July 11th, 2010
by
Yonmei
So, I was thinking about homophobia and heterosexism and the creative process.
I was told last year (by someone who had no idea who I was, to be fair) that I had no idea how the writer’s mind works: I couldn’t, she thought, or I wouldn’t be asking questions like “Why are you writing about this?” because I ought to know that writers don’t choose their subject matter, their subject matter chooses them. And I thought, well, there speaks a writer who has never been challenged.
I’ve had discussions that started from the question “Why are you writing about this?” for twenty-plus years. I am a lesbian writing about gay men. Everyone assumes this is a choice that can be challenged, apart from other lesbian slash writers, and meeting the challenges has led me to a better understanding of how a writer’s mind works – mine, if no one elses.
A post I made a few years ago about Robin Hobb’s Six Duchies/Liveships trilogy of trilogies, The Fool, the Fitz, and Fanfic brought up a question for me in the discussion thread that followed; Why is the culture of the Six Duchies homophobic? An important plot point turns on Fitz’s being homophobic – and homophobic in an accepted, settled way, as if being homophobic is just regarded as natural and right. While Fitz was somewhat isolated from the mainstream in the Six Duchies, his homophobia is not presented as part of his being out of step: it’s never questioned at all, except by its target, and the target is not from the Six Duchies at all.
There’s a new trilogy coming out, The Rain Wild Chronicles: I just finished reading the first volume, The Dragon Keeper, this weekend. (Minor spoilers under the cut) As it turns out, Bingtown and the Rain Wild are also a homophobic culture. No explanation is offered for this, either: it’s simply presented as normal that a gay man will grow up completely unaware – and that he will be so vulnerable in his unawareness that he will be the target for a man more aware than he is.
There is a same-sex relationship in The Dragon Keeper. It’s the first adult same-sex relationship that I think Robin Hobb consciously wrote. It’s presented as that of a wealthy man dominating and abusing a less-wealthy man, a gay man marrying a straight woman without telling her he is gay, without explaining to her that he intends to move his lover and employee into the house with them. Both men lie to the woman to keep their secret. This hurts her appalllingly. As it would.
Where does the homophobia in Bingtown come from? Why is it that Hobb doesn’t appear able to conceive of a society that isn’t homophobic?
Why did Dickens invent Fagin? Not because Dickens was consciously anti-Semitic: but because Dickens had been reared in an anti-Semitic culture, that took for granted ugly stereotypes like Fagin. And Fagin is, while an anti-Semitic stereotype, also a real person – as developed a character as Dickens usually makes.
Hest is a real person: I can see why the homophobia of Bingtown, the denial and lies forced on him, have made him the way he is – as I can see how his treatment of Sedric and of Alise have warped them: and neither of them had been treated well by Bingtown’s culture before Hest came along. Alise because her scholarly fascination with dragons was treated as, at best, an eccentricity: Sedric because his sexual orientation had left him devastatingly ignorant.
But. Alise, in her story, seems to be changing – to become alive to the possibilities for a woman independent of her family. There are strong hints she’ll move on from her gay husband to be with a straight man who admires and respects her. There no hints whatsoever that Sedric will move on from his abusive relationship with his lover to be with another gay man who admires and respects him.
Maybe it’s just the circles I move in, but I like to think that, as a culture we are moving away from homophobia and heterosexism, into a culture where it is taken for granted that “some people gay, get over it”. We aren’t there yet, but every success gets us closer: in the week that the Prime Minister of Australia declared her belief that “marriage is between a man and a woman”, the Prime Minister of Iceland married her wife.
It becomes more and more uncomfortable to read novels in which the authorial background takes for granted that homophobia is normal, that assumes gay men will inevitably grow up ignorant and warped by hatred and invisibility: that leaves lesbians invisible. Especially this is discomforting in the universe I walked into, as a writer, even before I came out: because in SF, I did not need to be trapped by heterosexism.
I don’t mean to judge Robin Hobb in particular for her cultural homophobia. I don’t think that would be fair, any more than it would be fair to judge Dickens in particular for his cultural anti-Semitism. But I’m still left with this discomfort: a writer I enjoyed that I seem to be leaving behind in a trap I can’t endure.
