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Selling Books with GLBTQ Characters

Why can't you sell your "gay" book into the mainstream? Here are some thoughts on it.

Comments

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

All very reassuring -- thanks for posting. I'm getting ready to start querying an urban fantasy mystery in which the hero is bisexual, and my big worry was that the gay presses would be antsy that he has a brief relationship with a woman early on while the rest would be bothered by his relationship with a younger man later in the story. But I think if I focus on the mystery and the worldbuilding in the background, then the relationships (both of which tie into the puzzle) will just be a 'by the way...' in the query.

And if nothing else I love the world I've created, I'm still writing more mysteries in it, and my friends seem to like what they've seen too.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

I think you are right, some gay presses would have a problem with the bisexual events in the book. Bisexuality is a tremendous issue with many gay and lesbian folk because it involves the perceived deception and betrayal of the same-sex partner.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Argh, annoying fallacies about bisexuals time. I keep worrying about getting that one from the other side. Both the hero's partners in the story know what he's like -- in fact they end up conferring over what to buy him for his birthday -- but there's still the possibility that someone will say he deceived the woman when he started seeing her. Even though she was the one who did all the chasing *and* the one that decided they were better as friends after an incident that had nothing to do with any current third party.

My other worry about the mainstream is whether my vague references to the age of consent situation in 1988 and the way Section 28 hung over everyone in education will confuse people who weren't involved in either reform campaign.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

But this isn't an issue with bad writing; it's an obstacle evolving from the readers' own perceptions of, and problems with, the issue. It's sort of like, hrm, writing a book about a teacher/student romance and trying to make him sympathetic -- there are readers who will simply never ever see this romance as a positive thing because for them, teacher/student is Out Of The Question. It's much the same way with bisexual; for a lot of the queer world, the question of bisexuality hits some major buttons.

That said, there are bisexual lead characters (first off the top of my head is Tanya Huff's Henry), but they're really quite rare. When a reader says, "it's not you, it's me," it doesn't change the fact that this boils down to "I'm not buying it nor reading it." I suppose dealing with that is a personal decision in return, on the part of the author.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I'm obviously hanging out with different people to you -- well, obviously, you and mroctober are on a different continent to me -- I don't think the sexuality of the characters is going to be as much of a problem over here, so much as the fact that there's brief 'on page' sex with both genders (some of it in a historical context as the story deals with events from sixteen years before and how they affect the time period of the novel).

I did think seriously about whether the story could work with a straight protagonist, and it wouldn't, because there's not a big enough reason for his self-styled nemesis to get involved if they hadn't been lovers in the past. Equally the death he investigates would have less impact if the woman hadn't been the protagonist's supposed true love so I'm not making him gay. Nor am I copping out by ending the story with the idea that he'd been one or the other all along and that all his lovers of one gender had been just him trying to deny it.

Sorry, I thought I'd given up bisexual activism sometime in the 90's. Obviously not.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Argh, annoying fallacies about bisexuals time. I keep worrying about getting that one from the other side. Both the hero's partners in the story know what he's like -- in fact they end up conferring over what to buy him for his birthday -- but there's still the possibility that someone will say he deceived the woman when he started seeing her. Even though she was the one who did all the chasing *and* the one that decided they were better as friends after an incident that had nothing to do with any current third party.

My other worry about the mainstream is whether my vague references to the age of consent situation in 1988 and the way Section 28 hung over everyone in education will confuse people who weren't involved in either reform campaign.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That may be true in a social sense, but in gay literature there are lots of bisexuals performing lots of different story roles, and not only the "betrayer" one (for one thing, bisexuals can be as monogamous in stories as in real life).

To get an idea of the variety of fiction available in a gay bookselling context, you could browse A Different Light (http://www.adlbooks.com/).

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

That may be true in a social sense, but in gay literature there are lots of bisexuals performing lots of different story roles, and not only the "betrayer" one (for one thing, bisexuals can be as monogamous in stories as in real life).

I'm not entirely sure that it's true in a social sense any more, at least not over here (or maybe on the rare times I go out I'm hanging around with a self-selecting bunch of folk who don't care about such things). As far as my hero goes he's serially monogamous in the same way most action-adventure/detective story types are -- at least until the end of the novel, when he's showing signs of settling down -- he just doesn't discriminate by gender when picking partners. Isn't there a theory that a detective has to have reached a certain age and gained a certain number of contacts for the classic PI type of adventure story? Exes are great for supplying mysteries to the non-agency type of detective.

And thanks for the link -- I'll check it out later, along with the nature notes I just spotted on your LJ.

[mroctober.livejournal.com]

Lucy, I worked at a gay bookstore and while I agree in some gay lit there are kinder renditions of bisexual characters, it is by no means common.