Want kids to read? Give them something to escape into…with characters that reflect them and their lives and aspirations. And vampires.
Ok, the vampires are optional. But something to identify with is not.
Take a look at most mainstream young adult (YA) fiction. It features primarily female characters, typically white (or a oppressed class of people/magical folk/aliens standing in for people of color or other minority groups), overcoming obstacles or searching for/trying to win the guy or, more typically, both. Nothing inherently wrong in this. But it’s a pretty narrow focus.
Does there need to be more diversity in YA fiction? No question. The lack of representation of youths of color, with disabilities, from non-traditional families, from other underrepresented groups is appalling. Readers who want to see themselves in these books. And non-hetero kids who want to see the boy get the boy or the girl get the girl, or at the very least, see a gay character who is not a sidekick, a stereotype, or a Victim to Be Saved by the Hero, what options do they have?
This is where Harmony Ink Press has stepped up to fill a gap.
Harmony Ink Press is an independent publisher who prints titles across genres – paranormal, historical fiction, teen romance, adventure, overcoming obstacles – with characters that span the LGBTQ+ spectrum, the + including the ever-increasing letters representing identities outside of the hetero-norm. To some degree, the stories are interchangeable with other YA fiction. Boy meets boy, best friend likes same boy, drama ensues, the right match happens, the best friend finds his own guy. Boy falls through a door into a magical world and begins to remember his place in a land of dragons and sorcery. Swap the genders and you have the formula for the average teen romance. And that’s important. But so are small details, like the main character wondering if the girl she’s working on a class project with will ever really hold hands with her in public, or worrying how his friends (who know he’s gay) will react if they see him with a guy. It’s the blending of these life details and the more mundane YA features that make Harmony Ink’s book work. The LGBTQ+ characters to not exist in a vacuum.
HIP does place an emphasis on personal growth and positive outcomes. This doesn’t mean everything is unicorns and happy shiny stars and perky Hollywood endings, and this less-than-everything perfect tracks with a lot of mainstream YA. Bad things happen to good kids. Good kids make bad choices. But rather than use literature as a cautionary tale about why NOT to be LGBTQ+, or make it seem like a burden to be overcome, it’s just who these characters are, and their experiences are something to be learned from. What do you do when you’re given the chance, by magic, to learn who people truly are? What if you witness a horrible crime during your senior year of high school? What happens when your Arab-American family moves to a small town? Can love and compassion survive after a worldwide biological crisis?
Another feature from Harmony Ink is their annual invitation to young people to submit their work. The Young Author Challenge has just ended for 2015 and will be restarting again later this year, but the prize is publication of their work and all entrants receive feedback. The core request, as Harmony Ink makes of all of its submissions, is that the characters show significant personal growth/grow or change for the better in some way. Much of the mainstream YA that has remained popular over time (don’t tell this to the kids) has exactly this quality, characters that are dynamic not just in their actions but in their maturation. Readers may not be able to put words to it, but they can sense it. “I like how they changed.” “I like how they became more _____.”
Harmony Ink does allow content-appropriate sexual material in its YA books. It must be integral to the story, not gratuitous, and not overly explicit. This important, because as much as teen sexuality is treated as an “if we ignore it, it will just go away” subject, not-heterosexual teen sexuality is not treated at all. There are numerous birds-and-bees books for hetero-normative conversations, but a recent Amazon search returned four that included explicitly LGBTQ content, and this was backed up by other site searches. While fiction may not be the best source of sex education, books from an LGBTQ+ publisher emphasizing positive portrayals of LGBTQ+ characters are far better than silence or what might be taught in abstinence-only school programs.
I’m not going to opine on the quality of Harmony Ink’s offerings. There are too many authors and too much diversity in style and content, and they offer excerpts on most of their books. I do hope that future publications will include more people of color and more diversity in backgrounds.
But for now, LGBTQ+ young adult readers, or adults who want an eye into the lives of these kids, have something to read that doesn’t talk down or preach at. Find Harmony Ink at HarmonyInkPress.com.
Photo: Harmony Ink Press logo