My "Bad Guy" is Gay, but those two things are totally unrelated

GuitarShank said:

That's a fair assessment, and probably true. Because I don't tend to include close relationships outside parent-child and siblings, I don't think about the sexuality options at all. So I guess they're default straight. And because I'm white and I'm not writing a story that deals specifically with race at all, they're default white. I don't say they're white of course, but I can see the issue with readers defaulting on straight and white when those things are undefined.

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I mean, the problem with that is that straight isn't and shouldn't be assumed to be the default.

As a gay guy myself, I would certainly raise an eyebrow if the protagonists were all straight (or assumed to be) and the only character confirmed to be lgbt was a villain. Queer-coded villains are traditional, and a product of homophobia. It's not enough not to make her a man-hating lesbian, a queer villain is a stereotype by virtue of being a queer villain. LGBT people want diversity and want to be included in stories, certainly but what we don't want is to be always typecast as the villain, especially if the villain is the only character in the story who is queer.

The most morally despicable character in my series is (most likely) bi. The most morally upright character (and a main protagonist) is gay. (The latter isn't because of the former, it actually just happened that way - lucky me!) I agree with the general consensus that it's a good idea to balance things out with a protagonist gay character. More specifically, a gay character who either A) is pretty significant, not just a side character you see once or B) doesn't die. Ideally both. There's no hard and fast rules, of course.

I'm a cis white woman. For some reason writing different sexualities has always come easily to me (perhaps because I questioned a lot when I was younger?) but I sometimes struggled with other issues of diversity, simply because my mind defaulted to white. But when I started forcing myself to envision characters differently than that first look, it honestly became really fun to have my world so varied and interesting. It really makes it feel like a living, breathing world. So even if it feels forced at first to make a character gay (or whatever else you make them), it might end up being really fun.

As a die-hard Whovian whose first (and so far only) novel-length completed work is a Doctor Who fanfiction:

People are not stereotypes, patterns are stereotypes.
How many gay/bi characters do you have who aren't villains?

Extensive personal experience

The Whoniverse (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sarah Jane adventures) has two characters that the writers tried to make as superficially similar as possible (one guy goes by the alias of Captain Jack Harkness, his psychotic ex-husband goes by the alias of Captain John Hart, both are bisexual/biromantic and extremely promiscuous, and both used to work for the Time Agency as law enforcement officers) so that the fundamental differences would stand out more strongly (Jack is a leader who goes back and forth between being Neutral and being Good, John is a loner who goes back and forth between being Neutral and being Evil), so when I started writing my own story, I wanted my main character to be a former Time Agent like Jack and John.

Naming her "Captain JH" wasn't too hard, I'd found a lot of names websites and settled pretty quickly on June Harper, and I've always been very prudish about sex and sexual expression, so I thought it would be helpful to me to force myself to write about somebody as promiscuous as Jack Harkness or John Hart.

I also realized about 3 chapters into writing that I wanted her to be a villain. I'd been reading about how not to write female action heroes, and one tip on what to do is that women tend to fight dirtier than most men do, for the same reason that smaller men tend to fight dirtier than bigger ones. I came up with a scene where she snaps the neck of an antagonist to the surprise of her male friends who'd been engrossed in the antagonist's monologue, and I realized that I could turn this into a much larger statement about vigilantes in general.

I've always loved the concept of the villain protagonist (I loved KA Applegate's Visser and Shakespeare's MacBeth as a kid), and in my adolescence I'd fallen in love with the vigilante serial killer concept (Dexter Morgan, Light Yagami, Walter Kovacs). But I've always hated when they were treated as the heroes.

When I realized that June Harper worked best as being more ruthless than the rest of my characters, I realized that I could take this a few steps further and turn her into a bloodthirsty vigilante serial killer that her own friends are afraid of (though not on their own behalf) to show that "Yes, these people murder the bad guys, but that doesn't make them the good guys." I'd also fallen in love with the Token Evil Teammate dynamic whereby one Villain Protagonist and a number of Hero Protagonists work together against a Villain Antagonist (Belkar Bitterleaf from Order of the Stick, Spike from a few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, arguably Jayne Cobb from Firefly), and I wanted to see how that dynamic changes when the villain is the one in charge of the Protagonists rather than one of the heroes.

This also made the symmetry more beautiful: Jack Harkness was a heroic leader, John Hart was a villainous loner, and now I was finding out that June Harper worked better as a villainous leader than she had when I was writing her as a heroic leader.

Then I read an article about Orson Scott Card and decided that I should probably look into LGBT stereotypes.

I'd assumed that my being asexual/aromantic would make me less likely to do something wrong than a straight person would, but after reading about how Card had gone from being so tolerant of Islam to being so bigoted against LGBT, suddenly I felt I should double check.

Turned out that "gays/bis are promiscuous" and "gays/bis are evil" were nasty stereotypes even on their own, let alone combined in the same character. I tried to change my characterization of June Harper, but nothing felt real to me because she couldn't be anything in my mind except a promiscuous, bisexual serial killer.

And then I had one of the most important brainstorms of my life: the problem wasn't that my bisexual character was a promiscuous serial killer, the problem was that my only bisexual character was a promiscuous serial killer.

I immediately went to the rest of my cast to see which of them could be made bisexual/monogamous and which ones could be made promiscuous/straight. I managed to work two of my guys (one of whom I'd been convinced was aro/ace like me) into being a couple*, but I couldn't in good conscience make any of my other cast promiscuous.


So I came up with a new guy I'd been toying around with the idea of a less humanoid species being a bigger part of my story anyway (so far I had 4 humans, 2 Time Lords, and a sentient ship), so I figured I would come up with a non-humanoid character and make him promiscuous and straight. I then hit my Doctor Who encyclopedias* and the wikis looking for a good non-humanoid species to use.


BTW: there was an arc I was planning for one of my characters, and there was another arc that I was planning for a few of my others.

Completely by accident, the non-human character I came up with ended up reflecting both arcs simultaneously, and both sets of character(s) benefit more from their exposure to his similar development

This is all a tricky business. OTOH because we ant diverse protagonists, OTOH, we also want them portrayed accurately and with sensitivity. I agree with someone who said hiring a sensitivity reader, or at least a queer beta. I also echo the need for more diversity both in orientation and race within the non-antagonist side of things.

I like characters that feel real. In life you observe and meet people without knowing for sure whether they are gay, straight, bisexual, or transgendered. Most people don't come right out and tell you their sexuality until after they have gotten to know you, or sometimes you never know what their sexual preference is. You might notice clues to lead you to wonder, "are they gay?" such as stereotypical things such as speech, dress, mannerisms, etc, but you never know for sure unless they or someone else tells you or if you see obvious signs such as kissing, holding hands, public affection, or obvious signs of flirtation. But even then, you never really know for sure unless you get into the character's mind.

For the most of my characters, I like their sexuality to be a mystery or hinted at until later on after we get to know them better. If gay characters do turn out to be the villain you have already gotten to know them first before you know their sexuality.