Dreaming In Books

It’s really a lot less to do with sexual orientation than with age. My earliest experiences in writing focused on young people – teens or children – and their process of maturation. I’ve always found it cathartic writing about characters who undergo the same processes of discovery that I’ve already undergone, but they do so in ways that are consistent with their lives and personalities and are wholly foreign to me. It’s very much the idea of possibilities and endless “what if?” scenarios and looking at the world through the eyes of a kid whose life is so far removed from mine.

I suppose my contributions to LGBT YA fiction have a lot to do with being an outsider looking in – a bit of a role reversal, really, given how the LGBT community tends to be regarded as the outsiders by way too many people. While I can’t fully empathize with the too-real fears of growing up gay (bullying, rejection, threats of physical harm, etc.), I do enjoy exploring stories that place LGBT kids front and center for no other reason than that THEY CAN AND SHOULD BE heroes of fantasy adventures or historical dramas because I rarely ever see them in those roles. It’s the classic theme of the resilient underdog overcoming obstacles and emerging a stronger and wiser person in the end.

I prefer to offer LGBT teens an escape, and I suppose I’d like to write them in a way as to normalize them through genre fiction because the focus is on individual growth regardless of their sexual orientation. My first love is classic literature and historical fiction, and even before I got into gay literature, I was attuned to “romantic friendships” between same-sex characters such as James Steerforth and David Copperfield. Those relationships in the 19^th century were purely platonic and were widely accepted by society, but there were relationships that developed into something more, however short-lived they might’ve turned out, no thanks to social conventions and the law in that time period. And that’s just scratching the surface. So at least as far as history goes, it wasn’t as if gay people never existed, and I’d like to acknowledge that and show that we don’t live in a bubble that’s limited to just the 21^st century.

Even in the bigger, more mainstream picture, historical fiction enjoys far less popularity than contemporary fiction. It’s simply the audience’s taste, and I don’t have any control over it. The most obvious attraction for contemporary fiction – whether realistic or steeped in magical realism – is familiarity. Setting, language, behavior, popular culture – we live in it now, and by and large, it’s great to see ourselves reflected in fiction in a way that we can easily relate to. Historical fiction is – perhaps in non-historical-fiction-readers’ eyes – too far removed from current reality for us to fully appreciate.

Human nature is universal, though, and pretty consistent through time. What changes are beliefs and laws, and I do believe that in order to fully appreciate the strides we’ve made today as far as LGBT rights go, we shouldn’t ignore history and the struggles that LGBT people went through, especially since countless suffered in silence, while others were subjected to exile, execution, or prison sentences, etc.

I can understand, though, the reluctance to embrace historical fiction, especially where LGBT characters are concerned. It’s largely because, yes, the past was cruel, and happily-ever-after was quite unusual. But what I tried to do – at least in my historical novels – was to emphasize HOPE, no matter what choice the young gay character ends up making down the line in the course of his maturation. My goal in each novel is to show the main character’s growth against obstacles that are unique to his time period and to show how much stronger he is in the end – both as an individual as well as the beneficiary of a loving friendship or relationship with an unlikely ally. True, this kind of story can easily be explored in a contemporary setting, but a historical novel offers a different challenge to the writer, and his success in tackling his subject can translate into an enjoyable reading experience for the audience.

Just the idea that somewhere out there, someone for whom I’m writing these books might be enjoying any given novel and that, perhaps, s/he is gaining something from the experience, even if it’s just as simple as forgetting the world for X number of hours. I know that I’m currently focusing on contemporary fantasy, but my real love is historical fantasy, and I’d love to have a large enough backlist of original folktales for LGBT teens – either in novel or short story anthology forms. I’d love to be an active contributor to a small niche and watch that market expand and grow before age takes over, and I run out of ideas and am forced to bow out and make room for the next generation of writers.

Like I’ve noted in a previous answer, writing niche fiction is incredibly lonely and brutal to one’s confidence. There’s always that shadow hanging over you as you spend hour after hour slaving away at a novel that you know only a handful of people will be reading or that could very well slip through the cracks, regardless of your marketing efforts. It not only takes a lot of patience to put your baby together and to release it in the big bad world, but also a lot of faith in your own ability to tell a good enough story that people would be willing to spend money on. And for that faith, you really have to dig deep in order to sustain the madness of repeating the cycle with every new book.

That said, the rewards are incredible. Knowing that you’re contributing something unique to a market that’s necessary for an underrepresented audience makes up half of the fuel that keeps you going (the other half is dark chocolate). Every once in a while, you’ll be lucky enough to receive a message from a complete stranger thanking you for writing something s/he has never read before and that s/he has enjoyed. Royalty checks be damned; those messages, however few and far between, are worth their weight in gold.

The LGBT YA market is definitely expanding, and I’m seeing more and more writers tackle genre fiction with LGBT teens for their main characters, though it appears that it’s mostly small presses and self-published authors who’re more consistent in supplying the market with these titles. But it’s a great start, and I hope to see it blossom even more. Writers approach their craft differently. There are those who write genre fiction with LGBT characters in mind, and there are those who allow their characters to determine their sexual orientation once they begin writing. It really depends on how the author does things. But if you’re talking about writing genre fiction in which LGBT characters’ stories revolve around things outside their sexual orientation, then yes – I’d love to see more of that happen. I still see pockets of resistance – for lack of a better term – in certain groups I’m a member of or used to be a part of, toward stories outside coming-out fiction. There seems to be this odd fear that genre fiction will push realistic fiction aside and make it unpopular or unnecessary.