I Crave Gay Violence

[rynling]

"The fact that this character is of indeterminate gender is irrelevant to the story," the copy editor wrote. "You may want to consider deleting this description."

"On the contrary," I absolutely did not reply, "the cursed Gothic manor being casually inhabited by nonbinary staff and artists isn't hurting anyone, and moreover it's a special treat to me, the nonbinary person writing the story."

Then I did not reach through the computer screen to crush the copy editor's fingers with a hammer.

Comments

[lassarina]

your restraint is epic. fuck that bullshit noise twice with a chainsaw.

[rynling]

Oh for real. I don't think the editor was being homophobic or whatever; I think she was concerned that maybe I was being homophobic... or that I might be mistaken for homophobic? Like maybe she was concerned that I was using nonbinary identity as window dressing. Which, to be fair, I absolutely was. But still. I get to.

It's funny, a lot of what my early academic career entailed was very politely attempting to explain that, if someone is out in the world making reams of gay art, it stands to reason that they're not 100% straight. Back in the mid-to-late 2010s (and unfortunately continuing on Twitter through the present day), it was a serious argument that everyone writing gay fanfic and drawing gay comics was a heterosexual cisgender woman. Which was not true, obviously, but people liked to accuse creators of appropriating queer identity.

And I think that might have been what was going on here, which is all the more reason to throw a chainsaw at it.

[lassarina]

It gets weird, because of course many people are engaging in tokenism, but also the only way to normalize characters who are [queer or any other marginalized identity] is to have them just there doing things. Unwinnable.