Despite the hangings-on of the most recent wankfest imbroglio as it rumbles to its seasonal slumber until roused again in mighty fury, sometimes it's good to remember that out there in the big room, change is a'happening and it's for the good. Over on Hello Beautiful, Jerry Barrow talks about his son's school assignment.
28 Jan 2009
colours & inclusions
28 Jan 2009 11:06 pmI've been reading some of the JD Robb/Nora Roberts series, In Death, which has its great points and its I-learn-to-edit-out points, but those are irrelevant to this post. What I want to mention here is that in one of the stories there's mention of a murder case (of course, being a series about a NYC police homicide detective) where two of the victims were a lesbian couple.
It comes and goes in the space of a single sentence, but I felt like I'd just gotten a shout-out, somehow. Like, hey, this is not a opp-gender world in toto!
Sure, Robb could have just switched the pronoun on one of them, because it's not a couple that's pivotal, it's one sentence, it's forgettable. But she didn't. It's a civil-union, married, couple that happens to be two women.
My second thought: so of course they end up dead.
My third thought: man, why am I so happy about a single sentence?
( I mean, you've got your Magical Negro -- the one who shows up to provide advice and wisdom and then dies horribly (or somehow otherwise disappears) just prior to the finale. And then there's the Dead Gay Lover, who hangs out long enough to provide prurient subtext before, well, dying. One way or another. )
All of us have absorbed the messages and biases of racism; even after ranting about this exact thing, I did it myself without thinking. And didn't I feel like shit when I realized it.
I expect there will turn out to be more evidence of my own subconscious racism when the book comes out, and people read it with a critical eye. Probably some heterosexism, Christian-centrism, and classism too. This stuff gets in all of us. It's like a perpetual infection; we have to constantly watch for the symptoms and repeatedly innoculate ourselves against it, lest it flare up and devour our souls.That post hit me between the eyes, with the realization I'd done the same thing myself, and had never once stopped to question it. Not with characters of color, but with gay characters. In the last major WiP, one character is introduced as being estranged from his (non-human) family because he's gay and has no interest in marrying a woman to continue the hidebound family name. So what did I do? Well, he's single for the entirety of the book. He doesn't even date anyone. He's in grad school, he's handsome, he's cultured, he speaks several languages, he's very much the scion of a wealthy family even if he's living on a soundman's income these days... and he's freaking single.
And I, therefore, am a freaking moron.
Because come on, a character like that let loose in the wilds of DC? Dude, he'd be beating them off with a stick. I've watched guys like that have to beat off the attention. If they're straight, they're fending off girls; if they're gay, they're fending off, well, everyone. (Heh.) But still: to be single for the entirety of the story -- and what's more, to not even express interest in being with someone, an extroverted and adventure-loving and life-thirsty man like that, sleeping alone? Maybe sometimes, maybe until he gets used to life in a lower income level, but he's resilient, he'll adjust, and when he does... why is he still single?
For that matter, going back farther into previous WiPs, why is that same character (five years down the road) seen to be sleeping with a distant cousin rather than, y'know, seeing someone regularly? Sure, sex buddies, which fits the casual attitude this character has -- but then you'd think he's got at least three or four such buddies ready to jump (almost wrote 'hump', bwah) at the snap of his elegant fingers. What did I write?
I wrote his distant cousin (who, incidentally, is bi) falling for a girl. End of book, boy and girl in love, and gay cousin? STILL SINGLE.
I just about wanted to beat my head on the desk. I write a sexy intelligent character and I make him freaking celibate. Would I have done the same if he were straight? Maybe. It's possible. But when he's the one character who self-identifies as unequivocally gay no-two-ways-about-it, it's like Hairspray all over again: any other couple-ness going on stands in sharp contrast to this one character being permanently single.
