(Untitled)

[sartorias]

The unnamed agency in our previous post has chosen to come forward to present their perception of our exchange. We confirm that it was the agency we referred to. We stand by every word we wrote in our original article

Comments

[kalimac]

They say that what you say happened happened, but that you have given it an incorrect assumed context.

In that light, your statement, "We stand by every word we wrote in our original article," sounds evasive and weasely. I'm sorry to have to say that, but it does.

[sartorias]

we talked a long time last night and early this morning about just this issue. We decided in favor of a short sentence rather than entering into a long description of she said but she said. While that sort of thing will be highly entertaining to those who enjoy Internet vituperation, it shifts the focus to personalities rather than the issue at large.

However. I can't resist saying this much. If the conversation was about the problems of our book, why would Rachel feel obliged to explain her experiences teaching at the Virginia Avenue project, and why would I bring up my years of school teaching, and the fact that yes, there are gay kids in the middle grades, and they deserve to see elements of romance the same as heterosexual kids.

But I realize I cannot prove that either of us said these things, so . . . The short statement.

[rachelmanija]

They specifically said that being gay was the problem. They told us we could keep the character so long as he wasn't gay. We protested, and they said that maybe he could be revealed to be gay in later books, but not in the first one.

It's true that there were other cuts and changes they requested as well. We didn't mention them in the article because we felt that whether we agreed with them or not, they were unobjectionable on moral grounds and so irrelevant to the article.

[kalimac]

"They specifically said that being gay was the problem." Yes, you did make that clear in the original post. The problem is that not only do they say that's not true, but that they offer a scenario whereby you could have misunderstood their intent. (Which leaves aside the great big issue of whether intent covers for conduct, of course.) I expect that nothing short of an exact transcript of the conversation could resolve this issue, and I presume there isn't one. But the nature of the brief response above does not increase my confidence that you did not merely misunderstand them.

[beth_bernobich]

Except the agent specifically said, "You can keep this character but not gay." That seems pretty unambiguous, and isn't addressed at all by their alternate scenario.

[kalimac]

Are you saying that the agent's response was a lie? If the conversation was indeed unambiguous, then the response was a lie, and "We stand by every word we wrote in our original article" is still a weak and evasive response. Because the agent comes close to saying that Sherwood and Rachel are lying, and some of the commenters to that post take that position explicitly.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that Sherwood and Rachel are lying, but I have no real reason to believe that the agent is lying either, especially if Sherwood and Rachel decline to make that charge outright. The only possibility I can think of that leaves both sides honest is a misunderstanding - which is what the agent, when not heavily implying lying, is saying.

[sartorias]

All I am going to say is that the person who wrote the article was not present at the conversation. I really, really hate the energy being put into focusing on personalities rather than the general problem.

So once again, I point you to our article. And if you want, go back and look at the secondhand report which does not fit together logically, that is, if we are totally fabricating the fact that we were asked to take out the gayness from this character, then why in the agent's own secondhand report is there a reference to the characters gayness, and how it could be introduced into later books? And there are other problems with that secondhand report.

But all this finger-pointing is drawing focus away from the problem - that people who in their own personal lives can be quite sympathetic to diversity, have for marketing reasons kept to the safe path by buying books with straight and white protagonists. Malinda Lo's statistics, linked up above, bear me out.

[kalimac]

If the person who wrote the reply was not one who participated in the conversation, that is a datum I did not know and is very important, because it introduces an additional layer of possible miscommunication into the process (between the actual agent and the writer), making it possible for the writer to be anything up to and including completely incorrect without deliberate intent.

[sartorias]

Here's what I can attest to. The person who wrote the article is not the agent in question. However, we can't say for certain who might have been present at their end of the speakerphone conversation--who might have wandered in and out, or listened.