colours & inclusions
28 Jan 2009 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI'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?
At the same time, I've been reading -- on a bookseller's recommendation -- Liz William's Detective Chen series, which the store fortunately had book1 and book2, to get me started right off. Yes, I enjoyed the first book, but to the point here is that the second opens with a woman strolling through the market thinking about buying a gift for her girlfriend. I scanned the line and immediately mentally edited: oh, the author must mean like many of my friends use it: a friend who happens to be a girl.
No, by the third chapter it's obvious, the character was thinking about her girlfriend. Yet for the duration of the girlfriend's introductory scenes, I found myself thinking, wait, in this book, Detective Chen's quasi-partner, Zhu, is supposed to find a girl. And this character is getting a lot of screen time...oh, man. I really hope she doesn't... I flipped to the back and reread the teaser just to make sure. Yep, the potential luuuurve interest is a different character. Excellent. The author isn't just jerking my chain.
Except that (and as this happens very early, so it's not a major spoiler) one of the two women...dies. Yeah. Dead gay girlfriend strikes again. Now I'm left wondering whether, at the end of the book, the remaining girlfriend will either die as well, or end up alone.
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.
(That's one reason I disliked Winter...something. What was it called? Dragon's Winter? Uhm. Dunno. Not a Dead Gay Lover, but an Erased Gay Lover, IIRC, but it amounts to the same thing: gotten out of the way so the main is either now suitably isolated, or even suitably isolated and ready for Proper Gender Lover to come along. GUH.)
This is what bothers me when writing romantic subplots -- and I don't mean to say I have issues with cross-gender or cross-racial sex scenes of any combination. I've written a whole variety of them, including threesomes (which are just harder because of the extra arms and legs). But that's for crack!fic, or for fiction that is geared towards an explicit-eyeballs audience of some kind. When it comes to popular/genre fiction, I find myself going oblique, even coy, when I'm not outright censoring myself even as I put words on paper. What the hell, brain?
When the story requires a sex scene between a opp-gender pair, I do tend to fade to dark once the character development point has been reached. Let's be really cliched, and say it's, uhm, this occurs once both characters have kissed and are now topless. Character point reached, fade. Mainstream fiction doesn't require (I think) the rest of the scene unless the romantic plot is the main plot, in which case sex scenes are there for reinforcing the character-connection rather than as diversion from some other main plot. That connection is the main plot.
When I look over the storylines I'd written for a similar -- if same-sex -- couple, I have to admit it's not entirely a tilt-your-head-and-squint moment to see the text, but it's close. Pretty close. Fades to dark damn well fast, too. That's what ground me to a halt when it came to revisions and I realized that the logical and proper character development points come at similar points to what the opp-gender couple got. Fading to dark too soon short-shrifts the emotional connection needed to justify later events.
It's like saying, "okay, so, just believe me when I say they're a caring and dedicated couple and now one's going to jump his ass in the frying pan to save the other." If we're talking two friends, this jumping isn't hard to believe; a lot of people will go to great lengths for a friend. But if we're talking two lovers who are along their way to their HEA except for this obstacle, then we're talking about a much more emotionally-heavy obstacle point.
And I get that. What I don't get is this reluctance in me, whether or not I intend to write it that way, or even if I would write it that way, if I knew I were the only audience to ever read it. That's hard to say for sure; all I do know is that I find myself uncomfortable on some strange level -- no, perhaps I should say distrustful -- that I'm somehow 'allowed to' to follow the story and give each character, regardless of lover's gender, their full time and development.
What complicates it is that this uncertainty about some nebulous permission is slamming up against a bizarre kind of mental quota. Frex, my brain says: here is scene A, which we'll consider the control. It's got one man, one woman, neither are virgins and both are adults and they're madly infatuated with each other and ready for increasing intimacy -- which is often the point of a sex (or near-sex) scene, to illustrate growing intimacy. Here are the ways I described it, here's what got stated, here's where I went oblique, here's where I cut away. Now, compare.
Well, for starters, the build-up, the sexual tension, is far more oblique in the same-sex storylines. Enough that sometimes it comes across (to me) as more of a strong friendship overlaid with notes of curiosity about the exotic (one of the couple being non-human and/or being a cross-cultural relationship). It's not always quite so clear that this is a baseline attraction to same-gender, in general. That is, sometimes the UST feels like it's veering dangerously towards the much-hated (by me) cop-out of "I don't like ___, just this one ___."
