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* "Tropes and the Marginalized:" http://www.sparkindarkness.com/2011/07/tropes-and-marginalised.html

* neo_prodigy found, "What I Want to See in the Bookstore:" http://www.gayya.org/?p=345

* My related thoughts in response to the two previous items:
When I was growing up, there were hardly any books with girl protagonists having adventures. if you wanted SF or fantasy or modern adventure, it always had to be a white straight cis-sexual boy having that adventure. Most of the POc male protagonists were in the sports stories, which is a whole other problem, I think.

By the time I was teaching there were a bunch of authors writing girls having adventures in various genres, and i kept a list in my head for the middle school girls desperate for something that didn't revolve around boys, clothes, dating, family issues, horses, etc.. This made me very popular with them. They passed my book recommendations around, and would come up to me unprompted to gush about what they just read and to ask for more reccies. I also did a secret trade in books with unconventional boy heroes or books with girl protagonists that the boys wanted, but were scared to be seen searching for at length in the stacks, lest they be mocked. The boys would share reccies and word of mouth would quietly spread I was safe to ask and usually had good advice.

It's not there yet, but it's so much better.

I know it's a side issue, but this was a big problem when I was teaching: I'd still love to see more books with POC leads that aren't about 1. boys playing basketball or other sports, 2. historical. (I love the explosion in historical novels with young protagonists generally, but a lot of kids were hungering for escapism instead of vaguely educational. I'm not against writing more of these, but a little plot and genre diversity would have been hugely helpful for my students, as it was common for them to need to pick things in various genres for reports. For example: Imagine how sick our Asian students were of having the stories all be about internment camps, or dealing with inter generation problems between immigrant and US born girls)?

I mention these things, because I think they are all related to this problem of stereotypical tropes leaving kids longing for more options.

How cool would it be if there were LGBTQ protagonists in action stories, in fantasy, in sf? How cool would it be if kids could see people like themselves out having adventures? How cool would it be if when kids came asking for a genre book with a certain sort of character, folks like me could just walk over to the shelf and hand them one?