In Desperate Need of Books

March 2011

 

New York City, early nineties. I am a lonely fifteen-year old roaming the streets while my immigrant brother, whom I am visiting for the summer, works at the downtown hotel where I meet him every day for a quick lunch and a trip back to his house in the suburbs. It doesn’t take long before I fall in love with the chaos, the coffee to go –impossible to find in Spain back then-, the colorful crowd and the immense bookstores.

Already a bookaholic –and when wasn’t I one? Books have always been the only thing I want for Christmas-, I spend hours inside those megastores, so different from my neighborhood’s papelería, the stationery store where I used to buy both my school materials and my favorite novels, snooping around the bookshelves and smelling some of the volumes (yes, I do that quite often).

And then I come across it. It is almost hidden in the young adults section, its shelves still colorful and not covered with black spines of creepy vampire series at the time. But still, it’s there, which is more than they could say in Kansas, where I learned later that they had burned piles of it, nazi-style, all across the state, or in other places where it had been banned. Its cover draws my attention: two girls who are facing each other hold their hands, their foreheads touching. Is it about…? No way, has someone written about…? The title is Annie on My Mind and it is written by someone called Nancy Garden. I read the back cover and am flabbergasted. Liza meets Annie, they fall in love. As simple as that. I buy it, of course.

It was my first lesbian novel and I kept rereading it all over my teenage years. I still do from time to time. It was also my only lesbian novel for a long time, just because I didn’t think there were others, apart from two very old ones that Liza and Annie read in Garden’s book, and whose existence I therefore learn through them: The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller.

I was very lucky to have found that novel and not another one. Annie on My Mind was written in 1982, but unlike Radclyffe Hall’s tragedy, it is a positive love story about two girls who overcome prejudice and end up stronger and even more in love. In fact, the last sentence of the book is “I love you, too!”. In Garden’s story, some people don’t understand the girls’ relationship, but others become powerful role models for them, like two teachers from Liza’s high school (these characters are clearly a tribute to Lillian Hellman’s play, The Children’s Hour). The novel made me dream of a time when I would meet someone like Liza and Annie, lesbian friends my age with whom I could talk. It gave me hope of falling in love that way, not with a straight classmate as had been the case so far, but with another girl who felt the same way as I did.

Also, Annie and Liza don’t give up their life plans for each other. Annie loves singing and Liza wants to go to college. Both girls fight for their dreams, encouraging one another and celebrating their achievements. In Annie of my mind, loving someone is not the ultimate goal. On the other hand, your loved one is the person who will hold your hand when you walk the path of your choice. I am pointing this out because an alarming number of today’s novels aimed at (straight) teenagers depict young women who leave everything for the possessive (vampire/werewolf/angel) boy they have fallen madly in love with. For instance, Bella in the famous Twilight series, gives up her academic ambitions, her family and, ultimately, her human life, to be Edward’s teenage wife.

Liza and Annie are not archetypes of anything, they are just themselves. The book is not a moral, it’s just a “girl meets girl, girl loses girl, girl gets girl back” story with two intellectually lively young women who not only have to struggle with first love tribulations but also face injustice and homophobia.

One day, to my surprise, I became older than Liza and Annie and started going to college. I realized Annie on My Mind and I had grown up together. After my claustrophobic high school years, being surrounded by creative people from different backgrounds who wanted to change the world made me the happiest of students. I joined a feminist group, I had real dates with girls –like those Liza and Annie had, but without riding the Staten Island ferry- for the first time and I discovered Chueca, my city’s gay district, as well as its bookstores, where I could by more lesbian novels.

Years later, Amazon became popular and I was able to buy books from the States and have them delivered at home on the other side of the ocean. This way I read many other young adult and adult books, although Nancy Garden’s novel would always hold a special place in my heart. Even if I am in my thirties now, I still buy young adult novels in Amazon. Why American young adult novels? Why in Amazon? The reason is simple: this kind of books for teenagers does not exist in Spain.

Yes, there are some exceptions –Nunca soñé contigo, by Carmen Gómez Ojea, for instance- but the sad truth is that Spanish young lesbians don’t have books they can relate to. Not many Spanish teen fiction authors are writing about them and big publishing houses are only interested in earning money with heterosexist paranormal romance and consequently, refrain from buying lesbian love stories from either national or international writers.

If you have read any book section of a Spanish newspaper or magazine lately, you will have probably encountered an article about the young adult literature boom. Yes, teen fiction is selling a lot, many kids are reading like crazy and I think that’s great, but aren’t we forgetting someone? Unless they understand English and have the money for online shopping, gay and lesbian teen readers have to make do with the straight worlds of the likes of Stephenie Meyer, their black flaps available in any local library or bookstore they visit.

Writers, publishers, it’s time to give all teenagers a chance to enjoy reading, to offer them the opportunity to grow up with food for thought and to provide them with fictional friends like Liza and Annie who help them escape from the “boy meets girl” world they live in or, even better, create a new one where all ways of loving are celebrated. And by the way, almost thirty years later and despite having become part of the canon of lesbian literature, Annie on My Mind has not been translated into Spanish yet.

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