From Sympathy to Empathy

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Author: Ella Hebe

The majority of LGBT young adult literature, however, still comes in the genre of "realistic fiction" and is primarily character-driven. From 1980 to 1995, most of the LGBT characters in YA fiction were secondary, often dead or killed off during the narrative, or run out of town and separated from community and/or family, as in Bette Greene's The Drowning of Stephan Jones, Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind,]&c-queline Woodson's The House You Pass on the Way, and Aidan Chambers' Dance on My Grave. While these texts might teach sympathy, encouraging young readers to feel sorry for the dead, displaced, or wholesale cartier jewellery disconnected characters, they do little to engage readers empathetically with characters who exist only as plot devices or subjects for still-living characters to talk about. The message is hard to miss: LGBT characters are most useful if they're dead or gone. This is not the reality that students need.

More recently, LGBT characters get to live, and because these characters are often the protagonists of the stories, readers are challenged to understand them as fuller human beings with thoughts, desires, and interests that may mirror their own and that are not necessarily silenced by novel's end. Even at the small-town Barnes and Noble where I live I can find a new canon of queer YA literature: Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Boys series as well as his middle school novel So Hard to Say; Brent Hartinger's Geography Club and The Order of the Poison Oak; Julie Ann Peters' Keeping You a Secret, Far from Xanadu, and Luna; P. E. Ryan's Saints of Augustine; Sara Ryan's Empress of the World; Tea Benduhn's Gravel Queen; Lauren My rack's Kissing Kate; and pioneering short-story collections such as the recently revised and updated Not the Only One: Lesbian and Gay Fiction for Teens, edited by Jane Summer.

These books present adolescent characters, mostly gay and lesbian (bi/trans characters remain hard to find, Luna being a welcomed exception), as smart, interesting, and often complex individuals in search of themselves and a place in the world that will let them develop as full human beings. These are not books in which the queer characters die or contract a horrible disease, at least not merely because of their sexuality. These are dolce gabbana jewelry characters that young readers can relate to, whose struggles to find love and connection resonate beyond the sexuality of the protagonists. Our bookshelves are richer for their existence.

But these are also texts primarily about characters whose existence is a struggle; the plots are mostly about individuals trying to "deal with" their sexualities, conflicts with others because of their sexualities, fears of parental reactions, etc. While these conflicts may be "realistic," they are also reductive when rendered as a canon of available literature, suggesting that the experiences of being queer are only about these personal conflicts, not about larger issues or more complex experiences with the world.