I've been told I have *too many* gay characters!

Of course give them some room. But telling detail doesn't give the full picture. It's almost impossible for any reader to have exactly the same image as you, you can't even guarantee 75% similar. Giving four of five lines to describe their appearance is not going to prevent them from imagining things themselves. Not at all.

 

There's nothing wrong with a little description. Here, let me describe my sci-fi protagonist: Helen spotted something on her arm she hadn't seen before -- or she hadn't been paying close attention: a mole, long and egg-shaped. She smirked. Kind of looks like an island, she thought. An island on a sea of brown. Or more rather a sea of brown covered by a lot of islands. A worry pinged at her brain, a irrational worry: since her great-aunt died of skin cancer, could she face the same risk? Don't be stupid, Helen, she shook her head. Just focus on the job; if a mole starts looking off, you've a twenty-four hour medical facility aboard. Focus on the job.

Here's Amos, my blind Colonial detective. I pulled at my hair. "Red? No one ever told me it was red!"
"What did you think it was?"
I shrugged. "Black?"
Emily laughed. "Amos, had you ever wondered why many mistake you to be Irish on sight? This is why. A youthful, rosy-cheeked, red-headed boy." She clicked her tongue. "Get use to it."
EDIT: Just for the record, folks, I know that Amos would've known what color his hair was since he first started learning how to talk. Especially since he's been blind since birth. He'd be asking his caretakers all sorts of questions. This was intended to be a joke.

 

"Readers are not permitted to engage in the reading experience. Perceptions shall be limited exclusively to that which is explicitly outlined within the text."

I have one main character born of Polish parents, and is therefore about as white as people come. The others are, essentially, race-less. In my mind, they're white, but I never say so or otherwise. They could be Asian (either the British sense or the American), Black, who knows?

 

You may as well quote some fictional person as saying that all fiction must be based on a moon made of green cheese. Because no one in this thread has said anything remotely like the above. In fact it's so far from anything that anyone has said that I was initially assuming that YOU were advocating that position, and I wondered what the quotes were for.

You seem to think that featureless characters with no individual attributes or backgrounds are the goal to shoot for. I can't wrap my mind around how that could possibly be a good thing. Detail and richness in fiction isn't a lamentable distraction; it's what makes the fiction worth reading.

 

But why? Why in your story is it necessary to let the readers decide who you're characters are? It's your job to make your own bloody characters. You know Lord of the Rings? Those books describe things LOADS but guess what? People still imagine them differently. You can't guarantee the exact same image as your head one, so why bother making it even more vague? It's not controlling to simply describe what is it your characters look like. You could apply your logic to any part of the book. Why are you controlling readers by making them imagine specific dialogue? Specific settings? I don't want to pull a slippery slope fallacy, but it doesn't seem like your argument is very specific to race. How do you draw that line? And why the hell does that line make sense?

 

Then that position plainly needs to be explained to me, because that was pretty much the message I got from the post I quoted. This: "So you want to enable readers to make every character look a lot like them? To let them control your story for you? Why don't you just wank them while you're at it?" is pretty obviously a damning condemnation of letting readers exercise their own imaginations about a character's appearance, rather than having the author outright tell them.

I don't think that at all. My characters are the basis of all my fiction, far more so than plot, but race and other physical attributes aren't generally all that relevant to them. They have their flaws and their nuances and everything else that comes with a good (I hope) character, but I avoid going into particular detail about their bodies.

Characters aren't only their bodies, and in deciding not to go into detail about one or another's birthmarks or suchlike, I'm not shying away from building the character. Your argument about not being able to guarantee the reader see what I do is, if anything, an argument in support of me. If it's a choice between not describing and having the reader make their own image up, or describing and having the same, why bother going through the effort of detailing it?
My entire opinion here is almost certainly coloured by the fact that physical description is something I neither enjoy writing nor reading, though.

As for the slippery slope fallacy, specific dialogue tempers the story in ways that physical description might not. Summing up a conversation between my two characters with "They talk about Hannah's boyfriend" strips out the sexual tension between them, their characterisation, little dialectal dashes, and other things. It's also, more importantly not as interesting to read.
Of course, the same argument can be made for describing a character as "White, short, and teenage", but for the stories I write, where appearance makes little to no difference, what's lost is less significant. Yes, what they're wearing can show character and so on, but at the end of the day, I'm writing what I like to read and when it comes down to it, detailed physical description is something I find tiresome.

