An interesting article from the excellent online news magazine Scroll.in on how children's and young adult books in India are starting to include lgbt characters:
Gay characters, single-parent families: Books for Indian kids begin to reflect real life Gay characters, single-parent families: Books for Indian... The narrative is broadening. Issues like sexuality and class are getting reflected in children's books. View on scroll.in Preview by Yahoo This follows a trend from around the world. LGBT characters started appearing in children's and young adult (YA) books sometime back. It includes some real classics like the short story Am I Blue (link below, and well worth reading) and some really good novels like Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (which really shows how these classifications like YA and so on are pointless, since this is a good novel by any standards or classifications). For a while many of these kids and YA books were, as they are in India today, a niche genre which, ironically, only became well known outside the LGBT community when homophobes found out of them and started screaming about 'indoctrination' of kids and trying to ban these books from school libraries. Some of these quite innocuous books feature on the lists of most banned books! But in a sign of how much things are changing, lgbt characters are cropping up in mainstream childrens and YA books, and these are much harder for the homophobes to ban. One of the best examples is Rick Riordan's phenomenally successful Percy Jackson series. In the current Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus series it was revealed in the second last book, The House of Hades, which released last year, that a key character, who had been part of the first series Percy Jackson and the Olympians had come out as gay or, at least admitting to same sex attraction. This caused lots of homophobic parents to start screaming about inappropriate themes, which simply and happily showed up their dilemma - they were letting their kids read this series thinking there was and would be nothing gay in it, and now they either had to let them continue or ban them, and good luck with that. Riordan himself released an extremely robust and common sense statement that firmly refuted allegations of inappropriateness. It is worth reading the relevant parts which don't reveal the name of the character, but if you click on the link you'll get his FAQs which do reveal the character's name (this is in case there are any Riordan fans here who haven't read House of Hades, which I realise is unlikely, but you never know!): http://www.rickriordan.com/about-rick/faq.aspx (the answer is in the only FAQ with a SPOILER alert) "I’ve been lucky enough to teach all sorts of students – fifth grade to twelfth grade, rich and poor, from numerous ethnic backgrounds, with diverse religious traditions and a variety of learning differences. I’ve also taught gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. Some self-identified as early as elementary school. Some came to terms with their sexual orientation later in high school. Most had a hard time during the middle grades, which are tough years for any child. All my middle school students enriched my classroom. They made me a better teacher and a better writer for children, and they all deserve my support. "I am committed to writing appropriate books for the middle grades. This means no bad language, no gratuitous or explicit violence, and no sexual content beyond what you might find in a PG-rated movie – expressions of who likes whom, holding hands, and perhaps the occasional kiss. The idea that we should treat sexual orientation itself as an adults-only topic, however, is absurd. Non-heterosexual children exist. To pretend they do not, to fail to recognize that they have needs for support and validation like any child, would be bad teaching, bad writing, and bad citizenship." There's also the Kevin Keller series from Archies comics. Again, a gay character was introduced into a series so mainstream and familiar that its hard for parents to stop their kids reading them. Remarkably, as this Salon article points out, Kevin is just one element in a remarkable reinvention of the Archies series: How “Archie” went from dull to daring: The world’s tamest comic series is now our most groundbreaking How “Archie” went from dull to daring: The world’s tames... Archie used to be the safest, squarest comic book franchise out there. But in the past few years, something changed View on www.salon.com Preview by Yahoo Rather sadly, the importer of Archies in India - one of their biggest markets - doesn't seem to be getting most of these more cutting edge series, but in time it will get harder for him to keep out these new Archies comics, and for those who want to read them they are anyway available online. I've bought the whole Kevin Keller series as e-books and you can probably find ways to download them for free if you look around. They're good fun!
