About YA Pride

The Basics

YA Pride is a website dedicated to promoting and discussing LGBTQIAP+ Young Adult literature. We publish quarterly issues on topics related to the LGBTQIAP+ YA literary community. These issues contain author interviews, guest posts, booklists, criticism/reviews, and more. We publish occasional pieces in between these issues when we feel they are necessary.

We are in the process of applying for non-profit status, but are currently entirely volunteer run, sustained by income from our other jobs, and generous donations from community members.

The Why

Every teen should be able to see themselves reflected in the books they read. Unfortunately, LGBTQIAP+ teens often are unable to. We want to change that.

All of our team members have experienced firsthand the life-changing (and sometimes even life-saving) experience of seeing ourselves reflected in fiction. Many of our lives were changed the first time we saw ourselves reflected in a book. We want to make sure every teen has access to that.

LGBTQIAP+ teens experience feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and depression at higher rates than their straight, cisgender peers. These rates are exacerbated when they are also people of color, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized. Seeing yourself reflected in fiction can restore hope, decrease feelings of aloneness and isolation, increase connection to community, change negative perceptions of self, and open doors to new possibilities. Additionally, straight, cisgender teens will also benefit from reading these books– both for the increase in empathy/understand as well as the fact that they’re great stories! Of course, representation alone cannot fix all of the problems that LGBTQIAP+ teens face. But it can make a substantial emotional difference, and that can change everything.

The History

When we launched in early 2011, under the name GayYA.Org, the world of LGBTQIAP+ YA literature looked very different than it does now. Each year, only a handful of books that featured LGBTQIAP+ YA characters were published. Authors were routinely asked by publishers to “straighten” their characters, or told that the publishing house had already published a book with a gay character earlier that year (as if only one would be enough!). Some of this was driven by simple homophobia, but most of it stemmed from the belief that books with LGBTQIAP+ characters wouldn’t sell. The novels that were published were deemed “issue” books, and were usually used to teach some sort of lesson. Most of them followed a routine and simplistic coming out narrative. Almost all of them featured white, able-bodied, thin, cisgender, middle class characters, and were written by authors who identified the same way. In short? It was a pretty dire situation.

Since then, the state of LGBTQIAP+ YA has changed a lot. There has been an energetic expanse in the last few years, characterized by an increasing diversity of authors, genres, identities, and narratives. More and more books are being published each year, to the point where it feels almost impossible to keep track of them all. Important conversations about representation and power are being had consistently. More teens are being connected with books that have people like themselves in them.

YA Pride has also changed. On a basic level, our initial goal was to mobilize a clear and active market for LGBTQIAP+ YA, to make it clear to publishers that there was a large group of people who would buy and support these books. As the amount of LGBTQIAP+ YA being published increased, this goal has more or less been accomplished, and our focus has swung to other work. On a deeper level, when YA Pride first launched, it was run by two white teenagers who were not fully aware of systemic inequality and their own privilege. As a result, we centered the people who had the most power: we mostly published pieces written by white people, allowed cisgender authors to have an authoritative voice on trans representation, and prioritized able-bodied perspectives of disabled people. Through a combination of personal growth, education, and being held accountable by the community, this has changed.

The Now

This is not a simple narrative of progress– in fact, it is really important that we resist that story. Publishing has failed and hurt the LGBTQIAP+ community, and it is important to call out the wounds that we see: fetishization of gay men (usually by white women); sidelining of F/F relationships; racist practices, behaviors, beliefs, and people who have abused, bullied, and gatekeeped authors, editors, agents and other publishing professionals of color; the fact that white authors get to tell stories about characters of color, that cisgender authors get to tell stories about transgender characters, that able-bodied people get to tell stories about disabled characters, at the expense of people from those identities getting to write those stories; the erasure and stigmitization of asexual, aromantic, bi, and pan people. This lack of equitable representation and ability to share stories is a form of emotional and psychological violence. Many people with stories to tell have been unable to tell them. Many people desperately seeking representations of themselves have been unable to find them. This is something to grieve and fight against.

Importantly, these issues are not something to be pushed aside to deal with “later,” after we achieve equitable representation for white, able-bodied, middle class LGBTQIAP+ characters. Trickle down social justice does not work. These inequities must always be at the center of our work going forward.

At the same time, through the combined hard work of librarians, booksellers, and educators, as well as LGBTQIAP+ rights activists who have worked to destigmatize queerness, teens now have increased access to these books. That provides an opportunity we haven’t had before.

All of these things are true at once, and it is important to hold them in that complexity, resisting the urge for one simplistic “progress” narrative. Now, we have a collection of stories to build on, but the inequities, stigmatization, racism, and gatekeeping of publishing and the YA community are still active. And yet, we have an opportunity to provide teens with something that no generation in living memory has had: a place in which to playfully, joyfully, and safely explore and create themselves and their identities. LGBTQIAP+ YA is not just a random hodge-podge of books that happen to feature queer characters. It is a collection of stories that collectively provide teens with this place. Now, after building on decades of work, we are at the beginning of a new stage, with unprecedented possibilities for what we can include in this space. So what are we going to do with it?

The Future

What do we want to create from here? What do we want to see as a result of this work? What are we doing this for? What stories do we want to make sure teens have access to? These are all questions our team has been asking ourselves and that the community is considering collectively. We don’t have all the answers, but we are committed to creating a space in which we can explore these questions together.