September 4, 2012

• Please write queer characters!

  Third of the Worldcon posts.

  JDN 2456174 CDT 18:53.

   

  There were several panels at Worldcon about issues of inclusivity, especially with regard to gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This was a great improvement over Gen Con, which had only a single LGBT panel (which was really a gay men panel with occasional mention of lesbians) and no panels on gender or broader issues of inclusivity.

  On one of these, the topic came up of straight white cisgendered upper-middle-class men writing stories with gay characters, women characters, working-class characters, Hispanic characters, and so on. A couple of objections were raised to this; the first is reasonable but the second is fundamentally wrongheaded.

  The first reason, the good one, is that this is often not done well. If you are a straight author whose gay characters are pure stereotypes, or cardboard cutouts that don’t feel like real people, or just copies of your own experience with a different label put on it, that’s generally not a good thing. And certainly examples of this do exist. Often ‘diversity’ is added in a slapdash way that ignores the reality and complexity of the phenomenon. But that’s hardly unforgivable, and in fact it’s a self-correcting thing. As more straight authors write gay characters, it will become more apparent whose gay characters are full, rich individuals and whose are simply stereotypes.

  The second objection is that straight white male (etc.) authors have no right to write such characters, because they haven’t lived the experiences of the people they are writing about. So this argument goes, we should leave the gay characters to gay authors, the women characters to women authors and the black characters to black authors.

  I want you to stop and think about what would happen if we actually did that. Every story would be a bizarre segregated world, populated entirely by clones of the author. There would be no exploration of diversity in any stories, because there would be no diversity to discuss. If white authors are only allowed to write about white characters, and black authors are only allowed to write about black characters, then there will never be any books with black characters and white characters interacting! (Nor does being multiracial solve this problem, since multiracial authors will have to write about only multiracial characters, and presumably ones with the same precise mix they have.)

  We have rightly complained about the lack of gay people, racial minorities, even women (which makes the least sense of all) in fiction, and science fiction is no exception. Star Trek was considered edgy for including so many women and racial minorities, and it only did so by relegating them largely to inferior roles. Uhura largely repeated the computer (spoofed brilliantly in Galaxy Quest), and had to wear a ridiculous skimpy uniform.

  So here I am, a queer person, saying to all straight authors: Please write queer characters. I’d prefer you do it well, and I am available to consult if you’d like to hear about my own life as a case study in bisexual experience (and there are lots more people you should also consult; you’ll find their experiences are not the same as mine). I’d prefer that you make your queer characters as rich, heroic, villainous, complex, interesting, and varied as your straight characters. But please, for the love of all that is good in the world, write queer characters.

  If your experience of the world came entirely from the majority of mainstream fiction, you’d never know that we even exist. You’d think that men only love women, and women only love men, and that’s how it is and has always been. Even in works of science fiction that purport to be radical and progressive about sexuality (like Heinlein) this is still often the case. Depending on what figures you use, queer people comprise between 5% and 30% of the human population (5% if you go by self-identification, 30% if you go by measured behavior). That’s hundreds of millions or even billions of people. And yet to read most books, you’d think we didn’t exist at all, or were some sort of bizarre aberration. (I remember cringing in the Dune series to see one of the Barons Harkonnen involved in gay sex just as part of his Harkonnen debauchery. There are to my knowledge no Atreides queer people in the entire series.) If you go by behavior, which, honestly, makes the most sense (I have had sex with men who still insisted they were straight; this has a name, denial), we are one of the largest minorities in the world—indeed if we were much larger we would not be a minority anymore—and we are present in every culture that has been studied, not to mention several hundred known animal species. To call same-sex sexual activity an aberration, you basically have to call 30% of mammals and birds an aberration. (This is about as weird as when people say that Biblical literalism is a radical fringe view—seeing as polls show it is professed by 40% of Americans.)

