Please Avoid These Gay Stereotypes In Your Writing Or I May Suffer An Aneurysm When I Read Your Book

This post grew out of a discussion I had with Roguemutt on his post yesterday that has to do with his novel, "Where You Belong" which I'm enjoying. However, one of his characters is gay and some of the stereotypes straight writers use when they are writing gay characters are annoying so I thought I'd point them out to you so you could STOP IT! Credit goes to writer Melinda Lo who provided much of the analysis presented here.

1.) The effeminate gay man. For many gay people, the flaming queen is a mixed blessing. I’m not denying that flamboyant, feminine gay guys do exist. In fact, one could argue that they paved the way for many folks to come out of the closet because it is impossible to hide their sexual orientation. It takes a ton of courage to be out as a flamboyant gay man in our culture.

But in many representations of gay men, being effeminate is dismissed as a joke — as something to laugh at or as entertainment. Being labeled as effeminate can also result in physical assault, verbal abuse, and murder. Keep this in mind if you’re writing about a character who is a feminine boy: Understand that living in the world is a more dangerous place for him because he presents as feminine. And if you describe a gay character in feminine terms, ask yourself: Why have you chosen this kind of representation? How does that change him? It’s not just about acting like a diva and being a girl’s best friend.

2.) The mannish lesbian. Similarly, butch women have also been on the front lines of gay representation, because this is what mainstream society tends to recognize as lesbian. But unlike stereotypes of feminine gay men, the masculine woman is rarely seen as something fun or entertaining. Mainstream society often condemns her as unnatural, or as a threatening figure. It also takes a lot of courage to walk in the world as a butch lesbian. To endure taunts and about your lack of femininity; to battle for your right to wear what you want. In the worst cases, those taunts can result in violence. From day 1, it seems, our culture encourages little girls to love the color pink and to want to be princesses. If you don’t want to do that, you challenge a deeply held belief about what a girl is. So if you’re writing about a lesbian who is masculine or butch, keep this in mind: Being butch doesn’t mean that you want to be a man. It’s a different way of being a woman.

3.) The promiscuous or devious bisexual. The stereotype of the bisexual as promiscuous or deceptive is probably less prevalent in YA than in adult fiction, film, or television, largely because this stereotype involves sex. But keep it in mind if you’re writing a character who is bi.

Often, people mistakenly believe that bisexuals have many sexual partners, or that they change sexual partners frequently. Alternatively, they may believe that bisexuals are being deceptive about their sexual orientation in order to trick someone. Even gay people can have the mistaken belief that bisexuals aren’t really bi; they’re just confused about whether they’re gay or straight.

But that’s not true. There is no evidence that bisexuals are any more promiscuous than anyone else. The word “bisexual” does not mean that a person is equally and continuously attracted to people of both sexes. It means that a person could potentially be attracted to people of both sexes. It may be true that all of us are, to some degree, bisexual.

4.) Dead gays. Gay characters created for the exclusive purpose of winding up dead in your fiction. Think of the Star Trek redshirt. Example in film: The Sopranos (only gay character dead). Orson Scott Card also uses gays as cannon fodder.

5.) The Pregnant Lesbian. For some reason, people who write lesbians think they're being incredibly original by having a story about a lesbian couple trying to get pregnant. This has been done exactly 2 million times before. It creates a scenario where, despite not having relationships with men, the lesbians still need men desperately.

6.) Homosexuals as villains. It's been done over and over and over. IT'S NOT ORIGINAL. IN FACT, IT'S CLICHE AND I WISH YOU WRITERS OUT THERE WOULD GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEADS THAT HOMOSEXUAL DOES NOT EQUATE TO EVIL. Here is the short list of films and books that I could think of where this occurs (there is more out there, this took me five minutes to compile). As you can indeed see by my list...yes, yes, yes, yes...this has been done before and is unoriginal.

• Diamonds are Forever
• Magnum Force (Dirty Harry movie)
• The Maltese Falcon
• The Detective
• Freebie and the Bean
• Mystic River
• The Boys of St. Vincent
• The Jackal
• Pulp Fiction
• Ace Ventura
• Braveheart
• Dune
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Rob Roy
• A Perfect World
• The Mexican
• Tron: Legacy
• 300
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• Casablanca
• Psycho
• Silence of the Lambs
• Ender's Game
• True Blood
• Where You Belong
• One Life To Live (soap opera)
• Desperate Housewives
• 24 (Fox's political thriller)
• Austin Powers
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
• Interview With The Vampire
• The Talented Mr. Ripley
• Disney's "The Jungle Book"
• Disney's "Pocahontas"
• Disney's "Aladdin"
• Disney's "The Lion King" - Scar puts the gay in that pride
• A Portrait of Dorian Gray
• The Shawshank Redemption
• HBO's Oz (A prison drama)
• American Beauty

Rant over. Have a great Thursday :)

Allegory

Finding hidden messages that the author has inserted in their text is a really tricky thing and usually a flash point for arguments, especially if the message doesn't sit well with people who really admire said author. An example of this is when I pointed out to several people that I thought Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game was nothing but a well-hidden diatribe against gay people (and therefore unworthy of the awards it has received--yup I said it). As I read it, I kept shaking my head at the homophobic references which pepper the text. Then one day I looked up the word "bugger" and discovered it was British slang for "sodomite", a.k.a. "homosexual" and suddenly everything clicked. Taken aback by my findings, I thought to absolve Mr. Card of said bigotry by using Google but nope... he's a confirmed bigot. So yeah, I was right (and got blasted on forums for voicing my opinion).

I'm a critical reader and I look for hidden messages. I can't turn it off...I'm sorry...it's just who I am. If my friend Roguemutt wrote three novels and all of them featured 12-year-old girls getting married to 40-year-old men and these men were very excited to take these girls to bed with them over and over across thousands of pages...I would call mutt a pedophile. This is an extreme example but it shows you how I read books as I look for author intent.

The definition of allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.

Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

Everyone who has been reading my blog knows I've been working my way through Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. Right now, I'm on the third book, a 2000-page work on my iPad (I increased the font size to make it easier to read) called A Storm of Swords. I'm not going to cover how I think it's a soap opera seeing as I did that in an earlier post. No...what I'm going to cover here is the underlying message that Mr. Martin has been pounding into my head and suddenly "I got it" in a chapter where Daenerys gathered an army of "unsullied" by purchasing them as slaves and then commanded them to destroy an entire city.

The message is simple: WOMEN ARE THE DEATH OF MEN.

It's pounded over and over in these books. Mr. Martin, I believe, is a modern day misogynist.

As you may already know, medieval misogyny gave rise to chivalry. The belief that Eve was responsible for consorting with snakes and thereby God threw all of humanity out of the Garden of Eden. Chivalry arose from misogyny as men sought a means to disarm women of their sorceries, witchcrafts, and curses that they were prone to cast over men to do them ill.

In Martin's books, every single horrible thing that has befallen a man has come from consorting with a woman. Khal Drogo died because a witch that said she could cure him of a minor wound poisoned him. Ser Jorah Mormont lost all his land for love of a woman. Cersei killed the king and tried to have Tirrion killed. The men of Astapor underestimated a woman and paid for it with their lives! In other words, all the men who exist in their version of an "Eden" are undone by women and a terrible fate befalls them.

I'm almost a third of the way through with A Storm of Swords but I will make a predictions on the novels based off of this theme.

Every man in these books that dies that is considered a prominent character will have a death directly related back to a woman (this includes as yet unreleased material).

What do you guys think? You fans of the books that are out there...can you furnish an example of a prominent male character that dies that was not offed as a direct correlation to a woman?