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Sexuality & queerness, slash, women writers | Comments (7)
I read your articles as linked to me by a friend, so The F, The F, and F first and now this, + sundry comics on the former. As a genre reader long before I identified as a queer male, I think it was a long and painful road of self-realisation. The most amazing, unique, different worlds still hated teh ghey as a fact, unspoken and unexamined. Boys love girls, girls love boys, those are the romances that work.
So, you know, I fantasized about Han and Luke (and maybe once or twice about Han and Chewie). I saw more than brotherly love between Raistlin and Caramon, and I imagined cold lonely nights passed between Rincewind and Twoflower. But I knew, *knew* that these were wrong, and spent an unacceptable amount of my life trying not to think about it. Because even in the worlds I escaped to, being gay either didn’t exist or just wasn’t right, so what chance did I have in real life? (Unlike those lucky straight female slash writers, who can enjoy the titillation without feeling the shame.)
My experiences are hardly unique, but I think that only lends weight to your argument. People don’t consider what they write about all the time, and so you get accepted practice in our world portrayed thoughtlessly in fiction. In regards to Robin Hobbs’ work and your aforementioned article, especially in the comments on it, these attitudes are so pervasive that they are *never* looked at, and combined with the blind love of a genre fan will never be, even when written out plainly. And so you end up with unexamined homophobia, family dynamics and, oh God, Twilight’s horrifying definition of romance between the 100-year-old stalker and the teenaged female protagonist.
And while it may not be fair to judge somebody based on their unexamined social mores, I think it’s more fair to study their reaction to criticism and their public displays of ignorance. I also think that having *written something down* it is harder not to examine it, it takes a certain amount of will to read it and not dissect it, and that makes the excuse of society rather more feeble.
Just doing a drive-by: I really enjoyed this article and you raised a lot of good points. It’s kind of depressing though. It’s not enough to go “oh see I acknowledge teh gay” as a writer – heterosexism will out in all sorts of seeping ugly ways that are harder to spot and refute.
Well that’s disappointing. Didn’t she write about a same-sex relationship back in the Ki and Vandien days (when she was Megan Lindholm)? Or am I just confusing her with a different author…
I was wondering whether I should order the Rain Wild serie for the store I work in, now I’m thinking, not so much.
Via feministe. After reading Lessig’s _Free Culture_, I decided that, yes, absolutely authors are entitled not to want readers writing fanfic, but that I’m entitled not to waste my time with them. If you can’t deal with me screwing up the interpretation on your pweshus, pweshus universe, that means either you’re a lousy writer who can’t get the point across, or a selfish one who can’t accept that half the story comes from the reader, and they’re all different. If the fanfic your readers write bothers you that much, you’re probably not gonna be much happier with the story I’m reading inside my head, anyway. Fanfic is just another way, using fiction, of reviewing the work, when it comes down to it. It is, at base, dialog between author and reader, but maybe more threatening than reviewing because the reader gets to turn the tables!
I keep forgetting how much fear of teh slash impels fanfic hatred by authors. But honestly, you’d expect someone who did `brilliant’ “gender-fuckery” to be a bit more open-minded.
I’d heard Hobb was good, but refused to read her on the no-fanfic principle. Now I have more reasons not to.
Layogenic: But I knew, *knew* that these were wrong, and spent an unacceptable amount of my life trying not to think about it. Because even in the worlds I escaped to, being gay either didn’t exist or just wasn’t right, so what chance did I have in real life?
Until I was 16 – and for context, I’d wanted to be a writer since I was 7, and started trying to write (as the rubric has it, an hour a day) when I was 14 – I had no idea, no mental concept, that it was possible to write a story in which a same-sex couple were the centre of the narrative. I got an idea for a novel, the first one in my life I finished, when I was just 16. When I started to write it, I realised that the central two weren’t just friends – they were lovers. So, sadly, I changed the gender of the sidekick from female to male. I didn’t see how I could write it otherwise. Over the six months it took me to write it, I came out, I found the local gay bookshop, I discovered that it was narratively possible to write a story in which the central couple were both women. …so I went at the finished MSS (typed!) with Tippex and correction strips, to change the sidekick’s gender back to what she had been when I conceived her.
That was in 1983. But sometimes it seems the vast majority of heterosexual writers still have their heads stuck back there.