(When I see that line in stories, I always want the recipient character to snap, "oh, well, don't freaking martyr yourself on my behalf!")
I have much less issue writing sexy women because I like strong women, and consider that strength inherently sexy. The problem there is, curiously and perhaps ironically, when I've written two strong women who become very close friends -- to the point of near-sisters -- I've had readers who read a massive subtext in there for a sexual relationship. Hell, one time I even wrote flirtation leading into invitation to sex, by one of those female characters, and a certain someone burst out while reading, "what's going on? Why's she hitting on him? She's gay!"
[Me: *jaw drops* what the hell gave you that idea?]
Point is (among the many) that when two male characters spend 90% of their time together, we've got Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all their precedents and antecedents telling us that this is a buddy-buddy flick where the guys just happen to be bonding closer than they do with their girlfriends, who are secondary to the male-bonding. When we get the same with women -- where men do not occupy 90% of their attention and/or conversation -- it's such a rare thing in literature/media overall that it stands out so freaking much that it becomes sexualized by default.
Think of it this way: imagine watching a movie filmed in the 30's. Imagine that in one scene, the hero is walking with his sidekick, and they pass a couple lounging at the bus stop, say hey, and carry on. Of the couple, the guy's got his arm over the girl's shoulder, she's leaning against him, close and comfortable. One is white; one is black. They're onscreen all of ten seconds.
I fully expect the audience would've been so hornswaggled by that culturally-uncomfortable image that any conversation between hero and sidekick would have been drowned out by the audience's brains full of immediate assumptions. I don't think the audience would have assumed friendship, that's my point: something that shocking, that unusual, must be sexual -- because a sexual relationship, in some ways, is the ultimate shock. You're with him, we ask in disbelief, because if it's unusual to be friends with someone, that's still nothing compared to sleeping with that person.
Lacking any obvious explicit signals that the two are "just friends", I think, the overall exotic (to that era) combination drives the immediate reaction straight into the biggest big of them all, of being in a sexual relationship.
(Contrast with the image of the same scene but it being two black guys hanging out on the bench while the white hero & sidekick walk past, say hey, keep going. The fact that the four appear to know each other to a friendly degree might create discomfort in some of the 30's era audience, but it's not necessarily a "woah!" moment. That lack of woah, I think, precipitates a lack of assume-the-ultimate, somehow.)
Then I stop and think about that analogy. Is that the message here? That we see women-as-lovers where we see men-as-buddies because women-as-friends is that freaking rare? As much as it would have been for a black person and a white person to be good enough friends to sit casually -- and openly affectionately -- at a bus stop together, in the 30s?
Certainly there are other issues buried under there, gender and power and things I won't get into now. Whether or not a story addresses them, the problem is that men-with-men (of any interaction) and women-with-women (of any interaction) get these quirky automatic responses. The men are just, y'know, really good buddies. Yeah. And the women? Totally doing it. Obviously. Because two women would never hang out just to, y'know, hang out, and guys, well, they hang out together without a girl in sight, all the time.
Which makes writing same-sex UST even more of a prickly, difficult thing: the wrong narrative tone and the audience is gonna get whiplash when those two "just really good buddies" are suddenly doing what?! Where did that come from, they were just like any guys are when they're good friends. With female characters: take a jump to the left and to find out these women are more like sisters and those who've been reading with implied subtext are going to get pissy because in their eyes, you just broke the rules.
Or something. Le sigh.
This is why I'm constantly waffling over whether a storyline that revolves around a two-sex shaman and an ancient (male) siren could be of any interest in any market other than erotica (which in turn has its own limitations in that it expects the exact opposite, which is as much explicit interaction as possible, as soon as possible, no-holds-barred, which doesn't fit my, ahem, preferences, either). The traps in mainstream urban fantasy seem so innumerable and difficult to parse that I dunno which way to go: play the coy innuendo game (which is almost impossible when a character's discovery of two-sex state does require a certain depth into sexuality and gender)... or just accept that the story could never be taken as a 'serious' mainstream romantic subplot, play up the explicit element, and dump it in erotica as something written and forgotten.
