Since it's officially Pride month, I thought this would be an interesting conversation to have. We all have different ways of creating our characters, with some being easier to flesh out than others. And it's likely that many of our characters might initially conform to our personal world views. So when it comes to making a character who falls into a minority group (regardless of whether or not the writer is from that group), it's interesting to hear how everyone came about to that. In the case of making a character who is LGBTQ+, I'm curious to hear how those of you who have such characters came to making them, and why. I'll start with my own, of course. I did once try to work on a graphic novel that was set during WWII, and one of my characters was a gay man. I made him that way because I wanted to showcase the intolerance expressed by the Third Reich. I never got far enough into the comic to do much, but I still created a whole backstory for him and all the other characters. He actually remains one of my favorite characters from that unfinished story, someone I would want to know in real life. Then I had a written story I tried to work on where the main character was also a gay man. It was set in a fictional world during war time, but, again, with that comic being a lost cause I still wanted to tackle the issues of homophobia and intolerance. He was almost the exact opposite of the character from the WWII comic, as well, being the stereotypical "manly", brash, angry guy...but of course, those characteristics weren't all that he was, just what other characters saw when they looked at him. He was perhaps one of my most complicated original characters, but I don't think that the story itself was strong enough to bother continuing. I might revisit the story someday if I can find ways to make it stronger. I like the idea and setting of the story, I just need to flesh it out some more. Now, my current story features a teen/young woman as the main character. I originally was going to have romance and sexuality not be an important part of the story, so I never thought about her orientation or that of the characters around her. But then, while writing, it somehow occurred to me that she was bisexual. I'm not sure how to explain it. I didn't just wake up one morning and "decided" to "make" her bi. It was more like...I just knew it. The story is written in first person PoV, so while being stuck in her head and having to put myself in her shoes I probably just figured it out, if that makes sense. And once I figured that out, it felt natural that one of the MC's best friends would be lesbian and have an attraction to her. Now, before this, I had changed my original plans and decided that there would be romance in this story. The MC is a priestess in this fictional world, and they are forbidden from forming romantic or sexual relationships with anyone, and I realized that that would be a good source of drama, especially since it is a YA story, and such things are usual tropes in a story about teenagers. Once I knew I would incorporate romance, I decided that the MC would form a relationship with a boy her age. But then my revelation above happened, though that hasn't changed anything about my earlier plans. This story is still a WIP, with me actively writing it and inching my way forward through the plot, so we shall see how everything works out in the end. So, while my first two examples were characters who were made with the intent of being gay, the third was a spontaneous discovery. I will admit that I personally don't identify as anything specific. I am definitely asexual, but that doesn't mean I can't write about characters who are sexually attracted to others. I have no interest in forming romantic relationships in real life, but my characters can. And I am a woman, but can try to put myself into the shoes of a man in my stories. So while I may not fall into the groups that these characters do, I just knew that I had to give it my best shot and have some diversity in my stories. But of course, I didn't add diversity for the sake of it. No one is a token character. Everyone has a purpose, and dreams and a past and all that that makes someone human. The real world is diverse, so why can't our fictional stories also be that way? So, long story short, I want to hear some of your stories behind how/why you made your LGBTQ+ characters the way they are. This month seems like an appropriate time to bring it up: awareness and all that. Hopefully the way I phrased this post doesn't come off as odd.
