I wrote a romance between two female characters, but I don't want the audience to think they're gay.

Seriously, that their both women isn't the point. I just made the empress' lover a woman because the empress needs an heir and her consort obviously can't provide her one so she gets insecure about that. Especially since the empress in entering into a political marriage. It's not an "LGBT" or Lesbian romance, just a romance between two women.

 

This seems unclear. Is it that the OP doesn't want the relationship to be analysed by the reader?
Is it that the characters' sexual orientation is only being used as a plot device, and the OP wants to be excused from writing about it?
The "because" in the OP didn't make sense to me - characters' genders are always arbitrary to the writer, but whether they should become lovers depends on who they are as characters, and on the story the writer wants to tell. So on the one hand, there doesn't need to be a "because" - and on the other, the empress needing an heir doesn't force the writer to make the lover a particular gender... except for storyworld-cultural reasons, but that's the tail wagging the dog: the storyworld-culture should serve the characters' story. The reader doesn't care about any of this - there's no point a writer showing the reader aspects of characters and their relationships that they don't want to write (or can't due to research). More information might be useful on the context or what the problem is.

 

What exactly do you think a lesbian romance is, if not a romance between two woman?

If you don't want the audience to think they're gay, you have two options. Make one of them a man, or don't have a romance between them. That's it.

 

You need to provide more detail. So the consort is male but any issue of the Empress and the male consort isn't an eligible heir? How does having a female lover solve that?

Is this like a platonic friendship? Is there anything sexual about their relationship? Is either physically attracted to the other?

 

Huh?

1. If the empress needs an heir and her consort can't [help her to] beget one, how does a romantic relationship with another female in any way lead to the procreation of an heir?
2. Why/how is it "obvious" that her consort can't provide her with an heir?
   
3. How is a romantic relationship between two women not a lesbian romance?

 

I would advise you to consult a dictionary on the definition of lesbian.

 

If there is no sexual element, what you're probably reaching for is the female equivalent of what they nowadays call a bromance: a womance, sismance or some other silly thing. In the olden days, we used to call it friendship, unless it was the intense emotional admiration that an adolescent felt for a role-model or hero, which was then called a crush or a pash.
How the reader interprets the relationship depends entirely on how you present it.

 

Seems to me if you have an issue with calling a romance between two women "lesbian" or "LGBT", you have some prejudices you should probably work on, and definitely need a better understanding of the LGBT community, loooooong before you should ever attempt to write this.

 

My advice here- even as a beginner- is to go right back to the beginning and start again. I’m not seeing anything here that makes sense, and it’s hard for me to imagine any detail here that you could add to make sense of it (why must the lover be a woman? Why can’t the consort provide an heir and why is the empress insecure about that? And why would a woman make that better? And how can a woman give another woman an heir? And why wouldn’t it be lesbian?)

I see how a romance need not be sexual. Asexual people can have romantic attachments, so whether they have sex or not isn’t always an issue. But if this is more than friendship and is romantic, then I don’t think calling it lesbian or gay is an issue here. It’s starting to remind me of Norm MacDonald’s joke where he’s talking to Larry King about being a deeply closeted gay man. Whenever Larry King says something about being attracted to men, Norm says “woah, I never said that. I said I’m a deeply closeted gay man. I don’t want to sleep with men!”

 

I don't understand this bit. She's insecure about not having an heir via her (presumably male) consort, so why would she enter a relationship with a woman?

Perhaps if she was in a loveless or abusive marriage, I could see it, but not having an heir seems an odd reason to enter a lesbian relationship (and I'm sorry - it IS a lesbian relationship).

 

I think I'll join the camp of...what is a lesbian romance if it's not, by definition, a romance between two women.

I am going to assume that what you are trying to go for is this: A future Empress is being forced into a loveless marriage with a man...in isolation and loneliness, she enters into a homosexual relationship with another woman, although in normal circumstances she is not attracted to women? In this case, want to or not you are still writing a lesbian romance. I believe in prison, they call this phenomenon "gay for the stay", as in they go in with a preference for men, form a romantic partnership with a woman, get out and go back to men. I'm not a psychologist so I have no idea what this would be called in non-slang terms.

 

I’m under the impression that the OP meant

“The empress’s lover is a woman. Her female lover (her consort) cannot provide her an heir, because they are both women, so she is entering into a political marriage with a man.”