I mean, I'm not published so I have no credits on my CV to argue existing audience or interest. That doesn't bother me; I'm also not naive enough to think anything I write will blaze a path -- because new writers don't freaking blaze paths, from what I've seen of reading first-time works. New writers do light a blaze, but it's more like the difference between the new writer giving a house tour and deviating enough to note specific artwork on the walls, versus an established writer/artist who can tear down the house and build an entirely new one on the foundation.
Which is why I think some stories currently out in print can sometimes be so, hrm, thematically predictable when certain elements in them (be it of race, gender, or what-have-you) are totally blazing. Perhaps there's an unconscious assertion that readers can only take so much from an untrusted, untested, unfamiliar author, so test the waters by adding in this one spice, this one strange portrait, but don't go tearing stuff down quite yet, okay?
It doesn't help that what's out there pretty much reinforces this for me. Like, hrm, oh! Flewelling's Nightrunner series: the romantic subplot drives a lot of the characters' interactions and choices. It should go without saying that when you love someone, you're going to react more strongly to them being in danger, heightened emotions, heightened fears, all that jazz. Yet when I compare Flewelling's treatment of the main couple -- in terms of how much illustration she does, versus sideways comments (a step above subtext, granted, but still) -- to what opp-gender couples get in comparative novels in the genre, well, now.
Okay, so she doesn't take the Dead Gay Lover route (that I could tell, given I stopped after the 3rd book) but for a genre that's effectively embraced (pun not intended) the inclusion of sexual attraction and scenes with some limited explicitness, the reliance on innuendo and lots of fading-out starts to become really noticeable. The one time it's illustrated (as opposed to implied and/or told via semi-oblique narrative reference) that the two are in an actual sexual relationship -- it's a strange kind of spell that duplicates the previous actions performed in a bed. The plot-point of this? That the intruder hears the sound of two people (yes, men) having sex, gets embarrassed and flustered, and does his best to get away and not interrupt them.
I thought about that, and how it might have played if it were opp-gender. If we take it from the control example that the intruder prefers women, then overhearing or accidentally seeing what appears to be sex (even draped with a blanket) between opp-gender, sure, there's a chance the intruder would get red-faced and back out. There's also a chance he would take the moment to spy, waiting for an eyeful of Naked!Chick.
It's not a far stretch to imagine a mercenary kind of intruder having no compunctions about being a peeping tom. If he's bold enough to be snooping around, he's probably not going to get a sudden attack of the conscience that sexxors! is all private and stuff. If he did back out and leave the couple be, I wouldn't expect the bad guy to be thinking, "oh, goodness, sorry! I'll just let myself out, oh, goodness..." but possibly just not care except for the fact that them being there means he can't search/steal.
Which means to me that to use the sex scene -- and all that's described are the noises and that the covers are moving about -- with a reaction of "oh, goodness, whoops! must backtrack!" made me feel like... How to put it. Like the author herself wasn't entirely comfortable with the fact that she'd written a couple that, as adults, is going to want to do hot nekkid weasel things with each other. There's even a bit of humor in the intruder's reaction, like a goofy self-consciousness that he'd nearly walked in on that, along with a bit of scuttling away quickly as possible to avoid it. That's how the scene read to me, at least, and remained my lingering impression, although it's only over the past month or so I've finally hammered down what got me so annoyed about it.
Because whether I like it or not, agree with it or not, or even think the author necessarily intended that reaction, the fact is that the combination of narrative and character reaction read like the author is saying: oh, sex between guys, icky, let's just, uhm, skip that part, shall we? I mean, we know they're doing it, but we don't want to actually see it. Let's just be moving along, hahaha, uhm, nothing to see here, move along!
Yes, Flewelling does imply relations between them (although up to that point in the series it consists mostly of one character euphemistically and obliquely 'recalling' things done with the other) -- but she fades out so fast, pretty much every single time. If there'd been any other scene with any level of explicit details (and by that, I mean "they are in bed together, check," and "they are naked, check," and "they are enjoying themselves, check" kind of "meet all the criteria to pretty much say without saying that they're doing it right then as opposed to recalling what happened off-page") then perhaps, in contrast, this one scene might not have been such a sore thumb.
I am, curiously, reminded of Hairspray; when the black kids and the white kids get together to dance, you see them getting along and dancing together and enjoying themselves as fellow kids. When they're not getting along, that puts the getting-along points in strong contrast. And on top of that, when Penny and Seaweed fall for each other, it stands in strong contrast to when the kids are all just friends. But if the movie had instead just implied that black kids and white kids would dance together, and just implied that Penny and Seaweed liked each other "that way", the power of the illustrative black-and-white conflict would have drowned out, I think, anything else. What isn't on screen has no weight.
