If you live in the UK and enjoy reading or working with LGBTQ young adult novels, you have probably noticed something significant by now: most of the novels you read are US novels. The hope is that this will change soon.
Read MoreSara Farizan’s debut YA novel If You Could Be Mine deftly explores the cross-section of gender, gender identity, and sexual identity for a lesbian teen in modern Iran.
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In 2012 I counted how many LGBT YA novels were published. In comparison to statistics on LGBT YA from 1969-2011, it looked like the representation of LGBT characters in YA was continuing to improve. This year there is both an increase and a decrease in the number of LGBT young adult books published. How does that work? Well, things are complicated. Additionally, things don’t look so good for girls. Here’s the overview:
94 YA books published in 2013 include LGBT main characters or are about LGBT issues
29 of those books were published by the Big 5 ((Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster)) or mainstream publishers ((These are general interest publishers that range in size from small to pretty big: Algonquin Young Readers, Scholastic, Candlewick Press, Carolrhoda Lab, Entangled, Flux, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Kensington, Running Press, Skyscape/Amazon, Soho Teen, and Strange Chemistry.))
65 of those books were published by LGBT publishers ((Bella Books, Bold Strokes Books, Harmony Ink, Prizm Books, Queerteen Press, Tiny Satchel Press))