Most gay YA with gay main characters ends with the main character not getting the boy or girl s/he has been thinking about/wanting/in a relationship with. The relationship ends badly. The boy/girl turns out to be straight or “just experimenting” or falls in love with someone else. Things don’t work out.
Let me say that again. Because it needs to be emphasized: Most gay YA with gay main characters ends with the relationship not working out.
These books are lauded, over and over repeated forever, as “realistic.” “The relationship was so realistic!” “The ending was perfectly realistic.” Realistic is used so often in reviews of gay YA that I notice when it’s NOT used.
Almost all gay YA ends with the relationship going south.
It’s alarming and it’s frustrating. But, more to the point, has no one else noticed this? There are shockingly few gay YA, so if you’ve read one, you’ve probably gone on to read many. Was there ever a point where you stepped back and said: Huh. This ends the same as the other ones I’ve read. That’s…odd. I think that the relationship-not-working-out thing is even more obvious, because if you compare it to the amount of straight YA books that contain happy endings, it’s actually one of the saddest things in all of young adult literature. In YA that contains straight romances, thousands and thousands more end happily than those that don’t. But in the world of gay YA, the number of those that end “unhappily,” (ie, “realistically”) is staggeringly larger than those that end happily.
WHY?
Is it because it’s harder to be gay than straight? Obviously, in a world that’s still alarmingly homophobic, no one’s contesting that. But what about in a book where magic happens? So people can fly and petunias can grow out of your ears, but it’s absolutely impossible for a gay person to get a happily ever after with their sweetheart? I’m going to say it because it needs to be said: THAT MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER AND IS, IN FACT, FULL OF RIDICULOUS.
“Realistic:” How Queer Kids Don’t Get Happy Endings by Sarah Diemer (via raphaellaskies)
This is what drives me up the wall. Nobody cares about ‘realistic’ when it’s a boy/girl romance. Oh, get them together! Never mind how teenagers break up too. Never mind how few people settle down and get married before the age of 25 these days. Never mind showing them that it’s OKAY if it doesn’t work out; a relationship ending doesn’t mean you’re a failure, and that it can even be a positive thing! Maybe it’s because the RIGHT person is still waiting for you out there somewhere! Never mind whether the boy and girl even really make a good couple, or the relationship is frankly alarmingly abusive. You just don’t have a book if the romance doesn’t have a happy ending!
But gosh, those gay teens, man. Wouldn’t want to mislead them into thinking the world’s all happy endings and rainbows. They might get confused and start thinking there could be a happy ending out there for them somewhere.