And they call me a homophobe

[fpb]

I have a strong and increasing objection to using homosexual characters as designated victims in fiction. I am not likely to write many more gay characters than I have, but you can bet your lives that if I do, the said characters are going to live to ninety-five in perfectly good health, thank you.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Dude, if you're referring to a certain deceased character, I'll be happy to discuss your labeling of him as a "designated victim," but I'd rather you raise the point on my LJ (where I have always been willing to entertain critiques of my writing) than take an oblique, passive-aggressive swipe at me here.

And if this wasn't referring to me at all, then I apologize for my assumption.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My dear man, while you have every reason to be proud of your work, you do not make a tendency. I will admit that your rather unnecessary epilogue was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I have been getting honked off about this sort of thing for a long time. Look around in fanfic. Tell me how many gay characters die young.

P.S.:

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is at least the second time you presume to tell me what I am supposed to write or not in my own blog. And this time it is after you defriended me. You are lucky that I have a great deal of respect for genius, but let me inform you that your genius is only a bit higher than your astounding bad manners.

Re: P.S.:

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

I apologize for the first time you refer to -- I agree, it was the first time I'd really commented on your blog, and though it wasn't my intention to dictate terms to you, I realize that it came off that way and was very presumptuous.

In this case (dead gay characters), I actually believe your point is a valid one, and one I expected to come up, but it felt like you were calling me out, only not by name. Okay, I get that you weren't referring only to me, but by your own admission, it was an immediate reaction to something I wrote.

As for defriending you, gads, look at my user profile, where I explicitly say that I try to keep my flist small and so prefer to keep most people on an RSS feed instead. I've "defriended" lots of people whose LJs I still read and comment on regularly.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

....wouldn't LJ be the place where you find an astonishing majority of happy, long-living gay characters (or, you know, gay characters going through the travails your protagonist is expected to encounter?)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You'd think. I also find a lot of depictions of gay characters unlikely, but then, what do I know? I only cohabited with three or four gay couples over a period of fourteen years, after all, not to mention gaining considerable knowledge of lesbian and gay comix during nine years as a reviewer of underground and independent comics.

Re: P.S.:

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought that JKR's account of Dumbledore's supposed homosexuality showed a variety of the same kind of cowardice. Many writers kill off their homosexual characters young; what makes this facile is that it involves a refusal to move them through life, to show them at thirty, at forty, at fifty (which is when quite a few male homosexuals actually do die, of AIDS and the like) or in old age, to deal with the homosexual lifestyle as it is. It is also fallacious to my experience, in that my closest homosexual friends only started having homosexual relationships in their late twenties/ early thirties; but that is my experience alone (and it brings in another ideological can of worms which I do not intend to open except in a forum for Catholics alone). What makes JKR's Dumbledore thingy a different version of the same pattern is that she seems to say that AD was gay because of a teen-age pash and then completely fades off the rest of his 150-year-long life, not even trying to give any idea of how this might have affected his attitudes, his career, or his relationship with male and female colleagues. It would, for instance, have been interesting to see a suggestion that sexuality, however repressed, underlay the peculiarly brittle relationship with Cornelius Fudge, which moved bizarrely from idolatry to suspicious hatred in a way that clearly could not be rational; but she did not even try, and so left a glaring unlikelihood in an important sub-plot. To me, the whole thing smells not only of afterthought, but of ill-conceived afterthought, even though she said the opposite.