I don’t write romance novels, so my characters’ sexual orientations are rarely front and center in my stories. Nonetheless, I’ve always included queer characters in the worlds I write, because that’s the world I want to live in. But writing queer characters used to be a very different exercise than it is now… and it’s a wonderful change.
Let’s start with establishing a timeline: I’m old. I only started publishing as Sara Blake in the past five years or so, but I’ve been writing and publishing seriously (not always prolifically, but seriously) for about twenty years. And I was writing and publishing less seriously for about ten years before that. I’ve seen a lot of evolution in the publishing industry and in the attitudes of readers in all that time.
So back to my queer characters.
I’ve lived in or near Columbus, Ohio my whole life. There’s a really cool bookstore in the cute neighborhood of German Village I used to frequent, called The Book Loft. Located in a big, old house, the store boasts 32 rooms of books. Some of those “rooms” are actually hallways, but it’s more or less a true claim—you wind through the store, room by room, over 3 floors, exploring a different genre or theme in each one.
Back in the ‘90s, my favorite room was at the very back of the top floor: the LGBT section. It was positioned in a way that it wasn’t a pass-through to get to anywhere else in the store, not to hide it out of shame, but for the privacy of the customers who chose to browse it. It was a big section, filled with both fiction and non. I spent a lot of time there.
The placement of that room says a lot about the time period. The 1990s were a time when it was becoming more and more common for people to be open about their queerness in their personal lives, but they were often still forced to remain at least partially closeted at work and/or with their families. It was the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which is highly criticized these days but was, at the time, quite the advancement. That room was placed out of the way in part for people who needed to remain closeted, but also just to keep the “ugh, am I going to have to deal with a homophobe today?” dread to a minimum.
This is the era in which I started writing seriously, and it definitely affected what I wrote. Or, rather, how I wrote it.
Because there was another message in the placement of that room: exclusivity. We were not only in a time period where it was only partially safe to be out, but also one where the gay community, as a whole, felt rather like a club one had to earn the acceptance of. These two things were, I hope obviously, not unrelated. (The Pagan community of the time was a very similar situation, but that’s another post for another day.)
That exclusivity was actually the thing that gave me pause when writing queer characters back in the day. I was never especially worried about homophobia—if people didn’t want to read about my gay little characters in their gay little stories, then they could just put the book down and read something else. My actual concern was that I didn’t want straight people to feel excluded—I didn’t want that implied “you do not belong in this space” wall to make any reader who wanted to read my stories feel like I wasn’t writing for them.
And so, I found myself in a continual balancing act, trying to include a character’s queerness when it was “relevant” to the plot, but keeping it in subtext when it wasn’t necessary to the story I was telling.
It was exhausting.
The series I’m working on right now, Widdershins, will be new to my readers when I finally finish it and start putting the books out into the world, but it’s far from new to me. These characters and a version of the season-arc storyline I’m writing right now have actually been with me for more than two decades. And it’s always been my biggest “balancing act” series.
I should share something first, about my approach to character development: I’m kind of insane about it. My characters are real people who just happen to live inside my head rather than out in the world. I know so many details about most of them that will never be on-page and never need to be. And I don’t mean I spend endless hours building character sheets, either—I just think about them. A lot.
I have a couple of characters in Widdershins who’ve always been on-page queer: Kyla and Griffin. They’ve both been in other books, unpublished except for one that’s out of print now anyway, where their queerness was “plot relevant” and thus included. But there are others for whom it was not relevant to the plot to share this detail and so, in previous attempts to write this monster of a series, I left it out. In particular, I have two characters who are a M-F married couple who are both bisexual. That wasn’t going to be “necessary” on page, so I just left it out. (Note that I said “left it out,” not “changed it.” They were always bi, no matter what I chose to share or not share.)
I was never “afraid” to include Kyla (lesbian) and Griffin (bi) on page. But I worried that revealing Jake and Gabby were also both bi would cause a heterosexual reader to say, “Hey, wait a minute. With all these gay and bi characters—is this book not intended for me?” I also, to be honest, worried about the still-ubiquitous issue of bi-erasure, and that people would accuse me of being unrealistic by writing “too many” bisexuals. (Or, worse, of using bi as a hedge to make gay more “acceptable.” I actually did have a friend once parse Kyla’s gayness out of subtext and ask me if she was “bisexual.” She clearly saw this as the “safer” question, even though there wasn’t the slightest hint anywhere in the story Kyla might be attracted to men.)
Over the years, I’ve watched things gradually evolve. A lot of different factors have contributed to this change, which I won’t be deconstructing here, but the result is this: people want to read gay books now. A LOT.
I haven’t been to the Book Loft in a while, due to changes in the store that have nothing to do with queer content, but I’m sure this month they’ll have at least one big, rainbow-bedecked Queer Books display, right in the front room of the store. I’m not sure where they keep the LGBTQ+ books shelved these days, or even how many of them are separated out from other books in their genres, but I know from past visits they’re no longer hidden away in a back corner.
There might still be some element of “maybe this book isn’t for me” among heterosexual readers, but a) at this point, that assumption is on them and b) there are SO MANY people who desperately want all the queer books they can get their hands on that it isn’t going to affect my potential readership numbers anyway.
And really, given that most mainstream fiction (books, TV, and movies alike) includes queer storylines and subplots, I don’t think there are too many heterosexual people who still think they’re expected to keep their hands off of queer stories. And since Heated Rivalry, that’s even more true than ever.
This place we’re at now is one I’ve always wanted and, in a world where what I want rarely seems to align with what other people want, that’s extra exciting. We’ve reached a place where, in fiction at least, it’s just a simple matter of fact that worlds have queer characters in them. There’s a lot less gatekeeping, and a lot less “why are you reading this?” scrutiny—just lots of gay books.
Yay!
Happy Pride, everybody!
