Do your research, make your characters three-dimensional people with wants, desires, and insecurities, and most importantly, write them to be the people they are, not caricatures of who you think they should be.

Written by Harlowe Savage

What do Damian from Mean Girls and Kurt from Glee have in common other than their extreme fashion sense?

Well, for one, they’re poor queer representation. Not only are they Frankenstein’s monsters of all the most extreme gay stereotypes, but their existence provides nothing to the plot of each of their respective stories other than their gayness.

And it’s those things, that while seemingly harmless to the untrained eye, hurt both the queer community and bring into question the writer’s ability to write truly inclusive characters. As pure as the intentions of the author may be, including poor queer representation tends to hurt more than it helps.

So what do you do? Just stop writing queer characters? No.

Strive to do better.

A brief (and brutal) history of gays in media

For a long time, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s when gay and queer characters first started to make their appearances in mainstream media, many writers were praised for including them in their stories despite not considering the consequences of painting queer characters as caricatures of their real counterparts. Then as media progressed further, many queer characters in books and shows were either thrown in as an afterthought, like Dumbledore’s gayness in Harry Potter, or killed off to absolve the writers of any commitment to long-term diversity, like Cas in Supernatural.

This doesn’t mean queer characters didn’t exist in the media for a long time, just that their appearances were more subtle. Queer Coding has been a tool that authors and script writers have used for hundreds of years to indicate or hint at the queerness of a character without stating it outright.

Now, originally queer coding was a way for authors to include queer individuals in their work while avoiding outright hostility from the public. However, it also subsequently forced authors to create actual plot and meaning for queer characters that was NOT related to their gayness.

Not just a trope: What being queer actually looks like

Real queer people, including myself as a bisexual woman, don’t want to read a story or watch a show about an absurdly gay character who contributes nothing to the plot and then dies. We want to see people we can relate to – individuals who are the heroes of their own stories but just so happen to run away with a Prince instead of a Princess.

A character’s queerness should not detract or distract from the primary story being told. Queer people in reality still have to function in society so true representation shouldn’t rely on “token character” syndrome, but instead treat them like real people.

Writers Helping Writers published this article about tired LGBTQ+ stereotypes to be avoided. Some of them include:

The predatory (older) lesbian
The promiscuous gay
The body-hating trans person
The androgynous nonbinary person
The queer one and only

If you’re planning to include LGBTQ characters in your work, do your research. Understand queer history and work to be as accurate as possible when representing these groups. Writers shouldn’t shy away from giving queer characters relationships or allowing them to speak on their queerness, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be the most interesting thing about them.

What GOOD queer representation actually looks like

One of the best examples of queer representation [1] [2] done right, is Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99. Rosa exhibits some major queer coding from the get-go with the leather, chains, and her assertive personality. However, her bisexuality is not confirmed, or frankly even brought up, until Season 5 of the show. This gives us a chance to get to know her as a person, what she likes, what she dislikes, and what she contributes to the plot as a whole before categorizing her as “a gay character.”

Harlowe’s Top 5 Books that Get Queer Representation Right

Red, White, and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Heartstopper - Alice Oseman
Alexander - Harlowe Savage
Storm and Sea - Tereza Kane
Captive Prince - C.S. Pacat

A good rule of thumb when writing queer characters is to think about what you’re doing in the context of how it would look if you did it to a straight character. For example, there are circumstances in which it would make sense for a straight character to announce their straightness, like if they were being hit on by another guy or if someone asked them about their sexual orientation outright. However, most straight people don’t go around shouting about how straight they are for no reason at all. So, why would a gay character do that?

Similarly, if your main character is a football playing, good ole boy from the Midwest who always talks about how pretty girls are, you don’t need to dedicate an entire line in your story to explaining his straightness. It’s perfectly relevant to mention what your character is wearing, extrapolate on their interactions with other characters, and how they move through the world. Just don’t make it about their sexuality unless it's important to moving the plot forward.

Queer writing - rules of thumb

If it would be weird to announce for a straight character, don’t do it for your gay character.
Queer characters are people first, if the most interesting thing about them is that they’re gay, you’ve written a bad character.
If you’re writing spice and you don’t understand how gay sex works, research it.

Love is love, but well-written love rules

In the context of romance novels, the sexuality of a character comes up more frequently than it might in fantasy or crime drama. Trust me when I say, the same rules apply across genres.

A great straight romance story highlights the romance between two (or more) people. The reader wants to know how those people’s stories come together. Readers are fascinated by a character’s motivations. None of that should change when it comes to writing romance stories about queer characters.

Readers crave internal and external conflict and a resolution that, yes, may be related to either the main character or society’s reaction to that character’s queerness. But the story should still be about that character as a whole.

Who are they?
What do they want?
What is their purpose?

These are all questions asked by every single main character ever written. If the answers to some of those questions relate to a character’s sexuality, that’s fine. But the answer should never be ‘I want to be with this person because they are also gay.’

As you plan your characters, think through:

Why do they want to be with that person?
What have they been through together?
What conflict will they face in the future?

Again, consider how boring of a story it would be if these characters were straight and the only motivation the reader experienced was ‘we want to be together because we’re both straight.’ So very boring.

Let’s talk spice (and the double standard with it)

“Spice” is a colloquial term in the book community for what many people would consider sexy or NSFW scenes. The level of spice can range from sexual tension and heavy kissing (one chili pepper) to explicit descriptions of sexual acts depending upon the author and the story (five chili peppers).

There are a lot of very opinionated people in the realm of spicy romance. And even more in the realm of spicy, queer romance. There are people who consider writing explicit, queer sex scenes to be fetishization and only allowed if a person belongs to a very specific part of the LGBTQ+ community. However, many authors, including myself, think that allowing explicit sex scenes in straight romances but not gay romances, is extremely hypocritical.

C.G. Drews, author of Don’t Let the Forest In, summed it up quite beautifully:

Tips to help you write authentic queer characters

That you’re reading this blog means you’re focused on doing good, not harm, when you add queer characters to your work. Here are five tips you can use in your writing right now.

Do your research – read queer-centered works and understand the history
Know and avoid tired, harmful tropes and caricatures
Write three-dimensional characters with wants, desires, insecurities
Don’t make everything about a character’s sexuality unless it moves the plot
Ask yourself: Would you do this with a straight character?

Representation Matters

My take on the whole situation is, write whatever you want. Just do it in a way that does justice to the characters that you’re writing. Do your research, make your characters three-dimensional people with wants, desires, and insecurities, and most importantly, write them to be the people they are, not caricatures of who you think they should be.

ABOUT HARLOWE SAVAGE

HARLOWE SAVAGE IS A QUEER ARIZONA-BASED AUTHOR WHO CRAFTS STORIES THAT DEPICT QUEER ROMANCES WITH THE SAME AMOUNT OF SPICE AND PASSION READERS GET FROM STRAIGHT ROMANCE. SHE FIRMLY BELIEVES THE GAP BETWEEN THE AMOUNT OF MAINSTREAM LGBTQIA+ ANDHETEROSEXUAL EROTICA IS FAR TOO LARGE. HARLOWE IS RECTIFYING THIS BY NORMALIZING QUEER ROMANCE NOVELS AND INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY TO THE GENRE. CONNECT WITH HER AT LINKTR.EE/HARLOWESAVAGE.

Tips to Write Authentic Queer Characters