Emilia Yu
Beyond the chaos of the showroom floor, the frenzy of Artist’s Alley, was a room tucked into the lower levels of the Javits Center where YA enthusiasts, queer readers, and combinations of the above packed into the panel for Queer Love in Every Genre to hear from both veteran and rising YA authors: David Levithan (Ryan and Avery), A.S. King (Still Life with Tornado), Meriam Metoui (A Guide to the Dark), and Camryn Garrett (Friday I’m in Love). The panel was moderated by Elle Gonzalez Rose (Caught in a Bad Fauxmance).
The authors discussed the genre that defined their work and the reasons they write for teens.
For writers like King, writing in the YA genre is not just an interest, but a calling.
“The reason I write for teens is because teens are the most undervalued and underappreciated group of people on the planet,” she explains. “I’m tired of them being reduced to a bunch of numbers. I’m tired of them being made fun of, I’m tired of everything they like being called stupid…I don’t plan on writing for adults. My work is crossover to adults anyway. It’s got complexity. It’s got all those things. I don’t think teens and adults actually have that much not in common. I think they’re very similar.”
Metoui expressed similar reasons for what drew her to the genre.
“Young adults and teens feel so immensely. Everything has an impact on you, it has some way of shaping who you are, and it always feels full force, and I think that’s a really beautiful thing to feel. I think there’s such a responsibility to be able to capture that in YA. Those feelings can be so easily dismissed because they’re teens.”
For Garrett, young adult fiction is a genre of potential and freedom: “I love having this space where everyone’s so messy and everyone’s so unformed. Even when we have adult books that are about messy women or women who can’t get it together, there’s still some sort of analysis happening about the fact that she’s not a full person, or she doesn’t know who she is. I just like the fact that teens are figuring it out and they don’t know anything…And I love being able to play in that space.”
Levithan also weighed in on the timeliness of this conversation amid a dramatic rise in book bans across the country.
“People are trying to silence us by silencing our books. And that makes me even more defiant in wanting our stories on the shelves. I think the one thing that we and the book banners can agree upon is the value of our work,” he remarks. “They are scared of it. We know that it saves lives and enriches lives. And so I love being a part of YA literature because of its inherently activist nature. Just by telling our stories, we are actually fighting back against the people who would silence our stories and ourselves.”
Each panelist shared their connection to queer literary history and the classic queer story beats they’ve worked within or around.
“I grew up in a little cornfield…I had people scrawl the word dyke on my locker. I had kids read Leviticus to me at the lunch table, and I hadn’t even come out,” begins King as she explains why she doesn’t always believe in big coming out moments. “It wasn’t like I walked up to [my classmates] and said, yo, I’m gay. I didn’t. They made their assumptions because of my friends, and everybody makes those assumptions, and they were nasty. It was not a nice place to be. So for me, it was significant that we could just privately be in the backseat with these characters.”
Garrett also took a different spin on the coming out moment in her work.
“We should have more books about coming out being a joyful process, not about something that, you know, gets you blackmailed,” she begins. “I was thinking about the idea of coming out and how it’s something you have to do every day. It’s not really a one-time thing…I was thinking about the idea of coming out being this big cultural moment in someone’s life, like a sweet sixteen or a bar mitzvah and I really wanted it to be celebrated. I also wish I had a coming out party where I wore a big dress and stuff. That would have been really fun.”
In closing, though all four authors strive to some extent to resist not just queer tropery, but tropery in general, everyone acknowledged the staying power of a good old enemies to lovers plot. But why stop there, they wondered collectively. Why not enemies to indifference? Lovers to 35 years old? Allyship to ‘oh wait, I’m gay too’?
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