And while it may not be fair to judge somebody based on their unexamined social mores, I think it’s more fair to study their reaction to criticism and their public displays of ignorance. I also think that having *written something down* it is harder not to examine it, it takes a certain amount of will to read it and not dissect it, and that makes the excuse of society rather more feeble.
That’s true. But seriously – in 1983, I didn’t change Falconer’s gender from female to male because I was consciously homophobic: I did it because nothing I had ever read had ever suggested to me that it was possible to write a story with a same-sex couple at the centre of it. And it was something that all of me needed to learn. I think in all honesty, the problem with so many straight writers, is they never got the message… but then, they never needed to. Their sexual orientation wasn’t being made invisible or made negative in everything they read.
calyx: It’s not enough to go “oh see I acknowledge teh gay” as a writer – heterosexism will out in all sorts of seeping ugly ways that are harder to spot and refute.
Yes. In this and so many other instances, I think the key problem is somewhere wherever (the mental Schenectady) we “get our ideas from”. If the society we live in teaches us from the earliest time that, as Layogenic put it, hetero romances “are the romances that work”, the part of us that conceives story ideas, won’t ever conceive a story idea about anything else but a hetero romance.
Orodemniades: Didn’t she write about a same-sex relationship back in the Ki and Vandien days (when she was Megan Lindholm)?
Did she? I have to admit, I have read only one Megan Lindholm novel, so I can’t say. (Wizard of the Pigeons. An entirely hetero Seattle, but a lovely novel.)
I was wondering whether I should order the Rain Wild serie for the store I work in, now I’m thinking, not so much.
I dunno. It is (I wouldn’t have continued to the end otherwise) a good story. And the thing is: it is so standard for writers simply to omit LGBT people from their worlds. I noticed Orson Scott Card as a writer because he didn’t omit LGBT people (though I feel now I should have noticed sooner that he couldn’t write a sexually-active gay man without making sure he died horribly and/or was castrated by the end of the story). If you were to refuse to buy writers who write the world as if everyone is heterosexual, you wouldn’t be able to buy many writers: it’s just it’s kind of noticeable when someone shows up who writes as if homophobia is normal.
Yonmei: That’s true. But seriously – in 1983, I didn’t change Falconer’s gender from female to male because I was consciously homophobic: I did it because nothing I had ever read had ever suggested to me that it was possible to write a story with a same-sex couple at the centre of it. And it was something that all of me needed to learn. I think in all honesty, the problem with so many straight writers, is they never got the message… but then, they never needed to. Their sexual orientation wasn’t being made invisible or made negative in everything they read.
But see, you looked at your writing, analyzed it, and decided (for whatever erroneous reasons) that it couldn’t be this way. That’s the step I’m talking about.
As far as the actual readability of The Dragon Keeper (I haven’t read the second, yet) I found it to be…well, disappointing. This was supposed to be a pair of novels instead of a trilogy, and it got expanded. I think that shows itself in the presence of unnecessary POV as filler to make this book full, and will probably continue into the next two.
(My favourite parts are, actually, the LJ-esque drama between the carrier pigeon handlers. This book should be titled The Pigeon Keeper and consist entirely of these guys.)
Mixing these subjects to bring the topic back to homosexuality, Alise’s initial sympathetic character is completely dissolved by her third POV chapter in no small part by the fact that Robin Hobb is as subtle as a giant gay hammer to the balls in Hess’ hehe sordid little affair. Homosexual relationships are not *alien* in this world, but Hobb writes this not only like nobody has ever had a gay-on anywhere near Alise ever, but that the reader needs to have it spelled out very clearly just for foreshadowing. Because it’s just that weird.
Alise is further alienated from the reader because she never seems to get that independent streak back. We skip years of their relationship with no hint as to the intervening experiences, and she’s supposedly been gearing up for this expedition, but in her scenes with Hess she is exactly as helpless and wibbly as she was as a newlywed. I felt like Hobb took the possibility of a strong female character, then treated her defining feature, her intellect and studiousness, as much like a shameful peccadillo as the world around her did.
Plus, I’m not looking forward to having a book in which all five POVs are in the same exact place describing the same exact scene in the same exact way for a whole book instead of just the last third.