That Story's So Gay

[This post edited and expanded by my boyfriend. Thanks, darling!]

It may have come to your attention that I’m queer.

Shocking, I know. I make so much effort to conceal it online.

One of the weird things about having been out for so long is that I’ve been able to re-evaluate some of the stories that I used to gorge on back in the day. When I was just coming to terms with my own sexuality I started devouring anything that promised to be a gay romance just so I could vicariously experience that validation. Half the reason I got involved in reading pony-fic in the first place was to hunt down shipping, honestly. Now I still read a ton of stuff (though my horizons have expanded considerably), but my standards of evaluation have changed.

Mostly because after three or four years of putting up with it, I’m just going to come out and say it: Am I the only one tired of defining gay characters by their gayness?

Let me be clear here because I’m sure if I go back and look, there will be a story that deals with homophobia/transphobia/what have you and is set in Equestria and works. I’m not talking about that story, whatever it is. I’m talking about the kind of story I’m sure you’ve read at least twice before. The kind that starts and ends with “this character is gay” and then defines them almost solely by their sexuality. Or even worse, the kind where sexuality just reaches out and defines the character in awkward ways.

You know what? Here’s an example you will probably be familiar with: Chengar Qordath’s “The Life and Times of a Winning Pony”.

Cloud Kicker is defined by her sexuality. Self-defined, in fact. I’m pretty sure if I go through chapter by chapter of Winning Pony there will be some reference to her sex life. And yes, I’m counting the chapters before and after Chengar completely goes off the rails and turns the story from a late ‘90s rom-com into a brooding military fantasy. Oh, and the ones where Cloud Kicker talks about how she sexually and emotionally abused Fluttershy without meaning to. These references exist because Cloud Kicker is a sexy, sexy sex-haver who is defined by the fact that she has sex. She has sex with everyone, everyone wants to have sex with her. The characters who are not interested in sex with her are either a) undesirable, b) taken or c) sticks-in-the-mud who don’t understand what a good time they’re missing out on. Cloud Kicker is just a sexy, sexy lady who sexes.

All of which would be fine, but Cloud Kicker is not a subtle character and Chengar is not a subtle writer.. While there’s a bunch of “I was raised military and started slacking” stuff that shows up early in the story and meanders aimlessly throughout, the constant need to remind us of how awesome Cloud Kicker is sexually just distracts from that. The story is in constant danger of drowning in vaginal fluid.

I hate this trope, particularly when it’s applied almost exclusively to queer characters. Being queer is not defined as finding one gender more attractive than another or not having a real preference in gender and then thrown on a back burner, it is defined as having all the sex with all the men/ladies. Or some of the sex with some of them. Or sex in general. That is what their lives revolve around. Not hobbies, not personal relationships, not their job: their sexual urges. Truly, we queers are defined by the pull of our genitalia in a way normal people aren’t.

I don’t think anyone ever means to say that, of course. It’s just a matter of subtlety, and subtlety takes empathy and work.

When you write for a character you don’t share a life experience with, it takes serious effort sometimes to get into their head and understand how they think and behave. It’s part of why stories by trans and queer authors generally have fewer problems with this particular issue than stories about trans and queer characters written by cis or straight authors. Living an identity is a very different experience from reading about it, because most of us aren’t absorbed by one facet of our identity. It’s easier for us to treat it as what it is: part of who we are, and not the whole. If you’re lazy, a hack, or just aren’t accustomed to thinking about things like this- well, then.

This isn’t a matter of psychic powers, it’s often simple research. Queer people write about their own experiences, and if you want to write a good story about a queer character--or a trans character, a neurodivergent character, a character of a different race to you--you should listen to them. When writers neglect this and stumble onwards using nothing but tropes scraped from Chuck Lorre comedies, Glee reruns and Roland Emmerich docudramas, mushed together into a thin, diarrhea-like consistency and slapped onto your story like gay spackle, you get stories that feel wrong and smell bad.

Much like Kudzuhaiku probably* isn’t an actual pedophile and only accidentally ends up defining a nine year old by her suitability (or lack thereof) as a sex object**, people who imply gay or bi characters are more sexual than straight ones aren’t doing that on purpose. They just want to write gay/bi characters and write a sexy story and have no grasp of how to use subtlety in long form. So they pile on the sexual references. After all, the fact that a character is gay is obviously the most interesting thing about them, right?

Right…?

Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, when hopefully liking XX and XY chromosomes isn’t seen as a mark of exoticism.

*I hope
**Did I mention The Catch is absolutely vile?

[By the way, was anyone actually interested in me doing a screaming, flailing rant about ViviD? I finished it a while ago but my blog’s had so few actual readers lately that I didn’t really want to waste the time of what few I’ve got.]

Comments

[MrSing]

I think that the biggest problem probably is that gay characters are exactly the same as straight characters in every single way except for their sexuality and any possible stress/conflict from having that sexuality. So when you write a character like that, the only way to make it noticable is to kind of awkwardly insert their sexuality in the narative.
It comes from the conflict that writers want to write about gay characters instead of characters who just happen to be gay, I guess.
You saw a lot of this stuff too back in the day when black people and women got more serious roles in the film industry. A lot of them were just written as horrible stereotypes. These days that, of course, still happens, but it has dialed down a lot. There are plenty of black and female characters that are excellently played.
I guess it will just take a few decades of awkward stories like the ones you are talking about until the "newness" of writing gay people has worn of and the subject can be approached in a more meaningful way for the mainstream audiences.

[Wade]

One gay character that really stuck out to me as like, unique because of his gayness, but not unique only because of his gayness, was Lafayette from the otherwise eye-rolling True Blood. They touched on his sexuality when it was relevant to the story, but that wasn't often the case - he was just a gay as hell mother hen type with that prided himself on being a man. That's a pretty cool idea for a character.

[devas]

This makes me think of Worm, by Wildbow, where there are a couple of gay characters, but nobody pays an inopportune amount of attention to them.

Maybe because the world is literally ending, but still.

The author, after the story was finished, also talked about how he felt he had to be extremely cautious about inserting lesbian characters in the story, to avoid fetishitization and getting the wrong kind of readers.