What isn't on the page has no power.
This was one reason I really admired Whedon, in the Angel series, when Gunn fell for that crazy physics girl. (What was her name, again? Man, it's been so long.) They got actual sex scenes! Okay, as close as you'd get on the WB night-time, but you know what I mean: same criteria as usual. Implied nakedness or getting there, in an actual bed, with happy sounds. Fade out; the point's been made, they're a couple.
Even when watching the series regularly, I was already picking up that Whedon only kept the camera on for sex-scenes that contained development points. Once he'd established that attraction had been consummated, any further contact was long enough to reinforce the romantic subplot but short enough that it faded to dark relatively quickly -- regardless of couple.
Willow and Tara are a quasi-exception; for their long (apparent) courtship, Whedon uses a lot of subtext and euphemisms until he could finally blow the lid off things and actually illustrate. After that, the couple shows roughly the same affection and get-in-bed-together shots as Xander did with Anya.
I guess once breaking past the suits with that arc, Whedon had less issue/difficulty the second time around, because there's not nearly as much scuffing-feet and hemming going on before Willow kissed Kennedy, after Tara's death. (To the point that a lot of viewers, myself included, were a bit taken aback at the speed of the attraction. I think that's, to some degree, because I'd adjusted mentally to see the long courtship phase as somehow indicative of Willow's and Tara's own innate personalities; the suddenness of the kiss, therefore, felt out-of-character. Strange, hunh.)
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?
At the same time, I've been reading -- on a bookseller's recommendation -- Liz William's Detective Chen series, which the store fortunately had book1 and book2, to get me started right off. Yes, I enjoyed the first book, but to the point here is that the second opens with a woman strolling through the market thinking about buying a gift for her girlfriend. I scanned the line and immediately mentally edited: oh, the author must mean like many of my friends use it: a friend who happens to be a girl.
No, by the third chapter it's obvious, the character was thinking about her girlfriend. Yet for the duration of the girlfriend's introductory scenes, I found myself thinking, wait, in this book, Detective Chen's quasi-partner, Zhu, is supposed to find a girl. And this character is getting a lot of screen time...oh, man. I really hope she doesn't... I flipped to the back and reread the teaser just to make sure. Yep, the potential luuuurve interest is a different character. Excellent. The author isn't just jerking my chain.
Except that (and as this happens very early, so it's not a major spoiler) one of the two women...dies. Yeah. Dead gay girlfriend strikes again. Now I'm left wondering whether, at the end of the book, the remaining girlfriend will either die as well, or end up alone.
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.
(That's one reason I disliked Winter...something. What was it called? Dragon's Winter? Uhm. Dunno. Not a Dead Gay Lover, but an Erased Gay Lover, IIRC, but it amounts to the same thing: gotten out of the way so the main is either now suitably isolated, or even suitably isolated and ready for Proper Gender Lover to come along. GUH.)
This is what bothers me when writing romantic subplots -- and I don't mean to say I have issues with cross-gender or cross-racial sex scenes of any combination. I've written a whole variety of them, including threesomes (which are just harder because of the extra arms and legs). But that's for crack!fic, or for fiction that is geared towards an explicit-eyeballs audience of some kind. When it comes to popular/genre fiction, I find myself going oblique, even coy, when I'm not outright censoring myself even as I put words on paper. What the hell, brain?
When the story requires a sex scene between a opp-gender pair, I do tend to fade to dark once the character development point has been reached. Let's be really cliched, and say it's, uhm, this occurs once both characters have kissed and are now topless. Character point reached, fade. Mainstream fiction doesn't require (I think) the rest of the scene unless the romantic plot is the main plot, in which case sex scenes are there for reinforcing the character-connection rather than as diversion from some other main plot. That connection is the main plot.
When I look over the storylines I'd written for a similar -- if same-sex -- couple, I have to admit it's not entirely a tilt-your-head-and-squint moment to see the text, but it's close. Pretty close. Fades to dark damn well fast, too. That's what ground me to a halt when it came to revisions and I realized that the logical and proper character development points come at similar points to what the opp-gender couple got. Fading to dark too soon short-shrifts the emotional connection needed to justify later events.