It never once, ever, occurred to me that a Hispanic girl couldn't snag the handsome guy. I hadn't originally had that sub-plot in mind in the original drafts but that's what developed and not once did I ever think, at all, that any agent or editor or publisher or reader would rock back on their heels in shock that a lovely Hispanic girl of recent immigrant parents wouldn't be attractive to, or attracted to, some guy from Iceland who grew up in India. Nor, when I started writing a girl from Mozambique and realized I was unwittingly adding subtext between her and a boy from Wales, that this was at all something to think twice about.
Nor did I ever give any thought to the fact that half the background cast in the WiPs (with the gay character) are PoC -- Hispanic, Black, even recent Indian immigrants, and that many of them have sexual relationships, ongoing, throughout the two stories. I never once thought, "crap, is this okay? am I allowed to write this? is this too much for the genre?" Granted, these other folk are background, so they're not getting any sex scenes, but it's made pretty explicit who is, and is not, a couple. Meanwhile, the gay guy who's front and center among the supporting cast doesn't even get to flirt with anyone. What the hell is going on in my brain?
Writing a Korean girl, a Lebanese girl, no problem. Writing them dating? Woah, sudden self-censoring going on, say, what, what? A story about an American woman of Irish descent doing anthropology studies in Asia and falling in love with a dragon, a female dragon... and I had the story mapped out, and thought: there's no way. Is there any story out there like this? Has anyone blazed this path already?
Because frankly, in the grand scheme of things, I'm nobody, and by definition I'm not holding my breath on being handed a torch to use as I please. I just don't see it happening.
So I deliberate, and wonder whether I should just, uhm, tone it down somehow, and then if it's ever accepted for representation (let alone publishing, hahaha but let's dream, shall we) that then I would, kinda sideways, sort of hint that maybe the characters could, y'know, actually get the screen time they'd get if one of them was a different gender. But then I think about the fact that toning things down would be sort of like writing a romance where at the end you say, "and they're really good buddies now," which is not exactly fitting the parameters of what we define as romance.
That sends me back around to the idea/fear that this relationship, like the black-and-white couple at the bus stop, is so over-the-top in and of itself that it overshadows, even utterly drowns, any other enjoyment of the story. That readers (and thereby the gatekeepers of agents and editors) couldn't get past it to enjoy the story-as-story...
Back and forth enough, and I'm in tailspin. Which I find rather amusing, from an objective point: a lot of the recent imbroglio has some quarters fussing that certain authors/posters are seeking some kind of PoC Official Seal of Approval. Yes, it is okay, you may use/write that character! Yes, this is an acceptable application of PoC! To ask for such would make me feel like an idiot (not to mention that I'm more focused on indigenous peoples, which may -- or may not -- be PoC although they often work against similar institutionalized prejudices): I mean, if I can't even write a character enough to know that s/he belongs in the story then ain't no outside opinion going to fix that.
If I do believe the character with that gender and that skin color and that personality belongs in the story, then I may seek a friend to do fact-checking and feedback for me but that, IMO, is seeking experienced eyeballs for an explicit request/research. That's not the same as asking permission in the first place.
Like it or not, the simple truth is that no one can give me that but myself.
And that's because the market -- genre market, that is -- that PoC characters are not so absolutely alien that you'd have to read eighty books before you'd find one. Are they common enough to match the diversity I see around me every day, in urban life? Far from it. But they're not non-existent, either; other folks have blazed that path, though the house is far from truly built -- but I do believe it is getting there. The more of us pitch in, the faster it'll happen.
But I do feel like I'd have a better idea of nailing down audience/venue for a story if I knew just how much I'm 'allowed to do', what the genre will bear in terms of gay characters like that long-suffering eminently eligible celibate bachelor. What I see out there in terms of same-sex protagonist-couples, well, just ain't that much. If it's a strange kind of burden to realize that only I can give myself the permission to include PoC characters, it's a much worse feeling to realize that I'd give myself the same freedoms to write GLBT characters... except I'm not so sure I have that power. I don't know what the gatekeepers will allow to pass.