I have a gay couple in my WIP, but instead of showcasing intolerance, I showcase inclusion. The gay couple aren't the protags, but they are main characters, and actually had a double wedding with the (heterosexual) protags. Sven is a "manly" man, not openly gay, but not ashamed of who he is, either. He just takes the attitude that his sexuality is nobody's business but his and his partner's. His hubby, Pierre is the exact opposite, and is openly gay. As to why I made them this way, I can't rememberl
When it comes to making/writing queer characters, I approach it the same way I do non-queer ones -- personality and experiences and on-page arc are everything, and things like orientation and gender can of course factor into those. In practice, though, it might be more accurate to say that I write non-queer characters the same way I do queer ones, because the latter are definitely the majority That wasn't always the case, to be fair. I'm queer myself, but before I became aware and comfortable with that, writing queer characters felt very chancy and tabboo. My earliest attempts had a lot of stereotypical traits without much thought put behind them, and rather overplayed arcs because I just didn't have good templates of queer stories to learn from. It took me a while to get to the point where I understood that any story I wanted to tell could have queer characters whose arcs weren't about their identities. (Not that there's anything wrong with those sorts of stories.) These days, as mentioned, I almost exclusively write queer characters. It's largely just because that's what I'd want to read and it's what I want to write, but I do also like the idea of being able to help show younger writers (and just readers) non-cliche examples of queer representation. I've never forgotten the first time I actually read a book with a bi main character -- I'd love to give that feeling to other folks.
I may not consider myself queer at all, but I, too, treat my LGBTQ+ characters the same way as I treat my other characters. Like you, I start with a personality and appearance. Their orientation/sexuality may not even impact their behavior. For some, it does. But it's just another part of the character. Like with my current MC. Didn't originally plan on making her bi, but once I discovered that about her, it just felt like a natural extension to her identity, but does not define her as a human being. I don't like using stereotypes, either, not unless there is a very good reason. Like how one of the men I mentioned in my OP comes of as a stereotypical "tough" guy...but that's just how he presents himself to others, whereas in private he is quite different. It's a self-defense mechanism for him.
I'm asexual too, and the extended acronyms that the "+" stands for have "A" for "asexual" so I'd say that counts Quick nitpick: I would still call that "diversity for the sake of it," but I think we're basically saying the same thing in different words Spoiler: WARNING - WALL OF TEXT When I started my Doctor Who fanfic, I was committed to following the "promiscuous bisexual calling himself Captain Jack Harkness" / "promiscuous bisexual calling himself Captain John Hart" pattern by making my then-leading protagonist a promiscuous bisexual who called herself Captain June Harper. I was actually quite heterophobic at this point in my life, and I thought it would be good to force myself to write about an extremely sexual character to get myself used to the fact that not everybody had to be exactly like me. While I was looking for tips on writing female action heroes, I also found an interesting note that women tend to fight dirtier for the same reason that smaller men do, so I decided there'd be a scene where one of the villains is begging for her life by lecturing the heroes about why the universe needs what she and her superiors are doing, but that while my male heroes are engrossed, the Captain just snaps her neck. I had just discovered Watchmen and Death Note at this point, and I'd been a fan of Dexter for years already, so I was a huge fan of the concept of the vigilante serial killer protagonist, but I didn't like that Dexter portrayed the protagonist as being a hero just for being a protagonist who goes after other villains. I wished that more people would realize that these people are villains too, and realizing that Captain June Harper was more violent than her friends also made me realize that I could take it even further than that: I could make her into an outright villain, and I could use the contrast with her friends (who are willing to use lethal force as a last resort, rather than being excited at torturing people to death as a first resort) to show that there is something wrong with these people in a way that so many Dexter and Death Note fans don't seem to realize. I'd also fallen in love with the Token Evil Teammate dynamic (one villain protagonist and a group of hero protagonists work together against the villain antagonists) ever since getting hooked on The Order of the Stick, and I thought it would be an amazing intellectual opportunity to see what happens when the sociopath is the one in charge instead of one of the heroes. And then the Ender's Game movie came out My dad sent me an interesting editorial by a guy who had been a huge fan of Orson Scott Card as a kid. He'd gotten used to the fact