YMWV

 

Do you live in a country, or are you depicting a country, where racism does not exist and never has?

It's interesting that your premise seems to be that these attributes are meaningless and should be left out, while someone else in this thread seems to be arguing that those attributes are so meaningful that they should be left out.

The only agreement is that they should be left out.

Would you agree that gendered pronouns and names should also be left out? ("How DARE you say 'he'! You're taking away my freedom to imagine that character as a woman! And that name is Germanic! You're infringing on my right to envision a Celt!")

 

Okay, to be clear. The position is that describing the basic appearance of a character is a good thing because they're your characters, it's your decision. Books aren't about maximized appeal and reader freedom, they're about telling a story. Now, I am willing to accept that some people don't like to describe character. But I'm not going to ignore your arguments either, especially not when it's that readers should imagine the characters. Details enrich, as long as they're not overwhelming and tedious. Giving your character appearance is not strictly necessary, but very little is. If you want to create a story that does not enjoy creating a vision, but rather tries to be loose and metaphorical, your perspective is definitely better. But the majority of stories I think benefit from creating a sense of reality, a real world, real characters. And ethnicity would be given away half the time anyway. If you have a guy called Apu Pattel, who is Hindu and lives in India, he is going to sound pretty Indian to people. Nobody is going to think he's anything unless you say so in one way or another. So he's never going to be whatever they want.

 

Okay I may be a little biased but let's just say this. There's no such thing as too many. There's stories without LGBTQ+ characters and there's stories where all of them are. All that says about that group is that they weren't the audience for the book. People will have their own opinions and I'm not saying that they are by any means homphobic, but different strokes for different folks. I wouldn't take it too seriously. If you want to change it fine. But don't feel you have to. You're probably going to offend someone somewhere somehow no matter how you write so yeah.

 

For the record, I'm depicting the UK, which is a country that has struggled with racism and still does. In what little Sci-Fi I write, racism is indeed dead.
It's important to realise, though, that racism isn't something that crops up in pretty much anything I write. My current novel is a tragic love story between two teens, and while that's a fertile field for dealing with racism, I'm not doing that.
The rest of this argument is basically just reductio ad absurdum, so I'll address it by repeating something I posted further back in the thread.

The fact that ethnicity is given away half the time is half the reason I don't consider it the zenith of importance to point it out. Meet my character Ash, who lives in Burton Upon Trent, England. What race did you think of? Probably not Ashekanazi Jew. What if I tell you that she's fifteen, has a mouth like Blackbeard's poop deck, and has given up on ever getting decent grades at school?
I don't know what picture of her you've formed, but whatever it is will see you through my novel just fine.
Again, I don't think keeping away from physical descriptions precludes real characters, nor a real world. I think you're taking my hesitance to go into that one facet of a novel and extending it to every facet. I go into plenty detail about other things.
I'm far more concerned with what's going on in the characters' heads and in their environment, rather than their bodies.

 

But if it's wrong for a writer to specify appearance or sexual orientation, what gives you the right to decide the thoughts in your character's head, or her age, or her manner of speech? Aren't those also ways that you're overriding your reader's imagination?

Isn't writing fiction at all, overriding a reader's imagination?

I see no consistency in your position.

 

But I would show a straight white male's sexual orientation most of the time, and a straight white male's sexual orientation is not as relevant. Nobody cares if you're straight except if they want to fuck you. But plenty of people, not a huge number put a good portion, do care if you're gay. Being gay is a thing. People ask about it. People come out about it. People talk about it. And appearance is something that I would show in every single instance of every single character, so that rule definitely applies to my argument there.

 

My general rule of thumb here is: that if I'm gonna do it to characters of minority groups, I'd do the same for characters of the majority.

Mention that someone has dark skin? Mention elsewhere that someone has light skin.

Mention someone is gay, mention that someone else elsewhere is not gay.

And so on. Here's an example of Helen meeting a crewman, who is white.

