A Single Unified LGBT Character Thread

I am so, so sorry for the late response; I was out and about today.

Anyway...blogs and articles!

Starting with my favorite blog, Writing with Color mostly focuses on writing characters of color, but they also talk about writing LGBT characters, so be on a look out for some helpful advice for both!

Here's a helpful blog post of what to be careful with.

Aaand another!

There's more, but here are the ones that are the most helpful in my opinion. Be sure to check them out when you can, guys!

edited 3rd Apr '16 6:42:32 PM by Masterofchaos

Pretty good resources.

In general, gay/lesbian representation is slowly improving, but (binary) trans and bisexual representation are kinda stuck somewhere in the 1800's. And it's even worse for ace/aro, pansexual, and non-binary identities, which are essentially treated as nonexistent.

edited 3rd Apr '16 3:54:34 PM by nekomoon14

I just want a character who is explicitly aro/ace and not that way to exemplify how evil and heartless they are.

Exactly. A real PERSON who's aro or ace or both. I've never seen anyone like that in fiction.

edited 3rd Apr '16 4:29:52 PM by nekomoon14

I generally prefer to avoid subjects like discrimination in my stories. Like, I'm aware that there are potential sources of conflict that I'm ignoring by doing so, but I have no interest in writing that sort of conflict. I'm writing a story where an overwhelming majority of the cast is LGBT in some way^* including trans, nonbinary, and ace characters, but that's far from its main focus, since I'm writing Science Fantasy, not "LGBT fiction", whatever that's supposed to be.

It's really unfortunate. I hear about so many people on the LGBT spectrum who first figured out they were LGBT when they read a book with an LGBT character when they were young. There are a lot of books geared towards teens and young adults who are LGBT, which is extremely beneficial. But I've yet to hear about anything written about aro/ace teens. That would have so wonderful to have as a kid, because I just learned that being aro/ace was an actual thing you could be painfully recently.

edited 3rd Apr '16 6:14:54 PM by Cailleach

Cailleach, how is that pronounced? (Tangent, I know lol)

I only learned about non-binary trans identities within the past year or two. And it's hilarious because I'm somewhere on that spectrum but I had no language for it before.

A lot of people think being trans or transitioning is about taking hormones or getting SRS, so I didn't recognize my own trans-ness until really recently. I've since come to understand that transitioning may be that for many people, especially if they're binary and looking to pass for cis, but that it can also be just living as your true gender without any (expensive) medical procedures. So many people think it's about "cutting of your penis" or something.

edited 3rd Apr '16 6:07:18 PM by nekomoon14

Like this. Cailleach is a goddess from Celtic mythology. She's a divine hag and weather deity.

Wow, Gaelic is kinda hard. I thought the name was familiar. I love divine matriarchs haha.

I guess I'd anglicize the pronunciation as "kal-yuhgh". I don't know if there's an accent mark for that popcorn-in-the-back-of-your-throat-Yiddish-sounding thing

EDIT: Speaking of deities, there's an East Semitic being called Asu-shu-namir, an intersex deity of sorts who rescued Ishtar from the underworld. Xe is basically the earliest recorded representation of an androgyne or androgynous person (that I know of). Myths and legends have a way of revealing the "queer" aspects of older cultures, however much they may be partially obscured.

edited 3rd Apr '16 7:06:47 PM by nekomoon14

Yeah, a lot of people assume that all trans people want to have surgery, which isn't true at all, at least not in my case. And even when we do, it's usually not the only thing we care about, but lots of people don't seem to realize that HRT is a thing. Which is always why it feels a little hollow for me when people write trans characters who basically exist to just be sad about their genitals all the time.

Right.

I've never seen an agender person in fiction either. I'm the kind of fiction lover who wants everybody to have characters they can relate to in those "core ways".

Two main characters in my biggest project belong to a society that believes no one inherently has a gender and it is a useless form of classification. Children aren't assigned genders at birth and their language is totally gender-neutral. It started when I was exploring my own genderless identity and I thought it might be interesting to bring it up to the scale of a small nation.

Also, has anyone here read Ancillary Justice? Several friends recommended it to me and apparently it has a genderless society that uses she/ her pronouns. For something more mainstream, we have Steven Universe, but the "gems are gems" thing is never addressed in show, only in a Reddit AMA from Rebecca Sugar.

That's really cool. Some of my characters are agender but cultivate an "androgynous" look. So, you'll have someone wearing a dress with well-groomed facial hair and muscular arms.

Here's a question even I don't know how to answer. How do you describe an agender or non-binary person's sexual orientation, assuming they're not pansexual or asexual?

Androsexual (attracted to males), gynosexual (attracted to females). We should use these terms more often.

What does pansexual mean? Should that word be used over bisexual? Does the term 'bisexual' necessarily imply a gender binary? Or can it be used to explain someone is sexually attracted to both the male human bits and female human bits, but not intersex bits?

Would 'pansexual' in a fantasy world imply, for example, that a human is attracted to non-humanoids? Or a sapient octopus attracted to humanoids?

edited 3rd Apr '16 8:29:39 PM by hellomoto

EDIT: Sorry.

