“When we talk about diversity and our frustrations with diversity, the only control we have is to write those stories and make them so good that they can’t be ignored,” she says. How often do you pick up a YA novel and find more than one queer character, especially if any are main characters? It’s a rarity, but one that Scelsa sees as changing. “That’s what you can do when you have more than one queer character in a book.” “There are lots of different versions of queerness in Fans,” Scelsa explains in an interview with Germ Magazine. In order to truly represent what it means to be queer, Scelsa thought that literature needed to highlight more than one queer narrative - the singular coming out tragedy that dominated the scene in the mid-90s and early 2000s. By “diverse,” she means showcasing a variety of queer experiences: characters going through a rough coming out alongside religious queer characters alongside non-binary characters. Scelsa felt that although more and more queer characters were cropping up in YA books since the 1990s, it wasn’t really until the past few years that the representation became diverse. For Kate Scelsa, a quirky writer who often calls herself a “lesbian with cats,” her first novel, Fans of the Impossible Life, was written as an answer to the problem she saw in contemporary young adult literature: a lack of diverse queer characters.
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