||||Megan Honig

When I talk to librarians about street lit, I acknowlege that many of them come to the genre with concerns. One of the big ones is the genre’s perceived misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.

I don’t want to dismiss this concern. We need to be thinking about who is getting marginalized and how to support all library users. But when this concern is used as a justification for excluding street lit books from the library, then we have a problem.

First of all, it is true that some street lit books express unproblematized misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. In the first street lit book I ever read, Payback is a Mutha, a woman catches her male partner in flagrante with another man and is so disgusted that she vomits—and I as the reader was expected to be disgusted too. In a pair of street lit novels, Secret Society and In Those Jeans, the revelation that the main female character is a trans woman is presented as a salacious, shocking plot twist (though the stories are more sympathetic and nuanced than one might imagine from their packaging), and in the opening of DeJon’s My Skin Is My Sin, a man’s having sex with a trans woman is used as an instrument of shame and digust. In the works of several authors—Quentin Carter is the one who most leaps to mind for me—women are portrayed as consistently shallow and sexually available to men.

But there are also street lit books that offer more affirmative portrayals of women and of queer and trans characters. Tracy Brown, who writes character-driven street lit, has strong and complicated female protagonists (I don’t remember any queer or trans characters in her books, though). Reginald Hall’s In Love with a Thug has a gay male protagonist, and London, the central figure in A. C. Britt’s London Reign, is a sympathetically portrayed gender nonconforming character. I also recall sympathetically portrayed queer and trans side characters in a number of street lit novels: Harlem Girl Lost, Black and Ugly, Black Widow, and The Northside Clit. (Can you think of other street lit titles to add to this list? Feel free to list them in comments.)

And there are also YA books that have their own misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. What about the homophobia in Catcher in the Rye—not a book published for YA but one frequently assigned in schools as a YA classic? What about throwaway trans misogynistic jokes in certain young adult bestsellers? What about the way the Twilight Saga romanticizes an arguably abusive relationship?

How interesting then, that we reject street lit for its presumed misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia but leave classic and contemporary YA lit relatively uninterrogated. It reminds me of the way mainstream media criticize misogyny in hip hop—assuming that a) the genre is a monolith and b) other (whiter) genres do not have similar issues.

Like hip hop music, street lit is not a monolith as far as its portrayals of women and queer and trans characters. Nor is it the only genre with problematic portrayals or erasures. So even if we thought it were possible or wise to try to eradicate messages of misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia from our library collections (and I certainly do not), eliminating street lit would not be an effective way to do it.

I do think there are ways libraries can help foster patrons’ respecting themselves and each other even in the wake of these messages. In fact, fostering this kind of respect is a big part of our jobs. But if we think the way to foster this kind of respect is to keep the entirety of a genre outside of the library, then we’re doing our patrons a major disservice.