UPDATE: Are Top Literary Agents 'Straightening' Gay Characters in YA Books?

FROM 2 DAYS AGO: I just read some interesting news. Writers Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith posted a disheartening piece about agents discouraging gay characters from YA novels.

Here's the T:

We are published authors who co-wrote a post-apocalyptic young adult novel. When we set out to find an agent for it, we expected to get some rejections. But we never expected to be offered representation… on the condition that we make a gay character straight, or cut him out altogether.

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.
Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

I can't believe it and I can at the same time. In fantasy, you can't be gay? That's totally ridic! Please read the rest of the post here

UPDATE: The claims are false!

It describes the experience an author-writing team had with an agent who told them that he or she would offer representation if the authors would either make a gay male character straight or cut him from the book all together. Though this may have happened with previous authors and agents, this time it is completely untrue.



We had read the manuscript, and had spoken to the authors to learn more about the story. Later, when this article was posted, we discussed in-house how awful it was they'd had to go through this.



Then we got a surprising call from an agent friend who had heard that this article was supposedly about us.

Initially we thought it was just an unfortunate rumor. 



Then the emails started pouring in

Did we know what people were saying about us?

Why were they saying this?

This can’t be true!

Well. It isn’t true.

Let me repeat this: there is nothing in that article concerning our response to their manuscript that is true.

More here