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Guest Post by Foxglove Lee

I want to tell you about a certain birthday dinner prepared by a certain special girl, which went on to become a certain YA comedy short called Happy Birthday, Klutzface!  I want to tell you about it because it was about as far from perfection as any celebration could possibly be.

We all want our lives to run smoothly, am I right?  Smooth is, after all, the path of least resistance.  Rocky terrain is fine for hiking, but we don’t want our relationships to be jagged or unstable.  That goes double (triple… quadruple!) for special occasions.  Home-cooked birthday dinners, for instance.  Everything needs to be perfect.

My sweetie pie and I usually go out to eat, especially if we’re celebrating something.  This year, when my birthday came around, I opted for a meal at “home.”  Like Mila in Happy Birthday, Klutzface! I happened to be housesitting on my birthday.  As a result, I had access to an amaaaazing kitchen: gas stove, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances.  So much more luxurious than my kitchen the size of a postage stamp, or Dee’s broken down, peeling-vinyl place.

Dee has cooked for me before.  Girl’s got talent, so I had high expectations.  I was really looking forward to my birthday dinner.  She arrived at my (borrowed) house after work, loaded up with bags of groceries, marinating meat in a cooler, and a black forest cake in a white bakery box.

It was all downhill from there.

I won’t go into tremendous detail, since I superimposed my life directly onto Happy Birthday, Klutzface! but I will say this: when you’re fanning an ear-splitting fire alarm with a tea towel while your girlfriend curses burnt meat (alongside cries of, “It’s not my fault! I’ve never cooked with gas!”) and all you can think is, “This is gonna make a great story!”… well, that’s a pretty good sign you were born to be a writer.

Fiction becomes a filter for life. Stories like this one, which is so close to lived experience that I can still taste the lopsided birthday cake, become a way of processing weird stuff that happens.  Things don’t always go as planned.  We know that.  Stuff gets screwed up, one thing gets overthrown by another, she cuts her finger, the cat throws up… and you always have the option of getting worked up about it.

I have a history of becoming… oh, let’s say “irritated” when things don’t go my way.  At times, I’ve had trouble acting maturely when plans didn’t work.  I could be juvenile, not as compassionate as I wanted to be, not as charitable or as understanding.

But being a writer has helped me to see the big picture, even while the house is filling with smoke.  This too shall pass.  Whatever it is, we’ll get through it.  In the moment, we deal.  When the moment has passed, we realize it wasn’t so terrible after all.  After a while, we laugh.

That birthday dinner was terrible.  The worst!  But I didn’t stress about it.  I knew, even in the midst of catastrophe, that it would make a funny story.

Foxglove Lee is a former aspiring Broadway Baby who now writes queer fiction for young adults.  She tries not to be too theatrical, but her characters often take over. Follow Foxglove on Twitter @foxglovelee or stay tuned to her blog (foxglovelee.blogspot.com) for exciting announcements!

Congratulations, young writer, you live in a time unlike any other in modern history. It’s a time filled with incredible opportunities not seen since the advent of the printing press.You live in a time where your words can reach millions almost instantaneously. You live in a time where gatekeepers (like traditional publishers) no longer exist, though, honestly for some, a good edit could come in handy. You live in a time where the character reflecting your life no longer need to be veiled.

This, perhaps, is most important to you, as a LGBTQ writer.

Now, I’m not the most well-read guy. After the standard high-school literature and the smattering of classes I had in college, I’m mostly a popular fiction reader. With that background, I can’t think of a single, major character from a mainstream book that was gay until Dumbledore–and he was in what was, ostensibly, a children’s book!

When I realized what J.K. Rowling had done, my head nearly exploded. Not only had Dumbledore been revealed as the greatest wizard of all time in her world, he was the one character that main character, Harry–of course, trusted above all others. He was the source of knowledge, and the leader of the Order of the Phoenix, the good guys. But, he was gay. All of his other character traits, his stature in the book, were not affected in the slightest by his sexuality.

That was a lesson to me. If I break it down, it’s this: your characters don’t have to start out with the single foundation of being gay, straight or even asexual. Like our development as people, we don’t pop out of the womb desperate to watch Glee–even though we may know we are somehow different. We grow into who we are, and so should the characters we write.

So, how should this revelation affect our writing?

Well, I, for one, think that our characters and stories should come from our imaginations. Our characters will reveal themselves to us over time. If they’re gay or straight, shouldn’t stop you from writing their adventures, and don’t let that stop you from writing for a more general audience than just the “gay” marketplace. (Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of the same “coming out” stories. I want more than that for our community.)

