Reminder Birds of Prey will be the first superhero movei starring an openly lgbt hero
While herors like Wonder woman, Valkyrie & anti heroes like Harley are in the superhero movies none of them have been shown in relationshops or shown talking about their sexuality
BIRDS OF PREY IS SUPPOSED TO SHOW A W|W RELATIONSHIP WITH RENEE MONTOYA
So remember to go hype up birds of prey so that both marvel & DC see that showing lgbt heroes being themselves on screen will bring them more money & more positive press
As long as its true that Renee Montoya is openly and proudly lesbian in this movie and we actually see her being a lesbian on screen I will DEFINITELY be supporting this film :D
Shes supposed to be at least thats what people whove seen early screenings of it seem to say fingers crossed that it stays that way. From what Ive heard mostly rumors is that Renee’s girlfriend is played by Ali Wong & i remember there being abig announcment about her being in the film so im betting shes gonna be in at least 2 or 3 scenes
In graduate school, we had an epic battle over characters’ racial diversity/representation on the page, and craft. Some well-meaning white writers in workshop were including problematic depictions of characters of color in their stories – the “all-seeing,” “magical” black woman, the homeless black man, the perpetual Asian American foreigner. When confronted, I remember that one particularly irascible, intractable white male peer accused us of policing art. “You can write about whatever you want, however you want,” he sputtered. “If I want to write about a triangle on the moon, I should be able to do it. And no one should criticize me for not including black people.” I remember I smiled wryly and said, “Yes, but that doesn’t mean that it will be good art. If you are using problematic and tired racial stereotypes and tropes in your writing, or just writing a flat universe of (white, male, middle-class) characters it doesn’t matter how awesome your triangles on the moon might be: your form is probably pretty lazy, too.”
Needless to say, he didn’t exactly appreciate my commentary.
It did, however, force us to confront the relationship between diversity of content, and diversity of form – a topic which I thought I’d pose in this blog post. Quite simply, I’m interested in this question: Does more racial/identity diversity of characters and content necessarily mean more formal diversity? Meaning, are stories that include characters from a variety of racial, ethnic, class, gender, and other identities more likelyto be better written stories, or take more formal risks, or be more formally interesting, than stories with characters with mainstream (read: white) backgrounds? In the course of writing my new book, Dream Country,I certainly found this to be true.
Dream Countryis a sprawling story of colonialism, war, family, and home, and features five narrators on two continents, over 200 years. There was no way to write this novel and do the questions it asks justice without pushing myself out of my formal comfort zone. It could not be your standard one-voice YA novel (not that there is anything wrong with that – my first novel, See No Color, is a YA novel of this variety. But this approach just was not going to work for this particular project). I needed to inhabit the voice of a disaffected teenage Liberian refugee, a 19thcentury African American single mother, a young Liberian revolutionary in Monrovia in 1980, and a modern-day young, queer, African and American writer. I needed all these voices to be distinct, yet compelling, and I needed them to also somehow fit together in the contours of a larger story. Needless to say, my content comfort zone was also deeply challenged in the writing of the book. I am not Liberian, but African American, and balked at the prospect – and responsibility – of representing Liberians on the page. But I realized that this was actually the topic of the novel itself: The chasms and connections between Liberians, Liberian Americans, and African Americans. In my quest to tell this story, I had to attempt to cross these chasms by doing intensive bibliographic and interpersonal research. I read everything I could get my hands on about the colonial period in Liberia; went to Monrovia and interviewed government officials and everyday people about the 1980 coup; and interviewed two gentleman who were generous enough to share their stories of being “sent back” to Liberia from the U.S. by their parents, in their eyes, to save their lives. While I am quite sure that there are still plenty of errors in the book, its formal challenges required me to reach for a new level of excellence in its content – a phenomenon I think may be more common than we realize.
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), a young adult novel that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples’ Literature. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, Dream Country, is about more than five generations of an African descended family, crisscrossing the Atlantic both voluntarily and involuntarily (Dutton, 2018).
May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! Here are some recent titles by Asian American authors writing young adult speculative fiction and genre titles you can enjoy! Please let me know if you recommend any young adult genre titles by those from Pacific islands heritage in comments. Thank you!
A Line in the Dark by Malinda Lo The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F. C. Yee The Speaker by Traci Chee Rebel Seoul by Axie Oh Not Your Villain by C. B. Lee WARCROSS by Marie Lu EXO by Fonda Lee Chainbreaker by Tara Sim The Ship Beyond Time by Heidi Heilig Dove Alight by Karen Bao A Crown of Wishes by Roshani Chokshi WANT by Cindy Pon A Thousand Beginnings and Endings edited by Elsie Chapman and Ellen Oh Heart Forger by Rin Chupeco Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie Dao
When Our Stories are Ugly #ownvoices as a weapon against internalized oppression
When I started to tell my story, I knew that there would be trouble.
Months before my debut novel The Art of Starving came out, people were upset about it. They saw the synopsis and said it romanticized eating disorders. My protagonist, Matt, is a bullied small-town gay boy with an eating disorder (all of which I was) who believes that starving himself awakened latent supernatural abilities.
