Is My Novel Offensive?

When Becky Albertalli published her first young adult novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, with the HarperCollins imprint Balzer and Bray in 2015, she never expected it to be controversial. She'd worked for years as a clinical psychologist specializing in gender nonconforming children and LGBTQ teens and adults.* Yet her book-about a closeted gay kid whose love notes to a classmate fall into the wrong hands-contained a moment that rubbed readers the wrong way: Simon, the sweet but clueless protagonist, muses that girls have an easier time coming out than boys, because their lesbianism strikes others as alluring. At a book signing, several people approached Albertalli to complain that the scene played too readily into a narrative they'd heard many times before.