You wrote WHAT? Sex scenes in GLBTQ YA Literature
The headline above was the title of the panel I had the pleasure of moderating at the Loft Literary Center's Children's & YA writing conference last weekend (April 25-27). The other panel members were: Kirstin Cronn-Mills, Molly Beth Griffin, Dawn Klehr, Juliann Rich and Elizabeth Wheeler. Between the six of us, we read scenes about sex, sexual identity, and gender identity and covered a pretty broad spectrum of GLBT (though we may have been a little short on the Q). Below are the stats that I cited at the start of the panel, plus some bonus stats: From the Teen Lit Lab studies — 250 teens surveyed n 2009 (read the whole Sex in Young Adult Literature paper here): 13.4% of girls said that the general level of sexual content in teen novels underestimates their level of sexual activity 32% of male respondents suggested that sex in YA Lit was most often tamer than what they personally experience 46% say that, in general, YA books overestimate the level of sexual activity they engage in When teens were asked to rank (in order of importance) the reasons they read YA fiction with explicit sexual content: ‘‘To be entertained’’ was the number one reason across all age groups (14-18) Exploring