My thoughts about writing minorities

I think it's a noble thing to try and understand another POV no matter which sexual orientation it involves. It's much harder for me to understand the idea of a gay/lesbian/transgendered (see my other thread) because I'm also a straight white dude, and when I first got the idea of writing a lesbian character, my older sister's advice was as follows:

--Don't make assumptions that the character is going to act a certain way just because she is a lesbian. So, I wrote my MC as a young lady, an everyday, ordinary teenager who's just come out and has to deal with the issues that some of her classmates pose. Some of them, not everyone. Her friends are supportive as are her parents and that's a cool thing. She's a very shy person by nature, but learns about getting tough when she has to and matures along the way when she meets the love of her life.

--Avoid stereotypes. Truthfully, I didn't really know how many stereotypes of lesbians were around. I had to check on various websites. I'd seen them in the movies--the image that some straight men (and I guess, some straight women) had of them, with short hair, tough, into leather, acting very butch--and I thought that stereotype totally ridiculous.

Who says a lesbian character has to be that way? Just the writer's way of making her more colorful? I suppose there are some women who are like that, but there are also probably some straight women who dress and/or act like that as well. I don't know, but I had my MC dress in jeans and blouses and T-shirts just like everyone else. Not girly per se, just average. And that's the image I gave her, an average girl thrust into a very un-average situation which helps her grow mentally and spiritually.

--Be honest. By that, my sister meant write the situations honestly, in that if 'A' does something, what would 'B' do or say and how would they react? I wanted my MC to be that kind of person who would react honestly and find it within herself to act when necessary.

This is by no means a comprehensive post, just my ideas as well as my sister's. I hope to learn more along the way.

KingAlanI said:

Sounds like some of the same thoughts I had, with a lesbian-specific example. (I tried to make my post more generalized)

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To be honest, I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but these are my opinions. I would not write a stereotype about someone who is black or Asian, so it also wouldn't make sense to write a stereotype about someone of the same-sex orientation. I think we've seen enough examples of how a same-sex group is portrayed...and many times, those portrayals gave in to the stereotype.

I didn't want to go that route. I simply wrote my main character as someone who happens to like the same sex--women--and let the story play out. It worked--it'll be published next year, and I have hopes for the sequels. (It's a trilogy).

Your sister was right; sexual orientation determines who you want to sleep with, not vote for. I made the mistake once of assuming that a gay friend of mine would be thrilled when gay marriage passed in NY. Turns out he disapproved...as a Catholic!

I have gay characters in my fiction, though I'm straight. I've also had black and Latino MC's even though I'm white. It's our job to inhabit our characters and see the world through their eyes, and I've learned a lot from that. But mostly I've learned that our differences are minor compared to our similarities.

Personally I find it helpful, when creating a character who's very different from me, to start with what we have in common.

Of course, in the process of avoiding stereotyping, it's also important to try not to totally erase groups of people to make the whole subculture more palatable to non-minority members. Which makes everything more complicated.

Butch lesbians are a minority, but they do exist and one concern in the lesbian community is that they're often either completely ignored in mainstream media or they're ultra-stereotyped. Which means there's a good middle ground somewhere, but it's hard to find and there's _always_ going to be someone somewhere who finds fault with it. The key is to try to balance things out and get most lesbians to be okay with it.

All lesbians shouldn't be butch. All lesbians shouldn't be easily classified as butch or femme. All lesbian couples shouldn't include a butch-femme dichotomy. But some lesbians should be butch, some should strongly identify as butch or femme, and some couples include a butch-femme dichotomy.

That doesn't mean that every novel has to cover every possibility and be a bingo list of inclusion (which is often the accusation leveled against those of us who want more inclusion by people who don't want more minority visibility in media.) Most of the problems with stereotyping aren't just, "this one novel doesn't have enough diversity" but rather, "this entire genre doesn't have enough diversity."

In a book with one lesbian character, butch/femme/variable/I-don't-care-about-labels expression are all valid possibilities. An individual lesbian could be any of those. It's only a problem when every book with one lesbian character has the same stereotype, or when a book with twenty lesbian characters portrays them all the same, or whatever. I mean, there really are men who fit the "straight woman's supportive gay best friend" stereotype and one character like that is believable, but I've seen them in the last few urban fantasies I've read and it's starting to get irritating.

So, there's no easy solution or simple answer. The best suggestion I can give is to find out what many members of the minority group in question think of current portrayals in books similar to yours and what's been neglected, and then try to cover some of the neglected areas. Of course, there's always disagreement within the zillions of often barely-connected communities that make up any minority group (and not all minority groups even have "community"), so there's no easy answer there, either.

Here's the way I rank portrayal of the groups I'm part of:

Worst: Negative stereotyping of everyone.

Bad: Mindless stereotyping that's not negative, but is still irritating, uncreative, and often problematic. Stereotyping is based on an outsider's understanding of the situation.

Neutral: [Minority status] doesn't matter at all for _anyone_. For example, _all_ gay characters are presented exactly as straight characters and _all_ gay relationships are presented exactly as straight relationships.

Good: A little nuance. Minority status matters, but differently to different people, and while some people do touch on stereotypes a little, they're presented as full characters, and not everyone fits the stereotype. Also, the stereotypes aren't always the majority's idea of stereotypes, but often are based on the community's internal stereotypes. (Trans people stereotype each other, playfully or maliciously, but I've never seen _any_ of those stereotypes in mainstream media. The middle-class white lesbian transsexual woman who plays tabletop role-playing games and is good with computers is a stereotype with a basis in reality, but I've never, ever seen it mentioned in written form.)

This is never going to be perfect, and it takes research to pull it off. But even doing a little research and mixing up just a little goes a _long_ way to being more inclusive.

Dammit, Lindsay (in Lindsay versus the Marauders) happens to be good at swimming and computers.

I'm not changing it, though, as her knowledge of computers is essential to a plot point.

Nice post, Mara. Something for me to keep in mind.

What Mara said.

I'll highlight two things I find important:

1) Please, please, please make sure your minority characters have goals and motivations that are unrelated to their minority status. (Sure, their minority status can affect their lives to a certain degree, even to a great degree depending on setting, but they should also have other concerns and other driving forces. Like getting the love interest, or earning a promotion, or taking down the bad guy, or proving themselves to their parents, or saving the world, or any of the other things book characters usually worry about.)

2) The more diversity you have, the less likely any one of your characters will be considered a token. The more you "normalize" a diverse world within your book, the more your characters will be seen as individuals rather than as trying to be representative of what you think of an entire demographic.