Eating disorder superpowers? Yeah, I get how that sounds problematic.
But the fact is, that was my experience. I didn’t get superpowers, but my eating disorder made me feel powerful. In control of something. I had absorbed so much hate and fear and toxic masculinity that they were the only weapons I had. And when the demons came - and they came every day - they were what I had to work with.
This is not an uncommon response. Many other survivors I’ve spoken with have shared a similar experience. I get emails all the time, from eating disorder survivors who have read the book and felt validated for the first time.
#ownvoices can get ugly, because our stories can be ugly. It isn’t all pride and power. And the pride and the power, if we’re fortunate enough to arrive at them, come from the ugliness. From what we’ve been through. From our ability to survive.
When we tell the truth about who we are and what we’ve been through, not everyone will like it. Adults may think that young people need to be shielded from these ugly truths, as if hiding from horror will make it disappear. Angie C. Thomas’s brilliant The Hate U Give was just banned in a Texas school district, allegedly for sexual content - when there is literally zero sex in the book - when obviously what they were really upset about was how brilliantly the book brought to life the pain and power of a young Black woman fighting back against police brutality. And young people, even ones from our own communities, might prefer not to explore these issues up close. Especially if they’ve been through something similar. They might find these discussions triggering. I have tons of love and support and respect for eating disorder survivors and others struggling with body image issues, who have to take a step back from this book. I have less respect for the grown-up gatekeepers who think that the way to help young people survive into adulthood is to pretend their pain does not exist.
My protagonist, Matt, is damaged. He’s been traumatized by constant physical and emotional abuse, and the crippling impact of patriarchy. He’s full of hate and anger and shame. He’s also smart and funny and full of love. We’re complicated people - all of us. Like Matt, I had internalized so much toxic masculinity - even as I rejected heteronormativity and embraced my queerness - that my rage took the form of violence. And when I couldn’t turn it on others, I turned it on myself.
Queer youth are especially susceptible to having complicated and painful body image issues, because we often grow up in a space where there is nobody to tell us we’re beautiful, nobody to fall in love with our minds. We’re having crushes on people that are not reciprocated. We’re being made to feel ugly and awkward and unwanted. That can be crippling. Some of these issues can last a long time. And then you grow up and enter a broader gay culture which is just as obsessed with a certain idea of masculinity and a certain type of body.
The power of #ownvoices stories to challenge is massive. With The Art of Starving, I wanted to confront the stigma and shame that so many young queer people are living with. I wanted to tell them how awesome they are. How I was there, once, sunk deep in misery and suicidal ideation and (sometimes) bloodthirsty rage, and eventually came out the other end of it being proud and happy and thanking the gods every day that they made me gay. But if someone had told me that then, I wouldn’t have believed them. I’d have assumed they were like every other adult, a complete idiot who didn’t understand me and therefore had nothing to teach me.
So when I started to tell this story, I knew that I had to honor the darkness that many young people experience. I get that some people won’t want to deal with it.. But it would have been dishonest of me to say “you’re awesome!” without acknowledging the pain folks feel.
If there’s a message to my book, it’s this: You are beautiful, you are magnificent, no matter what you look like. And if you are having complicated feelings about who you are and what you look like and what people think of you, that’s not weird or unheard of. Respect the darkness, but know that you are so much more.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) was published by HarperCollins in 2017, and will be followed by Blackfish City from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and have appeared in over a dozen “year’s best” anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City, and atwww.samjmiller.com
TODAY IS THE DAY! The YA world finally gets to have more Malinda Lo to read! I had the pleasure of beta reading this book, and this deliciously dark thriller is one of my favorites by Malinda. Just look at this stunning cover!
Jess Wong is Angie Redmond’s best friend. And that’s the most important thing, even if Angie can’t see how Jess truly feels. Being the girl no one quite notices is OK with Jess anyway. While nobody notices her, she’s free to watch everyone else. But when Angie begins to fall for Margot Adams, a girl from the nearby boarding school, Jess can see it coming a mile away. Suddenly her powers of observation are more curse than gift.
As Angie drags Jess further into Margot’s circle, Jess discovers more than her friend’s growing crush. Secrets and cruelty lie just beneath the carefree surface of this world of wealth and privilege, and when they come out, Jess knows Angie won’t be able to handle the consequences.
When the inevitable darkness finally descends, Angie will need her best friend.
“Lo has delivered an intricate tapestry of narrative, woven in a labyrinthine pattern of secrets and colored with intersecting hues of Chinese-American identity, the dark intensity of relationships, and telltale stains of blood.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“With an active focus on female friendships and relationships, A Line in the Dark is a twisty, dark psychological thriller that will leave you guessing til the very end. The story follows two friends down a path of dysfunction and murder as one of them, Chinese-American Jess tries to balance the expectations of her family, her fraught relationship with Angie, and her mounting sexual attraction for her. Lo offers some impressive storytelling, a chilling plot, and mean girls aplenty.”—Teen Vogue
I was in the car with all four of my kids one day, when they launched into a strange sort of competition.
