lesbians, where are the lesbians?

There was this brouhaha around gay characters in YA.

Do you know what my first reaction to it was? “Where are the lesbians.” And not the “we have a couple of supporting lesbian characters who don’t even get an on-page kiss until we realized we should act like we are super-good allies; time to tick checkboxes, friend!” crap.

I’ve made comments in the past that suggested I thought there was an equivalency between the exploitation of female homosexuality in porn for men and fetishisation of male homosexuality in slash fanfic and M/M erotica. I didn’t actually think there was an exact equivalency, but in retrospect I realize more and more that it was a fucking stupid thing to even imply. There is, obviously, no equivalency and it’s not remotely the same–there’s the factor of misogyny and a hundred different things that sensible people realize contribute to the harmfulness of exploitative by-men-for-men lesbian porn* in a way that isn’t at all like what slash fanfic and M/M, however vacuous and badly written, do.

*This isn’t saying that no woman anywhere enjoys such porn, nor that they should be judged for enjoying it (and certainly if they do, it’s not wrought with the same problems as male enjoyment: I’m not getting into the idea of women objectifying women, which gets thrown around now and again, because that is not the point). I’m condemning men. The ones responsible for the mainstay of supply and demand. 

Lesbian visibility is pretty bloody terrible in the fiction I enjoy, or even fiction I don’t. So the schtick of those graduated-from-HP-fanfic YA writers, who are ever so lauded for their beautiful wonderful inclusivity? It’s nine times out of ten about hot, hot gay boys. Hot, hot gay boy angst. You’d be lucky if one of the girls in the background… somewhere… likes other girls… somewhere… honest.

The only lesbian YA I can think of is Malinda Lo, whom I’ve never seen recommended and squee’d and fannishly defended the way Sarah Rees Brennan or whoever wrote Havemercy is. The titles that apparently feature major lesbian characters named here? I’ve never heard of most of them. This isn’t an indictment on their quality–The Dark Wife is self-published but, again, we are talking YA so it’s not likely to be any worse than the pro stuff. So it’s telling that I know of Brennan and Cassandra “Plagiaristic Hack” Clare and Havemercy in spite of that, simply by seeing them talked about, tweeted about, and whatnot a terrible lot and celebrated for their wonderful inclusivity of male homosexuality: to the point that someone who doesn’t read YA, and disdains it, has heard about them in those terms and contexts.

Lo isn’t a HP-fanficcer-cum-YA which means her audience is less likely to behave like fandom zerglings defending the overmind, but for fuck’s sake: Malinda Lo is queer and Asian, her characters are queer and some of them are queer and explicitly Asian and why does her share of recognition seem so little? Why isn’t she talked about as much as Brennan and, my god, Clare? I don’t think Lo’s writing is the best, but then it’s YA fiction: who gives a toss about quality? Well-written prose, complexity and great characterization are certainly not requirements for YA fiction to develop a fanatical following. If I couldn’t finish Huntress then at least Ash is readable, no more or less than anything else in that genre. I have this awful, nagging feeling that I’ve seen Silver Phoenix recommended more than Huntress, not least because Silver Phoenix’s cultural markers are much more obvious–to a white audience particularly (and with that hideous original cover too)–and, yes, because the central romance is straight: a girl getting together with a boy, even or especially an emotionally abusive boy, will set most people on fire the way a girl getting together with a girl (in a healthy, functional relationship no less) simply won’t.

At the time of this writing, a quick glance at fanfiction.net tells me there are 4,669 Mortal Instruments (the Clare shit) and 31 Demon’s Lexicon (the Brennan shit) fanfic. No section exists for either of Malinda Lo’s works. This doesn’t provide hard, empirical data by any means, but it’s a workable mindshare metric. I’d do a twitter search to compare terms, but “ash” isn’t a very good keyword and “huntress” turns up tons of unrelated detritus.

I could seek pretty great depictions of lesbians or bisexual women who do get with other women in non-YA SF/F, yes. Read a Caitlin Kiernan book and you’ll find yourself up to the elbow with queer girls and queer women, thank god, so much so that it comes across as normative. Valente’s Palimpsest though not my favorite features important, central romantic and sexual relationships between women. Tanith Lee’s Disturbed By Her Song is amazing. There’s Joanna Russ and Ursula le Guin and and. Put together I still seem to find fewer queer women–who are in relationships with other women, as opposed to bisexual Avice from Mieville’s Embassytown who only mentions in passing that she was married to a woman once, an event extrinsic to the text–than queer men. In contrast I can name Swordpoint, Nightrunners series, The Steel Remains, The Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Kingdom of Gods, Ink and Steel/Hell and Earth, A Companion to Wolves and (arguably, but many fans read it as slash anyway) Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy as books with primary gay male characters, even protagonists. Joan D. Vinge’s The Summer Queen has tons of bisexual men but, IIRC (though it’s been a while), all the women are straight. That’s just off the top of my head, many of them multi-books no less. I’m also really done with “there’s a tertiary female character who likes girls, right here, in this book primarily about straight people or queer boys going at it like bunnies” (so the off-screen lesbian in Kingdom of Gods who winds up dead is, uhhhh, nothx). Yaoi manga gets so much more attention (and exists in greater quantities) than yuri that I’ve learned to tune yaoi the fuck out–it’s so much white noise.

Not, admittedly, that I want to see lesbian representation like queer male “representation” in say A Companion to Wolves or Doctrine of the Labyrinths either, because both are incredibly rapey. But we are talking head-count basis and popularity. There, too, is a prevailing impression that lesbian romance/erotica doesn’t sell as well as M/M (if it sells at all). Submission calls? Mostly M/M. Carina Press has a section for M/M, but none for F/F. This small press publishes M/M exclusively. I pulled them out of a hat by the way, not by googling “woman-hating presses that shrink in terror from girl cooties.”

And, you know, queer women get treated even worse than queer men in fiction written by men. Like the Joe Abercrombie thing with the marital rape and Archeth from The Steel Remains who for some reason never gets to have sex: not because she’s asexual, she just… doesn’t get any even though she has sexual desire and very much wants to do that slave girl (refraining due to ethical concerns but, again, how hard would it have been to write her in a healthy, functional relationship with another woman? Oh, right: Richard Morgan lol). In contrast the straight barbarian and the gay protagonist fuck vigorously–not each other mind you–about twice every chapter. Some of Michael Moorcock’s male characters have been bi, and some of those have been spared the rape stick, whereas in its original incarnation Gloriana‘s eponymous pansexual queen gets raped by a man and ends up marrying him, as the rape “liberates” her from being the symbol of Albion and gives her the first orgasm ever of her life to boot. Hooray! I mean, sure women are treated shittier period, within fiction or without, but damn. Et tu, Moorcock?

I recognize that representation of homosexuality at all is important, but when yet another discussion about it comes up and it’s about the boys again all I feel is invisible and sad. It’s not a zero-sum game! More queer female visibility isn’t going to take away from or diminish the visibility of male homosexuality: at this point it pretty much can’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were more stuff for both? The prominence of slash doesn’t mean representations of female homosexual desire have to be so buried. Throw me a fucking bone.* That’s not too much to ask, is it?

*I’m saying “throw me a fucking bone” rather than “throw us a fucking bone” because I don’t want to speak for any woman but myself, since not a monolith, &c, &c.

Screw this, I’ll go read Christine Love.