[WRITING] Andrew Wheeler at Comics Alliance on gay characters in fiction

[rfmcdonald]

At Comics Alliance, Andrew Wheeler writes about how it is never accidental if a particular writer in a particular medium does not feature LGBT characters, that choices are always made at some level.

Organic, meaningful and natural. That’s the familiar language of the writer looking for an excuse not to introduce diversity to his (or her; usually his) work. It’s the magical view of storytelling as a gift from the muses, except these muses are a vegetable delivery service, and if they didn’t bring any gay characters in the delivery box, you can’t use any gay characters in your recipe. If the gods of literature did not inspire you with gay characters, you cannot offend the gods and add some anyway.

In this way the writer can present his cowardice, laziness, and lack of imagination, as artistic integrity. “I couldn’t write gay characters; I didn’t have any.” Hand-to-forehead; the tortured auteur.

Yet writing is a sequence of decisions, and you can be sure that’s at least as true in Hollywood, or at a publisher like Marvel Comics, as it is anywhere else in storytelling. Writers build worlds, sometimes in advance and sometimes as they go, and if the writer decides that their world should have robots or dragons, you can be sure they’ll contrive ways to put the robots or dragons into key scenes in the story.

Gay characters aren’t like robots or dragons, because the world the writer is building already has same-sex relationships. I’m sorry if that seems prescriptive, but it’s true; people in same-sex relationships exist in all fictional worlds, because they are a natural, meaningful, and organic part of the real world. They are already there. Maybe they’re hiding behind the dragons, but they’re there.

Unless, that is, you choose to exclude them.