that being a Muslim living in America meant that he would be subject to prejudice and the presumption of guilt until proven innocent, but Ender's Game had explicitly made one of the supporting heroes in Ender's class a Muslim. The now-author of the article immediately fell in love with the story, hand wrote a thank you letter to Scott Card, and was overjoyed that the giant of SciFi at the time wrote back to him personally. They wrote back and forth a few more times, fell out of touch as the years went on, and then the guy was horrified to start hearing about Scott Card's homophobia. His works had given this other guy so much hope that people would start to celebrate the full spectrum of human life, and yet somehow Scott Card had managed to miss the point of his own books. This article made me sick to my stomach. I was raised Catholic, had lapsed into Agnosticism for a few years but by this point had become a Christian again (though not a specific denomination anymore), but I'd always hated when innocent people of one religion are persecuted for the crimes of the guilty. There are righteous Christians, wicked Muslims, righteous Muslims, and wicked Christians, and I'd always felt that going after evil people (some of whom would happen to be Muslims) would make more sense than going after Muslim people (some of whom would happen to be evil). And yet when I'd decided that two of my lead heroes would be extremely religious, I had just taken it for granted that "religious = Christian." Orson Scott Card believed absolutely disgusting things about the human condition, and yet he'd worked to fight the lie "Muslims aren't human" in a way that I wasn't. In this instance, he'd been a better person with his work than I was being at the time with mine. That horrified me. I immediately went back to my notes, figured out which of my two religious characters would probably work better as a Muslim than the other, looked for as much as I could about Islam, and realized that not only did the woman work better as a Muslim than the man would've, the woman worked better as a Muslim than she had worked as a Christian. That just made it feel even worse that I had taken it for granted that Christians are the religious people available for me to write about, so the next thing I did was look into LGBT stereotypes to make sure that I wasn't doing anything wrong with my promiscuous bisexual serial killer protagonist. I know. I'm in the future also. -Mike Birbiglia. So it turned out that "bisexual = promiscuous" and "bisexual = evil" were already damaging enough on their own. I tried to force myself to rewrite my serial killer as being straight (I wasn't going to drop the serial killer angle, it was too important for me to show that vigilante serial killers are not the good guys), but every edit I tried to make always felt fake because Captain June Harper Was Bisexual to me. And then I realized I was going about it the wrong way: people are not stereotypes, patterns are stereotypes. The fact that one of my characters was a promiscuous bisexual serial killer was not the problem, the fact that 100% of my bisexual cast was a promiscuous serial killer was the problem, so I set about seeing which of my other characters could be made a) gay/bi, monogamous, non-villainous, and b) straight, promiscuous, non-villainous (and preferably all or most would be male so as not to turn my story into a "women are there for sex" fantasy). Putting my formerly aro/ace character Damien into a romantic subplot with one of the other guys (whom I now realized was gay despite not having made any plans about him orientationally before this) not only made them better as characters, not only made an already-planned scene a thousand times more powerful, not only made their interactions with everybody else more interesting, but accidentally salvaged yet another problem, this time with one of Damien's very first lines: When I thought the guy was aro/ace, I wrote a bit with him complaining about how promiscuous Captain Harper was (I'd actually written this line months before even realizing Captain Harper was a serial killer). I'd originally intended for it to be an asexual complaining about how promiscuous non-asexuals are (again, I was not in a good place at that time regarding the "heterosexual lifestyle"), but since I hadn't outright stated that Damien was ace, a normal person would've assumed he was straight, and the scene would've read as a heterosexual complaining about how promiscuous the bisexual was. Realizing that Damien was also bi made the line a thousand times better because now it's one bisexual complaining about another being promiscuous, making it clear that it's only the magnitude of the Captain's sex drive that Damien has a problem with, not the direction. That said, none of my existing characters could be made promiscuous and straight without feeling fake, the new guy I invented ended up being so professional that his off-duty promiscuity (and Damien's complaints thereof) never came up once during the story, and I've been focusing so much on original fiction that I haven't gotten around to the sequel that I was planning where we would find out to Damien's chagrin that one of the new guys is promiscuous.
Long story short: My stories always have gay central protagonists. Always. I'm gay. It's what I know best. Simples.
