'Too much' diversity?

So, I was talking to this person I've known for a long while (face to face at this point) and eventually the subject of books came up and I mentioned that I was writing bits and pieces now. They got quite interested at that as they remembered what I was writing years ago and I explained how I had moved on to something new. We talked for a long time and they were so excited by my project that later I sent them an email with a summary of my five stories that are all in this one world.
They said some nice things, and some criticisms that I view as very valid but then:
Do you not think your cast is oversaturated with diversity?
What in hell's name is that kind of criticism? Too much diversity???? Eh?
Basically what this guy was getting at was that nearly all of my cast isn't exactly straight or if not that, sitting nicely within binary genders. He thought this was going overboard.
I, of course, don't have a knowledge of all sexualities and genders but my stories aren't about that, it's all either subplot or completely incidental. Before this, I was fine with all my cast and writing them but now it's made me worry that this is wrong of me. I keep telling myself it isn't but now it's niggling at me and I can't get rid of niggles.
Am I going overboard? Am I 'allowed' to write about other sexualities and gender identities?
I can explain just how 'diverse' if need be. I don't think it is very diverse myself :/

 

@Homer Potvin Ah, maybe that's what he was going for. He didn't really elaborate even when I asked him about it. I'll ask him if what you've said is what he means, because if it is, I can see why it could be too much. Thank you

 

I see zero problem with this. I can't tell from your description whether (1) your cast is implausibly "diverse", or whether (2) it's a simple case of, "Well, events happen to non-white-straight people, too, you know." But either way, I see zero problem with it.

I suppose (1) may be true if persons A, and B, and C, and D are all non-straight and all encounter each other for reasons other than friendship or dating or some other reason that would mean that someone non-straight would be more likely to meet someone else non-straight. But if so, who cares? I remember reading my second or third Sarah Caudwell novel and noticing that I no longer assumed that any character was straight, and finding that pleasantly freeing.

 

I agree with the others. The problem isn't with the sexuality or whatnot, but how it's presented. My daughter brought a book to me the other day that she was considering and when I read the back I shot it down. Not because the plot was a bad one, what I'm assuming was the main plot sounded interesting, but the summary on the back made SUCH an issue of the boy having a boyfriend and losing him and feeling guilty about his feelings toward another boy that, while an interesting fantasy story was mentioned, it came across as "this is a book about a gay kid." If that's the type of story you're going for, that's fine, but if that's not the main focus, your friend may have a point.
As for why I shot the book down, my daughter is 11. Growing up is hard enough without bringing sexuality into it too early.

 

Well that's easy: 1) do more than one of each so that some of them overlap and some of them don't

• The protagonists of my first Urban Fantasy WIP are two straight white men, a straight white woman, and a black lesbian, the initial group of antagonists are two straight black men and a gay white man, the newcomer ally/antagonist Wild Card is an undead woman who used to be black and straight before getting killed, my secondary characters include two Asian-American women...
• The protagonists of my intended sequel are two mixed-species (human/psoglav with a white parent, human/orc with a black parent) lesbians and a mixed-race (white/Arab) bi woman, the antagonist is a straight black woman, my secondary characters include two straight men (one white and one Arab) and a bi non-human woman.

and 2) flesh them out so they're not tokens. Which you have to do anyway, so singling this out as an issue in writing minorities doesn't make a lot of sense.

Especially when you realize that straight white men are a 27.5% minority in America...

Do you and your spouse ever kiss and say "I love you" to each other in front of her?

 

Avoiding these types of comments is part of why I don't share a fair portion of my work outside of friends and publishers, to be honest. They're useless to me because dialing back the 'diversity' isn't something I'm interested in doing, but people will almost always dwell on the fact that a character is trans "for no reason" and any feedback on the actual story is diminished.

I don't know that I have any advice for you, that's just my MO because I'm quite confident that diversity isn't a bad thing and it's what I want to write.

I'm not straight, and I wasn't straight when I was eleven, either. If your daughter's not, growing up is probably going to be harder if you shield her from the existence of gay and bi people.

