Expletive Deleted: Teaching YA Literature with Gay and Lesbian Characters

In the November 1998 issue of English Journal, Deborah Jean Kinder chronicles a "journey of self-discovery" made by Kari, the first lesbian student who ever came out to her. Kinder (1998: 69) attributes Kari's successful passage to a "connection with a wide range of forms of literacy," including texts with lesbian characters. At the time, Kinder wished that she had known of more young adult (YA) texts with gay or lesbian characters to recommend to Kari. Kinder's article touched me, because a dear family friend had recently come out to me. I was in the midst of my own process of understanding, which included reading YA literature for an annotated bibliography of more than eighty fiction texts with gay or lesbian themes.

While I began the bibliography at least in part for personal reasons—to attempt to understand my friend's experience and to locate books that her daughter could read—I finished it for academic purposes. I believed that there were sound pedagogical and social reasons to include YA literature with gay or lesbian themes in school libraries and curricula and hoped that my bibliography would be useful. Little did I know that in my next academic life, as a graduate assistant teaching first-year composition, my belief in the importance of this literature would resurface when my students challenged the use of essays with gay or lesbian subjects and essays written by self-identified gays and lesbians.

Although the students themselves were predominantly white, midwestern, and middle-class, they received without objection the essays I taught by Amy Tan, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., authors of great ethnic diversity; only writings by and about gays seemed to arouse their opposition. While Molly O'Neill's (1999) "A Surgeon's War on Breast Cancer" provides an excellent model for a profile assignment, they contended that it was in our textbook only because Dr. Love, the essay's subject, is a lesbian. Thomas R. Stoddard's (1999) "Gay Marriages: Make Them Legal" was offensive to them, even though it makes a powerful argument. Indeed, if they resisted texts about "people who happen to be homosexual simply living out their lives" (Bauer 1994), like Love, how could they consider a rhetorical argument in support of gay marriage, like Stoddard's?

Offensiveness is a matter of perspective, however, and it can be changed. I was tempted to share with my students a conversation I had had with the daughter of my gay friend. The daughter had just finished reading a YA book with a gay character who is ridiculed and harassed for his orientation. "Aunt Denise," she said worriedly, "that book you loaned me has the 'F word' in it." I didn't recall that, and I must have looked puzzled, because she tugged at my sleeve and said, "You know—fag."

In the YA classic The Chocolate War (Cormier 1974: 162-63), Jerry Renault says that "the worst thing in the world [is] to be called queer." A Chris Crutcher (1991: 146-47) character, Loui Banks, agrees: a "homosexual [is] just about the worst thing a guy could be." It still is. "Homo. Switch hitter. Queer. Queen. Faggot. And some so bad," Loui continues, he "won't say them."

I wish that my students had shared Loui's reservations, but they did not. As a result, I did not tell them about variations on the "F word," but I did tell them that their assertion was partly correct: I had intentionally chosen a textbook emphasizing diversity, so it was no mistake that the book included an essay about a lesbian. In spite of my students' assumption that certain essays cannot stand alone as literature merely because they are written by or about members of a nondominant culture, literary value need not be sacrificed to "fairness."

Perhaps if my students had grown up reading Annie on My Mind (Garden...