100 Must Read LGBTIA YA Novels

Signal-boosting a great resource that writer Casey Stepaniuk has compiled a very detailed list of 100 LGBT-focused young adult novels. While it's, by her own admission, not meant to be a complete list, it's certainly an extensive one. Each novel has link to purchase, a synopsis and review and details on its representation.

Regarding the list she compiled, Stepaniuk took care to be as thorough and as inclusive as possible:

As far as I know, I’ve included all the YA books with intersex and asexual content that exist (in English, anyway). I’ve omitted some trans YA written by cis authors that has been flagged by trans readers as problematic but I aimed to include every trans YA written by a trans author. One last thing: this list includes 36 books by and about people of color (there are additional ones that feature characters of color but are by white authors), all of which have an asterisk next to them so you can easily spot them. Those books were EXTRA hard to find. This is my call on the publishing industry to PLEASE consider intersectionality when publishing LGBTQIA books and to prioritize queer and trans authors of color telling their own stories!

Here's the full list.

WLW Ask: Where Are Queer Butch Women In Video Games?

In the media landscape of video games, there has been a noticeable rise in the amount of visible queer characters in everything from indie games to AAA big-budget titles. Queer men have a number of different types and portrayals, from Grand Theft Auto's Gay Tony and Dragon Age's Iron Bull, to Mortal Kombat's Kung Jin and Dremfall Chapter's Kian Alvane.

But when it comes to queer women, Femme Hype's Aria argues that there is much less diversity of representation, and that that women who love women are the poorer for it. As Aria explains:

As much as gamers should applaud the industry as a whole making those steady strides to create women who are not sexualized for men, one of the hard points of women that have yet to be presented in games at all is ardent female masculinity, especially within the context of butchness as a trait in women... we have very few characters in the gaming industry who would fit a description of “butch.”  

Though their butch-ish coding may be recognizable to many players, these women are not in games that explore their characters’ stories or personalities, much less their sexualities, leaving any possible hope of butchness up to speculation and easily written off due to their environments and not their specific expression of their sexuality. Indeed, in may of the games in the FPS genre where some of these more “masculine” women exist, players can only speculate about the romantic and sexual modalities of these women—if their lives are explored at all—as the main men usually have their romantic lives explored.

Some would argue (though it's an argument I've only seen put forward by men-- well-meaning or otherwise-- that explicitly coding a woman character as butch could be reinforcing stereotypes. As Aria points out, however, this argument is rather lacking:

The absence of these types of women is not a testament to the gaming industry being uncharacteristically sensitive to queer stereotypes, it’s a testament to how female masculinity is rarely presented at all—and that, in fact, it must be overcompensated through clear heterosexuality. Not only does this prevent diverse representations of women, it upholds standards of women made for consumption by men. Having more butch bisexual or lesbian characters would subvert those standards and create a wider landscape of women for everyone to enjoy and admire.

SO I turn this over to you, dear readers. DO you have any game recommendations, indie, AAA or in-between, that feature butch heroes?

Overwatch: FPS, PVP and WLW

Description: In a style parody of the cereal box for "Cap'n Crunch Oops! All Berries",
Tracer from Overwatch appears in place of the Cap'n, bearing the name "Oops! All
Lesbians" with the tagline "All the time, forever" beneath it and the legend "Contains all
women loving women".

For most of its history, the first person shooter (FPS) genre has been dominated by male protagonists. Doom Guy, Master Chief... even Valve's team-based FPS Team Fortress 2 has nine class characters and all nine of them are men (yes, even Pyro, according to the series trading cards). Conversely, of the 22 character's in Blizzard's Overwatch, 9 of them are women. Unlike the cookie-cutter grizzled white guys or male-gazey fantasies of other games, each woman in the game has wildly different identities, roles, and even body types.

So perhaps it's not much of a surprise that Blizzard's foray into the team based FPS field has garnered lots of attention and devotion from a large fanbase of women. Especially prominent has been the large, joyful and vocal fans pairing up the game's women in various couples, across fanart, fan music videos, animations and fan fictions. My personal favorite power couple name is PharMercy, a pairing of the two healers Phara and Mercy.

However, all the of the women loving women content has been made by enthusiastic fans only. In an interview with Kotaku, director Jeff Kaplan had this to say:

The only stated relationship actually that we’ve even ever mentioned in the backstory is between Amelie who is Widowmaker and her husband who was brainwashed and assassinated. That’s the only reference we’ve ever made to a romantic relationship. It’s not that our characters don’t have romantic relationships and don’t have sexual identities or whatever, but the stance that we’ve sort of taken on the team is that we’re not going to talk about that stuff just to pander to the topic that when it comes out for game play or story reasons, that’s the right time for it to come out.

Tumblr user hattersarts, creator of the Sapphic Overwatch fanzine, had this to say about the idea that explicitly saying a character in Overwatch is gay is pandering:

“There is the problem where people say ‘Well, we don’t want to make it about them being gay.’ Well no, we want that, if I’m honest. I want to know they’re gay! I want that, I want you to shove that down people’s throats. Until we get to a point where the world doesn’t care, I want it. We need to care.”

Blizzard's coyness on the issue might be more than just well-intentioned fence-sitting. In a discussion of recent talks from DC Comics writers about Wonder Woman's sexuality on Metafilter, user rokusan had this to say:

 I've been involved in (the periphery of) Hollywood projects working from source material featuring characters who are either straight or of unspecified orientation, who are then deliberately cryptoqueered in the adaptation. They're not made gay, explicitly, but there are deliberate attempts to both raise and muddy the question just enough ... It ends up possible to see the character(s) both ways, or multiple ways...

But it's not a social agenda effort, clever or offensive or otherwise. It seldom comes from the creatives at all. Rather, it's a calculated marketing trick from on high... The logic is that by toeing such a line, they can attract a wider audience, each of whom uses some kind of identity consumerism to see the thing they wish to see in the character(s). Double the sales, the thinking goes.

What do you think, readers? As long as fans keep up the shipping, does it matter what Blizzard says? Or are unambiguous acknowledgment of gay or lesbian characters in Overwatch just as important for fans looking for representation and the series lore?