5 POOR EXCUSES TO OMIT QUEER CHARACTERS BY CHRIS CHElser

Maybe it’s because I’m bisexual myself, but to me, creating and writing LGBT+ characters (personally I prefer “queer”) is as natural as breathing. Even if sexuality is never addressed, I will have a fair idea of what any of my characters are into, and what not. Just like I know the colour of their hair, whether or not it is ever mentioned.

Sadly, too many good storytellers refuse to include queer characters in their work. On occasion, one is shoe-horned in for ridicule, victimisation, or unabashed tokenism, but never as a real person. The storytellers’ excuses for perpetuating this trend are as lazy as they are outdated, and are as tenacious as they are unfounded.

Here are five poor excuses that I hear too often:

“I can’t include queer characters in my story, because…
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1.…I don’t want my MC to be a flamboyant, over-dramatic man/ugly woman in overalls!”

News flash: no one else wants you to perpetuate this kind of damaging stereotypes, either. Nor is there a reason why you should.

Like cartoon portraits, stereotypes are exaggerated images. The problem is that any cartoonesque attributes are easier to remember than nuances. Without regular reality checks to confirm a stereotype for the cartoon it is, we lose sight of that reality. And in reality, queer people are indistinguishable from the rest of the population.

You can’t tell someone’s sexuality from their looks, unless they choose to draw attention to this side of themself. Some do, many don’t. Yet it is because they are indistinguishable that coming out can be such a shock to the people nearest to them: friends and family didn’t expect it, because nothing gave it away. 

The same is true for queer characters. A character doesn’t have to act, speak, or look a certain way to be queer. How many characters are queer in the minds of their creator without the audience ever finding out? J.K. Rowling told her readers that Dumbledore was gay, but nothing in the original Harry Potter books implied this. And why should it, when Dumbledore’s sexuality had nothing to do with the plot?
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Which brings me to the next excuse.

2.… it will ruin the plot!”
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Rowling just proved otherwise, but let’s expand that test, shall we?

When you create a character, you establish their unique personality, skills, capabilities, and traits that make them individuals. Certain aspects of a character are pivotal to the plot, others add realism to their personality. A character may be queer in the same way that they could be ambidextrous or dyslectic or blonde. It is part of them, but it doesn’t necessarily define who they are.

While such traits spice up a character, they rarely influence the main plot. Unless romance or sexuality is the central plot point, changing a character’s sexuality may change surprisingly little a story: If Luke Skywalker were bisexual, would that alter the course of events that led to him blowing up the Death Star? No. In the movie Hook, Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins portrayed Captain Hook and Mr Smee as a couple – which wasn’t scripted. Did it add panache to the movie? Certainly! Did it change the central story of Peter Pan grown up? No.

Still, the influence of sexuality on the story’s plot is a sliding scale. Between the extremes of a plot revolving around sexuality and sexual attraction and one where sexuality has no influence at all, exists an immense grey area that a storyteller can draw on.

A character’s decisions, whatever they are, have consequences. Those consequences are the source of a story’s essential conflict. The more complicated the choices to be made, the richer the story. Explicit choices about romantic partners aside, there are many ways in which a character’s sexuality can add to the general conflict of a story without being central to its plot. It may be a driving force behind a career decision, or a latent reason to trust one character over another.
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The influence of sexuality can be as prominent or as subtle as the storyteller wants it to be. To me, claiming that a queer character ‘ruins the plot’ is testimony of poor craftsmanship.

3.…it will alienate my audience!”
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The thing with audiences is that unless you make explicit mention of something, their minds will automatically fill in the blanks. With what? With what they believe is the statistical majority. With sexuality, this means that unless it is made explicitly clear that a character is queer in any way, the audience will assume – or even expect – that this character is heterosexual.
Audience expectation is a wonderful toy for a storyteller. All plot twists are based on this very concept. Remember The Usual Suspects? My point exactly.

Consider a story where the two most central characters are a man and a woman. For most audience members, there is an immediate if subconscious assumption that there will be sexual tension between them, and likely a romantic subplot. Now if one these characters is revealed to be gay or asexual, that reshuffles the audience’s expectations. No obligatory romantic subplot, so what is going to happen instead? Suddenly, the audience is paying more attention, because they can’t fill in the blanks ahead of the plot.