It’s important that readers of all kinds find our work accessible and interesting. Gay characters–whether they’re main or incidental–help to create worlds that reflect real life and just might foster greater understanding in our world.

Living in his hometown of Seattle after graduating from Emerson, Reese Delaney works for a large corporation by day, and by night, creates new worlds of his very own. He loves coffee and the coffee crowd where he draws his writing inspiration.

During a recent #GayYA chat, Lucas and Robin both expressed dissatisfaction with the term “Just Happening to Be LGBTQ”.  We asked them to tell us more about it . This is Part 2 of the  post they wrote for us on “Just Happening to Be Gay”.  Do you agree?

Robin: I think there is a tendency to lump “about being LGBT” and “coming out stories” in together. Whereas I don’t think either one of those things can ever really stand alone. But whether a character is especially focused right now on coming out or on saving the world or on getting onto a reality TV show or whatever, if they’re LGBT, it’s going to matter.

If two boys are on a date it’s a different thing than a boy and girl going on a date. They have to think about things like “Is it safe for us to hold hands here?” “If he’s not out, then how will we handle it if we see someone we know while we’re out together?” etc. Straight couples, not so much, usually.

Lucas: Not to mention the unknowns of sexuality before the date even happens ― the LGBT community isn’t usually a “visible” minority. If a boy has a crush on another boy, the first thing he has to wonder is, “Is he gay too?” and potentially “How do I ask him out without the risk of getting punched in the face?”

Robin: Oh yes! Yes, this, so much! Looking for tiny signs and then being CRUSHED when you realize you misinterpreted them.

Lucas: Been there!

Robin: “I think she’s into me! She was totally flirting with me during gym! … Wait, why is she making out with that dude?”

OK, now I’m just having flashbacks. This is embarrassing. But anyway! Yes, all the tiny ways in which LGBTness makes day-to-day life, especially dating, a very different animal.

And no, as the writer you don’t have to dwell on those things ― we always have to make choices about what to include in our stories. So one could decide to leave that stuff out, if one were primarily concerned with making the character’s sexuality NOT the focus of the story. But then, I would argue, one would be a disingenuous storyteller. Disingenuous to LGBT teens, who deserve to have their entire stories told, because that hasn’t actually been happening for very long.

Lucas: I think even if you don’t focus on it in your writing, it still has to be present, or the character isn’t realistic.

I think there’s such a breadth of what stories do need to be told. All aspects of LGBT life, especially in high school.

It doesn’t need to be about coming out ― though we still absolutely need coming out stories. But LGBT teens need all the types of stories that straight teens have had for decades. We’ve had the stories about drug addiction, for instance. But how is that different when the addict is LGBT? Does that affect why they’re an addict, or how they deal with it, or the other problems they must deal with simultaneously?

Robin: Also? This may be controversial but I think even in gay-utopia alternate universes where coming/being out isn’t an issue, I still want to know stuff about the character’s LGBTness.

Lucas: Absolutely. Just because it’s a non-issue culturally doesn’t mean it’s not going to affect the person. They still have to deal with being in the minority, for instance.

And (speaking of controversial), while escapism is certainly nice, and I’d like to think about a world in which being LGBT is completely within the norm, if you manage to write a story where being LGBT would truly not affect the character at all (which as the entire previous discussion suggests, I don’t think is really possible), that seems to no longer be dealing with an issue that speaks to me as a gay person. To me, reading about an LGBT character is about dealing with being an LGBT person, even if just in the small ways.

Robin: Wow. Hmm. I can see that. I can also see the case, though, for losing yourself in a fairy-tale-like world with yourself cast as the hero, where you don’t have to suspend disbelief about the heterosexual romance. I think that holds particular value for teens who truly just want to forget about their LGBTness for a while.

Like, I watched Princess Bride over and over and over when I was eleven, and if there had been a Princess Bride with Wesley as a chick, I’d have watched it at least 80 gazillion more times.

Lucas: Ha! A fair point! And I certainly can’t speak for all LGBT people or writers out there. But even then, as we’ve discussed, it would make a difference to the story, small as it may be.

Robin: Right! If, in Princess Bride, Wesley had been a chick, it would have totally emasculated Prince Humperdinck. Even better comeuppance! But I would want to see Prince Humperdinck actively addressing the fact that Wesley was a chick and that he, the Prince, was obviously not doing it for Buttercup in that department.

But mostly they’d all still just have spent the movie running around the hills swordfighting and such, same as ever.

Lucas: Haha, yep! And Buttercup would too have been dealing with more than just not being in love with Humperdinck.

No matter the situation, making a character LGBT is going to affect the story. Even if it’s just in a small way! It is, in fact, those small ways that matter most.

