There’s been a lot of discussion, debate and argument in the past year on the topic of minority characters in YA. I won’t rehash any of the more famous controversies that have come up recently, because you’re probably already familiar with them if you follow the industry at all, except to point out that there are still remarkably few YA books that go against the white-straight-cisgender norm. This, despite the fact that everyone, from agents to editors to authors, apparently agrees that the status quo is horrendously outdated.
But like I said, plenty of unpublished YA authors will enthusiastically tell you that they have a gay or bisexual or Asian character in their work in progress. Even better, many of these people are writing fantasy or science fiction, a field still typically dominated by masses of straight, white characters. ‘Unusual’ (read: conveniently tragic) characters are thankfully no longer relegated to the infamous ‘issues’ novel. This is a good thing.
Most of the time, anyway.
Click to see what TVTropes has to say!
(Yes, I’m going to start complaining. Before I do, I should point out that I’m not talking about any specific person, book or forum exchange in any of what I’m about to say. If you think I might be talking about you…well, I’m not.)
How many of the unpublished (or even published) authors congratulating themselves on their inclusiveness are writing about gay or non-white main characters? From what I’ve seen, it seems to be relatively few. Forums like Absolute Write are full of people writing about gay best friends and mixed-race siblings, but most people still seem to go right back to what they’re comfortable with when it comes to choosing a main character.
It’s all too easy to give side characters a few ‘minority’ traits and call it a day. I’m not saying that that’s what most people are intentionally doing, or that they’re doing it at all, but a lot of the time it’s what ends up happening anyway: we get a stilted conversation at the beginning of the book where (for example) the main character’s sister casually mentions her girlfriend, at which point said sister proceeds to do exactly nothing for the next 350 pages. In situations like this, I can’t help but feel that the gay character’s sole purpose is to demonstrate the main character’s inclusiveness – they’re fine with having a gay sibling, so they must be a good person, right?
I get the impression that a lot of people feel they need to include minority characters in their writing, or that they’ve subconsciously turned inclusiveness into a kind of competition – I’ll see your black Jewish lesbian, and I’ll raise you my transgender Chinese exchange student. If your sole motivation for including a minority character in your novel boils down to ‘All my friends are doing it!’….well, you might want to stop and think about what you’re actually trying to accomplish. It’s very, very easy to jump into a forum thread with ‘Oh, I’ve got a mixed race character too, LOL’, but getting that character right is a hell of a lot harder.
You also might want to take a closer look at whether you’re playing right into unfortunate stereotypes. Yes, people do it accidentally. Yes, even people with perfectly good intentions. And yes, it can happen even in science fiction, and even if you’ve set your novel in a Star Trek-esque utopia where discrimination of all kinds are a thing of the past. If your motivation is shallow, there’s a good chance your characters will be as well.
To deal specifically with science fiction for a moment, there’s an unfortunate tendency among a certain class of writers to wildly appropriate real-life cultures while creating futuristic or alien societies. Remember James Cameron’s Avatar by James Cameron? Remember how the blue alien things were exactly like the worst stereotypes of Native Americans? Remember how you sat in open-mouthed astonishment throughout the entire excruciating film because you naively assumed that nobody was stupid enough to do this kind of crap any more, yet there it was, projected onto a cinema screen in migraine-inducing 3D? Yeah. Don’t appropriate. (If you’re asking yourself what ‘appropriate’ means in this context, you have some serious Googling to do.)
Finally, I’d like to caution against any temptation you might have to become a Minority Warrior. Typically, this is where a white author/director/journalist takes it upon themselves to solve the Plight of Those Other People, with disastrous results. See, for example, Dances With Wolves, The Help, virtually every Hollywood movie ever made about race relations in the USA, and any book whose central message boils down to ‘Racism is bad, you guys’. It doesn’t have to involve race, though; you can just as easily be a Minority Warrior about sexual orientation or feminism simply by assuming you know more about the experiences of your rescuee group than they themselves do. Thus any stereotyping becomes magically transmuted into ‘authenticity’, and your poorly-handled subplot where a minority character dies to teach your hero a valuable life lesson is cathartic rather than, you know, an abomination.
It’s really tricky for white writers to write main characters of color and be confident that they’re fulfilling the need for authenticity. Not all writers are this aware of the potential implications of these choices, as you pointed out.
I do think white writers have some obligation to not contribute to the vast white universe that makes up science fiction and fantasy. The best friend of color or the gay sibling might feel one note, but I think it’s still progress. Maybe it’s a baby step, but it’s moving things in the right direction.
But I think the real solution is not so much focusing on whether writers who aren’t of color are including more characters of color, whatever the character’s status. It’s crucial to bring forward the YA writers of color who are marginalized by the publishing industry due to concerns that their work won’t sell. (I’m too lazy to look up cites now, but there are tons).
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Yeah, ideally we’d have a lot more writers of color get their work published without it being pigeon-holed into the ‘niche’ sections of bookshops. Again, though, this doesn’t seem to be happening despite the fervent protests of everyone in the publishing industry saying that no, they really do want to read more books that break out of the ‘everyone is white’ mould. Apparently they’re just not super-keen on publishing them.
