys’ attempts to define their own sexual identities. Also in 2003, the Margaret A. Edwards Award was presented to Nancy Garden. As in the earlier case of Judy Blume, the selection committee—to underscore its importance—mentioned only one of the recipient’s books in the award citation. It was, of course, Annie on My Mind.

  The volume of titles giving faces to lesbian, gay, and bisexual teens also continued to grow significantly in the new century. From 2000 through 2008, no less than 165 GLBT titles were published, an average of more than 16 per year (compared with 1 per year in the 1970s, 4 per year in the 1980s, and 7 per year in the 1990s).

  In a positive development, new output also reflected many of the diverse trends that have defined young adult literature for the twenty-first century. Thus, GLBT content began enriching literary fiction; genre fiction; commercial fiction; crossover novels; short stories; poetry; and a growing body of ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse literature. Even better, it has finally begun giving faces to perhaps the last invisible teens, those who are transgender. The first transsexual character had actually appeared in Francesca Lia Block’s 1996 short story “Dragons in Manhattan” (published in her anthology Girl Goddess #9 [HarperCollins]).2 The first appearance of a transgender character was in Emma Donoghue’s The Welcome, a story in my 2001 anthology Love and Sex (Simon & Schuster). And there are three transgender stories—by Francesca Lia Block, Jennifer Finney Boylan, and Jacqueline Woodson—in my 2009 collection How Beautiful the Ordinary (HarperCollins, 2009). Meanwhile, though, in 2004 a transgender character finally became the focus of an entire novel, Julie Anne Peter’s groundbreaking and National Book Award–shortlisted Luna (Little, Brown, 2004). A second novel featuring a transgender character, Ellen Wittlinger’s Parrotfish (Simon & Schuster), followed in 2007.

  A significant number of important new writers have emerged in recent years to continue bringing art, innovation, and diversity to GLBT literature. Among them, certainly, are the author-editor David Levithan, whose 2003 novel Boy Meets Boy (Knopf) employs a breathtakingly good mixture of realism and fantasy in its creation of an idealized world in which sexual differences are not castigated but celebrated! A second new talent, Alex Sanchez, has explored multiple aspects of the gay and lesbian life experience in his Rainbow Boys trilogy (Simon & Schuster) and, in his 2004 novel So Hard to Say (Simon & Schuster), he wrote one of the few gay-themed novels for middle school readers. Other significant new writers include Christian Burch, Nick Burd, Brent Hartinger, Steve Kluger, Brian Malloy, P. E. Ryan, Sara Ryan, Brian Sloane, Bill Konigsberg, and Martin Wilson, among others.

  The GLBT literature remains a literature in transition. Despite the many gains in the field, advances still need to be made. For example, too many titles, especially those that remain focused on coming out, continue to treat being homosexual or transgender as a problem or issue. Similarly, not enough novels feature characters whose GLBT identity is simply a given, as it is in stories about heterosexual characters. And in that same connection, more novels are needed that acknowledge that homosexuality is about more than the sex act. Given the increasingly early age at which young people are now coming out, we also need more novels for middle school readers that examine this phenomenon. We continue to need more GLBT novels, too, with characters of color and characters who come from other cultures and ethnicities. Also needed are more novels with same-sex parents. And, last, the genre must continue to come of age as literature.

  Nevertheless, if ours is not yet the “wonderful world” that a gay character in Boy Meets Boy sees when he looks about him, we are getting there—and (pace John Donovan) it will definitely be worth the trip!

  Yet the Controversies Continue

  No matter how compelling a case one might make for bringing candor to young adult literature, many folks continue to take strenuous exception. The result is not only a great deal of huffing and puffing by the mainstream media but also a cascade of book challenges in America’s schools and libraries. No one can say precisely how many of these occur, as the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom estimates that 70–80 percent of such cases typically go unreported. If so, that would mean there are significantly more than the 3,376 challenges that
were reported between 2000 and 2008. Of those, 1,225 challenges were for sexually explicit material; 1,008 for offensive language; 720 for material deemed unsuited to age group; 458 for violence; and 269 for homosexuality.

  Although some of these cases involved books published as adult titles, they were all challenged—in 51 percent of the cases by parents—because of their use by or with children and young adults. Indeed, the largest incidence of challenges has taken place in school libraries (35 percent), followed closely by classrooms (33 percent), and, last, by public libraries (25 percent).3

  For the past three years, the single most challenged book has been the innocuous and charmingly told picture book And Tango Makes Three, the true story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo, who having formed a same-sex attachment, were given an egg to hatch and rear. The principal reasons this book has been challenged include, according to the ALA, “anti-family,” “homosexuality,” and “unsuited to age group.” Other picture books featuring same-sex parents (though human ones)—notably Daddy’s Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies—have also excited numerous challenges over the years; they were, in fact, second and ninth on the list of the hundred most challenged books of the nineties, according to the Office of Intellectual Freedom. More central to our concerns, though, are the YA titles that have excited controversy. Not surprisingly, the Gossip Girl books are among those, along with The Perks of Being a Wallflower; the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor; Crutcher’s Athletic Shorts; Cormier’s The Chocolate War; the TTYL series by Lauren Myracle; the Printz honor title The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler; Myers’s Fallen Angels; and Go Ask Alice.