“I liked it,” a straight acquaintance said of Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. “But everyone said it was Sapphic and it wasn’t Sapphic.”
I, in the middle of listening to the audiobook, wondered if we were talking about the same Gideon The Ninth. Admittedly, I’m not finished; I listen to audiobooks in forty-minute chunks while I drive to my physical therapy appointments. But so far, and from the very first chapter, it’s been clear to me that the title character is a lesbian.
“There aren’t any sex scenes, though,” that same reader argued. “So, how do you know?”
How do you not know? I thought, but quickly moved on from that particular point, begging off the conversation by saying, “I’ll get back to you, I don’t want spoilers.”
Because what I wanted to say was, why do you need an explicit sex scene as proof that a character isn’t straight?
And they wouldn’t have liked the answer I would have supplied for them, the only real answer to that question when straight people complain about a lack of sex scenes as a lack of overall queerness in fiction: because the heteronormative mind equates queerness with sex, divorced from a total state of being, a straight default with a slight deviation of genital smashy-smashiness.
I had a view, peeking out of the closet, at attitudes of the ’90s and the ’00s, wherein any non-straight representation in mainstream fiction was the cis gay male, always flirting at the gym but never burdening a hetero reader with icky gay sex details. The rise in popularity of M/M romance novels written by straight cis women brought sexuality into gay “representation,” in the most painfully heteronormative way possible. Most of those books read like traditional straight romance novels clobbered with the find/replace stick: find “pussy”/replace “ass”, find “breasts”/replace “pecs”, find “Erin”/replace “Aaron”.
The ’10s continued the trend of authors, who identified as straight in public, putting out heteronormative depictions of queerness. Readers criticized fiction that didn’t have queer representation while somehow maintaining that blatant homophobia wasn’t enough reason for criticism. During E.L. James’s disastrous Twitter Q&A, a prominent author and internet darling took me to task for submitting the question, “Are you as homophobic in real life as your books are?” The very suggestion that the author of a book in which a running joke was that the romantic hero was far too manly and sexy to be mistaken for gay could possibly harbor some toxic heteronormativity in her brain was an indication of professional jealousy and not a valid argument. The main qualification for evaluating queerness in fiction was straightness, as queer voices were intentionally and forcefully pushed from the conversation if they were saying anything but “yaaaaaaaas, queen!”
Some opportunists embraced this attitude, with great success. Romancelandia cycled through a seemingly endless parade of pet gays who remained in favor just as long as they agreed that straight cis women could write M/M stories as authentically as any gay man, and that lesbophobia in publishing was just a trivial sales issue. These men usually fell out of favor by failing to embody the stereotype of the romcom gay roommate, getting “too political,” or being uncovered as a catfishing straight woman.
Now, in the roaring ’20s, the field of mainstream LGBTQA+ rep in genre fiction has grown. Queer authors are telling stories about queer characters that don’t center around the physical act of sex as an entire identity. LGBTQA+ characters aren’t just straight people who do something different when the bedroom lights go out. They are allowed to feel queer, to be queer, to inhabit a mindset that is completely alien to what straight readers are used to seeing, and those straight readers are tagging it as bad or inauthentic because it doesn’t match up to the heteronormative framework they’re used to. How can you tell if a character is gay if they don’t tragically die in their lover’s arms? How do you know a protagonist is non-binary if he’s using male pronouns and not wearing dresses? When the representation isn’t written specifically to educate straight readers, if the normal, every day parts of gay or trans lives aren’t shaped into something that appeals to a straight reader’s understanding, is that representation?
And that representation we see from big name, straight mainstream authors, which often rely on the homosexuality-as-tragedy vibes lingering in straight minds from the height of the AIDS crisis, is endlessly praised for being bravely queer, while true representation is dismissed as not being queer enough. When Sarah J. Maas, a straight author, intentionally writes homophobia into her fantasy world in order to keep a lesbian side character wallowing in closeted torment, a chorus of straight readers sing praises for her groundbreaking representation. When Tamsyn Muir, a lesbian author, writes a lesbian main character who hoards tittie magazines and gets a gooey crush on the equivalent of a wilting Victorian doll, those same straight readers criticize the representation because… there’s not enough scissoring to make it obvious, I guess?
In the same conversation with my aforementioned straight acquaintance, she mentioned another book we’d both recently read and mutually enjoyed: the very straight The Serpent and the Wings of Night. Acquaintance asked what I thought about the lack of LGBTQA+ representation in the book. I pretended not to understand. “The only straight people were Oraya and Raihn,” I argued. “Everybody else was queer.” When Acquaintance had no idea what I was talking about, I explained, “I never saw any of them having straight sex.” Which I hope drove the point home with this person.
The lack of LGBTQA+ representation in The Serpent and the Wings of Night or the heteronormativity of Ice Planet Barbarians don’t cause harm. Those are simply written with a straight audience in mind, regardless of what the authors’ sexuality might be. What I find more harmful are the attempts at representation made by authors who very clearly are not at ease writing queer characters or scenes of queer sensuality. Sweeping romances with highly explicit sex scenes between straight characters that suddenly become closed-door, fade-to-black only when it’s time for the icky gay sex to start are far more insulting and damaging than sweeping romances with highly explicit sex scenes between straight characters that have no LGBTQA+ characters or romances in them at all. If a straight author is uncomfortable writing outside of their straight experience, what, exactly, is compelling them to write the queer experience? Certainly not queer readers.
We often see authors bemoaning the fact that they have to write diverse casts of characters in order to avoid social media mobs or to remain competitive in the market, but I don’t see that being the case, at all. If a straight author can’t write an LGBTQA+ character without relying on outdated stereotypes or depictions of queer pain and death, how on Earth is that book meant to be competitive or exempt from criticism?
Very rarely do I see queer people clamoring for straight authors to write more queerly, or bemoaning the straightness of books written for straight audiences. That seems to be the exclusive purview of straight allies. Queer readers will seek out queer books from queer writers who are writing them authentically. They’re not absolutely salivating to read the latest heteronormative romantasy with a few queer characters tossed into die or live tragically chaste lives. Instead of calling for straight authors to write more queer characters, allies need to boost the profiles of queer writers.
And that starts with understanding that LGBTQA+ people are not solely defined by scenes of explicit fucking.
