Lesbian characters

So I've a story where I was trying to include a few sets of lesbian couples, budding lesbian relationships and so on.

Anybody here have insights or their own writing of such relationships?

Try this thread on the topic, where some people have their say.

Make them characters first. They should have plotlines, personalities, and character arcs that do not revolve around their lesbianism.

It's not hard to write lesbians in isolation—or at least, not harder than writing straight couples. The challenge comes from figuring out how they're impacted by societal constraints, and potentially by self-hatred as well. (I'm working on a story in which one character is of mixed descent, and hates the society her father came from. Said society is much more accepting of homosexual relationships than her mother's society, so she's got a lot of issues with her own bisexuality. Her partner, on the other hand, is very strong-willed and doesn't care what other people think of their relationship.)

edited 2nd Jul '11 1:53:34 AM by feotakahari

Well the story doesn't revolve around their lesbianism at all but I was a bit concerned that since I was writing the relationships as no different from straight ones, that I might be missing some subtleties with lesbianism. The world setting has lesbianism as a norm.

EDIT: If it helps here's the major relationships in the plot I have so far...

a) One between a royal person and a megacorp heiress. Most people outwardly view it as a political relationship but they do actually care for one another. The princess is a military woman and honourable, the megacorp heiress is a manipulative person.

b) Two super soldiers who get caught up in yet another conflict. They both suffer major PTSD.

edited 2nd Jul '11 11:20:10 AM by breadloaf

Remember that every lesbian relationship doesn't have one person who's dominant and one person who's submissive. You don't need a butch/femme dynamic to be in a lesbian relationship, and it's much more interesting to explore ones that aren't.

Ai, that's part of what makes yuri so awesome, there doesn't need to be a "top" or "bottom".

Either one of these sentences would make sense on their own, but together I get the feeling that I'd be vaguely offended if I understood what the problem was. (Granted, there is the issue of [lack of] children, but other than that . . .)

Anyways, go ahead and write these the way you'd normally write relationships between characters with these personality types. Gender doesn't have to enter into it, only culture.

edited 2nd Jul '11 3:51:20 PM by feotakahari

I guess the question is if there is something inherently different which I would prefer there not to be so. The setting is set after thousands of years after an not-described apocalyptic war turned the human race into a monogender one (so all reproduction is done via technology). Thousands of years after this is yet another apocalyptic war, thus the human race being monogender is mostly just a fact that everyone accepts and they're more concerned about the more recent apocalypse (but it was roughly a thousand years ago when the story begins).

So I guess tell me if it sounds "wrong" somehow for these relationships:

First one is a Princess of a major power in the region. She is put into an arranged dating situation because her mother wanted her to be socially successful but the Princess kept going off into military exercises/campaigns. The Princess, due to her military background, is seen as quite successful by the public and a "strong" person. She herself is fairly reserved, honourable but rather rigid.

Her love interest is born out of one of the arranged dates. She is from a single-solar system state, a daughter of a prominent senator/megacorp CEO. This is seen by most of the media as a straight up power marriage. She has an outward appearance of Paris Hilton (ie. stupid and rich). Most of her intelligence is located in being manipulative.

Their mothers know each other because the megacorp CEO wants royal-backing to expanding her operations to the Imperial Federation.

Now the other relationship is with two crusaders. They just returned from a suicide mission where they're the only two survivors, somehow surviving said suicide mission. One usually does drugs, the other alcohol. They slowly comfort one another and over time this grows into a relationship which they never realised was growing.

I'm not seeing anything so far that invalidates a relationship of any sort, though it's hardly likely to be the most stable of things (because of character psychology, not because of being lesbian). The only truly significant differences between lesbian and straight relationships are in how your culture treats them (so I suggest you figure that out), and minor details of biology (i.e., a lack of home-grown penises).

Well in that case I was crafting several cultures from somewhat whole cloth.

In the Imperial Federation (where the Princess is from), the relationships are very much viewed as breadwinner/hoes. Almost all marriages are monogamous but polygamy is technically legal due to multiculturalism laws. The person who gets pregnant is expected to be of the lower end of the power stick (viewed as having to go through the trouble of carrying the baby and childbirth), non-natural births are frowned upon (so while fertilisation is obviously via technological means, the natural womb is still used) and you've different mom roles (specifically, a stricter mom who teaches you stuff and a caring mom who is emotional). That's as closely matched to today's society as you get.

For the Commonwealth (where my shell shocked soldiers are from), they're more about degrees of relationships. Since sexual encounters have no relation to pregnancy, how close you are to someone isn't binary. You go anywhere from what you typically think of friends, all the way to bed buddies. Everyone regularly practices polygamy. This place, is however, a war torn zone, with conscription and crusades. So military conflict is a regular part of every day life, so it is very much a warrior culture despite being an organised state.

Interesting. I'd imagine that a caste system would develop in the Federation, then, as a way to more clearly establish the difference between breadwinners and childrearers, seeing as one has a lower status than the other. Maybe some sort of bullshit, slanted psychological tests to determine role suitability in children, with the aristocracy gaming the system for all they're worth to ensure that they get a disproportionate share of the more powerful breadwinners (or, if you really want to get creepy, deliberately performing surgery on their kids to render them incapable of childbirth)? Of course, that sort of thing would naturally tend towards the breadwinners having harems of lower-class, theoretically powerless childrearers, which kind of scuppers the whole 'monogamy good' cultural aspect you were going for...

I heard someone claim that lesbians tend to be better at knowing what their partner will enjoy, because they have the same bits themselves. No idea if that's true or not.

Better sex is an interesting thought, never really considered that.

I don't think I'll go so extreme with actual physical modification but there's nothing quite like concubines/mistresses with royalty that believes in monogamy. You'd probably almost expect such a divergence between the cultural expectation of what is good and what actually happens.