My oldest son said he was glad he had autism (which he does) and not Addison’s Disease—like his sister—because she had to take a lot of pills every day, and he never had to take pills. He didn’t like taking pills.
My second oldest son said he’d rather have Celiac Disease (which he does) than either autism or Addison’s Disease, since all he had to do was avoid gluten in his diet.
My daughter countered by insisting that her “thing” was better than either of her brothers’, since she could eat whatever she wanted to, unlike her Celiac brother, and swallowing pills was no big deal to her—she’d become a pro at it since her diagnosis at age five.
My youngest son was silent throughout most of this argument, but he finally spoke up. “It’s not fair,” he said. “I’m the only one who doesn’t have anything.”
There was a pause, and then his sister said reassuringly, “Yes, you do! You have allergies!” He brightened up. “Yes!” he said. “That’s true! I have allergies!”
This was many years ago. They’ve all been busy since then in all sorts of ways. The son with Celiac Disease came out of the closet his senior year of high school, graduated from college, and now works in entertainment. The daughter with Addison’s Disease was also eventually diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, OCD, and an anxiety disorder, and is currently a very happy college sophomore. The son with autism is an outstanding artist, whose work has appeared in a bunch of different exhibits. The one with allergies is now applying to college.
They’re all dealing with stuff and succeeding at stuff and occasionally failing at stuff, and have no desire to fit into any kind of “normal” standard or ideal.
I adore my kids. I mean, obviously I love them, but I also like hanging out with them and laughing until I can’t breathe. They’re kind, openminded, curious young adults, who care about social justice and want to make the world a better place for everyone, not just an elite few. And I think all the various ways in which they’re different from their peers helped make them like that.
The truth is, diversity always makes a community more thoughtful and interesting. A society where everyone looks, thinks, acts and worships the same way is stagnant and dull. Add in different backgrounds, viewpoints, beliefs, and needs, and it becomes vital, interesting, and relevant.
I want our country to not just tolerate differences: I want us to revel in them, to appreciate how much better we are when we’re not all striving to fit a mold. One of the things I learned in researching autism is that all the students in a class thrive when a student with special needs is included. Why? Because teachers can’t assume everyone learns the same way. They have to try out new and creative ways of teaching, which benefits the whole class. And yet parents will frequently protest when a kid with special needs is included in a mainstream classroom, insisting it will harm their kids academically.
The problem is, we’re hardwired to be suspicious of anyone who’s different—probably something to do with the importance of sticking to your pack back in primal days. We’re all too quick to be afraid of what we don’t know. People have to be taught to be comfortable with differences, and entertainment is a good way to make that happen: fiction can help you get to “know” the kind of person you might never meet or might actively be avoiding in real life.
My most recent YA novel, Things I Should Have Known, is about two sisters: Ivy has autism; Chloe doesn’t. They’re loyal and supportive and love each other a lot—but also get annoyed and frustrated with each other, the way sisters do. They both fall in love. They both get their hearts a little broken. They both get to be important characters, and they both get to struggle and celebrate and mess up. I want my readers to root equally for them both, to love them both—and, in the process, without even realizing it, to stop seeing autistic people as something alien.
(By the way, there’s also a major LGBTQ storyline in the novel, but because it sneaks up on you in the book, I’m not going to say any more about it.)
Anyway, my point is: diversity enriches a family; diversity enriches a community; and diversity enriches a novel.
Also? Don’t tell my son but his allergies were actually pretty minor.
Claire LaZebnik is the author of five novels for adults and five YA novels, including Epic FailandThings I Should Have Known. With Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel, she co-authored the non-fiction books Overcoming AutismandGrowing Up on the Spectrum. She has written for The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and Self Magazine, among other publications, and contributed a monologue to the anthology play Motherhood Out Loud. Please check out her website at www.clairelazebnik.com or follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
I thought I’d post this here as well just for those following me on this platform!
I have recently been given the opportunity to create a graphic novel series, with the first book set to be published in 2023 by IDW, for an original story that I’ve been developing for a while now with my collaborative partner AJ O. Mason.
KLOUD 9 is a queer space opera focusing on two Asian leads, and surrounded by a BIPOC cast of characters. This story is so special to me, and fills me with so much joy to be working on it. I’m so thankful for the comics medium, because through them, I think many creators have been able to carve space for characters and stories of all types, especially within the sci-fi genre that I feel is lacking in television and film.
If anyone’s interested, I’ll continue to keep updating on this project here (and progress on KLOUD 9 can also be tracked on my other social media platforms!)
I don’t make the rules, but OCs who start off as one gender only for you to change your mind and make them a different gender later are metatextually trans and that’s funky and good.
To those of you in the tags whose characters are straight-up textually trans now too; that is also funky and good.
And Drawcember Day 8 was Harley Quinn! If you haven’t caught on yet, I totally forgot to upload the past couple days to the Tumbr blog my deepest sincerest apologies roflllll. Allow me to slowly and subtly spam you.