They’re what make the difference between a character trait like that being tacked on, and having actual organic, realistic characters and situations.

Robin: Yes. And the dangerous thing is when you try to write around those traits in the name of making sure your character “just happens to be” whatever.

Well-rounded characters are well-rounded in every single aspect of their being. You need to sit and think about the impact of every single aspect of your character’s identity on how they act, how their lives work, etc. Even when it’s hard. As it often is when we’re writing about characters who are different from us.

Lucas: And it needs to be a conscious choice. If you do it, do it because it’s what right, because it’s what you want to do. Not just to have a token LGBT character (who “just happens to be” LGBT)!

For those of us who are, it does affect us in huge ways. There’s not a day goes by that the fact that I’m gay doesn’t make some difference in my life. Even if it’s that I had the opportunity to take part in this chat!

Robin: Haha, yes. (Although of course our ever-lovable non-LGBT friends are welcome to chat as well. GayYA is a discrimination-free zone!)

What about the rest of you? How do you feel about the “just happens to be” terminology, if you’ve come across it before?

Lucas J.W. Johnson writes speculative fiction, queer fiction, and YA fiction — often all at once. Visit him at http://lucasjwjohnson.com, http://silverstringmedia.com or on Twitter at @floerianthebard.

Robin Talley writes LGBT YA and apparently spends a lot of time thinking about lesbian versions of Cary Elwes. Visit her at http://www.robintalley.com or on Twitter at @robin_talley.

Young adult is a category filled with the documentation of firsts—first love being one of the most common. Any story about a teenager is going to be about self-discovery. So it stands to reason that a lot of books about GLBT (or “queer” to cover the gamut and then some) teens will be in large part about the process of coming out.

Personally, I was 28 when I came out and it felt like being 15 again. So if being a teen is about coming out, coming out can sometimes seem an awful lot like being a teen.

That said, some readers are beginning to bemoan the lack of other stories in Y/A with major queer characters. Does every book about queer teens have to be about coming out?

I say absolutely not. Coming out may be an angsty, teen-y experience in many ways, but it is not always so very angsty as to merit a whole novel. Other stories need telling, too. For the kid (or adult reading over a kid’s shoulder) for whom coming out isn’t or wasn’t an earth-shattering process, or for the ones who just want to read about something else, having lived enough of it already, those stories could and should take all kinds of forms.

The fact is that once you’ve gotten past that initial hump of coming out to yourself and to the most important people in your world, it’s not all that interesting to be queer anymore. “Gay” Y/A is going to start needing more than “gay” as a theme if it hopes to engage readers.

As a lesbian in an eight-year (extralegal) marriage with two kids under seven, I can attest to the fact that marriage is pretty much just marriage. My annoyances with my partner are much the same as my straight friends’ annoyances with their husbands. And while living in a heterosexist culture may impact my life in negative ways (eg: the extralegality of my marriage), so does living in a patriarchal culture as a woman, so does living in a racist culture as the (white) mother of African American children

Cultural biases definitely impact people’s lives, but let’s face it, the romance novels people love don’t dwell very much on how much sexism sucks, even though the main characters are usually women. The stories are much more about the specific details of the main characters’ circumstances. While sexism may put certain hurdles in a heroine’s way—perhaps she has to buck convention and marry someone her father doesn’t like—the story is about her relationship with the hero—not the argument with her father.

It is not the duty of fiction writers to make anyone a better person, nor to educate anyone nor to throw life rafts to the drowning. But fiction does have the potential for those kinds of effects (and their opposites and much in between). And if expanding the horizons of readers in general, giving queer kids a glimpse of how It Gets Better, or just affirming that they are people, are people, are people just like their peers, is anywhere at all on a writer’s list of goals, portraying the just-plain-human nuances of relationships between characters who are also queer, should be a to-do.

There are plenty of ways to do it. I have a young adult work-in-progress set in the past and another (not Y/A) work-in-progress set in the future. Both feature many lesbian characters and include strong romantic subplots. Neither book deals much with “coming out” or homophobia, but I consider both to be realistic portrayals of lesbian life and love. How can that be?

My historical story is set in the 1870s and ‘80s, partly in the slums of New York City and partly in the mining country of the Arizona Territory. One of my main characters has been passing as male since running away from an orphan’s home at age nine. At the end of the story, s/he is 19 and happy to be a “man.” Her love interest is conventionally female and their relationship is not worthy of much scrutiny because it passes as heterosexual. As for the self-discovery that they love members of the same sex, it would be historically inaccurate to have them too upset about that. For one thing, passionate relationships between women were acceptable—even committed, life-long ones—in the Victorian era, for another thing, both of my characters accept the passing boy as male. S/he is male-with-a-difference to be sure, but basically, male.