I’m still baffled by the “I want them to be in a same-sex relationship but not gay” thing, but I’m pretty sure her female lover = her consort and that’s why the consort can’t give her an heir.

 

Not same, I always want my audience to think my characters are gay.

 

Than explain our guy love, that's all it is
Guy love he's mine I'm his
There's nothing gay about it in our eyes.
You ask me 'bout this thing we share...
...and he tenderly replies.
It's guy love...
...between two guys.

 

This is what was tripping me up with the question to start with...usually a consort is your married partner. The late Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, for example, was Prince Consort to HRM Queen Elizabeth II of the UK. Consort usually just denotes that they are married to the monarch but not co-ruler with them, however, they are the legal spouse of the ruler. So if the Empress is in a lesbian relationship with her consort (but somehow isn't lesbian??) and wishes to procreate and obviously requires the services of a male to do so...so is now marrying a man...is it bigamous? Or was the "consort" not a consort in the legal sense, but just a lover, and now she's marrying a man? The entire question didn't make any sense.

 

I think the pain we are all going through is that we are thinking this through too much and trying to work it out more than it needs to. We just need to stop at the fact that someone wants a woman and a woman to be in love but doesn’t want to call it lesbian.

I think the OP needs to assess why they don’t want a lesbian relationship within their lesbian romance story more than we need to justify it. I don’t mean that to be harsh, but as a supporter of the LGBT community, I think it’s now at a stage where their work needs to be done more than ours.

 

You are likely correct. That's not the way I read the original post, however. I'm an American, so not much accustomed to royal terminology. My reaction came out of knowing that Price Phillip was Queen Elizabeth's Prince Consort, and the Queen has just pronounced that she hopes Camilla will be titled the Queen Consort when Charles ascends the throne. I therefore assumed that "consort" referred to the empress's legal mate rather than to her same-sex paramour.

 

My brain was not firing on all cylinders. Please forget this posts exists, kthanks.

 

Okay, I'm writing a high fantasy novel romance between an empress and a thief-turned-captain-of-the-Guard. They are in love since (from the Captain's view) the Empress "saved" her by taking her in after her trial after recognizing her talents and potential. However, the empress needs to produce an heir as her dynasty is being threatened by a conspiracy of corrupt priests. Even thought they are of the same gender and in love, I don't want it to be thought of as a "gay" story (whatever the hell that means, God I hate labels.) It's about them being in love, but that love being threatened by practical concerns outside their control and whether their love can last.

 

This is pretty much the textbook definition of romance, and the characters are of the same sex, so people are going to think of it as a “gay” romance/LGBT romance/lesbian romance/wlw romance/etc. You can’t really do anything about this.

Is there any particular reason you have a problem with the label?

 

Are you hoping for traditional publishing or will you self publish?

 

The human race has been divided and redivided and segregated into neatly labelled little boxes until sometimes one does wish one could write a story about people loving each other without needing to make an issue of their gender, race, or point of origin. Maybe someday, but probably not today or tomorrow.

About the best that can be done is to tell the story without political or social comment on gender and let people think whatever they're going to think.

 

I had someone ask me why they "had" to be Lesbians as if I were just trying to score woke points instead of writing a story. They don't have to be gay. I'm not making some sort of political or social statement. I'm bi myself. I just want to explore the dynamics and unique difficulties of a same gender relationship. I don't even like the term gay, bi, etc. If two people love each other who cares about gender or labels or that bullcrap? I despise stories where they have a gay character who's just gay and that's their whole thing. It's why I love shoujou/shounen-ai (girls/boys love anime which have same gender relationships, but the characters are fully fleshed out human beings.) I'm not writing gay characters, I'm writing about two human beings who are in love and have a uniquely difficult circumstance to overcome. (Her inability to give her an heir, the class differences even if she was male.) Terms like "gay" or "homosexual" are used to dehumanize people who just have different preferences as if they are a "different" kind of human.

 

Right, and this is what LGBT romance is.

Whether you end up going the traditional route or self-publishing, the labels are necessary. People who want to read about the development of same-sex relationships use the labels to find those stories. If you don’t use them, your target audience will struggle to find your work. Likewise, there are still plenty of people who absolutely flip their lid at even a hint of f/f or m/m content; the labels help deter those people.

If you’re worried about the sub-genre classification diminishing your story, trust me when I say that’s not the case.