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"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly


No one ever says to a straight writer, "You write too much about straight people," yet critics often accuse gay and lesbian novelists of writing too much about their own community*. For me, this is a double whammy on top of the one that already demonizes people simply for who they love.

We need a voice in fiction just as much as any other group does.  Maybe in big cities like New York or Los Angeles or even D.C. being gay is no big deal, but where I live people still care, and often in a bad way. Keeping quiet about who you really are is often the only way to go.

I had this terribly unrealistic dream once that I could write the kind of fiction that would shatter stereotypes, maybe even bring the most homophobic homophobe to see the light about how human and moral and loving gays and lesbians are or can be. I was going to write the kind of love stories that would emphasize the love, not the sex. Because when I was in my 20s and grabbing any GLBT fiction I could (because there was and is so little), it kind of angered me how much of it was steeped in sexual stuff and not so much the love.

But the more I wrote, the more I realized I was not going to be that person. My dialogue is horrible and I write about the kind of woman I'm pretty sure would never come across as realistic. Worst of all, no matter how hard I try not to base the narrator on me, my "voice" is always me.

Still, I try. Not because I wish I could write good fiction and won't give up, but because it is an outlet for me, a little happy place I escape to in a world that mostly doesn't believe that gays and lesbians are anything but sordid.

This post comes not from the perspective of a "special interest group member" (as the far right sometimes likes to anyone who dares to speak up), but from a basic human rights need. 

As an old New Order song ("Thieves Like Us") goes: "It's called love and it belongs to every one of us."





* (When Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger first appeared, a lot of book reviews went on and on about how it was her first "non-lesbian" novel...as if she had been writing too much about gay women.)