  So yes, I want straight people writing queer characters. And some of them, no doubt, will get it wrong. That’s okay. It’s certainly better than the alternative, which is that we preserve the status quo in which any LGBT character makes your book an LGBT book, to be relegated (that is, ghettoed) to the LGBT shelf so that only LGBT readers need concern themselves with it. When they get it wrong, we will write more books (or book reviews, or blog posts, or tweets, or whatever), explaining—calmly I hope—what it is they got wrong and how it can be fixed in other works. In fact, I think that a lot of the things they are claimed to get “wrong” will actually be things that are true of a certain proportion of queer people. For instance, if they are all flaming flamboyant effeminates… well, I’ve definitely met some guys like that. Not all queer men are like that; I’m not like that; but some are, and as long as such characters are dealt with in a rich and responsible way, I don’t have any problem with them being like this. It’s not the author’s responsibility to contradict every stereotype in every case for every character in every story. (If they always affirm stereotypes, that would be problematic. But even a slight deviation can have a significant impact; suppose our flamboyant femme is actually a star football quarterback. Now you’ve just made him quite an interesting character in one fell swoop!) I’ve definitely received criticism that some of my women characters are “unrealistic” or “don’t feel like women”. In certain cases this was actually made specific: It was alleged that one of my lesbian characters was overly focused on physical attributes instead of romantic emotions, and I don’t doubt that there’s some sort of statistical trend that women are more interested in romance than men. But frankly, I’m pretty damn interested in romance, and I’ve known some really horny lesbians who seemed like they cared a lot about physical appearance. Is this typical? Perhaps not. But it exists. Showing that real diversity is important. Even weirder was the time that for one of my sex scenes I basically copied, almost moment-for-moment and thought-for-thought, one of my first sexual experiences with a man, making only one rather significant change—the protagonist (playing my role) was now a woman. I was told that the result was “too stereotypically feminine”. I was told that no real woman would ever have these flights of romantic fantasy that I myself actually had at the time. (Or are we saying that romantic fantasies are now a masculine thing? Wherefore said lesbians above?)

  So basically you can’t win, certainly not with everyone all the time. And yes, straight authors writing gay characters, people will probably criticize you no matter what you do. Ignore those people. If they can’t give a really good reason that what you’re doing is wrong, and they aren’t writing their own stuff that is better, then shrug them off and keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t ignore legitimate criticisms (like “Why are all your gay male characters so femme? You do know that there are manly gay men right?”), but do ignore criticisms that are too vague to be useful and especially people who are critical of you no matter what choice you make.

  And above all, keep writing queer characters. We need them, desperately. If you’re not sure where to begin, try what Mass Effect 3 did and just make a couple of your motley crew gay. You don’t have to make a big deal about it—in fact, it’s often better if you don’t. Bioware did this brilliantly; you literally don’t know who is gay until you ask them about their family or try to hit on them—and it’s basically canon that Shepard (of either sex) is bisexual. This is how you do it right. Moreover, the very casualness speaks volumes about the culture that Mass Effect takes place in; it’s a world where the majority of intolerance has been conquered, where gender, race, sexual orientation and whatever else just aren’t that big a deal anymore. (The reboot Battlestar Galactica operates on similar principles.) If that’s the science fiction future you imagine (or hope for), then by all means, write it like that. Elder Scrolls actually does this too, but it feels out of place there; how is it that this medieval feudal culture is more progressive about gender and sexuality than our modern democratic republic?

  If you’re feeling adventurous, try creating entire cultures where, for instance, bisexuality, or transgender, is considered normative, and cisgender or heterosexuality is stigmatized. SF especially allows all sorts of opportunities for this sort of thing. All sorts of opportunities arise for aliens, fantasy creatures, and transhumans. (Transhuman transsexuals, oh my!) For my part, the Terlaroni are almost exclusively bisexual, but heterosexuality is not stigmatized, just virtually unheard of. If someone only has partners of one sex, it’s generally assumed that this happened by chance, just whoever they happened to fall in love with. If this happens with someone especially promiscuous (making it statistically improbable that it’s pure chance), people get confused, but not upset.

  Or, if that’s really the story you want to tell, tell us about a world where things are like they are now, or even worse than they are now (especially if you write medieval fantasy, the worse scenario makes a lot of sense). This is one that’s tricky to do, especially from the point of view of characters who are steeped in a bigoted culture. But it can be done, if you are skilled enough to pull it off. I think one way it would work well is if you—meaning you, the author—had also written other works that were obviously progressive in their attitudes, making it clearer that the character’s opinions are not your own. A straight guy who writes only one book, and in that one book the protagonist hates gay people, is going to be seen as a homophobe, and frankly he might well be one.

  But if you are seen as a homophobe and really aren’t one, write more books, from different perspectives, about different characters. If one of your hero protagonists is gay and breaks stereotypes, it’s going to be pretty hard to pin the label of heteronormativity upon you—especially if you do it well and it resonates with queer readers.

   

  • 9:51 pm
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