SIGNAL BOOST: SAY YES TO GAY YA

[mangacat201]

Originally posted by darkspirited1 at SIGNAL BOOST: SAY YES TO GAY YA

This comes from an article by rachelmanija

Our novel Stranger has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is
gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki's romance, like the heterosexual ones in
the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.

An agent from a major agency, one which represents a bestselling YA novel in the same genre as ours, called us.

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.

This isn't about that specific agent; we'd gotten other rewrite requests before this one. Previous agents had also offered to take a second look if we did rewrites… including cutting the viewpoint of Yuki, the gay character.

It's time to stand up and demand change. Spread the word everywhere if you are just as angry and outraged by this.

Comments

[lemanya.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated: I know a girl named Yuki Nakamura, so to see her name pop up threw me off for a moment and I had no idea what this was about.

That is pretty shit though- literature seems to be the only place that homosexuality wasn't the biggest controversy ever created. Until now it seems. But this is good! Sort of! This kind of awareness should help the breaking down of lines between so called "gay literature" and mainstream stuff.

[rachelmanija]

That is hilarious. I have only ever met men with that name.

I thought you would be interested to hear that we sold Stranger (aka "the Yes Gay YA novel") to Viking. Click on this link for a post with more details. Thank you so much for your support!