Well shit, I feel awful for not responding to this before now. Only excuse I have is that it’s been something of a rough year, health-wise, so I missed the notification.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, and for your kind words about my piece! Honestly, your own efforts attempting to correct the disparity under discussion are probably much more important than anything I could produce. Keep doing that, and send me a link. I’ll buy a copy when I’ve got any cash to spare.
I’d argue the lack of enthusiasm for “gay”-category novels is both a problem of quality and a reaction against a sort of literary ghettoisation. If you want to be treated as a part of the world, rather than a freak separate from it, it doesn’t exactly help when the main options for fiction supposedly aimed your way are badly-written bodice-rippers and kitchen-sink stories about suicide or AIDS. There’s a reason Chuck Tingle is successful — and when a single author’s quickly knocked-out parody of a genre is better than most of the genre itself, there probably isn’t much worth saving.
Plus there’s a dearth of new material, which honestly isn’t a bad thing given the aforementioned ghettoisation. Much as I appreciate, say, Michael Hollinghurst’s work, it’s so incredibly outdated now it feels like a period piece even when set in the present day. And that generation of writers all seem (understandably, given the tidal wave of death and trauma they had to deal with back when) stuck in that mode.
Case in point: I remember a BBC mini-series that was palpably written by guys whose entire conception of how gay men live, socialise, and fuck stopped in 1982. Everyone was utterly miserable, fucking each other solely in parks and public bathrooms, usually getting beaten up or killed doing so, and no one used the internet at all. The show also seemed totally okay with one character having sex with a 14-year-old. This was broadcast in 2010 or so. It didn’t get much attention at the time, but it stuck with me because it was such a weird overlay of a past world onto the present, and it felt incredibly uncomfortable to watch as a result.
Sci fi, on the other hand, has come a hell of a long way since I first wrote about this issue. And, much as I thought Discovery was going to pull the traditional “kill your gays” bullshit when they did exactly that, the way they ended up paying that moment off was, on balance, worth it. Even if it involved killing off one of my favourite characters and one half of the only gay couple in the show, they did save the multiverse together. I’ll take a heroic mycelium-undeath saving multiple universes with his partner over “oh they’re dead now for no reason” any day. Still though, I wish they’d found another way.
We’re not quite there yet, but sci fi in every medium’s been putting both its feet forward on this lately, and it’s really good to see. Ann Leckie’s work is fantastic about LGBT representation and identity, for instance— plays around with gender a lot, and is in general incredibly queer. Her Ancillary Radch novels have won major awards the last couple of years, and she’s not the only one! We’re seeing more representation on TV, in games, and in comics too. So things are, counterintuitively, getting somewhat better in our constructed realities while the one in which we live gets worse.
On your final point: I wouldn’t worry about audience rejection on account of LGBT characters these days (I can’t, really, as I’m currently writing a tale replete with them). Tell a good story, and no one you’d want to read your work will care a jot who the characters are fucking.
Good luck, and keep writing. I look forward to reading your stuff :)