It's like saying, "okay, so, just believe me when I say they're a caring and dedicated couple and now one's going to jump his ass in the frying pan to save the other." If we're talking two friends, this jumping isn't hard to believe; a lot of people will go to great lengths for a friend. But if we're talking two lovers who are along their way to their HEA except for this obstacle, then we're talking about a much more emotionally-heavy obstacle point.
And I get that. What I don't get is this reluctance in me, whether or not I intend to write it that way, or even if I would write it that way, if I knew I were the only audience to ever read it. That's hard to say for sure; all I do know is that I find myself uncomfortable on some strange level -- no, perhaps I should say distrustful -- that I'm somehow 'allowed to' to follow the story and give each character, regardless of lover's gender, their full time and development.
What complicates it is that this uncertainty about some nebulous permission is slamming up against a bizarre kind of mental quota. Frex, my brain says: here is scene A, which we'll consider the control. It's got one man, one woman, neither are virgins and both are adults and they're madly infatuated with each other and ready for increasing intimacy -- which is often the point of a sex (or near-sex) scene, to illustrate growing intimacy. Here are the ways I described it, here's what got stated, here's where I went oblique, here's where I cut away. Now, compare.
Well, for starters, the build-up, the sexual tension, is far more oblique in the same-sex storylines. Enough that sometimes it comes across (to me) as more of a strong friendship overlaid with notes of curiosity about the exotic (one of the couple being non-human and/or being a cross-cultural relationship). It's not always quite so clear that this is a baseline attraction to same-gender, in general. That is, sometimes the UST feels like it's veering dangerously towards the much-hated (by me) cop-out of "I don't like ___, just this one ___."
(When I see that line in stories, I always want the recipient character to snap, "oh, well, don't freaking martyr yourself on my behalf!")
I have much less issue writing sexy women because I like strong women, and consider that strength inherently sexy. The problem there is, curiously and perhaps ironically, when I've written two strong women who become very close friends -- to the point of near-sisters -- I've had readers who read a massive subtext in there for a sexual relationship. Hell, one time I even wrote flirtation leading into invitation to sex, by one of those female characters, and a certain someone burst out while reading, "what's going on? Why's she hitting on him? She's gay!"
[Me: *jaw drops* what the hell gave you that idea?]
Point is (among the many) that when two male characters spend 90% of their time together, we've got Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all their precedents and antecedents telling us that this is a buddy-buddy flick where the guys just happen to be bonding closer than they do with their girlfriends, who are secondary to the male-bonding. When we get the same with women -- where men do not occupy 90% of their attention and/or conversation -- it's such a rare thing in literature/media overall that it stands out so freaking much that it becomes sexualized by default.
Think of it this way: imagine watching a movie filmed in the 30's. Imagine that in one scene, the hero is walking with his sidekick, and they pass a couple lounging at the bus stop, say hey, and carry on. Of the couple, the guy's got his arm over the girl's shoulder, she's leaning against him, close and comfortable. One is white; one is black. They're onscreen all of ten seconds.
I fully expect the audience would've been so hornswaggled by that culturally-uncomfortable image that any conversation between hero and sidekick would have been drowned out by the audience's brains full of immediate assumptions. I don't think the audience would have assumed friendship, that's my point: something that shocking, that unusual, must be sexual -- because a sexual relationship, in some ways, is the ultimate shock. You're with him, we ask in disbelief, because if it's unusual to be friends with someone, that's still nothing compared to sleeping with that person.
Lacking any obvious explicit signals that the two are "just friends", I think, the overall exotic (to that era) combination drives the immediate reaction straight into the biggest big of them all, of being in a sexual relationship.
(Contrast with the image of the same scene but it being two black guys hanging out on the bench while the white hero & sidekick walk past, say hey, keep going. The fact that the four appear to know each other to a friendly degree might create discomfort in some of the 30's era audience, but it's not necessarily a "woah!" moment. That lack of woah, I think, precipitates a lack of assume-the-ultimate, somehow.)
Then I stop and think about that analogy. Is that the message here? That we see women-as-lovers where we see men-as-buddies because women-as-friends is that freaking rare? As much as it would have been for a black person and a white person to be good enough friends to sit casually -- and openly affectionately -- at a bus stop together, in the 30s?
