The Character Romance thread (Official)

BansheeOwnage bringing the gifs of great captains.


Vers is fine as long as my Scottbrew and Sheplooo are surrounded by guys who are happy to top their total bottom asses


He isnt that old. I would say late 20's/early 30's, about 10 inches

I agree with you insomuch as to say as a general statement straight writers can write gay characters. But writers often write what they know and even if you tell a writer things they can miss the heart of it. Theres a crucial emotional motivation that can cause a story beat to miss its mark. The gay dads storyline in MEA is a prime example of this. Well intentioned but the perspective was lacking.
But yes again as a general statement you dont need gay writers to write gay characters but in the context of MEA it really wouldve helped since theres a lot of tonedeafness. The romantic side of the Gil romance is spot on, love is love after all. But the "gay drama" is the missed shot. And that's where sometimes talking might not be enough, just sometimes though, it would be ignorant to declare no straight writer can write gay stories.

Yeah, I can't wait to read Steelcan and Walter Black's work.

Do you guys have AO3 accounts or what? What M/M pairings do you like to work with?

Honestly, though, if you're writing an LGBT story about the LGBT Experience (tm) and you get offended at the idea that maybe you should consult LGBT people then maybe you're writing that story for the wrong reasons.

Just putting that out there.

Well I don't see how me being defensive is something wrong.  As I've said this an inherently defensive position that I've taken.

Scott always struck me as kind of a bottom anyways.

I think you're missing an important distinction in all this, which I tried to get at with my post. There is a difference between writing a character that is gay, where that is just a thing about them, even if that story features a same-sex romance, and writing about the gay experience.

What does a straight person have to offer about the gay experience? Nothing at all.

Let's have an example that I might consider analogous to To Kill a Mockingbird. Let's say that there is a story, written by a straight person, about what it is like to be the child in a same-sex parent household. For the first few years of this child's life, she won't think anything at all is different about her family. As she gets get older, starts going to school, sees more of the world, she may see ugly behavior directed at her and her parents. That is that child's own experience.

Now let's switch it around at look at those same parents. Perhaps they have been together a long time, but were only (finally) able to get married after the Supreme Court ruling. In deciding to have a child together, they will have to contend with a legal system that isn't really equipped to deal with same-sex parents; more often than not, the biological parent is given priority in legal matters. They know that there might be times during family outings that they will get certain looks. There are probably dozens of other things that I can't even think of that these parents will have to deal with that straight people really can't comprehend. This is all on top of the usual parent type stuff.

Can a straight person do justice to those parents? Possibly (I'm not going to deny that outright). But it would have more meaning, be more real, if a gay person were writing it.

I have a couple of real examples.

There is a woman, a mother of a gay teen, who writes pieces for the Huffington Post. These are about her own experiences in trying to be a parent (along with her husband) who is raising a well-adjusted, confident, gay young man. She isn't writing about her son's experience as a gay teen, but of her own as his mother. That is the key distinction.

To turn it back toward race, after Trayvon Martin was killed, there were quite a few African American people who shared their stories of being parents, or of their own parents, and having to give "the talk" to their black child (especially if a son). How to behave in public places, what to do if confronted by police, and other similar things. I recall distinctly that white America (the non-racist people, anyway) was collectively shocked and horrified, because the very idea that this is a thing that happens, that AA parents have to deal with, was just completely foreign to a great many people.

How can a white person even fathom that experience? How could they do it justice? You can write about it respectfully, but it's not the same as having lived it.

Because you're taking it personally and making an LGBT issue all about you. Yet again.

How am I to take a statement such as "straight people should write gay people" as anything besides an attack.

But it's true that was indeed hyperbole and I'm willing to accommodate that, even if I think it's treading a dangerous line.  What I find far more troubling is the consensus here that straight people are inherently unable to write such stories well without guidance.

As for the bits on hiring more LGBT writers in the industry and such, I haven't staked out a claim in there because I largely agree with it.