The man's face flushed paler than Helen had ever seen, his rosy complexion had become a mottled, sickly grey. “Easy there, man,” she said gently. “Breathe. What's on the scanners?”
“Yes, Ma'am. The-the reports indicate that a fleet of Var'oins are coming to attack one of our central colonies. God...”
“Send out the alert. Rally as many ships as possible.”

See? You don't have to cut the narrative off to say bluntly that the person is xyz. You can weave it into the narrative in a way so that it makes sense.

As for the current discussion of whether or not its wrong to let readers imagine the characters. OK, well, if I told you that Helen was 6'8'', muscular, had dark skin, bony cheeks, short black hair and piercing brown eyes, would any of you be able to imagine the same exact woman throughout? Your image of Helen may not even match with the Helen that exists in my head. Unless this were a graphic novel, a video game, a TV show, or a movie, I highly doubt any of you would get the same image of her from the description I just gave out.

 

It's not wrong, it's just not something I do. I've never said otherwise.

Being gay is a thing, and as I've said, if it's a source of conflict within the story, you should mention it. We're not even arguing over anything now.
If it comes up in your stories (and whether or not it 'comes up' is a subjective decision), then go right ahead and talk about it. If it doesn't (and whether or not it doesn't 'come up' is a subjective decision), then don't.

For the stories I write, I consider race, broadly, a non-issue, so I don't mention it. Sexuality does come up, so I mention that quite happily. Whether or not the author thinks it's relevant is only thing that matters, really.

 

But why does it have to be a source of conflict?

OK, an example: Joe's investigating a sociopathic criminal. One of the crimes is the fact that the criminal broke into Mr. Smith's yard and killed their dog. Joe is interviewing Mr. Smith, who says,

"My wife called me, freaking out, and..."

But then the author says, "Oh. Wait a minute. I just revealed that Mr. Smith is heterosexual. I have no excuse for revealing that information, because Mr. Smith's sexual orientation doesn't drive the plot in any way. So the author changes it to,

"My neighbor called me, freaking out, and..."

Is that what people are suggesting? Don't reveal a character's sexual orientation unless it's a very specific plot driver?

If so, I just don't see why.

 

No, you're telling us -- I believe -- that unless the plot directly revolves around the person being gay, colored, or whatever, we shouldn't even mention it. I feel like you're trying to force your own style on us.

Kevin turned his head to see a brown hand clasping his shoulder.
"Hey, man, you doing okay?" Adrian asked, concern written on his face.
Kevin smiled sadly, fingering the glass of cold Guinness. "Yeah. A little."

Yes, Adrian would have to put up with a lot of shit -- shit that Kevin would even bear witness to, but the plot doesn't have to be about Adrian being black; it's just a way for me to describe him.

Here's another example, back to Amos:

"Oh come on, anyone can fire a musket -- Hell, I could!"
"Oh yes, that's a comforting thought," Emily sighed. "A blind boy firing a musket."
"With help, of course. Someone would have to be aiming me-"
"You're not firing a musket, okay?"

Or even...

Helen smiled at her sister as she clasped her arms around her wife's shoulders. "Hope you two have a happy anniversary."
"Aw, thanks, lil' sis!" Lindsey said cheerfully.

So what are you saying, man? It seems like you're telling me "I don't have a problem with this!" and then in another post, you're saying, "Unless it's an issue, it shouldn't even be mentioned." So in these three examples, do you want me to not casually mention that Adrian is black, Amos is blind, and Helen's sister is married to another woman -- assuming that they're living on a planet that still sees homosexuality as a crime? Do you want me to weave a plot that directly discusses racism, bigotry against the disabled, and homophobia? Yes, the three would have to put up with some shit, and I would probably need to show on some level, but...

Are you saying "weave the plot around them being different" or, "keep in mind the bigotry they may have to endure for being different"?

 

Because homosexuality is a social deviance, remember? It's okay to casually mention things that follow social norms, but homosexuality is "the other" and readers who encounter the other will be distracted by it.

[To my mind, this reads as "homophobes won't like it" and I therefore don't give a shit.]

 

I suppose that a mindset that goes to the same place, but has its origins in a somewhat better place, is the possible idea that if an author specifies that someone is nonstraight or nonwhite, they're then going to be worried that anything negative about that character will be construed as being a general condemnation of people with that trait. But that just means that the traits are being left out due to author fears, not due to any "good writing" grounds. And it doesn't excuse all these complaints about OTHER authors including nonstraight or nonwhite characters.

