So I recently read Dahlia Adler’s “Out on Good Behavior” and I really liked it. But I saw someone’s review of it that was extremely negative, they were upset that Dahlia didn’t contradict many of the stereotypes about pansexual people (sleeping around and focusing on sex were the main two negative points). I know those were definitely themes of the novel, but I didn’t see how they were so bad. What’s your take on the book? Do you think the conformation to stereotypes is really an issue?

shiraglassman:

lgbtqreads:

Well, let’s start with the important full disclosure here: I’m Dahlia Adler. (Glad you liked the book – thank you <3) I run this site, this Tumblr, this everything, so there isn’t anyone I can pass this question off to. That said, I do my best to be as objective as possible in this space, and I’ll do the best I can here.

I do stand by the rep in the book. I find the thought that queer books should never contain stereotypical behavior stifling and limiting as an author, a reader, and a person* and I wrote the kind of character and trope I wanted to read, and who also felt like certain shades of both who I was in college and who I might’ve been if I’d known I was queer back then.

That said, it’s valid to feel the other way too. There aren’t a lot of books with main characters who ID as pansexual and there’s a certain kind of hypersexual persona that is overly associated with pan people and it feels like Frankie feeds into all of that. If you don’t like that in a character, or feel like it’s important pan people not be written that way (or at least not when there are so few pan MCs out there), then it is a book where you are not going to like the rep, and that’s 100% valid. I don’t see hypersexuality as a negative, especially where no cheating or lying are at play (which they aren’t in OoGB), but when people automatically make the association between pansexuality and hypersexuality, that’s really annoying, and it’s not a book that’s going to help with that. To my mind I made the careful distinction that Frankie isn’t hypersexual because she’s pan, but it’s obvious that either I wasn’t successful in that for some readers or it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been, and both of those responses to it are valid.

So, the tl;dr version is: it’s valid to think it’s bad rep. It’s also valid to think it’s good rep. It’s valid to think it’s somewhere in between. I don’t think it’s objectively any of those things.

Also, because I’ve been looking for a way to make this exact book rec and now I can just straight-up do it: If you didn’t like the pan rep in Out on Good Behavior (or even if you did but just want to see more that looks different), please pick up Final Draft by Riley Redgate when it comes out in June. It could not be more different in that regard and I think it’s exactly the kind of pan rep people who want it to be less stereotypical are looking for. (Redgate is, of course, the author behind YA’s first mainstream on-page pan main character, in Seven Ways We Lie, but this is a single-POV book and also the main, pan character is female.)

*For example, when I see gay male authors discussing how wildly few effeminate male main
characters there are, because it’s So Important that we buck the
stereotype and instead make them all athletes who would never dream of
touching makeup or loving musicals, which…doesn’t feel great for more effeminate gay kids or for the authors who were those kids and don’t feel they can sell books with those characters.

This post has some interesting food for thought on exactly how we frame the “don’t write this; it’s a stereotype” argument to have more nuance.