A couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I got into a discussion about the fate of the queer characters in one of my stories, pointing out that they die about 10 pages after it is revealed that they are queer. It was a pretty interesting conversation and now I am rethinking how my queer characters are portrayed.
This conversation and others about race and gender have led me to want to reexamine all my fiction, so - and I can't remember if I've mentioned this already - there will not be a new issue of The Courier anytime soon because I've found a lot of really problematic ideas buried in it, written by a younger, less educated Virginia. Writing in a way that is responsible is something that is absolutely necessary to me, now, and I want my writing to be something healthy and realistic for people who aren't necessarily represented that way in a lot of fiction.
Anyway, as an apology to my girlfriend, I drew the two queer characters being very sweet, open and alive together. I am still thinking about how to rewrite them.
1 comment:
Aw! They're cute!
I appreciate what you wrote here, and it's reassuring that you believe in responsible writing. Not knowing much about the full context in Courier I can't really comment on it. However generally it does bother me when an "unconventional" character gets killed off ingloriously for no real reason while the straight white folks get to walk off into the sunset at the end.
I think I have some idea of what you mean too, I also have some difficulty writing queer characters. The biggest stumbling block for me is said characters' "coming out." Not so much a literal coming out but revealing their sexuality in the work itself. Essentially if I have a character reveal that they're not straight I'd like it to be in a way that's meaningful and not cheap and exploitative, if that makes any sense.
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