 

I'm asexual/aromantic. I didn't know this when I was 12 because I didn't know that there was such a thing as asexual/aromantic, I thought I was a broken heterosexual/heteroromantic.

After Dad told me at 15 that asexuality was a thing and that he was pretty sure that I was, that was 3 years of hating myself ended in a second. I wasn't completely comfortable with my orientation, and I still thought it was annoying that I wasn't straight and thought my life would be easier if I was, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with me anymore.

If a penguin is raised by fish, how is he supposed to accept that he breathes air when "breathing water" is treated as being so axiomatically correct that there doesn't need to be a word for it?

 

I second this. Why can't characters be whatever they are just because? Your character looks like Quasimodo, but the plot isn't about how to properly treat the deformed? Cool, excellent. Your character is a black lady who plows half of the Asian men in her college in Tokyo? Hey, whatever floats her boat. Your character is a white dude doing white dude things? Go ahead.

WARNING! INCOMING RANT!!!
Dear new writers, just write the fucking book. Let your characters be what they are. As Wrey once said, people will bitch no matter what. Too inclusive, not inclusive enough...whatever. Look, I'm half-blind and half-deaf and I couldn't give two rat shits that 99.999999% of the characters aren't exactly my demographic of half-blind/half-deaf people. Write your book, be honest with your book. You don't want me opening up your book and finding it too sterile, too...not honest and open with itself, now do you??

 

But sexuality is there. She knows that people get married. She knows that people have babies. She knows that people have boyfriends and girlfriends. She's probably met someone who's engaged. You may have friends who have had anniversaries. The fact that people couple up is already known to her.

And so is the fact that people are different from other people, in all sorts of ways, and that that difference can cause them to experience pain. Eleven is absolutely the age when that can get really, really horrible. Keeping her from reading books that deal with that fact doesn't seem useful to me.

Now, if you don't want her to read explicit sex scenes, sure. But those can happen with hetero romance novels, too. You seem primarily concerned with the non-hetero nature of this novel.

 

The only potential valid criticism is of statistical implausibility. People in the LGBT basically have to seek each other out. Odds on meeting a transgender person as I recall is 1 in 300 , non straight some 1 in 16, so if a group of people happen to have a chance meeting and they're all trans or non straight - it's not believable. So it can't be completely incidental.

 

I don't think there's such a thing as too much diversity, but I think there can be such a thing as stuffing in too many 'social justice' storylines into a piece of fiction (like Glee). Diversity exists, and funnily enough, people who don't fit into the norm are often magnetised to one another to feel a sense of belonging.

I think there's this odd myth that in a group of straight or white or whatever, standard conforming people, there's only one (1) person who is not straight, or isn't white, or isn't from x religion.

But I can assure you, people group together to feel a sense of kinship. You come together out of a sense of belonging one way or another. What's more likely true is a group of minorities together because they feel relaxed in themselves, they can talk about their lives and problems without feeling as though their friends may not understand.

 

Hmm okay. I got a response (because I emailed again) and it turns out it is @Phil Mitchell 's idea and a little of @big soft moose 's too. I certainly didn't go in with the intention of putting 'one of everyone' in this world because there certainly isn't. I honestly don't think my cast is that diverse myself but presumably having a large chunk of my cast LGBT isn't 'realistic'. I personally don't think I'm gonna do anything about it, because that's who my characters are now, but I've just got to keep in mind some people might not gel well with it, I suppose, which is rather disappointing. I'll also keep @Homer Potvin advice in not letting it override the main plot as I thought myself that would be the explanation, but guess not.
So you understand what I'm talking about, @ChickenFreak , I have three straight women, two bi women, one bi man, three gay men, three straight men, one aro-ace man and one I-don't-have-a-clue man because he's romantically involved with a non-binary person (these are protags and important secondary characters only). But I must add, these are not all in the same one story. This happened because I made a world too big for the simple plot I originally had so it kept wandering off and so to keep that plot on some rails I made other stories with new characters in the same universe.

 

To deal with a number of points in a (hopefully) concise way:

It is always ok to write whatever characters you want them to be. As long as you aren't forcing characters into the story just to walk on and go "hey I'm a demi-gendered griffin!" then you have no problems. Good characters aren't tokens and good stories are not gratuitous in their inclusivity.