I tend to the view that people are people, and my characters are not defined by their sexuality so gay/straight/whatever is just one characteristic of their make up
The main character of my book is asexual, though it isn't brought up much. She can tell what makes someone attractive, and wants to look good. She shops for clothes, wears makeup, and sometimes frets over her body (she's quite short for her age, which makes her look younger than she is). She just isn't interested in sex, or romance. But, like I said, it isn't brought up much.
So do I, but until people stop being homophobic, sexist, or racist, what sets us apart is still going to have importance when it comes to identity. For me, things like sex, orientation, race, etc. are just one part of the tapestry that makes up everyone, and that includes fictional characters in a fictional world.
This is pretty much my viewpoint as well. Two of the main characters in my book series are in a lesbian relationship, but it's understated by design. Nobody really reacts to it, it's generally just accepted as a relationship like any other. This is by choice however as in this case it's a speculative fiction series set about 500 years in the future and readers will not know the societal norms or what people accept unless I show them. As for the why and how it ended up like that, it was by accident. In the early drafts I had these two women, who were initially just colleagues, separated by a disastrous plot twist which results in one missing and stranded in danger and the other believing she's dead. I decided that didn't feel meaty enough for them to be simply co-workers (although their jobs and the successful doing of them is very important) and it would be more emotionally charged if they were also in love.
I think this is true to a point. There is always going to be bigoted people, and people will always divide up. If it isn't by race, it'll be by culture. This isn't always a bad thing, as I believe culture is a very important factor in determining where to live, and that some cultures contain practices that have no place in the modern world, but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't want to get into right now. Back to gays in fiction, I think it does a disservice to the gay community when every time one of them is shown, it's made into a huge deal. It won't ever be normalized if it's constantly obsessed over at every time it appears. If anything, it will hold back the very cause you wish to fight for. That's not to say you can't have story conflict regarding said character's sexuality (while nowhere near as prevalent as people on tumblr seam to think, homophobia does still exist), but I feel that some people are fighting very hard for a battle that has already been won.
^preach. That was my initial feeling as well. I started out with straight characters. Later, I realized one of my MCs was probably gay. It was like waking up. I realized very rapidly that I preferred to write about queer characters. Years later, I’m writing crazy gay smut.
Mostly every character I create is "bisexual until proven gay/straight." Like, I rarely plan romances in advance, more like I just stumble upon good chemistry and go "oooh" as I'm writing, and why would I want to rule out the potential for future trysts with any gender? Granted that does raise the question of how identity is affected and life experience and so forth. But most of my stories take place in settings without the modern conception of sexual orientation (secondary world fantasy), which takes some bits out of the equation--no pressure to self-identify and no such thing as coming out of the closet, for instance. And the life experience part tends to grow organically as I write, and differs depending on how the culture views non-heterosexual behavior. Show and tell examples? Aveen, cis female- Aveen lives in a culture where bisexuality is widely and publicly practiced among men, and nobody pays much attention to the sexual behavior of women as long as they dutifully bear their husband's children. I started out trying to make Aveen have a romance with a man but it didn't go well. In a rewrite I gave her a girlfriend, and that went much better. "She's bi," I told one of my beta readers. Like, everybody in this story is bi, right? "Nah man, she's GAY," my beta reader said. Said beta reader is a lesbian so I figured she'd know. "Golly," I said after giving it some thought. "You're right. She is gay. She's totally gay." Taji, cis male- Taji lives in a culture where heterosexuality predominates and your average straight person never stops to consider there might be another way. Taji has slept with both men and women. Taji doesn't understand why everyone doesn't sleep with both men and women. Taji is extremely confident and has never felt any angst about this. Likewise, there's never been any question in my mind that Taji is bisexual. Thea, cis female- Lives in the same culture as Taji. Has only ever had romantic and sexual experiences with men, and hasn't really considered the possibility of hooking up with a girl. She's probably straight. But what if some day she meets a really cute girl?!?! I don't know. I can't rule this shit out.