Just like that, you have caught the audience’s genuine interest.

That said, homophobia in the audience is all too real. You can’t fight true bigotry, yet when someone discards a work for featuring a queer main character, it doesn’t need to mean they will turn their back forever.

When Starz’s pirate series Black Sails revealed that one of the most formidable pirate captains in fiction had a passionate love affair with another man, many – mostly male – viewers were appalled. However, the story was compelling enough that they returned to watch the plot unfold, only to find that they actually appreciated the character in this new light.
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An audience wants to be captivated by a story, not appalled. That is why a story that tries to please everyone fails to please anyone. And why, rather than playing it safe, deliberately excluding LGBT+ characters in fact limits a story’s potential to surprise the audience, and captivate them.

4.… I’m scared to offend the LGBT+ community!”
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By keeping silent, you already are. Few things offend people more than ignoring them. Every single person on this planet wishes to be acknowledged for who and what they are. The storyteller’s real fear behind this excuse is that they misrepresent the queer community, and to be held accountable for it.

The solution, however, is embarrassingly easy: do your research.

A storyteller researches times and places they haven’t lived themselves. They research technologies they don’t use on a daily basis. They research cultures and languages not their own. They (should) research people with a different gender than their own to make sure the characters they create are credible. How is researching sexuality any different?

Writing a queer character when you identify as straight is similar to a male writer creating a female character and vice versa. Yes, there are differences, but first and foremost, you are writing a human being. If you feel you don’t have a proper understanding of their life and their thoughts, go out and find them. Find these people, ask questions, and above all listen. Neil Gaiman did this 30 years ago, before the internet. In today’s interconnected world, what excuse do we have not to reach out to each other?

5.… sexuality doesn’t feature in my story, so it doesn’t matter anyway!”
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Yes, I know that we established that in many stories, the main character’s sexuality doesn’t affect the plot, but this goes for every character trait. It can contribute to a story’s conflict, but it doesn’t need to in order to be included. Look at Viola Davis and Liam Neeson in Widows, where the fact that they are a mixed-race couple is not a plot device, but an ambience trait. It adds realism, but has no direct influence on the plot.

And still this representation matters.

Giving a character socially charged traits (race, religion, sexuality, etc.) is more than tokenism or a plot device. It creates a three-dimensional character, and makes that character a person. A fictional person, granted, but our brain doesn’t distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’. Recent studies suggest that the brain regards fictional characters that we relate to the same way it regards real-life friends. This affects us all on two levels.

Firstly, on an individual level. When you are part of a minority, it is difficult enough to find friends and role-models in real life. Finding them in fictional characters should increase your odds, but that can only happen when storytellers create the kind of characters you relate to. Fictional persons who are like you, and who show you what you could be. I know from experience that this can be a life-changing influence.

Secondly, society’s outlook on certain subjects changes with how those subjects are displayed. Positive representation changes society’s attitude to LGBT+ people for the better, while perpetuation of the old stereotypes set it back.

So yes, positive representation of queer people in fiction matters. Not just for the individual, but for society as a whole.
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Bonus Excuse: “But I don’t wanna!”
That is every storyteller’s prerogative. It is your story, and they are your characters. You can still choose to stick with statistical majority, for valid storytelling reasons or out of personal bias. You can. Just be adult enough to admit that this is a choice, and not some awkwardly fabricated necessity.

CHRIS CHElsER'S AUTHOR BIO 

Inspired by first-hand experiences, Chris Chelser writes dark paranormal fiction about ghosts, monsters, history and the human soul. Preferring dark stories to ‘happily ever after’ since she was a child, she began writing in her teens and never stopped.
She lives in the Netherlands with her family, and with the demons under her bed, which have inspired The Kalbrandt Institute Archives series, her novel The Devourer, and other work still stewing in the murky depths.
Website: www.chrischelser.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/chrischelser

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Several months after her first encounter with the archives, Eva's training relentlessly pushes her psychometric ability to the limit.
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Because there can be no doubt that they work for a monster...
 
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