Another one for the race side of the question is the idea that we should all be "color blind", and that even though we live in a world rampant with prejudice, our books (unless they're specifically about prejudice) should pretend that that prejudice doesn't exist at all, and that therefore the life experience of nonwhites in majority-white countries should be depicted as PRECISELY the same as the life experience of whites.

I'm not remotely OK with any of these, or with the resulting idea that nonstraight or nonwhite people should be completely absent from fiction unless and until there's a good excuse for them to be present. But I suppose those start in a somewhat better place.

 

And the "other" has to be carefully dissected and examined in a long, intricate plot about being gay, rather than just having a character who is gay because...because the author just wanted him/her to be gay. Really, it's wholly unfair to them. Heterosexual white guys don't need to be carefully examined in plots that discusses why they're white, or why they're heterosexual, so why must this treatment be for homosexuals and not-white people? Or hell, even women in some cases?

Why is there an unspoken rule practically where if you include a non-white homosexual, then the plot must examine it to its gritty details? Yes, bear in mind the bigotry they'll face -- they're not gonna always have it easy, but the plot doesn't always have to be, "Ooooh! They're different, so let's find out why!!" I remember once, a few years ago in another forum, a black poster complained that she was sick of race always being brought up every single time a movie featuring black people was released.

 

First off I'm just going to put in my two cents. In reality there is NO reason why a person is gay, just like there's no reason that a person is straight. It's simply biology.

So with that logic you don't or shouldn't have to explain anything. And I agree it's not fair. Personally I don't think you should even have to explicitly say "he she is gay or bi or whatever". So for me I just don't. Lol

I don't go into any of that. My Mc's had girlfriends and he's been with dudes. Like you I just sort of casually mention it in dialogue or I mean bro. Actions speak hella loud. Like whoopdie doo, he got his dick wet in an orifice not attached to a woman, sue him. Pardon my vulgarity but thats just sorta what it comes down to. Sexuality doesnt NEED to be a plot device to be relevant and I'm not about to unnecessairly make it one when there's so many bigger issues to deal with. it's relevant because it's part of who they are as a character and whatever makes the character fuller is just as important to the story as the plot itself. So I totes agree.

And @NaillRoach yeah being gay is a thing. Sadly it apparently warrants some big to do and well the only way that will stop is if people Stop making it a thing. And what's a way you do that? How about the exact opposite of what you're implying and just treat them like the people they are and moving with the story as the story and not a microscopic analysis of a characters past sexual encounters.

 

Like George R.R. Martin said when an interviewer once asked him how he was able to write his female characters so well, "You know...I've always considered women to be people." I write my characters as they are: people. Them being a different shade of skin color, or what sex parts they want to touch, or whatever is just one aspect of their character.

 

Exactly mate. People, not just in stories, but just in general would be a whole lot better off If everyone was just a person as flawed as they are and accepted that. And I mean let's be real no matter what you write and how "politically correct" you try to be if that's what you're aiming for, someone somewhere is going to find a problem with it and a reason to be butt hurt over it. And that's okay cause your writing is in part a reflection of your views and ideas; its you painted over a world or the landscape of the Earth you decided to use. People are all different and that's one of the few things I actually genuinely like about the human race. Thanks to that you can't please everyone and boohoo to that.

 

I could kiss you, George.
Mind if I use your quote after his for my sig, Link?

 

The following is almost completely irrelevant. I had to post it anyway:

Coupling, Episode ?, The Girl With Two Breasts:
Steve: There are times I worry about the way you see women.
Jeff: I see women as people in their own right.
Patrick: In many ways, they are.

 

I'm going to quote myself again, and highlight the key nuance. I hope this time it's absorbed.

In your example, you would mention the character's wife either way, so it doesn't go against my little axiom. This is the third time that's been posted now, and I'd really like it to be read.

I very much hope you're not conflating me with the poster who actually said that, because it doesn't represent my views in the slightest.

I'm done with this argument, because I've done nothing but restate and explain myself and if I've failed to get my message across so far, I doubt I'll ever manage it.