Young Adult Fiction: Coming out of the Closet

Authors Hayley Long and James Dawson are taking part in our event

For LGBT History Month, we're hosting a free event at the Free Word Centre in London exploring the portrayal of gay and lesbian characters and relationships in fiction for young adults. Here, we explain why we decided to hold this event...

Several months ago, we started to put together this list of some young adult books featuring LGBT characters and relationships - and it got us thinking...

Although there are lots of great books on our list, the process of putting it together made us realise just how few books with gay characters are published for young people in the UK. What's more, although some recent, well-known titles such as Malorie Blackman's Boy's Don't Cry or Hayley Long's Costa-shortlisted What's up with Jody Barton? have featured young male gay characters, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters are even less frequently represented.

What we also noticed is that often when young gay or lesbian characters appear in books for teenagers, the story focuses on the difficulties and challenges they face as a result of their sexuality - for example, in Cat Clarke's powerful Undone, one of our picks for young adults this month, a teenage boy commits suicide when he is cruelly outed by his classmates. Books where characters' sexuality is just one aspect of a story, rather than a major focus, seem to be even rarer - James Dawson's Hollow Pike or Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments books being some of the few titles that spring to mind.

Interestingly, it seems that in the US, far more books with LGBT characters are being published. As the website The Huffington Post suggests: 'Though many of these books continue to be banned at schools and libraries for "offensive content" it is becoming more and more commonplace, acceptable and even expected for young adult authors to explore issues of teen homosexuality’. We've seen this in teen movies and TV series too - from Willow and Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Kurt and Santana in Glee, it has become commonplace for television dealing with teenage experiences, and aimed at young people, to include gay and lesbian characters. So why isn't it necessarily the same story with UK young adult books?

We decided the time was right to investigate this further. Following our previous events with former online writer in residence Bali Rai exploring young adult fiction, we wanted to give young people from the LGBT community the chance to connect with publishers and authors and share their views, as well as to stimulate more general discussion about how books for young people could, or should, be representing a more diverse range of characters and relationships. And what better time for this discussion than LGBT History Month which takes place every year in February?

The result of all this is Young Adult Fiction: Coming out of the Closet - a free event at the Free Word Centre in London, taking place on Thursday 21 February from 6.30pm. We're delighted to be joined for this panel discussion by two brilliant young adult authors, Hayley Long and James Dawson, as well as Emily Thomas, Publishing Director of Hot Key Books, and young volunteer Catherine Hennigan, a graduate of the prestigious Stonewall Young Talent Programme. The event will be chaired by Booktrust consultant Alex Strick.

The event is free and open to all so if you're interested in teen and young adult fiction, or in LGBT issues, please come along and join us: book a free ticket here.

Find out more about the event
Read our list of young adult books with LGBT characters and relationships
Read an interview with panellist Hayley Long about her book What's Up with Jody Barton?