Disproportionately gay: an alarming trend in youth literature
The way to win over a culture is to capture the minds and hearts
of its young people. The gay-rights movement has certainly learned that lesson,
which helps explain a current trend in youth literature. Anyone who reads books
for teens these days will tell you that portrayals of gay relationships and
characters are rapidly increasing.
In fact, they’re increasing to the point where they’re all out
of proportion to reality. If you know the statistics on rates of homosexuality
in the real world, you know that it’s somewhere around three percent, maybe
less. Not so in the world of Young Adult fiction; there, it’s far more
pervasive.
Book reviewers on the Youth Reads page at our website BreakPoint.org are
noticing that the subject is coming up in more and more contemporary teen
novels. It doesn’t matter if they’re romances or fantasy novels or any other
genre—the theme runs through all kinds of books for this age group. Acclaimed
author Rainbow Rowell is just one prominent recent example. She wrote a
bestselling young adult book about a college girl who writes stories about a
gay couple—and then Rowell wrote her own young adult book about the gay couple
in her character’s stories!
Given the state of the culture, all this isn’t surprising, but
it’s worth a closer look. There are two main factors at work here. Authors who
work to normalize homosexuality are trying to promote what they see as
compassion, understanding, and acceptance. I believe they’re also trying to
break down sexual boundaries of all kinds, to push what they see as “freedom”
as far as they possibly can.
The result is far from healthy or edifying for young readers.
Even when there are no explicit descriptions, sexual themes are often introduced
before kids are ready to deal with them in a mature way. Moreover, the way
they’re introduced can be confusing to vulnerable and impressionable readers.
For instance, many authors show characters “discovering” their homosexuality by
realizing that they have romantic feelings for a close friend. (This was the
case in “The Girl at Midnight,” a book recently reviewed on our Youth Reads
page.) Portrayals like this can leave kids wondering if their own friendships
are really friendships or something else.
As C. S. Lewis wrote, almost prophetically, in his book “The
Four Loves,” “It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory
that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.” He went on to
warn that such an obsession with sexuality can warp the way we look at all our
relationships: “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but
only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never
had a Friend.”
So the push for homosexuality in kids’ books is dangerous in
more ways than one. But having said all that, let me also say this: I do not
think Christians are supposed to run in fear, or try to live in a bubble. It’s
no good pretending these books don’t exist: If our kids don’t read them, they’ll
hear kids at school talking about them, and of course they can easily pick up
the same themes from TV or movies or music or school. To try to shield them
from every cultural influence is unhealthy in a different way. Instead, we
ourselves need to be aware of these themes, and make sure to talk to our kids
about them in a loving and sensitive way.
That’s why I invite you to come to BreakPoint.org and
take a look at the Youth Reads page, which was designed to help parents be
aware of what’s in the books that teens and preteens are reading.
Wise guidance from Christian parents can help inoculate kids
against unhealthy influences, and prepare them to think about sexuality from a
Christian point of view. And we want to give you the tools to help you do just
that.
