We hit the third post this Pride Month, where I delve into my seemingly both slow and fast journey through the world of "well, I'm writing queer characters now so I need to do it well/properly". I've previously chronicled my own internal journey and my early fictional stumbles. Now I'd like to go more detailed and nitty-gritty. This time, through the story of writing the book that got me to publication, I'll show I had to confront a final odd hurdle within myself and push back at that little bit of myself that was still stuck in the past.
Be warned, this article will contain references to and discussion of a storyline that involves assault and its associated trauma. There will also be spoilers for one of my books.
My debut novel, Starborn Vendetta, is in broad strokes a reimagining of story elements from Count of Monte Cristo, Faust and Macbeth. But in particular, there was a character who starts off the story and forms a core part of how things progress. That character is Gaspard Atarex, a member of the Feles people in the Cluster who starts off as a guard within Prison Station d'If, where protagonist Mercedes Solari is sent. Within the first chapter, I wanted to show Gaspard as bitter, hollowed out by his duties, detached from any real passion. He is gay, has a preference for human males, and due to the prison environment has an outlet without needing another person. When Mercedes appears, her magnetic personality awakens a wish to protect her from the vindictive warden, and the only way he can do that is through someone he loathes.
The root of that became another character, a Feles prisoner dubbed Echo. Later in the story, it is revealed that Echo found Gaspard trying to help prisoners, which would've gotten him into huge trouble, and blackmailed him into a relationship. Echo is a predator, plain and simple, and Gaspard is his victim. Things happen, the d'If is exploded, and both Gaspard and Echo survive. Echo tracks down Gaspard and essentially stalks him. At the end of their combined story, Echo is killed by another character. But here's the kicker; in the original draft of the story, Gaspard never resolved this core issue and...kinda made...peace with Echo? I'm getting embarrassed remembering it.
I see that this may be interpreted as a form of internalised homophobia. We'll come back to that, but I will say it reflects a passive acceptance of behaviours and ideas of redemption that not only queer media, but other media had been pushing for decades by this point. The Beauty and the Beast trope taken to one of its logical extremes, the deeply toxic "it's okay, they're fixable" or "see there was good there" attitude which is unacceptable in real life. The odd thing is that when I was writing it, I didn't think of it in terms of them both being men. I wanted a character suffering from that kind of trauma, and either could easily have been gender-swapped. Equally the fact that Gaspard was gay didn't feel like a factor related to this, just an aspect of how Gaspard was in the world.
My editor at the time called this conclusion out immediately, saying that Echo's actions didn't merit any kind of forgiveness. They didn't ask me to do a gender flip, but they did say I needed to show this wasn't a good thing, which I hadn't originally due to how dark my original tone was. I looked through, and had to agree with their stance. I'd gone through some more writing by this time, and some more media and real-life encounters that reshaped my ideas.
The most basic change I made was that I removed any forgiveness Gaspard originally met out to Echo. Instead he very actively broke away, and when Echo died, he declares that he hates him and doesn't forgive or forget. Gaspard's emotions are still confused and he's still traumatised, but he is on the path to breaking away from that and finding a life beyond that. I also rewrote some bits to show that Gaspard's emotions towards Echo were extremely confused, influenced by being placed in a vulnerable position and taken advantage of; at his core he hates Echo, but some part of him believes Echo's statements that he actually desires the connection. I did further research into the accounts and treatment of sexual abuse victims during this rewrite (I know, I should've done that from the first), and incorporated some of that into his personality and actions. I'd like to think I managed to make him a more nuanced figure in the final draft which made it to publication.
Reading back through this, I'm thinking "What the hell?!". And maybe you've got similar reactions. I wrote Starborn Vendetta during a pretty dark period of my life. My maternal grandparents where in the final stages of their lives, my father unknown to me was also dying and only had months left, and I was struggling with other things in my family and coming to grips with my own mental health and identity. This included not being embarrassed by my tastes in media, finding my own style of clothing, and asserting myself as an individual within the family.
Prior to the revisions, several things happened. First, my father died a few months after I finished writing the initial draft of Starborn Vendetta, which required something of a mental reset for myself. Second, I became more fully aware of how many queer people were actually within my own family, which opened me up to the realisation that what I was writing needed to be respectful not just for nebulous others I hadn't yet encountered, but people within my own family.
So going forward, I was. By the time the dev edits for Starborn Vendetta came in, I'd already written or part-written the next two entries in the Cluster Cycle and it brought me face to face with elements of how I might've ended up writing elements of the next few books. Suffice to say, there was course correction, and that correction was necessary. Since then, I've always been very careful in whether or not to consider incorporating that kind of story, and what I should be researching when portraying it in a respectful and empowering manner.
For more information on the kind of pitfalls I half-fell into or nearly fell into, see Emily Inkpen's article "Writing Sexual Assault - Things to Remember".
So where do we go from here? I've talked for the past weeks about my writing journey relating to queer characters. Next week, the final Sunday of Pride Month, I'll be giving what have become my guiding principles for when I include and write queer characters. Until then, stay fabulous, stay safe, and if you're writing a story based around assault or trauma, remember to do your research. And sometimes, there can be no forgiveness.
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