New York Times best-selling YA author pulls out of Running Press anthology because she was told that her gay-themed story was unacceptable. 
Hmm…interesting. My immediate reaction was outrage. It’s easy to jump on the homophobia bandwagon. It seems with gay characters sprouting up all over the place in movies, TV shows and books, that objecting to gay teen characters in a YA anthology is completely unfounded. And I applaud author Jessica Verday for having the integrity to withdraw from the anthology and then publicly tell everybody why.

Now speaking as a publisher, I do understand a little bit about demographics. When you market a specific type of product to a specific market, it often means setting up guidelines for what is and what is not acceptable. Running Press did a brief series of M/M Romance novels in which they were testing the waters by introducing gay romance into the Romance genre and they were fully behind it. So this about-face is a bit perplexing. I imagine they feel that in this case they are marketing to a specific young-adult demographic and allowing homosexuality into the anthology could backfire with a lot of angry parents who think their children need to be protected from all knowledge about unthinkable subjects. Running Press probably wants to play it safe and that is their prerogative, but personally I think they would benefit with a more progressive attitude and be willing to embrace a little diversity in their young adult literature.

Cheyenne Publishing is putting out its own YA anthology this June called AWAKE with all publisher profits going to The Trevor Project.

Anyhow, I think Ms. Verday may have found a new reader...

Edit: An update on this story...