I think there are many valid reasons for not specifying anything about the sex lives of fictional characters. Massive numbers of readers are asexual, postsexual, or presexual; they'll be bored by whatever sexuality the characters have. Your story may be primarily a romance; if so your goal is to get your readers to identify with one character who's interested in one other character, and other characters' sex lives will be an unwelcome distraction. Your story may be primarily an adventure story, mythic tale, or moral fable; if so your goal is to activate a different circuit in the brain, and there, too, sex will be an unwelcome distraction. If your story is primarily a comedy, some people think sex is funny but others think it's not; if it's primarily a tragedy, some people think sexuality can deepen the tragedy but others think it distracts. But I want to be fair about this. I think there are ways to ensure that, if your fiction includes homosexual characters, they're readable as realistic parts of the story and not just a political choice.
So what are the ways I'd use to make homosexual characters believable? A few quick thoughts:
* When people aren't married or trying to get married, in real life, the odds are astronomically higher that they're a- or pre- or post- than that they're homosexual. For young characters, it's especially important to respect asexuality and presexuality as options. Sixteen-year-olds who don't think they're "in love" and don't want to flop into bed just to prove something are indeed a minority, and the very last thing they need is to be emotionally molested by books that suggest that they must be homosexual. Most of them aren't. Some of them are privately seething with inappropriate heterosexual passions that are best resolved by refusing to feed them any attention, and that type of sixteen-year-old would rather read about characters who are asexual, or can pass as asexual, than about even heterosexual characters.
* If the story is based on something that really happened, the number of "sexual minority" characters, their roles in the story, their lovable and unlovable social behavior, etc., should reflect that reality. Not more, not less.
* If you're making up a fantasy world...in real life, the incidence of homosexuality shoots upward when people are crowded together, and shrinks when a population is at or below optimal density. That's why, in most of the alternative Peaceful World of some fiction I've written, few people have ever met a homosexual person, but in some places homosexuality is socially accepted as part of a strict, and agreed upon, population control plan.
* Sane homosexuals are believable. Solid long-term homosexual relationships are believable (for older female characters, at least; for young male characters in any kind of relationship, all readers can do is hope for the best). Homosexual characters whose emotional problems are sympathetic, like fear of males as the result of having been raped or molested, are believable.
* Sometimes writers need to decide whether they're writing for the homosexual lobby, who demand implausibly heroic models of homosexuality, or for mainstream readers, who demand characters in realistic fiction that resemble characters in real life. Homosexual characters written as models of emotional wellness are not believable. Very few if any readers have met a couple of men who were stable enough, emotionally or in their relationship, that we'd believe they'd be good foster parents for a child, so if you write that kind of characters you can fairly be accused of dragging them in to make a political statement...or some other kind of statement, maybe a comic or tragic one.
E.g.: no reader seriously believes Huck and Jim are even bisexual, but nobody's ever been quite sure about the King and the Duke. If Huck and Jim were out of earshot, I wouldn't be one little bit surprised.
I don't believe Margaret Atwood knows someone like Boyd in The Robber Bride, at least not very well, but I accept him, because the novel is a comedy about the worst of all possible friends and, when a character is glad her son's involved with Boyd rather than horrible Zenia, that's part of the joke.
I can believe Madeleine L'Engle knew someone like Max in A House Like a Lotus.
I've previously observed that I didn't believe Anna Quindlen knew somebody like the forgettable male couple who really seemed out of place in Blessings.
I can believe M.E. Kerr knew somebody like Charlie in I'll Love You When You're More Like Me; I find Charlie, a conscious parody of stereotypes but a nice guy, more believable than wossname in Night Kites, where Kerr was trying harder to write the kind of character homosexual lobbyists wanted to read about and succeeded in writing a character like nobody I've ever seen or heard of in real life.
And a meta-rule for any novel I'm going to read twice: You don't have to mention a character's sexual preferences. If you want to create sympathetic homosexual characters, the easiest way to do that is to base them on your actual homosexual friends about whom even "members of the gay community" who don't know them well never know for sure. Maybe they're not sure what they're meant to be. Maybe that's why they don't go around waving signs and preaching that their "gayness" is genetic.
(I heard someone proclaiming that in a group of church ladies here in the cafe, recently, and I'm pleased with myself for not getting up and thrusting scientific facts upon that group. There may be some genetic influence, especially in the sense that people whose secondary sex characteristics are less sharply defined are more attractive to some homosexuals, but sexual preference is definitely not genetic in the way that eye color is genetic; identical twins often have different sexual preferences.)
Maybe your lovable homosexual characters are quiet about their personal affairs, and only a very sophisticated long-term observer ever notices that Joe's blue eyes darken with interest when he looks at Jim, and whether that means they are or are not having sex, the observer is too sophisticated to ask. That's realistic, believable, and unoffensive.
Oh, dear, I feel an aphorism coming on: "When writing fiction, remember that the whole world is not San Francisco and never will be."
I think fiction written for adults should contain "sexual minorities"--but it should not shove any character's sexuality into readers' faces. Only if a novel is frankly "porn" aimed at men, or the sweatier kind of "romance" aimed at women, do we ever need to see a character in bed. When that happens, for obvious reasons, the characters shown in bed should be the couple whose relationship is most exciting to the intended readers. So in nearly all fiction it's quite enough to mention that Jane doesn't date men...but then again I also think it's quite enough, if the novel is not a romance about Jane "falling in love," to mention that Jane does date men, or is married to Jack, or whatever. I think most fiction is better without descriptions of body parts.
It's always acceptable for characters to be sexually ambiguous, especially if they're not the central character. If the main characters are students, and the story is not about one of them being molested by (or trying to seduce) a teacher, and if the characters are introverts, it's completely believable that they don't care whether the teacher has any sexuality or not--they'd prefer not to think about it. That's true even for 35-year-old graduate students. Teachers can't legally date their students so, as conscientious introverts, your student characters prefer not to think about whether their teachers have any sex lives or not.
It may be harder to pull off in a second-rate novel, but it can work beautifully in a good novel, for a relationship between main characters to be ambiguous. In Native Tongue, are Nazareth and Michaela very good friends who would feel disgusted and betrayed by any suggestion that they're lesbians, or are they in fact lesbians? Women can read them whichever way they find easiest to relate to, the first time...and then go back and read them the other way, the second time. When Native Tongue was a new book I was singing and writing songs with a bisexual actress, discovering that even though political lesbianism made sense to me in theory I wanted that friendship to be "pure" in practice, so I loved that Nazareth and Michaela were real friends. I wasn't thrilled that the political lesbians wanted to claim them as a perfect pair of discreet lesbians...but they did, and they still do, and I've had to admit that the story works that way too. Their relationship is that well done.
You and I may never succeed in writing fiction that well, but we can always try.
No comments:
Post a Comment