I have a strange habit of doing it and I'm not sure why. Not overtly, or for any particular reason, and I'm not gay myself.
I certainly do find myself disagreeing with a lot of what you say. But it's because I disagree with what you say, not because it's you saying it.
Huh? Because if he wears a suit into the store or a garbage bag, it changes who the character is, what he's doing there, and raises all sorts of interesting questions. If you know how to use it, clothing, or hair colour, or sexual orientation, can do more than just excuse the action line. I start my current WOP with a description of the character. Her scars. Her size. Her weight. All of this raises questions about who she is, what she's like and what's going on, and establishes what kind of story we're getting into. So far, no complaints. I don't however, say she's gay. I drop that in later when simply describing her first kiss, slipping in a she instead of the expected he. It's no big deal to her.
If this bores you, then definitely don't read Witch & Wizard by James Patterson and Cate Tiernan. I wanted to gouge my eyes out after getting less than a fourth of the way through the book. I was actually really sad about it too because I love Cate Tiernan. However, that book ruined her for me forever.
I don't find it difficult myself. For one thing, I assumed I was straight until I was about thirteen, so it's not alien to me. Plus, I'm bi, so no particular attraction is alien to me either - though it's all the same to me. The only difficulty I have in writing straight characters is convincing myself there's a reason to ...
Hey, did you hear the one about the linguistics professor lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." And then a voice from the back of the room sarcastically said, "Yeah, right."
To the topic at hand, I've never written queer characters before. Not that I was uncomfortable with it or anything. My characters were just always straight. But actually very, very recently, one of the girls in my WIP decided she was a lesbian. I had never really thought about her sexuality before, but when I went to plan for her to have a romantic relationship, it just didn't feel right with a man. And just like that, I figured out who her love interest would be... Another woman, who up until that moment, I thought was straight. Now, I definitely don't feel comfortable writing stories about coming out and the struggle that goes along with it. But I'm okay with writing a queer character itself.
I don't find it difficult. I mean, I still know what it's like to be attracted to the opposite sex. Plus since it's so mainstream, it's probably easier to know how to write a straight character. I guess it's different for everyone, though.
I'm old enough that I'm uncomfortable with the word 'queer' used to describe other-than-heterosexual characters. I don't think I've ever written anything wherein I even alluded to any character's sexual preference though, so I guess it depends on your storytelling.
It's all very interesting. A long time ago, when I was young, naive and hopeful, I went to a writing workshop. Ok, so not that long ago, but it was in the early days of my manuscript. So we all did peer reviews. On my turn, they brought up the fact that my character, a 14 year old street kid, is gay, despite her fucking guys (which she hates, but that's 'story'). The group discussed for some time about why she was gay. Was it the sexual abuse, was it the males being bad to her and abusing her, was it this, was it that, and how is that important to the story... and I listened with interest as they tried to deconstruct it. As they tried to understand why. And then the 'teacher' hit the nail on the head. She said: "maybe she's just gay." And that's when I piped up and agreed. That's just her. No traumatic event that pushed her away from men. She just likes girls. That's it. That's all. Very interesting experience in people desperate to find meaning and causality in a character trait seen as 'different'.
I like to write what I like to read, and I like to read vibrant characters that seem well rounded and realistic, so sexuality does come into play there. I understand some people care more about plot, so I guess that's a different target audience. Plus, many people find a character's sexuality very important and will even read a book purely because it features a queer protagonist. It's nice to see a character who's like you for once, or at least someone who goes against the mainstream. Although from experience these books aren't always great and they lack in other aspects of story telling. I really want to see great, well rounded stories that also have queer protagonists, and I think that will come once more people begin to write them.
While this initial statement has triggered more, I agree with it. For me it's included because of her romantic interactions. As it would be generally. If there is no love, sex, related abuse, or significant character interaction, I don't see the relevance either.
See, I personally HATE this line of thinking. Most of my favourite characters are NOT like me, and if they are, that's not why they're my fav. This egotistical bullshit about 'needing to identify' with a character drives me up the fucking wall. I really don't understand it. Talk about bigotry. for me, I want to read about people not like me, because I have to be like me every day. And I don't need someone like me to save the world for some ego trip of pretending it's me. See, I don't get it. I really don't.
It's fine if you prefer characters that you don't identify with, but I'm not seeing how enjoying characters you can relate to is egotistical and bigoted. I have anxiety. A character in a long-running series that I enjoy semi-recently started dealing with anxiety, and seeing this character handle it in addition to their stock world-saving duties makes me feel less shit about having anxiety. Maybe that's stupid or childish, but egotistical and bigoted? Really?
