Gay in YA

Recently, while watching my new show The Fosters, I witnessed what was probably the youngest homosexual kiss in the history of television. Thirteen-year-olds Jude and Connor share their first kiss in what was a natural progression to a sweet, youthful love story. It took me by surprise when I realized that the portrayal of LGBTQ community in media is somewhat strange─ we’re taught to believe it’s an adult thing, as though it’s something people transition into, not something people are born into. To make matters worse, the video was age restricted on YouTube, while racier scenes featuring heterosexual characters are given a free pass.

This got me thinking about the portrayal of LGBTQ characters in YA novels. Thankfully, literature has seems to have embraced characters from the community with open(er) arms than television. It’s not that I have read tons of novels featuring gay characters. Most of the books I have read featured straight people. However, I have come across some wonderful portrayals that I believe played a role in shaping my perception of the community.

First, let’s talk about a novel that was primarily about being gay.  When Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden first came out, being gay was a much bigger deal than it is today. This is a story of a girl falling in love with another girls. It starts out as a friendship, as the protagonist are still confused about their sexuality, but turns into a love affair that is no different from any other love affair, but is still condemned by society. Of course, I didn’t really relate to the challenges because I have never faced them myself, but I enjoyed the book and treated it like any other love story in which the leads are struggling to stay together.

There are some writers who focus on the LGBTQ community. David Levithan is one of them. His novel, Every Day, is about a soul that lives in a different body each day, was an attempt to show how we fall in love with people, not sexes. I didn’t agree with the philosophy completely, because at the end of the day, even gay people don’t fall in love with straight people, but I understood it. Recently, I read his short story Your Temporary Santa and fell in love with it. In the story, a gay relationship was treated just like a straight one, and I found it to be the best in a collection of short stories. Another memorable David Levithan book is Naomi and Ely’s no kiss list, about a young girl who has loved her gay best friend ever since she can remember and is faced with the need to move on.

The Perks of Being Wallflower had Patrick. What I liked about Patrick was that he was a vibrant, colorful character who wasn’t defined by his sexuality. He was, first and foremost, a good friend and remained so even through tumultuous periods of his life. I felt his pain when his relationship with Brad came to a brutal end. What happened to them, I wouldn’t wish it on any couple.

The last book I read with a gay protagonist was Ask the Passengers by A.S. King. It made me realize that even in a country like the US, which is supposed to be much more liberal than India, being gay is still a taboo for a lot of people. The truth is that homophobics are not villains. They are people like you and me, with families and friends and jobs to go to, and as long as you are straight, they’re probably going to be very nice to you. They’re not evil monsters. It’s just that they have a rather straight and narrow mindset, venturing out of which scares them. Not just people, but whole neighborhoods can be homophobic, which is especially true in more conservative cultures.

I’m a heterosexual female and perhaps my opinions regarding this matter are not entirely agreeable. But the truth is that I have never met an openly gay person in my life, which saddens me because statistics show that it’s impossible never to meet a homosexual, which basically indicates that millions of men and women are still in the closet. What’s sadder is that I have heard stories of closeted Indian homosexuals living lives as married men/women. These books have, in their own small way, helped me see that the LGBTQ community consists of people who are not very different from me. I think if more such books were written in India, we would be able to understand each other better. Maybe by the time my children are my age, people will just be people and won’t carry labels like ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ and neither will books.