But, here's why people get annoyed, IMHO. In so many words, it makes it sound like you are writing a book about being gay. And that's fine if you are. But if you aren't, if you are writing a story that stands on its own and would work without the characters being gay, then I think it is a fair question to ask why the story needs them to be gay. This isn't a question so much about diversity, it's one about minimalism in writing.

Even them all being couples doesn't really need them to be gay, at least not unless you argue that gay couples are magical and different in how their love lives work. And, at least in theory, Chekhov's Gunman would narrow his eyes at you for having these details all over the text without directly paying them off. And, honestly, I do generally believe that's the case. That we should always seek to prune away everything that the story doesn't need.

I am sympathetic to the idea of making characters that could be any sexuality gay even when the plot isn't about that. But the counter to that is that if it doesn't matter to the plot then don't mention their sexuality at all. This is, I think, what people mean when they say it feels 'unrealistic' or 'jammed in', that a book that goes out of the way to tell us the hard boiled detective is gay when there's no reason to tell us that is breaking the covenant with the audience to, in so many words, display their progressive credibility. I understand that characters who are not said to be gay will be presumed straight, and when you know characters are gay it rankles but in the end if it doesn't matter it doesn't matter.

Lots of writers want to have gay characters and write it like it's just no big deal, just normal happy gay people. But if their being gay doesn't achieve anything then I would argue it shouldn't be there.

I don't know your writing, I don't know which things are needed by the narrative and which aren't. But just on the surface to me, by seeing quite so many gay characters, it looks like it's a book about being gay. That doesn't mean it's a bad book at all. There's plenty of those stories out there that are great. But if that's not what you want to do, if you want to tell a story that stands on it's own then I would argue that you need to trim down the interpersonal details to keep the focus on that story.

To try and at least keep something concise; presume that all the gay characters are robots instead for a minute. If this is a story about robots and robosexuals then having them be robots isn't a big deal, it helps in fact. But if this isn't a story about robots, why are there now robots all over your book stealing focus when their being robots will never be paid off?

That's the danger of informing parts of character that don't do anything for the plot; you have 100,000 words and every one you use on something that doesn't matter is just wasted.

 

"Every detail should matter" isn't the same as "don't have a gay character unless the story is about being gay."

By that logic, a character shouldn't be married unless the story is about being married. But characters are married for all sorts of reasons that aren't as big as that marriage being the theme of the book. And if a character is married, it doesn't need to be a straight marriage. If a character is going on a date, it doesn't need to be a straight date. If a character is flirting, they don't have to be flirting with the opposite sex.

Now, I don't believe in minimalism in details anyway. But even if I did, that would not in any way make gay characters a problem.

 

A story doesn't at all have to be about gay for there to be an mc who's gay. I've never understood this logic. Loads of stories have incidentally straight mcs without folks implying that they're about being straight. Even if they're romance, they're not about 'being straight' - they're just romance. Why does a story with a gay mc, or a predominantly or even partially queer cast, make you think "this is about being queer" even if the plot is plainly about fighting orcs or space nazis or what have you?

Is every story with a predominantly straight male cast about being a straight man, or is it about ... whatever it's actually about?

Your point about minimalism is interesting, but it's one that I find very tiring, because it always, always comes up in discussions about diversity. I like playing with minimalism personally, but my entire style doesn't hinge on it. I'd say few peoples' does. We all pick and choose what details we want to include, which ones are important to us, which ones we feel are important to the story, and it always seems - in these discussions - that the point being made is "a character's orientation is never a detail worth including unless it's important to the plot". I think that's up to us as individual writers. It's mighty odd that minimalism is so commonly used as a tool to erase queer characters when it doesn't come up so often in other contexts.

