Winterson’s protagonist grows up in a strict Pentecostal household, and believes that she is destined to become a missionary. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson Garden’s story follows two teenage friends who find themselves falling in love-and struggling to keep the secret from their families and friends. Garden’s 1982 novel is now regarded as queer canon, but it was once banned in school libraries. I felt like that was a good indicator of a shift in perspective.” “It was just there among all the other teen romances. “It wasn’t put into the LGBTQ section or anything,” LaCour says, a smile in her voice. There was her name, alongside best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, Sarah Dessen, and others. She almost walked out the door in disappointment-and then her eye landed on the teen romance display. She hunted around the new releases, the special interest section, the young adult table-nothing. “They’re saying, ‘We love that Juliet made out with the librarian who brought her cookies we love that America and her girlfriend broke up but it didn’t devastate America.’ And I’m saying, ‘Hey, little queer babe, it’s okay if you get your heart broken, because it’s okay to move forward.’ ”Īfter author Nina LaCour published Everything Leads to You in 2015, she made a trip to Barnes & Noble, looking to see one of her books on the shelf. “We’re now talking to the younger version of ourselves, and they’re talking to us,” Rivera says. “We’re hoping the next gen grows up a little less fragmented than we did.” Wright is the author of 27 Hours, a novel following two queer teens in the midst of a battle to save the galaxy. “I think that’s why a lot of us do this,” says Tristina Wright. So instead, young LGBTQ+ readers turned to adult fiction, or comics, or fan fiction, or zines-any version of literature that depicted queer life. Sometimes they were banned sometimes demonstrators burned them in public protest. YA fiction from a LGBTQIA perspective isn’t new, necessarily-seminal books like Annie on My Mind (1982) and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) explored young adulthood from the perspectives of queer girls, though they didn’t always make it into schools and libraries. Last year, comic book creator Gabby Rivera made headlines with a new superhero series that starred America Chavez, Marvel’s first-ever queer Latinx caped crusader. Schwab and Rainbow Rowell have made their queer characters integral to their plots (whether they’re set in sci-fi universes or Hogwarts-like wizard schools), where Nina LaCour won awards with Hold Still, her touching novel about a queer teenager experiencing loss and love. The future of queer women’s representation in pop culture isn’t in L Word reboots or the upcoming Wonder Woman sequel-it’s in young adult fiction.
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