Well here goes, wall of text. Evergreen started out as a snowflake idea. My initial thought was to have a scene with a girl being chased by a pack of wolves through the woods. (basically red riding hood) Then I extrapolated from there, and made a mountain and a little village at it's base. I reused one of my failed stories plot lines, the missing parent, for Rose. (I really wanted to write a story like this) Naturally Rose must have at least one good friend, who became Lyla. Rose's mother left the village when she was two years old, and Lyla's mother tried to chase after her but failed. Lyla grew very attached to Rose because of how Lilly (Lyla's mother) interacted with Rose's mother. It was assumed Rose (Rose's mother), was having some kind of affair with Lilly behind her husbands back. Before they both ran away. In present day, Lyla and Rose are best friends, and Lyla feels very deeply towards Rose. Rose only ever sees Lyla as a friend though. After her father's murder at the hands of J, Lyla finally works up the courage to confess, she gives Rose a rose, in honor of her father, and for her feelings towards the older girl. Their feelings are mutual. They go to second base, and then all the way home throughout the course of the novel. The epilogue is very touching. I was glad I was able to craft a believable relationship between two girls who really looked up their mothers. Rose comes to understand the depths of her feelings as her world is torn apart by Jormond as he lays waste to town after town. The first love scene I wrote for Rose and Lyla put me to tears. Btw, I felt like Rose was a overused name, but I tried at least 5 others and nothing else fit, I wanted to name my girls after different types of flowers found in the wild.
I have a pair of lesbian antags. They break up shortly after we meet them, off screen. Kinda made Zlada 'Red Wolf' Volkov Bi, after spending a night with the Uldivarion Empress. I don't bring up a lot about sexuality of my characters for the most part, more important to have them run around and play hard on the field. I tend to favor writing hetero relationships cause that is what I know, and I don't want to screw up the other dynamics with a lack of knowledge on how they work (nor do I want to come off as offensive). Interspecies relationships is far easier to write. Not sure if I want Sarge to hook up with Unicrix, though I don't know if a brain in a machine can replace a more organic person in terms, but it/he has a fully functional mind if anything else. And I feel bad for Janxica being alone in that aspect, but how do you attach a 20cm tall creature to when everybody else is human sized or bigger? Though I suppose it would be no different that a 90% machine and a woman. (And no hybrids are not common in interspecies breeding, cause science says that is highly unlikely.)
These, however, are details that are trivial and unneeded unless the story directly focuses on them. Personality, design and role come first, always. There are a lot of odd-on-outs in my stories as well, Sierra sometimes behaving 'oddly' around Mel , the (fake) relationship between Victoria and Pensy, or even the man in north who married a centaur. However these are never explicitly focused on or told, rather shown via the actions of the characters as they behave.
So, a little backstory to the development of my WIP- it started with the idea for seven characters who all shared a supernatural power, each representing different aspects. One of the character's powers essentially made her a seductress. I thought it would be interesting to see how a character with such powers who isn't really a seductress by nature would develop over time to adapt to it's influence. I imagined it might be more interesting to make them a lesbian, and how that might complicate things, as well as because, you know, why not? I decided to call the character Jade. Over time, Jade has become more of a hardened, cynical and depressed character, and more pragmatically focused. Also over time, I've changed the roster of supernatural forces to include vampires as a very popular and appropriate 'race' for my world, and Jade became a vampire. Some things have so far stayed the same though. The closeness between Jade and the #1 main character Sarah, Jade's fear of her own powers, her limited ambition, and her status as a lesbian. A very important part of Jade's backstory is, unsurprisingly, her experience surrounding her being turned into a vampire. She is chosen by a 'noble' from one of the vampire houses, nobles being allowed to turn others, who is interested in her as a potential partner because of similarities in their personalities and life experiences. The noble, Vitaly, belongs to one of the most dangerous houses, and his influence over her leads her down a dark path at first. Vitaly remains interested in Jade as a partner, and eventually Jade reciprocates. But, of course, this relationship doesn't match her sexuality. However, she was young enough when turned- and not the most socially active person- that she wasn't entirely sure of her sexuality, and Vitaly appeals to her limited bisexual side. Eventually, the thrall over Jade from being turned wears down and she becomes increasingly conflicted, eventually fleeing from the house. But her experience with Vitaly, and her deliberate social isolation from that point mean that, now, at the beginning of the story, she remains somewhat confused and uncertain of her sexuality. I have several other LGBTQ characters planned, a few of which are, as you would expect, romantic/sexual interests for Jade.
