Audience
The audience for such books includes both teens and adults, according to Sharyn November, a senior editor at Viking Children's Books/Puffin, who observes that "young adult used to mean books aimed at readers between the ages 16 and 21," but some of these books are now "reaching the 14 plus crowd and ideally crossing over to the adult market," although gay young adult novels are also aimed at children as young as twelve years old.
Gay young adult fiction serves more than just gay teenagers, it offers gay literature to straight adolescents as well. All young adults, defined here as people who are 12 to 18 years old in transition from childhood to adulthood, are struggling with issues of responsible sexual behavior and emergent ideas of self-identity, and all young adults should have access to literature that reflects the reality of their lives, their emotions, their fears and their joys, including gay and lesbian teenagers. Furthermore, as homosexuality becomes more and more acceptable to society at large, or at least more visible, all teenagers are going to know others who are lesbian or gay, whether it is family members, teachers, friends or neighbors.
Nancy St. Clair describes the benefits of including homosexual fiction in adolescent classrooms for both the homosexual and straight students:"For the straight students, the course offers the opportunity to study a culture they are curious about, but which the homophobia, so prevalent in student life, prevents them from freely exploring. My course, then, becomes a mandate to explore that which is taboo for many of them. For lesbian students the unit offers both a validation of their experience and an arena where their voices can be heard."
Yet, given the status of young adults as minors, many topics of interest to them, such as homosexuality,are controversial. As Nancy St. Clair describes in her article: "Adults have been eager to have the genre moralize, to perform a social service, while the adolescent has been eager for an understanding of society and his/her emerging, if continuing sexuality. Still, the decade beginning with the mid-1970s and running to the mid-1980s saw the publication of a second category of novels, ones in which the representation of adolescent homosexuality became increasingly complex and decreasingly moralistic."
Despite the controversy over gay fiction for young adults there is still a need for books dealing with homosexuality for adolescents. Nancy St. Clair argues, "If we as teachers truly believe that literature helps students understand themselves and the issues they face, then we have an obligation to provide our gay students with the same resources as we do other minority students." Public libraries, committed to providing materials to young adults to meet their educational, recreational and social information needs, should collect materials that address these needs.
Read more about this topic: Gay Male Teen Fiction
Famous quotes containing the word audience:
“I read a part of the story of my excursion to Ktaadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested. It contains many facts and some poetry.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the actor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.”
—Viola Spolin (b. 1911)
“Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.”
—Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)