 

I sometimes struggle with reading stuff that's very diverse, but I know that's mostly because I was raised in a place that was very not diverse. My hometown is still something like 88% "non-Hispanic white", and there was only one out gay kid in my high school. (He said he was going to bring his boyfriend to the prom, the football team promised to beat them up if he did, and the administration "solved" it by telling him he wouldn't be allowed in.) The company I currently work for has about 30 people in the office, and while we're nationally diverse (Aussies, Canadians, Americans, a few Brits, one Kiwi), we're largely ethnically homogenous, with only one black guy and one part-Maori guy. We've also only got one woman, which is one more than we had for several years.
I guess what I'm saying is that what some people consider an absolutely normal and average level of diversity may strike others as a sort of forced Benettonism. Like with any topic, theme, or whatever in your writing, you need to consider your target market most of all. If you were writing for the True Christians™ that I grew up with, you might be able to squeak in one Muslim, Jew, or African-American character, provided that they were a) professionals such as dentists or lawyers, and b) nowhere near the central cast of the story. This would show that you're tolerant, but anything more would just be crazy.

Sorry...rant over, not your fault, my stupid upbringing.

 

I'm honestly not sure how much of this is a direct response to my post because I don't really see what bearing it has on what I said. No one ever says or implies that they're just calling out orientations willy-nilly in these conversations, but it's always treated as such. I'm just talking about casual, organic mentions of characters being queer. It's the kind of thing people don't even notice when the character involved are straight.

Say there's a story where a character, who is not in a relationship during the course of it, has an ex mentioned as a relevant point of their backstory. Maybe the ex was abusive, or died, or it was the character's first relationship; whatever. The ex is the same gender. This is incidental. That's what I'm talking about - not "This is Ted and he's gay, and this is Audrey and she's bisexual, and Stan over there is ace, and ...". The plot doesn't have to be completely reliant on a character's orientation, doesn't have to be about their orientation, for it to be mentioned unobtrusively. I feel like you get that.

What I don't understand is how people turn "casual mention of character's orientation" into "this story is about being [orientation]" in their head

 

That seems like an extreme example, and one I've never encountered or heard of when it comes to queer characters. What stories have you read that went from any other kind of thing but somehow got 'taken over' by being about being gay (whatever that would mean)? Does this actually seem like a 'danger' of writing a few gay characters to you? Because I'm not getting it.

It also just seems to imply bad writing: a subplot taking over the main plot. Which is another thing that always comes up in these conversations. "Well, you don't want to do it badly, so don't do it at all" is the impression I get.

Again, it's as if for non-straight characters to be mentioned, it becomes 'about' them being non-straight; it becomes part of the plot or message if they're mentioned too often. I've absolutely never heard anyone talk about anything being 'about' being straight (well, outside of jokes in queer circles ...). Liam Neeson has to save his wife in one of the Taken movies, right? Is that movie 'about' heterosexuality as a result, or is it about a character saving their spouse? Does the fact that it's a guy saving his wife overpower the basic story, or is it just probably a dumb action movie where a damsel in distress gets saved and there's not a deeper message?

(ETA it's so late that it's early here and I'm mostly procrastinating on writing something that I have to finish before I can sleep, so apologies for any typos / missing words / etc.)

 

As others have pointed out, tokenism and a story that's blatantly about pushing an ideology can be a turn-off to many readers and something for the writer to watch out for.

On the other hand, it's probably best if you write what you want to write. Bending over backwards to please others can be pretty frustrating and suck all the fun out of writing. You can't take everyone's sensibilities into account.

I'm not that obsessed with identities, so if the book has a straight character, fine, if the book has a gay character, fine -- as long as they're compelling, well-written characters whose lives I want to follow, whom I care about, it's all good. Nowadays a sexual identity or ethnicity alone aren't enough for me to make the book "fresh" or "less boring". It's all about how well the author is able to bring these characters to life. Say I pick up a book with, gasp, a straight white male character. As a character I expect he'll transcend his skin color and sex. If he doesn't, he's simply a one-dimensional character, he's boring, and it's likely CTRL+F'ng through the manuscript and changing every "he" to "she" won't make him any more interesting. But that's just me as a reader, right now. There was a time I actually preferred books with male protagonists 'cause I was interested in masculinity and felt I connected with male characters better, but nowadays I'm more blind, if you will, to these things.