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A lot of good blog topics start out, “So somebody asked me about ....” Well, nobody asked me about this, but it would be a very excellent question and I’m kind of surprised nobody has. Let’s pretend it happened. So nobody asked me, “Heather, given that you write stories with lesbian protagonists, why the heck do you put them in oppressive historic settings? Why not put them in contemporary settings? After all, it’s rather an exciting time to be non-heterosexual in the USA. Or futuristic settings where we can imagine that prejudice will be entirely eliminated? If you’re going to create secondary world fantasies, why use ones that carry over prejudice from our own past? Why not create a fantasy world -- even a pseudo-medieval one -- where being LGBTQ simply isn’t an issue?”
See? That would be a really great question. Why hasn’t anyone asked me that? (I’ll tell you anyway.)
I think it’s wonderful that the legal and social context I live in is more just than the one I was born into (though still far from as just as it ought to be). When I was born, being lesbian was considered a mental illness. Being open about it meant risking your job, your friendships, maybe even your freedom if you were still under age. When I realized I was a lesbian and began coming out, I assumed that it meant cutting myself off entirely from some important parts of life: from having children, from the possibility of getting married, from having my partner accepted as “family” by my parents and siblings. I would have found it impossible to imagine that the progress we’ve seen would happen during my lifetime: that marriage would be an option, that legal equality would be a (still incomplete) possibility, that children would (in some contexts) feel as free to express developing same-sex desires as to express developing opposite-sex desires. And if I were born today, and grew up in this new world we’re building, I might be impatient with looking backward to the “bad old days” and want to imagine only stories in which all sexualities (and genders) were equal and where it didn’t matter who my characters loved.
But I wasn’t born today. And for me it matters very much. It matters to me that I love women and not human beings in general. It matters to me that I spent most of my life not seeing myself and the things that matter to me reflected in the culture around me or in the history and literature that I loved. I feel it like the weight of a vast debt. Like an empty hole in the world that pulls on my soul like a gravity well. In a couple generations, perhaps we will have moved far enough from that well that the effects will barely be felt. But I still feel wisps of my soul being pulled off and sucked down into that abyss every time I open a book that fails to reflect my experience.
I still straddle that gap: between an era that denied and erased my existence and one that seems to aspire to deny and erase my difference. It is, perhaps, a worthy aspiration. I’m not sure. (I’m reminded of the time I attempted to explain to someone why members of Deaf culture could be deeply unsettled by an emphasis on “curing deafness”. I’m not going to go further with that analogy here. If you see the parallel, good; if you don’t, it would derail my point.)
In straddling that gap, I’m all too reminded of how different my life would have been in I’d been born a decade earlier...a generation...a century...a millennium. I want to explore the ways of being that would have been possible for me in a previous age. I want to figure out who and what I might have been in those spaces. I need to “Occupy History”, in the idiom of modern social politics, and stake a claim for me and mine in that vast territory that tried to erase us. And, for me, that “vast territory” includes the imaginative fantasy worlds that I have loved all my life despite their blithe assumption of my non-existence.
I sometimes feel like part of a lost generation in terms of literature. By the time it became possible to write the stories I hungered for, those stories were considered too tame, too traditional, insufficiently transgressive. But that vast literary debt still stands unpaid. I write in history, and in historic fantasy, because I want to help to fill that abyss with enough stories to content it, such that it no longer hungers for my soul.
See? That would be a really great question. Why hasn’t anyone asked me that? (I’ll tell you anyway.)
I think it’s wonderful that the legal and social context I live in is more just than the one I was born into (though still far from as just as it ought to be). When I was born, being lesbian was considered a mental illness. Being open about it meant risking your job, your friendships, maybe even your freedom if you were still under age. When I realized I was a lesbian and began coming out, I assumed that it meant cutting myself off entirely from some important parts of life: from having children, from the possibility of getting married, from having my partner accepted as “family” by my parents and siblings. I would have found it impossible to imagine that the progress we’ve seen would happen during my lifetime: that marriage would be an option, that legal equality would be a (still incomplete) possibility, that children would (in some contexts) feel as free to express developing same-sex desires as to express developing opposite-sex desires. And if I were born today, and grew up in this new world we’re building, I might be impatient with looking backward to the “bad old days” and want to imagine only stories in which all sexualities (and genders) were equal and where it didn’t matter who my characters loved.
But I wasn’t born today. And for me it matters very much. It matters to me that I love women and not human beings in general. It matters to me that I spent most of my life not seeing myself and the things that matter to me reflected in the culture around me or in the history and literature that I loved. I feel it like the weight of a vast debt. Like an empty hole in the world that pulls on my soul like a gravity well. In a couple generations, perhaps we will have moved far enough from that well that the effects will barely be felt. But I still feel wisps of my soul being pulled off and sucked down into that abyss every time I open a book that fails to reflect my experience.
I still straddle that gap: between an era that denied and erased my existence and one that seems to aspire to deny and erase my difference. It is, perhaps, a worthy aspiration. I’m not sure. (I’m reminded of the time I attempted to explain to someone why members of Deaf culture could be deeply unsettled by an emphasis on “curing deafness”. I’m not going to go further with that analogy here. If you see the parallel, good; if you don’t, it would derail my point.)
In straddling that gap, I’m all too reminded of how different my life would have been in I’d been born a decade earlier...a generation...a century...a millennium. I want to explore the ways of being that would have been possible for me in a previous age. I want to figure out who and what I might have been in those spaces. I need to “Occupy History”, in the idiom of modern social politics, and stake a claim for me and mine in that vast territory that tried to erase us. And, for me, that “vast territory” includes the imaginative fantasy worlds that I have loved all my life despite their blithe assumption of my non-existence.
I sometimes feel like part of a lost generation in terms of literature. By the time it became possible to write the stories I hungered for, those stories were considered too tame, too traditional, insufficiently transgressive. But that vast literary debt still stands unpaid. I write in history, and in historic fantasy, because I want to help to fill that abyss with enough stories to content it, such that it no longer hungers for my soul.
