![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjOne of the consolations of being an author is knowing that so many of those trying experiences along the way are shared by your fellow writers. That moment when you realize you’ve chosen the wrong point of view and need to start over from scratch. The sinking feeling when you type “the end” and realize it’s just the beginning of revisions. The nail-biting period when your novel just dropped and you’re waiting for your first reviews. The embarrassed look on your friend’s face when you thrust a copy of your book at them and they mumble, “Sorry, I’m not really into porn.” The despair when a reviewer notes, “The writing was excellent and I really enjoyed the characters, but I only gave it two stars because there wasn’t enough hot sex.”
Wait—what? You don’t get those last two? Oh, right, perhaps because you write about straight characters.
When I decided to publish my novel Daughter of Mystery with a lesbian press, the overriding reason was, of course, the sexuality of my main characters. The dearth of mainstream fantasy novels with central lesbian characters gave me no expectation that my story would get a fair shake from the usual SFF presses, and I wanted more than a fair shake—I wanted a publisher who fully supported the characters and story I wanted to tell. And the story I wanted to tell was the exciting adventures of a swordswoman of mysterious origins and a scholar discovering her talent for magic. I wanted to tell about their struggles against the barriers of gender and class, about trust and betrayal, about negotiating one’s place in the world. And I wanted to tell about how these two unique individuals happened to fall in love as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and about how they created a space in their lives for that love.
Daughter of Mystery was certainly never intended to be an erotic romance. It is not even, in the strictest sense, a “romance”. If you removed the romantic arc entirely, you would still have a complex and entertaining story, though a somewhat different one. But it is a complex adventure story where one of the several important threads is the development of a romantic relationship. In the historic setting of my story, it would in many ways be more typical for a woman who desired other women to live her entire life without acting on that desire. Goodness knows I’ve read many a historic novel where I could imagine characters having secret lesbian desires that they never had the opportunity or nerve to explore. It was a deliberate decision not simply to write about characters with lesbian desires, but to write within that set of possible stories where they expressed them.
When I made those choices, both regarding story and publisher, I hadn’t quite anticipated the number of people who believe that “lesbian fiction” is—or ought to be—synonymous with erotica. Or that a large proportion of the people who believe that are among the most avid readers and supporters of lesbian fiction. And this bothers me on several levels.
One position that you encounter is that because sexuality is what makes lesbian characters different from straight ones, it’s only natural that sex is going to be central to stories about lesbians. This is, of course, absurd—the same absurdity that leads straight people to respond to a picture of you and your girlfriend having dinner with, “I don’t want to know about your sex life.” No one picks up a novel with straight protagonists and thinks, “because these characters are heterosexual, the primary defining feature of their stories is going to be their sex lives and I expect to see that featured in the book.” (Except, of course, on a metaphorical Freudian level in which every element of a character’s life is about sex.) The proper response to this position is, “Real-life lesbians are still lesbians even when they’re not having sex. Lesbian characters in books can still be lesbians even if the story isn’t about sex.”
The belief that fiction about a lesbian character is inherently and essentially “sex literature” is offensive to me because it reduces us to a single facet of our lives in a manner that is not similarly applied to straight characters. I expected to have to fight past that belief to reach straight readers. I hadn’t expected it to be an issue with lesbian readers.
But is it? What is the motivation behind that portion of the faithful lesbian readership who are disappointed when a story does not revolve around the sex lives of the characters? And furthermore, about a very specific type of sex life? To the extent that I can understand the point of view, it seems to be this: because lesbian fiction is the one place where authors can write openly about lesbian sex lives, free both of the constraints of disapproval and the distortions of the male gaze, then it’s important to use that space to supply the literature that isn’t available from other parts of the publishing industry. There also seems to be a certain component of “not writing about your characters having eager and energetic sex lives on-screen reflects internalized homophobia and the bleaching out of lesbian sexuality that we see all too often in mainstream media when we get mentioned at all.”
But I still have a problem with this. Two problems, in fact. The first is that this attitude still contributes to the popular fallacy that “being a lesbian is all about sex”. No sex; no lesbian. The second is that—in practice—this attitude focuses on a rather narrow range of what it means to be a sexual being. I don’t mean to call out any particular reviews; I’ve encountered the response too many times for it to be just a personal idiosyncrasy. But this type of reaction gives a strong impression that if the characters aren’t sexual in a specific way, and with a specific degree of intensity and preoccupation, and depicted with a specific amount of explicit detail, then they aren’t acceptable as accurate portrayals of lesbians. Not enough sex; not a good enough lesbian. I can’t help but think that, for those readers, I myself would fail at being a “good enough” lesbian.