Reading this thread just made me realize that most of my characters, including protagonists, are LGBTQ+. For example, one of the main characters, Corvus, is gay and he also has a partner, who is also gay. They also adopted a daughter who happens to be bi. I think I chose these sexualities for them simply because I thought "Why the heck not?". From there, I started of how their sexualities would have any affect on their everyday lives. So, I came up with this: Osh and Corvus lived in seperate settlements with different beliefs and whatnot. Regarding sexuality however, Corvus's tribe believes that being queer is abnormal and people like that are monstrosities that want to end the population by forcing others to conform to their ways. Therefore, Corvus kept his sexuality a secret from his tribe, including his family. Additionally, he has learned to have a thicker skin to block out any insults about his sexuality people might throw at him, not to say that he can't be overwelmed from it at times. On the other hand, Osh's tribe doesn't mind anyone who's queer and leaves them be. However, they aren't allowed to be married because the tribe doesn't see a point to it as they believe marriage is basically for making babies. Therefore, Osh hasn't really been exposed to any insults about his sexuality. So the first time it happens, he is mostly confused and hurt. Anyway, that's my two-cents on the matter. This was an interesting topic though
I think it's best when it just comes naturally. Reading this thread gave me an excellent idea for one of my characters to be bi or a lesbian. It just makes the most sense for them to be that way. It feels very forced when it's over done. Less than 5% of the population identifies as LGBTQ. So if a stories characters are exclusively LGBTQ there should be a reason why.
Nice First of all, 5% is the very-low-end estimate. Some higher estimates go as high as 20% or 25%, so a better guess than 5% would be closer to 10-15%. Second, queer people are even more likely to seek each other out when we live in places where we're even more heavily outnumbered than the average. Third, most people never have a problem with most/all of the most important characters in a story being straight white men. I don't have a problem with straight white men – I myself am 2 out of 3 – but straight white men are a 25-30% minority in America. Why does nobody ever have to justify the fact that they make up far north of 50% of the characters with the most importance in our culture?
Sure, my reason is "99.9% of characters in fiction are straight so I'm balancing that shit out." I hate the "there should be a reason why" thinking. Statistics don't dictate people's lives and they don't need to dictate stories, either. The majority of my friends are queer. Is that unrealistic?
Am I alone in my dislike of the word “queer”? As a child, this was used offensively, so as a gay man it doesn’t sit right with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-How-Many-People-LGBT-Apr-2011.pdf Only two states were above 5% (DC/Vermont) the last time numbers were reported 3 years ago. That 2011 study has it around 3.5% for the US. It would be a statistical anomaly for that number to triple in 7 years. That's neither here nor there. I don't have a problem with anyone who is LGBTQ. It just comes off as unrealistic in a real world setting if it's every character. Like if you have twenty characters in a book and ten are 7 feet tall, that would feel convenient without further explanation regardless of ones tendency to seek out others like themselves (though being a 7 footer is far less likely). As far your question about whites being overrepresented, they comprised nearly 90% (~45% males) of the country from 1870-1970 thus it has been ingrained in society here from the beginning. Not the conversation I wanted to have to be honest, was just pointing out it can be overdone to the point of feeling forced, though that can happen with any other demographic as well. I hope everyone is having a great Pride month.
