A few weeks ago in my Write With Me series, I warned that there will always be people who want to tell you what you can and cannot do in your writing.
The internet has empowered millions of people to say, write, and publish whatever they want without gatekeepers, but also encouraged millions more who want to be the gatekeeper. These people have always been with us, though the faces have changed over the years. The people with publishing power used to control the levers and now the people who feel powerless want to assert their own kind of control.
This advice can be well-intentioned. I will concede that much. Sometimes it is not. It is frequently couched in presumptive language:
“You don’t want to…”
“You shouldn’t…”
“You wouldn’t want to…”
The speaker presents their advice as a factual statement about what you want, rather than a statement of their opinion about what they think you should want. The speaker also ducks responsibility for their opinions by framing them as consensus thought, with you on the outside.
You don’t want to be on the outside, do you? You’re one of us, aren’t you? You want to be on the inside, with the good people, where we don’t do those things, which coincidentally are things I personally don’t like.
I published that post just a few weeks ago and, as if I’d summoned it from the ether, a perfect example soon appeared online. This article on Writer’s Digest hides behind the gay community to tell you want you can’t do, which is a pretty safe position because no one wants to piss off the gays. As a gay guy and a writer, I feel qualified to weigh in.
As you might suspect, I have a contrary opinion.
The writer identifies a story trope that you don’t want to use because you wouldn’t want to be a bad writer, so I’m already in a mood. The trope? Gay/lesbian people being disproportionately more likely to be killed off in fiction, with their deaths seen as punishment for their sexuality or identity, rather than for story reasons.
This used to happen, and quite regularly. In the 1950s and 60s, popular novels with gay or lesbian characters almost always ended with suicide or a heterosexual conversion or one of each. Books like The Price of Salt, The City and the Pillar, and Giovanni’s Room were extreme outliers, and even Baldwin’s book concludes with a death. Morally, the ending of The City and the Pillar isn’t much better, but (spoiler) at least the gay protagonist doesn’t kill himself.
Anecdotally, we have heard that publishers refused to take books with gay/lesbian characters or insisted that their endings be altered to include radical change or punishment for the characters, usually death. Gay and lesbian characters literally (literarily?) were not allowed to live.
That was pretty messed up. That was also 70 years ago. As tropes go, the dead queer is about as modern as Zeus in a box on a winch.
Now I don’t read every book that’s published, but between my online gay and writing communities, I think I’d have heard if this were still a problem. The gays and the writers – not to mention the readers – aren’t known for being quiet about their complaints.
In fact, the article itself offers only two terribly outdated examples of the dead-gay/lesbian trope: Goldfinger, the James Bond novel (1959) and film (1964), in which a lesbian who falls in love with Pussy Galore is killed; and an episode of the sitcom All in the Family in which the drag queen character Beverly LaSalle is killed in a gay bashing (1977).
If your best examples of a trope occurred 50-60 years ago, it’s safe to say it’s no longer a trope. Worse – or better, actually, for my argument – they aren’t even good examples. Very few women of that era lived to see the end of a James Bond movie, so if you’re mad about a dead lesbian, you can chalk that up to the original series’ sexism and misogyny. The homophobia is practically an afterthought. In that light, you might even view the on-screen portrayal of a lesbian, even a doomed one, as quite egalitarian for 1964.
That’s a joke, but it’s not untrue. And if you ask me, killing off a fictional lesbian is not as offensive as naming a female character Pussy. But alas, RuPaul has inured the modern audience to misogynistic name puns, so that detail passed without remark.
The example of Beverly LaSalle even more badly undercuts the article’s own assertion. Beverly was portrayed with great empathy and was considerably fleshed out for a character that appeared only a few times over the course of several years. The character’s death was shocking, as it was intended to be. At no point did the writing suggest Beverly deserved what happens. It was, however, something that did happen in 1970s America and with horrifying frequency. The whole point of the episode was unfairness and bigotry. It took away someone viewers had grown to love and accept, and shoved their faces in the kind of violence people like Beverly – and me – had grown to expect, and it shook the core cast of characters, even the bigot.
Beverly’s death was intended to grab the audience and make them think. It was the polar opposite of the dead-gay trope. If anything, it took the trope and throttled it.
The article goes on to advise that you create fully developed characters with a reason to exist in your story and, if you have to kill them off, you do so with the right build-up, for a good story reason, not simply because you think they’re icky.
Which is what you should be doing for all your characters, not just the gay ones.
I understand it can be challenging to write about someone who is not like you. I approach it with caution myself. But scolding and avoiding are not the way to go. Every challenge you face in writing can be resolved with the good habits of writing.
Treat your characters like human beings. Avoid clichés. Don’t always send your story in the easy or obvious direction. Read voraciously. Ask for feedback. Ask for help. Do your homework. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you what you can and cannot write, especially if their examples of bad writing are 50 years out of date.
After all that, if you still want to kill off a non-straight character of whatever kind, I give you my blessing. If anyone complains, tell them your gay writer friend said it was ok.
Just between us, I’ve known a lot of gay guys. Some of them would not be missed.
I have stories, believe me.
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