In a way, it reminds me of the pointless debates—from both sides—over whether a given historic couple should be identified as “lesbian” that hinge narrowly on the question of whether they ever engaged in genital sex. Love and desire come in many different forms. If we expect literary couples to adhere to a narrow, specific range of expression—the range that is approvingly referred to in reviews as “hot” or “steamy”—what does that say to all the readers whose own preferred expression of desire would not meet that standard of approval?
I write about a variety of characters in the Alpennian novels. (I can say “novels” even though only one is on the shelves at the moment because I’m currently working on books 3 and 4.) And those characters enjoy a very wide variety of sexual expression. Some are confident, some are hesitant. Some are experienced, others naïve. Some seek purely sensual satisfaction, others are in it for the emotional bond. Some make bad choices due to an overwhelming sex drive, one is pretty far toward the asexual end of the scale.
Several reviews have commented that they felt there was more “heat” in the scenes between Barbara and her former lover Jeanne in Daughter of Mystery than there was between Barbara and Margerit, the focal romantic couple, and that this was a problem. Well, yes, there is more “heat”. And that’s because Jeanne is a very uninhibited, very experienced, sexually assertive person. It doesn’t make Jeanne a “better lesbian” than Margerit. (Jeanne’s actually bi, but leans more toward women.) You see more of Jeanne’s sexuality on the page because Jeanne is a more expressive person. You see less of Margerit’s, not only because she’s still figuring out this whole desire thing for most of the book, but because she is more shy, more unsure of herself, more concerned about her public reputation, and—quite frankly—because she would find Jeanne’s outgoing style simply in bad taste. And Barbara’s relationship to the two women is entirely different. As she tells Margerit, “[Jeanne] was neither my employer nor my charge to protect. And I wasn’t in love with her—that made things simpler. [With you] it isn’t simple at all.” [1]
To say that the romance between Barbara and Margerit is “less satisfying” than the couple of scenes of tension between Barbara and Jeanne is to say that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to feel and express love. It’s saying that the quality of a story is not whether it reflects the characters in an authentic way, but whether the reader gets turned on. And that brings us back to the false position that all lesbian literature inherently is—or should be—erotica, and that the defining characteristic of a lesbian is her sex life. It’s disappointing enough when I run into that attitude from straight readers. It feels like betrayal when I encounter it from lesbian readers.
* * *
[1] By the way, for those readers who have expressed an interest in more Jeanne & Barbara, I point out that the story of how they met (Three Nights at the Opera) is available free on my website. [http://alpennia.com/3nights.html] But don’t expect erotica in that one either.
Wait—what? You don’t get those last two? Oh, right, perhaps because you write about straight characters.
When I decided to publish my novel Daughter of Mystery with a lesbian press, the overriding reason was, of course, the sexuality of my main characters. The dearth of mainstream fantasy novels with central lesbian characters gave me no expectation that my story would get a fair shake from the usual SFF presses, and I wanted more than a fair shake—I wanted a publisher who fully supported the characters and story I wanted to tell. And the story I wanted to tell was the exciting adventures of a swordswoman of mysterious origins and a scholar discovering her talent for magic. I wanted to tell about their struggles against the barriers of gender and class, about trust and betrayal, about negotiating one’s place in the world. And I wanted to tell about how these two unique individuals happened to fall in love as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and about how they created a space in their lives for that love.
Daughter of Mystery was certainly never intended to be an erotic romance. It is not even, in the strictest sense, a “romance”. If you removed the romantic arc entirely, you would still have a complex and entertaining story, though a somewhat different one. But it is a complex adventure story where one of the several important threads is the development of a romantic relationship. In the historic setting of my story, it would in many ways be more typical for a woman who desired other women to live her entire life without acting on that desire. Goodness knows I’ve read many a historic novel where I could imagine characters having secret lesbian desires that they never had the opportunity or nerve to explore. It was a deliberate decision not simply to write about characters with lesbian desires, but to write within that set of possible stories where they expressed them.
When I made those choices, both regarding story and publisher, I hadn’t quite anticipated the number of people who believe that “lesbian fiction” is—or ought to be—synonymous with erotica. Or that a large proportion of the people who believe that are among the most avid readers and supporters of lesbian fiction. And this bothers me on several levels.
One position that you encounter is that because sexuality is what makes lesbian characters different from straight ones, it’s only natural that sex is going to be central to stories about lesbians. This is, of course, absurd—the same absurdity that leads straight people to respond to a picture of you and your girlfriend having dinner with, “I don’t want to know about your sex life.” No one picks up a novel with straight protagonists and thinks, “because these characters are heterosexual, the primary defining feature of their stories is going to be their sex lives and I expect to see that featured in the book.” (Except, of course, on a metaphorical Freudian level in which every element of a character’s life is about sex.) The proper response to this position is, “Real-life lesbians are still lesbians even when they’re not having sex. Lesbian characters in books can still be lesbians even if the story isn’t about sex.”