Certainly there are other issues buried under there, gender and power and things I won't get into now. Whether or not a story addresses them, the problem is that men-with-men (of any interaction) and women-with-women (of any interaction) get these quirky automatic responses. The men are just, y'know, really good buddies. Yeah. And the women? Totally doing it. Obviously. Because two women would never hang out just to, y'know, hang out, and guys, well, they hang out together without a girl in sight, all the time.
Which makes writing same-sex UST even more of a prickly, difficult thing: the wrong narrative tone and the audience is gonna get whiplash when those two "just really good buddies" are suddenly doing what?! Where did that come from, they were just like any guys are when they're good friends. With female characters: take a jump to the left and to find out these women are more like sisters and those who've been reading with implied subtext are going to get pissy because in their eyes, you just broke the rules.
Or something. Le sigh.
This is why I'm constantly waffling over whether a storyline that revolves around a two-sex shaman and an ancient (male) siren could be of any interest in any market other than erotica (which in turn has its own limitations in that it expects the exact opposite, which is as much explicit interaction as possible, as soon as possible, no-holds-barred, which doesn't fit my, ahem, preferences, either). The traps in mainstream urban fantasy seem so innumerable and difficult to parse that I dunno which way to go: play the coy innuendo game (which is almost impossible when a character's discovery of two-sex state does require a certain depth into sexuality and gender)... or just accept that the story could never be taken as a 'serious' mainstream romantic subplot, play up the explicit element, and dump it in erotica as something written and forgotten.
I mean, I'm not published so I have no credits on my CV to argue existing audience or interest. That doesn't bother me; I'm also not naive enough to think anything I write will blaze a path -- because new writers don't freaking blaze paths, from what I've seen of reading first-time works. New writers do light a blaze, but it's more like the difference between the new writer giving a house tour and deviating enough to note specific artwork on the walls, versus an established writer/artist who can tear down the house and build an entirely new one on the foundation.
Which is why I think some stories currently out in print can sometimes be so, hrm, thematically predictable when certain elements in them (be it of race, gender, or what-have-you) are totally blazing. Perhaps there's an unconscious assertion that readers can only take so much from an untrusted, untested, unfamiliar author, so test the waters by adding in this one spice, this one strange portrait, but don't go tearing stuff down quite yet, okay?
It doesn't help that what's out there pretty much reinforces this for me. Like, hrm, oh! Flewelling's Nightrunner series: the romantic subplot drives a lot of the characters' interactions and choices. It should go without saying that when you love someone, you're going to react more strongly to them being in danger, heightened emotions, heightened fears, all that jazz. Yet when I compare Flewelling's treatment of the main couple -- in terms of how much illustration she does, versus sideways comments (a step above subtext, granted, but still) -- to what opp-gender couples get in comparative novels in the genre, well, now.
Okay, so she doesn't take the Dead Gay Lover route (that I could tell, given I stopped after the 3rd book) but for a genre that's effectively embraced (pun not intended) the inclusion of sexual attraction and scenes with some limited explicitness, the reliance on innuendo and lots of fading-out starts to become really noticeable. The one time it's illustrated (as opposed to implied and/or told via semi-oblique narrative reference) that the two are in an actual sexual relationship -- it's a strange kind of spell that duplicates the previous actions performed in a bed. The plot-point of this? That the intruder hears the sound of two people (yes, men) having sex, gets embarrassed and flustered, and does his best to get away and not interrupt them.
I thought about that, and how it might have played if it were opp-gender. If we take it from the control example that the intruder prefers women, then overhearing or accidentally seeing what appears to be sex (even draped with a blanket) between opp-gender, sure, there's a chance the intruder would get red-faced and back out. There's also a chance he would take the moment to spy, waiting for an eyeful of Naked!Chick.
It's not a far stretch to imagine a mercenary kind of intruder having no compunctions about being a peeping tom. If he's bold enough to be snooping around, he's probably not going to get a sudden attack of the conscience that sexxors! is all private and stuff. If he did back out and leave the couple be, I wouldn't expect the bad guy to be thinking, "oh, goodness, sorry! I'll just let myself out, oh, goodness..." but possibly just not care except for the fact that them being there means he can't search/steal.