I use androsexual and gynosexual, but I don't know any existing words to describe attraction to agender or non-binary people. Bisexual explicitly relies on a binary concept of gender/sex, while pansexual is incredibly broad but generally implies that the person doesn't particularly care about gender/sex, certainly not as much as personality. Something like omnisexual could include non-humans, but I'm not sure because I think that's used as a synonym for pansexual.

Attraction has very little to do with genitalia. When we're walking down the street and see someone we think is attractive, we're not basing that on their genitalia (unless they're nude, I guess) but on their overall presentation.

Making it about "bits" kinda misses the point, I think.

edited 3rd Apr '16 8:37:12 PM by nekomoon14

Sauce. It's much easier to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity when our words for orientation don't involve the sex or gender of whoever is experiencing the attraction.

That website also says "skoliosexual" describes those who're attracted to non-cis people.

So er... presentation? Bits missing the point? I must've missed the point so entirely I am unaware of what the point is. To use a very simplistic example, straight men can find the androgynous presentation attractive, but would not want sexual contact with those that have male bits.

Unless sexual orientation isn't concerned with what happens in the bedroom, but that seems like a weird definition of sexual orientation.

edited 3rd Apr '16 9:06:34 PM by hellomoto

That's a really good resource.

Are you suggesting, then, that skoliosexual could be used as a catch-all for attraction to non-binary and intersex people? I feel uneasy about it, only because it seems like that refers to someone who's perhaps attracted to trans-ness in general. Or am I misunderstanding the term?

edited 3rd Apr '16 9:05:47 PM by nekomoon14

I just did a quick Google search and found that term. I don't have any better ideas that you do now

I looked at it again. I think it's growing on me. I'll strongly consider using it.

Yeah not a lot of nonbinary trans characters and even with the binary ones, it occurred to me that most of the examples of say transwomen that I can think of were in stuff like webcomics (though I guess we're just adding to the minor stuff to, but I mean that's good too right?).

edited 4th Apr '16 10:38:53 AM by phantom1

I don't follow many webcomics, personally, but if they have greater trans representation then that's pretty cool.

There's a movie called XXY about a person with the titular chromosome situation, and it's a really great film. I'm not sure if it was accurately portraying it correctly or not, but I enjoyed it. I think it's a Spanish-language flick.

Oh I'm just thinking like Dumbing Of Age and Questionable Content, though the trans characters come in pretty late for both.

Hmmm.

I'm not sure how precisely to broach this subject, but I guess I might as well charge headlong into it.

A statistically significant percentage of the characters in the thing I'm writing are some shade of LGBT+, mostly homosexual or bisexual (in different ways) but also various shades of transgender, asexual, non-binary and intersex. The setting isn't consistently friendly or unfriendly to queerfolk, seeing as it's set in a rough equivalent to the '20s and draws on places both welcoming and unwelcoming to non-straight, non-cisgender people, but regardless, there's a whole lot of odd afoot here.

But here lies the rub: Two of the most vicious antagonists also fall into this category.

With one, their experiences as a sex worker at a young age have coloured any attempts to personally express a divergent gender presentation in a negative light, envying and resenting people who feel comfortable being themselves in that way. This, combined with a series of brutal emotional blows and betrayals and an underlying, likely hereditary mood disorder, has made them... not a nice person. Which, I fear may be stepping on quite a few buttons for some.

The other is, for all intents and purposes, agender, and arguably trans*, although this takes a bit of a backseat relative to their being on the top of this story's list of "people best not fucked with." The character is more a force of nature (or outside of it) than anything else; their identity only really becomes relevant when how they became what they are becomes relevant.

(There is also one really nasty character who is... indiscriminate, but that's more a consequence of her overwhelming pathological sadism than anything else.)

But yeah, even with a whole host of other, flawed but mostly decent queer and trans* characters in the cast, as well as reasonably well-rounded portrayals of mental illness elsewhere in the story, I fear that I might still provoke accusations that I'm doing the "tragic gay" thing, or somehow asserting that being trans* or non-binary makes you a crazy murderer.

I dunno. I'm cis, but not straight, and most of my online circle of friends is trans* for reasons that escape me. I guess I'm just trying to confirm here that I haven't fucked up on some deep level that I wasn't able to see the first go around.

I'd have to actually read your story to make a good judgment of it, but as long as not all of your LGBT characters are antagonists (-glances at Transistor-) you're probably not on the wrong track. My only concern is that if your antagonists as a group aren't as varied as the protagonists in this respect, people might think you're implying that there are good and bad ways to express your queerness. And it is a bit difficult to vary them if there's only two.

Oh, there are quite a few antagonistic characters, all quite different from one another. There are recurring themes and through-lines between them, as with anything else in this monstrous kudzu garden of a novel, but they're all their own people. Same goes for everyone else.

(Note that "everyone else" includes a genderqueer burlesque performer, an intersex practical magician, and a trans* couple who... well... have their own little flashback subplot.)

edited 4th Apr '16 7:24:37 PM by JHM