First, I just want to say congrats to Cindy Pon whose book FURY OF THE PHOENIX is out today! Y’all should definitely read it–Cindy is probably one of the most twisted writers I know (don’t be fooled by the sweet facade!) She’s having a kickass contest, so enter to win!

But I also want to continue to offer my support to Jessica Verday who pulled her story from an anthology after the editor asked her to turn her gay couple into a hetero couple on her assumption that the publisher didn’t want to include gay characters.

There’s been a lot of talk about this, and on the blue boards it was suggested numerous times that the editor shouldn’t be cast as the villain simply for making a business decision. I agree that the editor isn’t the villain (she’s actually a nice lady; I know because I’ve worked with her), but this is bigger than her. This is about the deeply entrenched discrimination in the publishing industry. So deeply entrenched, that some editors apparently take for granted that publishers don’t want gay characters.

People keep coming up with all kinds of reasons to rationalize why the editor initially wanted Jessica to make her couple heterosexual, mostly saying that it’s a business decision. I say as long as there’s institutional discrimination, there will always be some halfassed rationale to back it up. It’s a business, people say; you can’t get all emotional when making business decisions.

Can you imagine Rosa Parks boarding the bus thinking, “Well, it’s wrong of them to discriminate against me, but they’re just thinking of the bottom line–making me sit in the back of the bus helps to maintain their profit margins and really, why should my rights as a human being interfere with that?” Gandhi himself said business without morality is complete bullshit. Or something along those lines.

I think when people rationalize like that, they do it out of fear. Institutional discrimination is scary; business on the other hand, well that’s just status quo.

There’ve been some other remarks too. Stupid things like that Jessica has a vendetta against the editor (as though she’s not allowed to not want to work with someone who assumes gay characters are bad business) and she’s being petty by not offering her story now that the publisher has asked her for it nicely. I don’t worry that Jessica’s story won’t ever see the light of day; I’m positive it will. So I don’t think that her decision not to include the story, even after the editor and publisher apologized, is a loss for readers who will certainly have a chance to read it in the near future. We gained something much greater than one story, though. People talk about discrimination in the publishing industry, and now we’ve seen that those people aren’t just making it up. Thanks to Jessica, many MANY people have seen the truth for themselves.