Ah, from the bowels of my blog.
So, apparently some folks are getting their knickers in a twist over my previous post “My Top Ten Pornfic Peeves” because I mentioned that it was highly unnecessary to make absolutely every character gay. Now, since everyone is filling my mailbox about this ridiculousness, let me please clarify something: Making characters arbitrarily gay with no further mention or plot significance is shitty writing. No, that’s it, that’s all. It’s just plain ol’ shitty writing. Have all the gay characters you want, but stop pressuring emerging authors to fulfill a quota to make their projects "gay enough". If you wouldn't introduce a side character as straight, introducing them as gay just to say they're gay reinforces the misconception that being straight is default which frankly, isn’t a good thing. Do I care if my mail-person is gay? I shouldn’t. Do I care if my grocery check-out person is gay? I shouldn’t. Should I care is my significant other is gay? I definitely should. There is no reason to specifically assign a sexuality to background characters when it’s not reasonable for their sexuality to factor into the role they play in your story. There is a difference between writing, “This is Sheila, I met her and her girlfriend at the club, we’re friends” and “This is Sheila, she is a lesbian” and then never, ever mentioning Sheila again. In cases like this, I am being told by the author that every single person on the planet is heterosexual by default and that I must be specifically told that a non-essential character is gay, just to force a little representation. I have a problem with this. I have a problem with this because there is such a thing as good representation and bad representation, which is entirely the point of my post. There is nothing wrong with having an all-gay cast, but don’t feel that you can’t tell an LGBTQ+ story that contains straight people. Or, a LGBTQ+ story that leaves some characters ambiguous. Or an LGBTQ+ story that only has one gay person in it. When you’re writing, it isn’t about the numbers. It isn’t about some gay-to-straight ratio, or a percentage of visibility: it’s about the story. Just tell the best story that you can, include the characters you want to include, but don’t let anybody tell you that your story isn’t representative enough because you didn’t make absolutely every single character 100% gay with no questions and no hesitations. There is more to the story than black and white, there is a grey area of still-deciding and not-sure, and maybe-but-only-if, and there are a lot of people out there who don’t know if they’re straight or gay or if they’re male or female, or if they are the same person they went to bed as. But most importantly, if you can’t take posts like “My Top Ten Pornfic Peeves” with a chuckle and a grain of salt, it’s probably time you get off the internet.