The belief that fiction about a lesbian character is inherently and essentially “sex literature” is offensive to me because it reduces us to a single facet of our lives in a manner that is not similarly applied to straight characters. I expected to have to fight past that belief to reach straight readers. I hadn’t expected it to be an issue with lesbian readers.
But is it? What is the motivation behind that portion of the faithful lesbian readership who are disappointed when a story does not revolve around the sex lives of the characters? And furthermore, about a very specific type of sex life? To the extent that I can understand the point of view, it seems to be this: because lesbian fiction is the one place where authors can write openly about lesbian sex lives, free both of the constraints of disapproval and the distortions of the male gaze, then it’s important to use that space to supply the literature that isn’t available from other parts of the publishing industry. There also seems to be a certain component of “not writing about your characters having eager and energetic sex lives on-screen reflects internalized homophobia and the bleaching out of lesbian sexuality that we see all too often in mainstream media when we get mentioned at all.”
But I still have a problem with this. Two problems, in fact. The first is that this attitude still contributes to the popular fallacy that “being a lesbian is all about sex”. No sex; no lesbian. The second is that—in practice—this attitude focuses on a rather narrow range of what it means to be a sexual being. I don’t mean to call out any particular reviews; I’ve encountered the response too many times for it to be just a personal idiosyncrasy. But this type of reaction gives a strong impression that if the characters aren’t sexual in a specific way, and with a specific degree of intensity and preoccupation, and depicted with a specific amount of explicit detail, then they aren’t acceptable as accurate portrayals of lesbians. Not enough sex; not a good enough lesbian. I can’t help but think that, for those readers, I myself would fail at being a “good enough” lesbian.
In a way, it reminds me of the pointless debates—from both sides—over whether a given historic couple should be identified as “lesbian” that hinge narrowly on the question of whether they ever engaged in genital sex. Love and desire come in many different forms. If we expect literary couples to adhere to a narrow, specific range of expression—the range that is approvingly referred to in reviews as “hot” or “steamy”—what does that say to all the readers whose own preferred expression of desire would not meet that standard of approval?
I write about a variety of characters in the Alpennian novels. (I can say “novels” even though only one is on the shelves at the moment because I’m currently working on books 3 and 4.) And those characters enjoy a very wide variety of sexual expression. Some are confident, some are hesitant. Some are experienced, others naïve. Some seek purely sensual satisfaction, others are in it for the emotional bond. Some make bad choices due to an overwhelming sex drive, one is pretty far toward the asexual end of the scale.
Several reviews have commented that they felt there was more “heat” in the scenes between Barbara and her former lover Jeanne in Daughter of Mystery than there was between Barbara and Margerit, the focal romantic couple, and that this was a problem. Well, yes, there is more “heat”. And that’s because Jeanne is a very uninhibited, very experienced, sexually assertive person. It doesn’t make Jeanne a “better lesbian” than Margerit. (Jeanne’s actually bi, but leans more toward women.) You see more of Jeanne’s sexuality on the page because Jeanne is a more expressive person. You see less of Margerit’s, not only because she’s still figuring out this whole desire thing for most of the book, but because she is more shy, more unsure of herself, more concerned about her public reputation, and—quite frankly—because she would find Jeanne’s outgoing style simply in bad taste. And Barbara’s relationship to the two women is entirely different. As she tells Margerit, “[Jeanne] was neither my employer nor my charge to protect. And I wasn’t in love with her—that made things simpler. [With you] it isn’t simple at all.” [1]
To say that the romance between Barbara and Margerit is “less satisfying” than the couple of scenes of tension between Barbara and Jeanne is to say that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to feel and express love. It’s saying that the quality of a story is not whether it reflects the characters in an authentic way, but whether the reader gets turned on. And that brings us back to the false position that all lesbian literature inherently is—or should be—erotica, and that the defining characteristic of a lesbian is her sex life. It’s disappointing enough when I run into that attitude from straight readers. It feels like betrayal when I encounter it from lesbian readers.
* * *
[1] By the way, for those readers who have expressed an interest in more Jeanne & Barbara, I point out that the story of how they met (Three Nights at the Opera) is available free on my website. [http://alpennia.com/3nights.html] But don’t expect erotica in that one either.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 12:57 am (UTC)I'm glad spicy romance exists for those who like it.
I don't like it; and it's getting harder to find good historical romances that *don't* have it.
And even harder than that to find good historical romance that, if it does have it, has it in an historical way. A lot of spicy historical romance reads to me like modern people in costume.
I also applaud the resistance to one type of sexual being. Lesbians are just as varied in their preference for spice as any other set of human beings.
My sexual preferences are not even a significant fraction of my whole being. My friends, family, hobbies, job, interests, vacations, dinner, even much of the time I spend with my wife, has little to do with sex. That is not a definition of my life and I am DELIGHTED to read a book where that is true for the characters as well.