Which means to me that to use the sex scene -- and all that's described are the noises and that the covers are moving about -- with a reaction of "oh, goodness, whoops! must backtrack!" made me feel like... How to put it. Like the author herself wasn't entirely comfortable with the fact that she'd written a couple that, as adults, is going to want to do hot nekkid weasel things with each other. There's even a bit of humor in the intruder's reaction, like a goofy self-consciousness that he'd nearly walked in on that, along with a bit of scuttling away quickly as possible to avoid it. That's how the scene read to me, at least, and remained my lingering impression, although it's only over the past month or so I've finally hammered down what got me so annoyed about it.
Because whether I like it or not, agree with it or not, or even think the author necessarily intended that reaction, the fact is that the combination of narrative and character reaction read like the author is saying: oh, sex between guys, icky, let's just, uhm, skip that part, shall we? I mean, we know they're doing it, but we don't want to actually see it. Let's just be moving along, hahaha, uhm, nothing to see here, move along!
Yes, Flewelling does imply relations between them (although up to that point in the series it consists mostly of one character euphemistically and obliquely 'recalling' things done with the other) -- but she fades out so fast, pretty much every single time. If there'd been any other scene with any level of explicit details (and by that, I mean "they are in bed together, check," and "they are naked, check," and "they are enjoying themselves, check" kind of "meet all the criteria to pretty much say without saying that they're doing it right then as opposed to recalling what happened off-page") then perhaps, in contrast, this one scene might not have been such a sore thumb.
I am, curiously, reminded of Hairspray; when the black kids and the white kids get together to dance, you see them getting along and dancing together and enjoying themselves as fellow kids. When they're not getting along, that puts the getting-along points in strong contrast. And on top of that, when Penny and Seaweed fall for each other, it stands in strong contrast to when the kids are all just friends. But if the movie had instead just implied that black kids and white kids would dance together, and just implied that Penny and Seaweed liked each other "that way", the power of the illustrative black-and-white conflict would have drowned out, I think, anything else. What isn't on screen has no weight.
What isn't on the page has no power.
This was one reason I really admired Whedon, in the Angel series, when Gunn fell for that crazy physics girl. (What was her name, again? Man, it's been so long.) They got actual sex scenes! Okay, as close as you'd get on the WB night-time, but you know what I mean: same criteria as usual. Implied nakedness or getting there, in an actual bed, with happy sounds. Fade out; the point's been made, they're a couple.
Even when watching the series regularly, I was already picking up that Whedon only kept the camera on for sex-scenes that contained development points. Once he'd established that attraction had been consummated, any further contact was long enough to reinforce the romantic subplot but short enough that it faded to dark relatively quickly -- regardless of couple.
Willow and Tara are a quasi-exception; for their long (apparent) courtship, Whedon uses a lot of subtext and euphemisms until he could finally blow the lid off things and actually illustrate. After that, the couple shows roughly the same affection and get-in-bed-together shots as Xander did with Anya.
I guess once breaking past the suits with that arc, Whedon had less issue/difficulty the second time around, because there's not nearly as much scuffing-feet and hemming going on before Willow kissed Kennedy, after Tara's death. (To the point that a lot of viewers, myself included, were a bit taken aback at the speed of the attraction. I think that's, to some degree, because I'd adjusted mentally to see the long courtship phase as somehow indicative of Willow's and Tara's own innate personalities; the suddenness of the kiss, therefore, felt out-of-character. Strange, hunh.)
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.
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Date: 29 Jan 2009 11:45 am (UTC)Possibly: http://nojojojo.livejournal.com/161692.html
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Date: 29 Jan 2009 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2009 02:57 pm (UTC)Ah, shallowness. Never fail me.
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Date: 29 Jan 2009 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2009 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Jan 2009 08:38 pm (UTC)Points! (I feel like numbers today.)
Date: 29 Jan 2009 11:54 pm (UTC)2. I'm never going to run out of links to read regarding this imbroglio, am I? In fact I suspect I'm quite behind. Ah well, something to do over the weekend.
3. I think I'm too bullied by my characters; none of them are about to let me get away with neutering them or downsizing their roles, even if I do it unconsciously. Not that I get enough written down to know.
4. ... I thought Ranulf *was* getting plenty? Or is that scene with Lyall-the-voyeur no longer included? D:
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Date: 30 Jan 2009 12:06 am (UTC)2. No. You aren't. Just accept this now.
3. The power of revisions, babe!
4. This took me awhile to realize what you meant -- no, the elegant man who could snap his fingers of which I speak here is a completely different character, in two older set-aside WiPs.