Rachel Manija Brown (rachelmanija) and Sherwood Smith (sartorias) come forward to reveal that they were offered representation for their co-written post-apocalyptic YA novel by an agent at a major agency - on the condition that they make their gay character straight. Here is the article on Genreville at Publisher's Weekly, and here is the article on rachelmanija's blog.

They are asking any authors who have had a similar experience to come forward over on the Genreville post (pseudonymously if neccesary) and tell their stories. (Chillingly, the very first comment to that post is an author revealing that they were not asked to erase the icky gay cooties - their editor just did it for them, without mentioning it to the author at all.)

They're also asking editors and agents who are open to gay characters and other minority characters to explicitly advertise as such. They're asking readers to fight with their wallets - to buy YA books featuring queer characters, to request their libraries carry YA books featuring queer characters, and so on. Here is a list of known YA SFF books with major queer characters as a handy reference, complete with annotations and links to Amazon.

(And, because intersectionality is important: Known YA SFF with POC main characters, author surnames A-L, and author surnames M-Z.)

Please reblog and retweet. (Twitter hashtag: #YesGayYA)

This shit isn't going to stop until the writers and the consumers stand up and say that this is unacceptable. It won't stop until we send the clear message that we, the readers, do want to read these books, that we will buy them and request them at our libraries - that they are by no means "unmarketable," and that we know that flimsy excuse for what it is: a flimsy excuse.