![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Queer characters, fiction recommendations, cataloging, and internalized prejudice
I've been thinking lately about queer characters in fiction and how hard it can be for folks to find published stories with queer content in libraries and bookstores -- even when that content is actually there in published books.
One thing on my mind is how it can be quite hard for readers in libraries and bookstores to find published books where the queer characters are just peacefully protagonist-ing along, where the subject matter of the book is not explicitly queerness. Partly I think that this is to do with subject cataloging rules, where typically only a handful of subject catalog items are applied to a given book, and they are applied based on how much of the book the subject occupies. So a sad book about coming out stories would be tagged with queer relevant cataloging, and a happy book that was primarily about a family's successful puppy photography business where the photographer was happily queer might not get a subject tag identifying that queer aspect of the story (probably it would get tagged with dogs and photography and maybe family relationships or small businesses or something).
Another aspect, I think, and this is true for me at least and may be true for other folks, is that I've often been hesitant when I have my librarian or bookseller hats on to be too out in the open about the queer content of a story, because I know from my days in customer service and library school that with explicity queer content, and acknowledgement of that content, come the challenges from parents and groups of adults, predominantly religious-oriented family-watch-dog style groups, that challenge that book or attempt to restrict access to adults. This sort of thing goes quite far: when I was in library school there were consistent challenges to And Tango Makes Three, a perfectly innocuous based-on-a-true-story picture book about penguins adopting a baby penguin, because both grownup penguins were male.
So I used to hope to sort of... quietly clue people in that a book might have a queer content thread that they might enjoy, without being so obvious as to draw attention to that content from the people who would object to the book's presence in the library at all.
And I spent enough years being worried about that kind of push back from my job environments that I find that I've really internalized some of that prejudice and carried it over into situations where there weren't clear consequences for me. I remember seeing a lovely pride parade picture book and talking myself out of bringing it to volunteer story reading time because I was afraid of potential conversations with parents about the book that might come up, even though it met all my personal criteria for picture book story time (it was brightly colored, with good illustrations, a simple rhythmic text, and the people depicted in the story were very diverse in terms of race and ethnicity).
The reason this has all been on my mind lately is because I've been talking with friends who shared how hard it was for them to find published stories in fantasy with queer characters as they started reading in the genre. I had a relatively easy time finding books with queer characters for a number of reasons: 1) I grew up in a town with a large independent bookstore that, though I did not know it, had several key staff members who were queer; 2) I grew up before the closure of a lot of the independent queer bookstores -- when I was a teenager visiting Minneapolis and Seattle, there were queer bookstores in both cities that I could go to; 3) As a teenager I had access to the internet from 15 on, and this was before CIPA and COPA were passed, which meant that there was a lot more readily accessible information about sex and sexuality available online for me; and 4) I just have a good filtering mechanism for finding more of books I like to read, and was able to get pretty far with the information available to me from 1-3.
It seems to me that a lot of those stories have maybe gone out of print since I read them, and I wonder if that might be because of people hesitating to talk about the very things in those stories that some readers most want and miss.
So thinking about all of this I've wanted to maybe make a list of stories I read and enjoyed growing up in genre fiction and comics that had queer content, but I keep holding back because I feel like any list like that is just something that gets latched on to by conservative folks as a source of things to ban.
Then I wonder if I'm worrying over nothing, if those kinds of things are so much less an issue anymore, or whether it would even matter much given the tiny reach of any of my digital footprints.
I'm still in a muddle, I guess, and I'm talking it out here hoping to get some kind of mental clarity.
One thing on my mind is how it can be quite hard for readers in libraries and bookstores to find published books where the queer characters are just peacefully protagonist-ing along, where the subject matter of the book is not explicitly queerness. Partly I think that this is to do with subject cataloging rules, where typically only a handful of subject catalog items are applied to a given book, and they are applied based on how much of the book the subject occupies. So a sad book about coming out stories would be tagged with queer relevant cataloging, and a happy book that was primarily about a family's successful puppy photography business where the photographer was happily queer might not get a subject tag identifying that queer aspect of the story (probably it would get tagged with dogs and photography and maybe family relationships or small businesses or something).
Another aspect, I think, and this is true for me at least and may be true for other folks, is that I've often been hesitant when I have my librarian or bookseller hats on to be too out in the open about the queer content of a story, because I know from my days in customer service and library school that with explicity queer content, and acknowledgement of that content, come the challenges from parents and groups of adults, predominantly religious-oriented family-watch-dog style groups, that challenge that book or attempt to restrict access to adults. This sort of thing goes quite far: when I was in library school there were consistent challenges to And Tango Makes Three, a perfectly innocuous based-on-a-true-story picture book about penguins adopting a baby penguin, because both grownup penguins were male.
So I used to hope to sort of... quietly clue people in that a book might have a queer content thread that they might enjoy, without being so obvious as to draw attention to that content from the people who would object to the book's presence in the library at all.
And I spent enough years being worried about that kind of push back from my job environments that I find that I've really internalized some of that prejudice and carried it over into situations where there weren't clear consequences for me. I remember seeing a lovely pride parade picture book and talking myself out of bringing it to volunteer story reading time because I was afraid of potential conversations with parents about the book that might come up, even though it met all my personal criteria for picture book story time (it was brightly colored, with good illustrations, a simple rhythmic text, and the people depicted in the story were very diverse in terms of race and ethnicity).
The reason this has all been on my mind lately is because I've been talking with friends who shared how hard it was for them to find published stories in fantasy with queer characters as they started reading in the genre. I had a relatively easy time finding books with queer characters for a number of reasons: 1) I grew up in a town with a large independent bookstore that, though I did not know it, had several key staff members who were queer; 2) I grew up before the closure of a lot of the independent queer bookstores -- when I was a teenager visiting Minneapolis and Seattle, there were queer bookstores in both cities that I could go to; 3) As a teenager I had access to the internet from 15 on, and this was before CIPA and COPA were passed, which meant that there was a lot more readily accessible information about sex and sexuality available online for me; and 4) I just have a good filtering mechanism for finding more of books I like to read, and was able to get pretty far with the information available to me from 1-3.
It seems to me that a lot of those stories have maybe gone out of print since I read them, and I wonder if that might be because of people hesitating to talk about the very things in those stories that some readers most want and miss.
So thinking about all of this I've wanted to maybe make a list of stories I read and enjoyed growing up in genre fiction and comics that had queer content, but I keep holding back because I feel like any list like that is just something that gets latched on to by conservative folks as a source of things to ban.
Then I wonder if I'm worrying over nothing, if those kinds of things are so much less an issue anymore, or whether it would even matter much given the tiny reach of any of my digital footprints.
I'm still in a muddle, I guess, and I'm talking it out here hoping to get some kind of mental clarity.