As Both Writer and Editor, David Levithan Is at the Heart of the Explosion of Queer YA Literature

David Levithan (Courtesy of Penguin Random House)

Young adult literature has exploded over the past few years as a genre as diverse as the media on offer to older folks, especially where queer fiction is concerned. While this year's Texas Book Festival will have several newer authors on the queer YA fiction scene, David Levithan, an editor with Scholastic and author of Answers in the Pages, has been pushing queer representation in the genre since 2003.

Having started in the young adult field out of college as an editor, Levithan said he approached his first novel, 2003's Boy Meets Boy, as a way to write the book he wanted to find as an editor. When he wrote the book in the early Aughts, he said, "I could name all of the queer YA books [published] that year," he recalled, "[and] odds are I knew all the authors of the books. It was a very finite group." Times have changed, and what used to be published in a year for queer fiction is now published in a month, and the topics and voices published have grown more diverse. "We've added an immense amount of dimensionality in the past 20 years."

As a writer, Levithan said he sticks to realistic fiction rather than speculative, with an eye toward the past for his next works. "Since YA literature is, or queer YA literature, is such a young beast," he explained, "we haven't really gone back enough. ... There are plenty of queer stories from history to be told that haven't yet been told." 

Even with that preference for grounded fiction in his own writing, Levithan said he enjoys being able to work with more fantastical authors as an editor. He is currently editor for Maggie Stiefevater's paranormal Dreamer Trilogy and says that he likes to help harness her imagination by playing the reader: asking questions and pointing out places for clarification. However, he doesn't think that what he writes is too different from the sci-fi/fantasy YA he edits. "It just has to ring emotionally true to the reader."

Emotional truth is incredibly important in LGBTQ fiction, as it is key to creating characters who stand out from tired tropes. Levithan emphasized that he rarely has authors who create flat queer characters because most understand that every queer experience is nuanced. Even non-queer writers don't write from a vacuum, he said, and usually are observant enough of the queer folks in their lives to write well-rounded characters. "That's very recent to this decade. If you went back earlier, there [was] lots of basically good-natured or well-intentioned desire to diversify a cast of characters, but what would end up [happening] is you would end up having the stock character of the gay best friend, or the caring lesbian teacher. You have to just make sure that those characters had depth to them and weren't just sort of the cultural stereotypes that they had become."

Creating solid, substantial young adult literature with good queer characters is, to Levithan, crucial for today's teens. "They want to see themselves on the shelf," he said, "and they want to sort of explore different parts of their lives in the books and the stories that we give them." Answers in the Pages even tackles an issue near and dear to Texas' queer youth: misguided parents seeking to ban LGBTQ literature. With such tumultuous times currently facing queer books and their creators, frequent Texas Book Fest guest Levithan said he's never been more aware of his identity as a gay author than this year. "On the one hand, I don't particularly feel like supporting the state government in any way possible," he says. "On the other hand, I think it's important to go and support all of the librarians, the teachers, the parents, the readers, everyone who is standing up to everything that is going wrong."

Levithan appears at the Texas Book Festival with David Barclay Moore (Holler of the Fireflies) and Kelly Yang (Key Player) as part of “Speaking Up, and Standing Out,” Next Chapter Tent, Saturday, Nov. 5, 4pm.

Answers in the Pages by David Levithan, Knopf Books for Young Readers, 176 pp., $17.99