I have not yet written a transgender character, but I have been looking for a good place to fit one into my stories for a while now. I'm an asexual/aromantic virgin who actually likes the LGBT+ acronym better than the longer ones where "A" is listed outright but yeah, totally a personal preference. Fun fact: I actually tried to make one of my first serious characters aro/ace like me, but then he went and retroactively turned out to have been bi the whole time ... OK, so maybe not a completely fun fact so much as a sequence of serious mistakes that turned out better than they could've: Spoiler: Very very long When I started my Doctor Who fanfic, I was committed to following the "promiscuous bisexual calling himself Captain Jack Harkness" / "promiscuous bisexual calling himself Captain John Hart" pattern by making my then-leading protagonist a promiscuous bisexual who called herself Captain June Harper. I was actually quite heterophobic at this (shamefully recent) point in my life, and I thought it would be good to force myself to write about an extremely sexual character to get myself used to the fact that not everybody had to be exactly like me. While I was looking for tips on writing female action heroes, I also found an interesting note that women tend to fight dirtier for the same reason that smaller men do, so I decided there'd be a scene where one of the villains is begging for her life by lecturing the heroes about why the universe needs what she and her superiors are doing, but that while my male heroes are engrossed, the Captain just snaps her neck. I had just discovered Watchmen and Death Note at this point, and I'd been a fan of Dexter for years already, so I was a huge fan of the concept of the vigilante serial killer protagonist, but I didn't like that Dexter portrayed the protagonist as being a hero just for being a protagonist who goes after other villains. I wished that more people would realize that these people are villains too, and realizing that Captain June Harper was more violent than her friends also made me realize that I could take it even further than that: I could make her into an outright villain, and I could use the contrast with her friends (who are willing to use lethal force as a last resort, rather than being excited at torturing people to death as a first resort) to show that there is something wrong with these people in a way that so many Dexter and Death Note fans don't seem to realize. I'd also fallen in love with the Token Evil Teammate dynamic (one villain protagonist and a group of hero protagonists work together against the villain antagonists) ever since getting hooked on The Order of the Stick, and I thought it would be an amazing intellectual opportunity to see what happens when the sociopath is the one in charge instead of one of the heroes. And then the Ender's Game movie came out My dad sent me an *interesting* editorial by a guy who had been a huge fan of Orson Scott Card as a kid. He'd gotten used to the fact that being a Muslim living in America meant that he would be subject to prejudice and the presumption of guilt until proven innocent, but Ender's Game had explicitly made one of the supporting heroes in Ender's class a Muslim. The now-author of the article immediately fell in love with the story, hand wrote a thank you letter to Scott Card, and was overjoyed that the giant of SciFi at the time wrote back to him personally. They wrote back and forth a few more times, fell out of touch as the years went on, and then the guy was horrified to start hearing about Scott Card's homophobia. His works had given this other guy so much hope that people would start to celebrate the full spectrum of human life, and yet somehow Scott Card had managed to miss the point of his own books. This article made me sick to my stomach. I was raised Catholic, had lapsed into Agnosticism for a few years but by this point had become a Christian again (though not a specific denomination anymore), but I'd always hated when innocent people of one religion are persecuted for the crimes of the guilty. There are righteous Christians, wicked Muslims, righteous Muslims, and wicked Christians, and I'd always felt that going after evil people (some of whom would happen to be Muslims) would make more sense than going after Muslim people (some of whom would happen to be evil). And yet when I'd decided that two of my lead heroes would be extremely religious, I had just taken it for granted that "religious = Christian." Orson Scott Card believed absolutely disgusting things about the human condition, and yet he'd worked to fight the lie "Muslims aren't human" in a way that I wasn't. In this instance, he'd been a better person with his work than I was being at the time with mine. That horrified me. I immediately went back to my notes, figured out which of my two religious characters would probably work better as a Muslim than the other, looked for as much as I could about Islam, and realized that not only did the woman work better as a Muslim than the man would've, the woman worked better as a Muslim than she had worked as a Christian. That just made it feel even worse that I had taken it for granted that Christians are the religious people available for me to write about, so the next thing I did was look into LGBT stereotypes to make sure that I wasn't doing anything wrong with my promiscuous bisexual serial killer protagonist. I know. I'm in the future also. -Mike Birbiglia. So turned out that "bisexual = promiscuous" and "bisexual = evil" were already damaging enough on their own. I tried to force myself to rewrite my serial killer as being straight (I wasn't going to drop the serial killer angle, it was too important for me to show that vigilante serial killers are not the good