I do think white writers have some obligation to not contribute to the vast white universe that makes up science fiction and fantasy. The best friend of color or the gay sibling might feel one note, but I think it’s still progress. Maybe it’s a baby step, but it’s moving things in the right direction.
There’s nothing wrong with the ‘[x] best friend’ character as long as they really are characters instead of just window dressing. But all too often, they really are just window dressing, and I get the impression from browsing writing boards that the purpose behind their creation is, a lot of the time at least, to score PC points. I think a good rule of thumb is that if you’re trying to be inclusive, make sure your minority characters have actual arcs of their own. I doubt many teenage readers from minority populations are going to be thrilled to see themselves represented only as bit characters who disappear in the second act and contribute nothing to the plot.
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Side note–I just noticed this was written by Sean, not Phoebe. I swear, you have very similar voices! You guys should totally do a joint project
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We’ve considered doing that in the past, actually
I like to think our similar voices comes from a shared foundation of 100% pure genius. Yes, let’s just assume that’s the case.
(Ironically, I just spotted a mistake in the first sentence of the blog post. Whoops.)
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I am now officially cheerleading for the joint Sean-Phoebe project. We can give you a celebrity smashed up name, like Sebe (pronounced “see bee”) or something. On the other hand, this is clearly a joint project already, mind meld and all
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Sean’s lying. The truth is, he’s my clone.
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I knew it! Or your twin, separated at birth and reunited via the interwebs (romantic sigh).
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(I heard they share a brain in a jar somewhere!)
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I am a gay woman and have written gay characters into my manuscripts. Both as secondary characters, and in one novel as a primary character. I have been told, by an industry professional, how hard of a sell this can be and that I should think of main romances as being hetero. So it’s the age old conundrum – Sell out and make a smidge of money from this insanity making passion, or hold firm, and potentially never have your writing see the light of day. Alas, I am not entirely noble and it’s a really hard call.
But I do have a real mosh in my current WIP – white female MC, gay white male BFF, and two potential love interests, (hetero), one half-Indian (Asian), and one African-American. I think for me, since I have no interest in white males, it’s easier to write a hetero romance if the love interest has something unique about him. (No offense to the white males out there, it’s just a thing.) But your post has really got me thinking about how to have this melting pot be authentic and not just there. And about the arcs of each character.
Great post. And you’re both cute – you should totally do a mash-up.
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Ouch, I’m sorry to hear you’ve had a tough time with trying to get published. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of people saying that they’ve been ‘politely warned’ (as it were) about the difficulties inherent in getting a book with a front-and-center gay romance subplot published…despite protests from seemingly every publishing professional under the sun that this no longer happens.
Actually, if you’re okay with doing it, I’d be really grateful if you got in touch via e-mail or something and gave me a bit more detail about your particular situation. I can see why you want to keep something like that anonymous, given that you’re trying to get published, so I’d obviously never talk about it on the blog. It’s just that I’m close to finishing a YA sci-fi book where the main character is gay (and there’s some romance), so I’m sort of curious about the kinds of experiences people are having trying to get that sort of thing published. But if you’re not comfortable with that, feel free to ignore this request!
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You are welcome to e-mail me. I can’t name people but can share my experience.
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I actually DO have a twin. An identical one. Only it’s not Phoebe. (Also it’s a guy. Obviously.)
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Many claps for you.
Very nicely said.
The back-patting especially can be infuriating. It’s one thing to write well-rounded minority characters but the back-patting and crowing is always by the people who write nothing but stereotypical shells – the giggling gay BFF who apparently doesn’t count as an actual guy, for example.
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That’s very true. Glee is a perfect example; it really tries to say that it’s using minorities, and that they should be treated equally, but Kurt is a huge stereotype.
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One thing that you left out is a gender bias: in many books TV shows and movies, even those written by women, there are more men than women present. Statistically, in TV shows, there are twice as many male characters as female characters (this is as of 2006; I have no idea what it is now.) This may derive from the fact that it’s generally okay to use stereotypes for genders (just the main two; but then again, third-gender characters have almost no place in books TV shows and movies.). Writers may feel that stereotypes for men are easier to write than stereotypes for women, so they unconsciously create more male characters than female, because they can think of more characteristics for the males. (This only applies to comedies; dramas are about even in the men to women ratio.)
The other thing that I have to say about this is that it’s often unconscious when writers do the best-friend-is-a-minority thing. Just take Cassandra Claire’s Mortal Instruments; the side characters (Alec, the gay guy; Magnus, a bisexual Asian, Maia, the biracial girl, Simon, the Jew) are minorities, but the main characters (Clary and Jace) are not minorities in any way. Claire probably didn’t intend to do this, as many of the stories involve their being minorities, but she did anyway, probably unconsciously. I say this mostly because I’ve done it a lot without ever meaning to.
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I think it’s very easy to do that if you’re not a member of any marginalised group yourself, because we’re constantly surrounded by normative influences (advertising, TV, movies, book covers, and so on). To use one simple example, it wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I even considered writing a story with a gay protagonist, because of course any romance in a book had to be heterosexual. Not only did I fall for that despite being gay, I never even questioned it.
I think that’s why consciousness-raising is such an important thing to do, and I’m glad that a lot of it seems to be going on in blogs and websites these days.
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