Thursday, December 4, 2008

Finding Help in the Genre of GLBT

For my final project, I had decided to do the underrepresented group of the GLBT. I thought it would be as simple as typing something along the lines of "gay children's literature" in Google and I would find a bunch of books to include in my project. What I had not anticipated was the difficulty I would have finding information about the authors who wrote these books.
Because the concept of bringing gay people into children's literature is still a touchy and controversial subject, the author's who produce these books are not very well known or well documented.
While I was doing some searching, I came across a very helpful tool to finding a lot of useful information about literaure that includes gay themes or character. And it was a very pleasent surprise that I actually found it on this blog site.

His name is Lee Wind and his blog site name is "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read?"

Wind is a teen action fantasy author and has created this blog to help those who are interested in not only literature for and about the gay community, but also other random information, facts, and cool things to look at.

What I found most helpful about his site was the right side tool bar that had a break down of all the literature you could possibly read. It is divided into subcategories including "Books with Gay Teen Characters/Themes", "Books with a GLBTQ Parent/Caretaker", and "Picturebooks I Wish Had Been Read to Me When I Was a Little Kid".

If anyone is interested in this genre of literature, Lee Wind's website is very helpful and below I will add the link so everyone can find it ok.

http://www.leewind.org/

2 comments:

Lee Wind, M.Ed. said...

Hey Rachel,
Thanks for the shout-out!
When I was a teen, there were no books out there that had any gay characters in them - now I have almost 200 listed on my blogsite!

It's fun to find more hidden gems and to track new books just coming out - thanks for letting people know about what I'm up to!

Best,
Lee

Lee Wind, M.Ed. said...

Hi Rachel,
you left me a question on my blog a while ago, but didn't include your blog or an email as a linkback, so sorry for the delay in getting back to you. On my site, when you click on an author's name, it will take you to their website (if they have one) or, failing that, to an interview with them...
If they're publicly OUT as GLBTQ, often there will be something about it on their website (like Brent Hartinger, author of "Geography Club", has a whole bio page talking about him coming out, here:

http://www.brenthartinger.com/beinggay.html

Best of luck!

Lee