Beyond Diversity 101

SPOILERS FOR Now I Rise (Kiersten White),  Worldbreaker series (Kameron Hurley), The Obelisk Gate (N.K. Jemisin)

I feel that I talk often—and many gay readers who grew up before the advent of personal computers in your pocket— about how great it is that there is so much diversity in books now, particularly YA. That when we were teenagers growing up, the “gay” section was either erotica or memoirs or memoir-like stories about how miserable we should be, or would have been ten years prior. This varies depending on which minority we’re talking about (white gay teens and young men are easy to find. Women, older members of the community, or people of color, not so much.) I don’t think that anyone will argue anymore that we need diversity. That fight is all but won, and those that are still fighting with us are never going to change their minds.

But as we really dig into this discussion of diversity in fiction, I think we need to think critically about how we’re portraying diversity. These are stickier conversations, but they’re important to have. We need to have them, and we need to have them in public forums. We need to discuss and possibly argue about them. But, one would hope, that we come out the other side with a better understanding. Also important to note is that all of these conversations will not be the same. It’s a dangerous trap to fall into that there’s one solution that will bring diversity into the mainstream across the board. We all want the same thing: more representation, to see ourselves in the fiction and media we consume. But we are still all different communities, with different concerns and different priorities, even inside the community, there are schisms, and we need different, more nuanced solutions. We need to move beyond diversity 101.

(DISCLAIMER: I am part of the LGBT and coded-as-female community, so those are the ones I will frequently reference, and more generally the most-common lens through which I view the “diversity question.” )

One of the most exciting and terrifying things for me to stumble upon while reading is a gay character. Now, I read a lot of novels with LGBT and gender non-conforming characters, but I go out of my way to find them from authors and recommendation sources that I trust. When I’m surprised by one, my first feeling is usually excitement, followed quickly by dread. Try not to get attached to this one, I think. You don’t know what this author will do to them. Now sometimes everything turns out alright and even goes on to be amazing (case and point: Santa Olivia and Saints Astray by Jacqueline Carey), but I can never know for sure, and let me tell you, that is the not fun version of reading “on the edge of my seat.” Every time it happens, it feels like reading GoT all over again (and let’s not even talk about what a train wreck that book is in terms of representation. I didn’t believe Loras was gay until the HBO series came out because we never heard from Loras himself. I assumed that the “rumors” of Loras “liking little boys” were just rumors, because clearly the only gay people are pedophiles

). I recently finished Now I Rise (by Kiersten White) and was only 30% in when that dread set in. As soon as Radu and his wife “flee” to Constantinople, TK has to leave her partner, and it becomes clear that Radu and TK have feelings for each other, I was afraid all three of them were going to die. It felt like waiting for the inevitable. Even though in the end, none of them died (extra spoilers: though Radu admits to being a spy and breaks TK’s heart, which: just stab me in the heart why don’t you, White??) it’s still an uncomfortable feeling waiting for the ax to fall for 70% of a book. It is not a pleasant way to read. And it happens so often— and ends badly in face of all that trepidation often— that as a reader I’m trained to expect the worst as soon as a LGBT character walks on the scene. That should not be the norm. I should not have to worry about every single gay character in a novel. It’s exhausting. And real life is exhausting enough as it is.

ASIDE: I’m not sure I would argue that Now I Rise should have ended or been handled any other way. White ended up handling it with, what I would consider, the appropriate balance of care and craft. Regardless, it still illustrates my point. I got lucky in that White can now be added to the “tentative trust” list. But my trepidation still existed. I still felt it, even if it didn’t move from trepidation to fury and despair. It’s the potential that’s important.)  

Sometimes when I argue this point or when similar arguments arise, a common counter argument is that we’re arguing that all minorities should have “happy endings” and that’s “unrealistic.”  

First off, let’s get a few minor quibbles out of the way: (1) It’s fiction. In this post alone, I’m mention a duology about a scientifically mutated wolf-hybrid half-breed turned secret-agent/bodyguard; a retelling of the myth of Vlad the Impaler reimagined if Vlad was a woman; an end-of-the-world portal fantasy with an alternate dimension trying to take over a neighbor dimension; and another end-of-the-world fantasy with a slave-class of people who are basically earthbenders. I know I mainly talk about fantasy novels, because that’s what I typically like to read, but the same for realistic fiction as well. Arguing that it’s realistic for (any and only) LGBT and other minority characters to suffer on the merits of their identity is disingenuous. (2) See, Chocolate Raisins as Major Characters Metaphor. This post is arguing against whitewashing poc in movies, but the basic concept still applies to other diversity arguments. If we never again produced another film, tv show, or novel that buried its gays at the same rate we publish content with straight happy endings (which we don’t do even including unhappy endings), it would take years to achieve the saturation and variety we see in “normal” media.

These points aside, I still wouldn’t argue that you can’t give a character an unhappy ending. When I was an undergrad, a fiction professor I had (who deserved way more respect than I gave her at the time) told us that it wasn’t that we couldn’t kill our characters at the end of the story, but that we had to earn the character’s death.  What she was warning us against wasn’t that killing characters was bad, but killing characters because we were lazy writers was bad. Kameron Hurley also talks about this idea in her essay, “Taking Responsibility for Writing Problematic Stories.”

Sometimes it so happens the character who has to die is the gay guy. The problem is when he’s the only gay guy in the book. The problem is when you read a lot of books and the only gay guy in the book is the one who dies in every book...I understand that my work--and every other writer’s work— isn’t read in a vacuum. We have to interrogate what we’re doing and understand how it’ll be read in the wider context of things. And as much of a gut punch as it was for me to be reminded that seeing yet another gay male character thrown under the bus in service to someone else’s story hurt people, it doesn’t hurt me as much as the person who actually read it for the third, fourth, fifth time and threw it across the room because, goddammit, why the fuck does the gay guy always die?

It’s not that all LGBT or minority characters have to live or can’t have bad or problematic traits. There’s many examples of stories that are good, yet the gay character is the villain or dies. Off the top of my head, I think of The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin, the Star Wars: Aftermath series by Chuck Wendig. Even Kameron Hurley’s Worldbreaker series has a bunch of dead or seriously maimed or flawed LGBT and minority characters. And I don’t see that series getting any rosier in the last novel of the trilogy. But that’s just the thing. There are many diverse characters in these series, and the ones that die, “earn” their deaths that has nothing to do with their sexuality. They’re not just so much fodder in the pop culture machine that is the “tragically gay.”

So, in part, it’s a numbers game. If there is only one LGBT character, as a work, it’s running a higher-risk of getting thrown across the room. All of my hopes get pinned on that one character. That one character becomes my surrogate, the surrogate of all gay readers. And if something happens to that character, it feels like a physical blow. Of course the gay guy dies. Of course I die. When you have multiple LGBT or minority characters, the risk is lower. I can see myself in multiple characters. I have multiple stories. I have multiple possible futures. Which is much more reflective of our real reality. If you only have one LGBT main character--sans all context of gay culture— or only one LGBT couple, that’s a problem all on its own and does not reflect our reality.