The futuristic story is simply set far enough into that future to imagine that people just don’t care that much about sexuality and gender boundaries the way they do now. One reader was confused by this. She wanted to know why these women weren’t more worried about the impact of being lesbians. Then she wanted me to add an explanation to the story of why they weren’t. I reminded her that in the 21^st century, we rarely worry about being traded into arranged marriages as teens by our fathers, the way women did five hundred years ago. Nor do we ever sit around discussing how nice it is that we need not worry about that anymore. (Well, most of the time we don’t!)

Instead of being about being lesbians, my futuristic story is about challenges to the human race, as faced by two lead characters who struggle with having opposite values while being really attracted to each other. Oh, and they’re both women.

If we can’t imagine different worlds, we’ll never solve any of the problems in this one. Those different worlds could be frontier pasts, futuristic starships, or the internal landscape of an ordinary kid in the contemporary world who just cares more about the fight he had with his boyfriend yesterday than the fact that he has a boyfriend, rather than a girlfriend.

Shannon LC Cate is a write-from-home lesbian housewife and adoptive mom. She writes about writing at ShannonLCCate.com and about family life at Peterscrossstation.wordpress.com. You can find her on Twitter as @LilySea.

Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff is a story of friends lost and families found, place sought and love gained, but the book will be remembered for more than a heartbreaking and moving story. But I wish you would stop reading this review now and read the book yourself. Right now. This will be here when you get back.

Because what makes this book so remarkable is the way in which Brezenoff takes a fairly typical story of angst and trauma, a story no less powerful despite its archetypal structure, and puts it in a form that forces the reader to confront deep seeded notions about the idea of gender.

The reason I wish you would all read the book before reading this review is because the teacher in me wants to know what your initial, uncoached reactions to the protagonist, Kid, and Scout are. I won’t say “unbiased,” because the structure of this novel is designed to uncover and challenge biases with regards to gender.

You see, Brezenoff does something few writers have attempted. He presents a novel in which genders the main character and the main character’s love interest are not revealed, leaving it to the reader to decide. Brezenoff gives Kid, the protagonist, love interests of both genders, so the reader can’t assume Kid is gay or straight and thus boy or girl.

I made assumptions based on the characters. I won’t tell you what I assumed about Kid and Scout, but I did a lot of thinking about my choices, and more than anything, I realized that gender is more than boy/girl. And freeing characters of the expectations of gender takes a lot more than leaving off gendered pronouns and assigning characters gender-neutral names. At the end of the story, the reader is left with this question: why did I assign the genders to Kid and Scout that I ultimately chose?

My choices were undoubtedly marked my personal history and experiences. If a person behaves in this way, then it is highly likely this person is a boy or vice versa. But another reason I made the choices I did is the connotation one of the names evoked for me, a name tied in my mind to a long literary tradition — I don’t want to say it outright lest it influence your reading, but you can probably figure it out, you smarty smart pants readers you. Does the connotation I noted make me right about this character? Certainly not, but what it tells me is that gender is more than pronouns and names and preferences. The concept of gender is reinforced by hundreds of years of cultural history, and even the most careful scrubbing of pronouns from a text will not leave the story truly open. Ideas we didn’t even know we carried will make their way into our work and our world. There is always a choice to be made.

As I read the story, I was always mindful that the choices I was making as a reader were based on assumptions both surface of my thoughts as well as deeply internalized cultural information. And I really I wished that I could teach this book in schools. Alas, language and content mean that I could probably never (well, definitely never, here in my home state) teach this in secondary schools. However, I do believe that Brezenoff’s book opens the door for more artists to take up the challenge to create stories, songs, movies, paintings, etc. that challenge long-held notions of gender, of what it means to be normal, what it means to love, what it means to belong. I don’t think gender differences will ever be neutralized — our bodies are different, and face it. Sameness is boring. What I hope it that our differences — differences in gender, in taste, in choice, in life and love — will remind us all how awesome it is to be alive and to share this world with one another.

Debra Touchette is an assistant librarian, grad student, blogger and wanna-be teacher. She blogs about her reading at Library Lass: Adventures in Reading, and is @threelefthands on Twitter (but mostly just to see what shenanigans @maureenjohnson and @realjohngreen are up to). She is often accused of being to serious and thinking too much, but she figures there are worse things, like awkwardly writing about herself in the third person all the time. But maybe someday she’ll lighten up, get a puppy, lay off the coffee. Or not.