inadvertent homophobia?

There’s this story I started a few months ago. I liked where it was going but I put it down nevertheless. I wasn’t sure why I stopped writing; I thought maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. This was shortly after I went on hiatus from my novel. I figured I was just written out, all the words drained out of me like water swirling away down the sink. But I realized a few weeks ago that in fact I had a dilemma.

The story, like many short stories and like most of mine (though curiously enough not my novel), is loosely based on a real incident. But this incident could get me in trouble. People can be awfully prickly about how you present their foibles, even in fiction. And you can only protest “but I made it up!” so long and then you sort of have to shut up. The law's not always with you.

I wanted to change the scenario a bit to protect myself and the story but couldn’t think of a better locale. So I stopped writing. A friend came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution, though: change, not the locale, but the character. I ran it through the movie projector in my mind and it worked even better than the original. Great. Wonderful. Yay friends!

But I realized something today. The solution only works in an ideal, non-politicized world. In other words, it doesn’t work. The solution involved changing a flamboyant woman into a flamboyant gay man. Sounds easy, and it would be. But the character has, well, foibles. And these foibles could be construed as unlikable, though I don’t necessarily feel that way. And that would – if you look at things through a certain filter – mean I cast a gay guy as my villain. Again, I don’t consider this person a villain, just a trifle deluded. But let’s be realistic here. If you’re reading submissions for some literary magazine and you read a story where the only gay person is not altogether wonderful, you’ll probably assume the writer is a homophobe.

It’s ironic because it’s so far from true you can’t get there from here. I would guess more of my friends are gay than straight. I get bent out of shape at the Boy Scouts’ ridiculous prejudices, I abhor the fact that gay marriage isn’t legal, I don’t understand why anyone should care what anyone else’s sexual orientation is and why that should set people apart in any way. I also believe there’s a spectrum of straight-to-gay sexuality, that we all fall somewhere on that curve and that most people are neither one hundred percent straight nor one hundred percent gay but somewhere in between, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

But it’s not like I can append a note to the story, telling all readers not to judge me and my story by this one character. And maybe in some sense I would be culpable if I wrote it that way. I’d be perpetuating a stereotype, the queeny gay man who does outrageous, socially unacceptable things with an enormous sense of entitlement. And since there’s no balancing character, it’s pretty doomed. If I were reading that story, I’d wonder about the writer and her politics too. It reminds me of the hullabaloo some years ago about Basic Instinct, that it showed lesbians as villains at a time when there were no good dykes in the movies except maybe in tiny-budgeted well-intentioned indies.

It frustrates me that I have to give up my perfect characterization, but this is not a perfect world. Things are better, but gay men and women are still mostly stereotyped in the media. It’s still an identifier. It still matters when it shouldn’t. And so I have to be careful not to play into the prejudice myself. I wish it were otherwise, I wish one negative portrayal didn’t mean a condemnation of a huge sector of humanity. If I write a mean straight white woman, it won’t offend anyone unless my portrayal reeks of misogyny. But if I write a mean gay man – or gay woman – my portrayal automatically reeks of homophobia. Even if it doesn’t.