Author Stt Swenson giv his sight on how to wre Gay men for our How To Wre LGBTQIA+ Characters article seri.
Contents:
- BEYOND THE CLOSET: WRG GAY CHARACTERS
- WHY ARE SO MANY GAY ROMANCE NOVELS WRTEN BY STRAIGHT WOMEN?
- HOW TO WRE LGBTQIA+ CHARACTERS: GAY MEN
BEYOND THE CLOSET: WRG GAY CHARACTERS
Common perceptns about the gays & some reali wrers n e to enhance the characters wag to bt out of wrg closets. * straight authors writing gay characters *
I sometim refer to LGBT+ as gay this post. A lot of stereotyp around gay people make to stori wrten by straight thors–the token gay iend, for example.
Instead, I want to pot you to several articl wrten by LGBT+ people who generoly offer their perspective on wrg gay characters. Fally, tumblr’s miss turdle has a brilliant pilatn of rourc for wrg LGBT+ characters wh articl rangg om “How to wre gay characters mastream fictn” to “Wrg lbians when you’re not a lbian.
WHY ARE SO MANY GAY ROMANCE NOVELS WRTEN BY STRAIGHT WOMEN?
“If you’re wrg queer characters you need to have an awarens the text of the social climate, even if the story is not ‘about’ homophobia or transphobia or their attendant vlence. Troop, a gay protagonist, the edor jt naturally assumed the thor was gay as well. By assumg he was gay, Burt’s edor ma an unrstandable mistake, bee why, after all, would a straight man want to create a gay protagonist?
An olr gay man did, as I had had many olr gay men take an tert me and my life my 20s. Forcg gay relatnships on otherwise straight characters.
This happens a lot fanfictn – characters who are tablished by the actual work as beg straight sudnly havg a revelatn and realizg how horrible the oppose sex is and beg gay – or even takg a character’s genr exprsn and nng amok wh , cidg that they’re “really” trans. I don’t md if ’s a natural progrsn of a close relatnship, but havg two characters sudnly bee “gay for each” other whout a reason beyond shippg brgs about a mental groan whenever I see .
HOW TO WRE LGBTQIA+ CHARACTERS: GAY MEN
This is a trend I’ve noticed when readg when to straight people wrg queer characters: Men wrg lbians, and women wrg gay men, tend to oversexualize the relatnships for the straight dience.
While I do appreciate reprentatn, ’s pafully obv that ’s wrten by straight women for straight women and that gay relatnships are beg turned to fetish fuel whout any regard to the dividual characters themselv. Yuri is also an offenr – the women aren’t gay bee of any anic aspect of their sexualy, ’s all about the male gaze and sexualizg them for straight men.
A month after my weddg, one of my bt iends told me he was gay. That she falls love wh a woman is important—I’m not dismissg her sexualy—but she falls love wh Fna, a human storyteller, bee of Fna’s fire and passn—not jt bee she happens to be a one we meet real life is a rdboard cut-out or stereotype, so there’s no need for any of our LGBTQ+ characters to be, gay? But other stori, your characters may happen to be gay and ’s simply part of who they my fantasy novel, Callpe and Fna ially fight their attractn to each other, but not bee they’re both women.