Queer Representation and How Far We've Come

 Salutations, my curious congregation. There's a big talking point about Queer Representation and what goes far enough. A lot of people talk about how if queer people are present in stories it's usually as background characters and rarely as protagonists, but I just want to take a moment to appreciate the progress we've made.

TWs: Swearing, irreverence, and this entry's probably gonna be fucking gay. If any of that bothers you, why are you here? Are you okay, buddy?

Expect this to be a short one, I've just been thinking about the fact that I can pick up an Urban Fantasy book now and generally expect that there's going to be a gay character in it somewhere. And most of the time, they're going to be named and matter to the storyline. And alright, maybe the protagonists don't tend to be queer, but if I go back and read books that were written in the 90's and early 2000's there's an almost complete lack of gay people in them.

Alright, I'm about to @ the Morganville series.

Everything is so aggressively straight in those books. To the point that when queer things do come up it's only to mention 'oh I thought this person was gay and therefore wouldn't be interested in the opposite sex' in this very weirdly heteronormative sort of way.

And it is weird! It reads as very strange to me to go back and see it now, and I'm actually a little bit beside myself about that. I'm so used to authors acknowledging that bi and asexual people exist that whenever I'm reading something and it sits there and pretends like that isn't a thing, it actually feels discordant.

Maybe that's not enough progress, but it is progress. I can look at where we've gone just in the past ten years and when I compare the books we have now to the ones I had in my late teens and early 20's, it gives me a little bit of hope that we're going to keep along this progress route. Even with everything else going on in the world right now, artists are gonna make art and they really do give a shit about making sure people see themselves in their work.

I'm used to books where gay people explicitly exist now. And that's honestly kind of rad.

Fortune Favors,

Robin the Red