In Case You Missed It...

...there's been a bit of a firestorm recently revolving around the subject of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans-gender characters in YA fiction. What started this particular, um... discussion... off was that two authors, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith wrote a piece for the Genreville blog of Publishers Weekly, claiming that they had been told by a perspective agent that they should straighten a character's sexual orientation - or at least not disclose it. (Here's that post.)

This took off pretty fast on the internet, and shot into mainstream media quickly, as in this article in the UK's Guardian newspaper.

The two authors hadn't mentioned the agent by name, but she came out herself - Joanna Volpe - with a strongly worded denial of the claims, posted here at The Swivet.

Opinions and counter opinions have been flying ever since.

Occupation: Girl has a terrific summation of the whole situation, with lots of quotes from lots of voices. YA Highway also tackles it with a summation.

Just mentioning it...