Yes, I use that last verb very specifically.
But still, the fact remains: regardless what I intend, what any author or filmmaker or other artist intends, what is not on the screen, the page, in the lyrics, holds no weight. It is by our excisions and exclusions that we reveal where the real power lies.
What's not on the page might as well not exist. What's on the page has power.
It comes and goes in the space of a single sentence, but I felt like I'd just gotten a shout-out, somehow. Like, hey, this is not a opp-gender world in toto!
Sure, Robb could have just switched the pronoun on one of them, because it's not a couple that's pivotal, it's one sentence, it's forgettable. But she didn't. It's a civil-union, married, couple that happens to be two women.
My second thought: so of course they end up dead.
My third thought: man, why am I so happy about a single sentence?
( I mean, you've got your Magical Negro -- the one who shows up to provide advice and wisdom and then dies horribly (or somehow otherwise disappears) just prior to the finale. And then there's the Dead Gay Lover, who hangs out long enough to provide prurient subtext before, well, dying. One way or another. )
All of us have absorbed the messages and biases of racism; even after ranting about this exact thing, I did it myself without thinking. And didn't I feel like shit when I realized it.
I expect there will turn out to be more evidence of my own subconscious racism when the book comes out, and people read it with a critical eye. Probably some heterosexism, Christian-centrism, and classism too. This stuff gets in all of us. It's like a perpetual infection; we have to constantly watch for the symptoms and repeatedly innoculate ourselves against it, lest it flare up and devour our souls.That post hit me between the eyes, with the realization I'd done the same thing myself, and had never once stopped to question it. Not with characters of color, but with gay characters. In the last major WiP, one character is introduced as being estranged from his (non-human) family because he's gay and has no interest in marrying a woman to continue the hidebound family name. So what did I do? Well, he's single for the entirety of the book. He doesn't even date anyone. He's in grad school, he's handsome, he's cultured, he speaks several languages, he's very much the scion of a wealthy family even if he's living on a soundman's income these days... and he's freaking single.
And I, therefore, am a freaking moron.
Because come on, a character like that let loose in the wilds of DC? Dude, he'd be beating them off with a stick. I've watched guys like that have to beat off the attention. If they're straight, they're fending off girls; if they're gay, they're fending off, well, everyone. (Heh.) But still: to be single for the entirety of the story -- and what's more, to not even express interest in being with someone, an extroverted and adventure-loving and life-thirsty man like that, sleeping alone? Maybe sometimes, maybe until he gets used to life in a lower income level, but he's resilient, he'll adjust, and when he does... why is he still single?
For that matter, going back farther into previous WiPs, why is that same character (five years down the road) seen to be sleeping with a distant cousin rather than, y'know, seeing someone regularly? Sure, sex buddies, which fits the casual attitude this character has -- but then you'd think he's got at least three or four such buddies ready to jump (almost wrote 'hump', bwah) at the snap of his elegant fingers. What did I write?
I wrote his distant cousin (who, incidentally, is bi) falling for a girl. End of book, boy and girl in love, and gay cousin? STILL SINGLE.
I just about wanted to beat my head on the desk. I write a sexy intelligent character and I make him freaking celibate. Would I have done the same if he were straight? Maybe. It's possible. But when he's the one character who self-identifies as unequivocally gay no-two-ways-about-it, it's like Hairspray all over again: any other couple-ness going on stands in sharp contrast to this one character being permanently single.
It never once, ever, occurred to me that a Hispanic girl couldn't snag the handsome guy. I hadn't originally had that sub-plot in mind in the original drafts but that's what developed and not once did I ever think, at all, that any agent or editor or publisher or reader would rock back on their heels in shock that a lovely Hispanic girl of recent immigrant parents wouldn't be attractive to, or attracted to, some guy from Iceland who grew up in India. Nor, when I started writing a girl from Mozambique and realized I was unwittingly adding subtext between her and a boy from Wales, that this was at all something to think twice about.
