The Guardian reports that Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija
Brown were contacted by an agent from "a major literary agency" who
offered to sign them up "on the condition that we make the gay
character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references
to his sexual orientation".
The character in question was Yuki, who appears in Smith
and Brown's young adult book, The Stranger.
Yuki has a boyfriend in the novel, with whom he does
"nothing more explicit" than kissing.
The paper reports that Smith and Brown refused to make the
character straight with Brown telling the agent that: "Making a gay
character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross.
That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are
gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them
are the heroes, and that's not right".