guys), but every edit I tried to make always felt fake because Captain June Harper Was Bisexual to me. And then I realized I was going about it the wrong way: people are not stereotypes, patterns are stereotypes. The fact that one of my characters was a promiscuous bisexual serial killer was not the problem, the fact that 100% of my bisexual cast was a promiscuous serial killer was the problem, so I set about seeing which of my other characters could be made a) gay/bi, monogamous, non-villainous, and b) straight, promiscuous, non-villainous (and preferably all or most would be male so as not to turn my story into a "women are there for sex" fantasy). Putting my formerly aro/ace character Damien into a romantic subplot with one of the other guys (whom I now realized was gay despite not having made any plans about him orientationally before this) not only made them better as characters, not only made an already-planned scene a thousand times more powerful, not only made their interactions with everybody else more interesting, but accidentally salvaged yet another problem, this time with one of Damien's very first lines: When I thought the guy was aro/ace, I wrote a bit with him complaining about how promiscuous Captain Harper was (I'd actually written this line months before even realizing Captain Harper was a serial killer). I'd originally intended for it to be an asexual complaining about how promiscuous non-asexuals are (again, I was not in a good place at that time regarding the "heterosexual lifestyle"), but since I hadn't outright stated that Damien was ace, a normal person would've assumed he was straight, and the scene would've read as a heterosexual complaining about how promiscuous the bisexual was. Realizing that Damien was also bi made the line a thousand times better because now it's one bisexual complaining about another being promiscuous, making it clear that it's only the magnitude of the Captain's sex drive that Damien has a problem with, not the direction. Granted, none of my existing characters could be made promiscuous and straight without feeling fake, the new guy I invented ended up being so professional that his off-duty promiscuity (and Damien's complaints thereof) never came up once during the story, and I've been focusing so much on my original fiction that I haven't gotten around to the sequel that I was planning where we would find out to Damien's chagrin that one of the new guys is promiscuous (and that one of the theological opinions of my Muslim protagonist, who somehow became the lead hero without telling me is actually a personal quirk only shared by a minority of the Muslim community. I could not find a way to make her holding the majority opinion feel real for me, but neither could I find a good place to explain that her opinion was in the minority, so I was counting on my sequel to fill in the blanks left by my first installment, but I haven't had time to work on the sequel yet) BTW: this is NOT "I am abandoning fanfiction because I've 'moved up' to original fiction," this is me having spent too many semesters years focusing on college too exclusively for the sake of fun, and now I have to start focusing on college more for the sake of work (and then after that, work for the sake of work), but the second that my day job and my original fiction start getting me enough money to live off of comfortably, then I will absolutely be getting back to my fanfiction (amongst my other original projects). EDIT: How did I just accidentally write 1500 words?
Bigoted if they complain that there are not always characters they identify with, like having to have the token 'whatever' to appease people because that's what they are: be it gay, black, asian, white, whatever. that's bigoted because they won't accept a full cast of peoplenot like them. It's egotistical for the same reason. They must be like me or I don't like them. It's not when they are an occasional thing, like seeing it now and again. That can be fun and interesting. But when it's an always thing. The: 'It must have' crowd.
Do you have aspects of yourself that are generally under- or mis-represented, or that society has traditionally tried to repress but that you'd like to celebrate? (genuine question - I can't keep track of whose background is whose sometimes). Because I think that can be a big factor for a lot of people. If you've got a pretty comfortable spot in society, then sure, it's fun to branch out and see how other people (fictionally) live. But if your spot in society is more tenuous, then I think it can be really important to see an aspect of yourself represented when you rarely or never do.
The best way we can be more inclusive is to stop dividing and just call everyone people. But seriously, if we do choose to divide, not every label has to be 'all inclusive'. It's ridiculous.
Haha, I don't. I'm bisexual but if someone's sexuality isn't mentioned I always assume that they're straight. But I guess that's what you mean? If you actually want to increase queer visibility in media you have to say they're queer, or people will just assume that they're heterosexual.
Are you familiar with the distinction that's sometimes made between "accepting" and "celebrating" differences? Like, we can "accept" that people from different cultures move to our country just by not being xenophobic assholes. But we can "celebrate" their arrival by learning a bit about their cultures and finding a spot for them on our cultural patchwork quilt. Too often when we just call everyone "people" we seem to end up defaulting to the dominant culture. I think that's a shame. I'm not sure what you mean by the "not every label has to be 'all inclusive'" part - that seems obvious? Like, if it's all-inclusive, aren't we back to just "people"?