Nor did I ever give any thought to the fact that half the background cast in the WiPs (with the gay character) are PoC -- Hispanic, Black, even recent Indian immigrants, and that many of them have sexual relationships, ongoing, throughout the two stories. I never once thought, "crap, is this okay? am I allowed to write this? is this too much for the genre?" Granted, these other folk are background, so they're not getting any sex scenes, but it's made pretty explicit who is, and is not, a couple. Meanwhile, the gay guy who's front and center among the supporting cast doesn't even get to flirt with anyone. What the hell is going on in my brain?
Writing a Korean girl, a Lebanese girl, no problem. Writing them dating? Woah, sudden self-censoring going on, say, what, what? A story about an American woman of Irish descent doing anthropology studies in Asia and falling in love with a dragon, a female dragon... and I had the story mapped out, and thought: there's no way. Is there any story out there like this? Has anyone blazed this path already?
Because frankly, in the grand scheme of things, I'm nobody, and by definition I'm not holding my breath on being handed a torch to use as I please. I just don't see it happening.
So I deliberate, and wonder whether I should just, uhm, tone it down somehow, and then if it's ever accepted for representation (let alone publishing, hahaha but let's dream, shall we) that then I would, kinda sideways, sort of hint that maybe the characters could, y'know, actually get the screen time they'd get if one of them was a different gender. But then I think about the fact that toning things down would be sort of like writing a romance where at the end you say, "and they're really good buddies now," which is not exactly fitting the parameters of what we define as romance.
That sends me back around to the idea/fear that this relationship, like the black-and-white couple at the bus stop, is so over-the-top in and of itself that it overshadows, even utterly drowns, any other enjoyment of the story. That readers (and thereby the gatekeepers of agents and editors) couldn't get past it to enjoy the story-as-story...
Back and forth enough, and I'm in tailspin. Which I find rather amusing, from an objective point: a lot of the recent imbroglio has some quarters fussing that certain authors/posters are seeking some kind of PoC Official Seal of Approval. Yes, it is okay, you may use/write that character! Yes, this is an acceptable application of PoC! To ask for such would make me feel like an idiot (not to mention that I'm more focused on indigenous peoples, which may -- or may not -- be PoC although they often work against similar institutionalized prejudices): I mean, if I can't even write a character enough to know that s/he belongs in the story then ain't no outside opinion going to fix that.
If I do believe the character with that gender and that skin color and that personality belongs in the story, then I may seek a friend to do fact-checking and feedback for me but that, IMO, is seeking experienced eyeballs for an explicit request/research. That's not the same as asking permission in the first place.
Like it or not, the simple truth is that no one can give me that but myself.
And that's because the market -- genre market, that is -- that PoC characters are not so absolutely alien that you'd have to read eighty books before you'd find one. Are they common enough to match the diversity I see around me every day, in urban life? Far from it. But they're not non-existent, either; other folks have blazed that path, though the house is far from truly built -- but I do believe it is getting there. The more of us pitch in, the faster it'll happen.
But I do feel like I'd have a better idea of nailing down audience/venue for a story if I knew just how much I'm 'allowed to do', what the genre will bear in terms of gay characters like that long-suffering eminently eligible celibate bachelor. What I see out there in terms of same-sex protagonist-couples, well, just ain't that much. If it's a strange kind of burden to realize that only I can give myself the permission to include PoC characters, it's a much worse feeling to realize that I'd give myself the same freedoms to write GLBT characters... except I'm not so sure I have that power. I don't know what the gatekeepers will allow to pass.
Yes, I use that last verb very specifically.
But still, the fact remains: regardless what I intend, what any author or filmmaker or other artist intends, what is not on the screen, the page, in the lyrics, holds no weight. It is by our excisions and exclusions that we reveal where the real power lies.
What's not on the page might as well not exist. What's on the page has power.