LGBT PUBLISHING DISCRIMINATION HELP

It should be, but it is alright to acknowledge that specialty topics sometimes involve specialty publishers that better understand a sub-genre than a wing of a large corporate publishing house might, or be willing to go to press for something that won't sell at Barnes and Noble. Having a niche is one way small publishing houses survive in the globalized marketplace.

 

I accept this as a stepping stone on the path toward equal access, like "race records" of the fifties.

I include heavy bi and pan themes in a few of my stories. I hope with all sincerity that they are regarded as sci-fi, etc., not LGBT literature.

 

Hey, I'm with you on that. I think the problem is sometimes that in our need to show diversity, we misrepresent reality to the point of it no longer feeling genuine. I live in a very LGBTQ town, and if I lived here my whole life I might get the impression that 25% of the world is LGBTQ, which is what it looks like on TV. But the average place in the US has few to no LGBTQ people visible, and tons of the kind of types of people that rarely make it into fiction.

Some readers are going to want to read a book where 50% of the characters are LGBTQ, but for people that live in typical parts of the US that looks like a deeply stylized piece of genre fiction because it doesn't match their experience. Meanwhile, almost no one in fiction is Asian, because that group hasn't yet made enough of a fuss about under-representation for media makers to overreact by putting them in everything.

It will be a strange world when LGBTQ characters in media are no more or less common than they are in reality, or when your typical fictional Latino isn't tall, thin, light skinned and handsome.


Most people are straight, boring, unattractive, overweight, poorly dressed, badly spoken and uninteresting. No wonder fiction doesn't look much like reality.

 

Damn; There's an idea for a story.

 

It's only because she phrased it as "research". (I read the thread last night though so I may have remembered wrong?) But sure I agree anecdotal evidence is not without its value. I find them immensely interesting, in fact.

I'm straight but my impression of the industry nowadays is that if you're part of the LGBT community, it's often seen as a good thing because you're easier to market? The #ownvoices trend isn't limited to race, after all. I'd actually be more interested to see if there's a difference in LGBT discrimination between the general book market vs books that make it into school libraries. A gay author might be just fine on a Waterstones bookshelf (for the non-Brits, it's one of the largest book retailers in the UK) whilst the same author might be rejected from school libraries due to parental prejudices about who influences their kids.

 

I do think it's important, and I do generally do this myself, for LGBT fiction to be able to be normal fiction. For characters and themes to occur without main billing. Especially as has been mentioned it's not too much of an issue anymore, though there are still important progresses to be made.

 

I put it in the query letter when they’ve specifically asked for stories from diverse authors. Otherwise, I don’t.

 

I'm UK, and I contract edit with a US MM publisher (gay romance, covering all sub-genres: steampunk, sci-fi, crime, thriller). They also have imprints: Harmony Ink: YA, and DSPP (horror, no romance etc).

I also write psych thrillers, gay dark romance.

With acquisitions and taking on stories, no personal details are given, so we can get male or female authors, gay, etc, and all that counts at the end is if it's a good story.

I also edit a few indie authors: the only time I'll say no is when I don't think the story is ready for an editor. It's not fair to take money from an author if you know it's not ready for 1st edits and won't sell at the end. I've never asked an author about their sexuality or gender or based a decision to edit with them based on either.

There's the rare publisher that causes upset without realising why (or they do and don't care). E.g., one last year listed gay relationships in with accepting no 'taboo' content alongside rape and paedophilia, which rightly angered a lot of authors in the community. If you don't accept gay romance, fine, just don't list it next to paedophilia and put them on the same level.

There are publishers who say they only accept het relationships, but you have to respect that as a car manual publisher will only publish car manuals: it's targetting a specific audience, and it's their choice to do so as a business, as the publisher I edit with only publishes gay romance. That's not discrimination, just tailoring to a specific readership. I've not seen one that has said they won't accept LGBT authors, but because I haven't seen it, doesn't mean that it doesn't it happen.

Some publishers ask for 'own voices' for anthologies (gay men writing gay romance etc), but that's mostly tied in with other LGBT works they're doing, regardless of the author's gender and sexuality.

I do see a little discrimination from readers, where sometimes arguments will crop up between authors regarding own voice authors (gay authors writing gay romance) and female authors (straight women writing gay romance). It's always a mute debate in my view: 'author' and 'talent' comes with no gender or sexuality. You're either an author and have talent, or not in my humbles. Being gay won't always make you the better writer on gay romance, just as being straight won't guarantee it either. You need to be able to write and tell a story.

On the whole, LGBT+ publishing has come a long way since it first started out.

 

The publishing company I worked at until I realized it was a scam had quite a few characters in the LGBT+ community. None of them would have raised an eyebrow, I think, because "I'm Gay!" isn't exactly a big part of the plot.
THat's not to say that some jack*ss woudn't throw a hissy fit about the MC being non-cis or bi or homo, but out of a thousand readers we got maybe two or three complaints. So I'd say you'd just have to be insanely unlucky or verbal about how you are a different person from what the majority expect.
Remember what we were all taught in school, don't give away personal information that isn't neccessary. If you believe the publisher is discriminatory against LGBT+ people, then don't tell him. He's probably not gonna ask "Hey, are you straight?" And if he does, he's an *sshole and you don't want to be there anyway.

 

See, that is an excellent question. I once saw some stats about how gay authors were discriminated against, and had exactly the same question: "How does anyone know who isn't gay?" And those stats must have been for very publicly Out writers, since some authors aren't even a real person.

So we must just be talking about authors that are either writing gay fiction or are promoting themselves as LGBTQ. The problem with those stats is that LGBTQ people have a lot of involvement in the arts, and one would expect a disproportionate number of writers to be LGBTQ, regardless of whether they are open about it or not.

 

Just a quick duotrope search and there are two pages of publication listings under the topic of sexuality and gender and 34 agent listings. You can't search by type of author, but I believe LGBTQ stories would probably be along the lines of what these places are looking for. On top of that, I've seen a surge of submissions guidelines calling for under-represented voices in literature across genres. It seems like it could work in a writer's favor to be one of these under-represented writers or to have a story that deals with such. I've also come across several articles and interviews in recent years that discuss this and the strides being made in the publishing world. It might help to look at some of that and some actual data that's already been collected. I think the arts in general tend to be more encompassing than other areas. I'm not saying the publishing world doesn't love literature by old, white men, but a lot has changed and a lot is still changing.

I'm not sure how useful the proposed booklet is going to be or how you're going to get places to carry it. The information is already out there and becomes dated pretty fast.

 

In the original post the person says they plan to distribute it. Class assignment or not, is such a leaflet going to really be housed in such places where aspiring writers in the LGBTQ community going to find them and pick them up and find them useful? Hopefully, this is just a class assignment. Forgive me, it's been a long time since I've done homework. And isn't there some rule about homework on this site? I thought the OP was planning to pursue this outside the classroom and that's why people were commenting.

 

I guess that would depend on the assignment. If it's about hypothesis, evidence, conclusion, than even having an outcome contrary to the original hypothesis is useful. If it's about people that may be having a rough time dealing with their sex and identity, then having someone say, "look, it's not all bad and it gets better." That could be pretty helpful.

 

How would a publisher/agent be aware of your sexuality in the first place, unless you'd made it a point at the outset?
If anyone is writing a LGBT themed story, or any story that contains gay, trans or bisexual themes, does it matter as long as it's well written?