Writing Queer 2: My early fictional attempts.

 Last week, I looked back my early exposure to queerness before I came to accept my own bisexuality. This week, I'm looking at my early attempts at writing queer characters. I won't bore you with many, since I didn't really attempt anything like that for a long time.

Many of my first attempts came from the first extremely long story I wrote, and something I initially attempted to self-publish. That was The Leviathan Chronicle, a story set within a heavily-fictionalised version of the Crusades in a separate world, where two opposing supernatural factions (the Seraphim and the Powers) used humans marked by their power to fight the holy war as a proxy conflict. And out of the five lead characters, three had some level of queerness relating to their stories or personality.

To briefly summarise; the titular character Leviathan was intersex/gender queer, and standing as an outsider to the conflict. The other two were Elathan, a spy who loses his lover Paimon and is revived after being executed once found out; and Mastema, one of the faction leaders who suffers from trauma due to a certain kind of abuse from his father. All of them live to the story's end, don't worry, but...let's just say I wasn't being very tactful with how certain aspects of their stories were handled excepting Leviathan. It goes without saying, this was my angsty era, and I was working through some stuff in my mind at that time that needed a dark outlet. The fourth lead was Astarte, a woman driven by revenge to the exclusion of all else. But I hardly consider my need to be dark that as an excuse.

Basically, because of some elements of my media exposure at the time, many of my stories were and are tragic in tone. Not completely depressing, but still tragic. A different story, which was written as a tragedy from the outset following eight reincarnated people in a fantastical Medieval Europe, had a central subplot where one was reincarnated as twins, with another seeing the surviving twin as her soulmate when he in this incarnation is gay. He survives right to the end, and isn't persecuted because of his sexuality, but the fact that the female lead isn't able to rekindle his initial incarnation's love for her is the main issue in the story. I don't want to dwell on this longer than necessary, mostly because I feel queasy knots of embarrassment twisting round me when I think about my early writing, plus this is a story I'll likely never revisit. But it's still worth mentioning, because it sums up something I was doing at the time; I wasn't being violent to LGBTQIA+ characters, but I wasn't exactly putting them in happy scenarios.

I think you can see through these examples that I was going through a stage of...how do I put this? Standard angsty storytelling? War, suffering, religious questioning, the tragedy of reincarnation, all that stuff. That didn't always focus down to specifically queer issues, but I'm sure people will see how queer characters can be magnets for them. I know this from personal experience writing. It wasn't until my earlier experiences of less problematic relationships that my own writing began to change. As I said last time, I was a sheltered type, and I was also shy of asking about those subjects with anyone close to me.

I also lacked emotional maturity. I hadn't known truly deep emotion, either for real people or fictional characters. I hadn't cried at media in any form. It took that kind of emotional connection for me to think "I want to create something that moves people and even saddens them without falling into the usual traps I'm seeing in popular media." There's enough sadness in the world of people on the spectrum, and while those are valid experiences, I wanted to create experiences that weren't built on heartbreak and abuse, tainted by sorrowful memories. I want experiences that are built in simple love, innocent happiness, the kind of thing straight love stories have held onto like vices for decades. Things are changing for the better, especially when you take a step back and look at the broader range of stories outside the narrow mainstream bubble, but there's still steps to take. And I'd like to live and see a day when both counterculture and mainstream can exist side by side, as equals.

So how did I get past this hang-up that I've outlined in both struggle and result? How did I manage to create worlds and universes that I was able to write more realistic and less tragic examples of the wonderful spectrum of existence? Well, you'll find out next week.