When I look back on the books I read as a child, I am struck by just how heteronormative they are. At the time I thought nothing of it – preteen me just thought everyone thought girls were cute and was painfully unaware of my own queerness – but now I have some perspective I can see just how normalised straight relationships are to younger readers and I am starting to understand why it’s a problem.
Take the Night World series by L.J. Smith. I read them in their omnibus format, which meant three books in each of three bindings, with nine stories in total (there’s an unfinished tenth story that’s two decades overdue, which is irrelevant but perpetually annoying). I cannot tell you if these books are any good. It’s been years since I read them and, whilst I remember enjoying them, I was a little girl with romantic ideas and have since learnt that some books I used to enjoy are actually rather terrible when I reread them now. What I can tell you is that Night World appealed to the girl I was because it was a series about soulmate bonds. Every book featured a new set of characters, two of which would fall in love, and one of those that did would be a supernatural being of some kind. We’re talking vampires, witches and shapeshifters, before Twilight made them too popular to be cool.
So, nine couples. Is a single one of them queer? Nope. You could argue that it’s the age of these books that explains their heteronormativity – they date back to as early as 1996. But gay people didn’t start existing post-Y2K, and there are plenty of novels featuring queer characters that are as old or older. Frankly, there is no reason for one of these couples not to be same-sex. There’s not even a single queer character in the entire series that I can remember, and with nine books that makes for a large supporting cast.
You might be wondering why it matters. Because I did enjoy these books (although looking back, all three covers feature very attractive women and that may have had something to do with it), and I did like the characters and the relationships, but I can’t help but wonder how great it would have been to have even just one queer couple. To include them along with eight other straight couples would have sent a great message about normalising gay relationships, especially when a ‘soulmate bond’ is involved and couples are literally destined to be together. It would have had such a positive effect on queer readers to experience this reassurance and support, and it’s a shame that it’s absent from a series I enjoyed so much.
Night World isn’t alone in being a series where each book is dedicated to a new couple in the same world. Julia Golding wrote both The Lacey Chronicles (as Eve Edwards) and the Savants series (as Joss Stirling) and both feature a family of brothers who all fall in love with girls, with each brother getting his own book in which to find his love. Any gay characters? Nope. Once again, there’s ample opportunity here to pair off a brother with another guy, making his relationship just as natural. Soulmates play into the Savants series as well, and it definitely sends the wrong message that every single couple who are ‘destined’ to be together are straight.
I do not hate all these books. On the contrary, I enjoyed them all (as far as I remember), although they might not be great works of literature. At the time of reading, I never sat back and thought about how strange it was that every boy fell in love with a girl, and then they lived happily ever after – with just enough action to make for an interesting plot, of course.
Maybe it’s not fair to argue that these books should feature gay characters, because surely authors can write whatever they want. And it’s true, they can. I cannot make the young adult novel writers out there include more queer representation in their work, but what I can do is honestly say that if even just one of those books I mentioned featured a girl being destined to end up with another girl, or a boy falling for another boy? Maybe a younger me, merrily reading books far above her age range, would have realised a lot sooner that she was far more interested in girls than boys. And maybe the kids who weren’t seeing reassurance anywhere else would realise that they’re just like anyone else. Contemporary YA books are certainly doing better when it comes to queer representation, but there is still an absence of what I like to call ‘casually queer characters’, whose sexuality doesn’t drive the plot but simply exists. And since uni doesn’t give me much time to write the books I want to see in the world, for now all I can do is hope it gets better.