When I wrote my 2011 post that broke down the statistics on LGBT young adult books, I was relying on data collected by other people for other (equally valid) purposes. I wrote the post in one long, late night of number crunching, and I always hoped that I’d have the opportunity to revisit that data because I was pretty sure I’d gotten some things wrong. This year for YA Pride, I’ve decided to look at the data again, but with a different, more specific focus. My conclusions echo what I’ve concluded every year since 2011: There aren’t a lot of LGBT YA books being published, and there is definitely room for growth and change in the kinds of LGBT YA being published. The good thing is, I do think that change is happening, even if it’s at a snail’s pace.
The Data
Since 2011, I’ve realized that the data I used then, which mostly came from Christine Jenkins’s bibliography of LGBT YA and additional information provided by researcher Michael Cart, did not fully align with the goals of my own research. This isn’t necessarily surprising, because Cart and Jenkins, whose data came from co-writing the book The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature With Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969–2004, were working on a different kind of project.
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