Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 1 - Representation

I wanted my first blog post in this series to be about something that I hold incredibly dear to my heart: representation.

As someone within the LGBT+ community, I feel that it is imperative for my writing to give instances of representation.

Anyone who strives for representation will be asked of their characters, "But why do they have to be (insert minority)?", and of their writing, "Aren't you just shoving it in your readers' faces?"

My answers:
1. Why shouldn't they be?
2. The fact that you perceive it that way proves its necessity

Futures Gleaming Darkly was intentionally written with queerness in mind. I not only wanted to come up with speculative fiction about my daydreams of future technologies, but how they would impact and be interacted with by LGBT+ folks.

For example, how would a new dating app work for a pansexual person as seen in Stoplight?

In other cases, I just had the stories focus around trans, gay, lesbian, etc. people because those kinds of people are real and deserve characters based on them.

For example, in Bubble, our protagonist is a gay man who has a boyfriend that he talks to via videochat. He very well could have been straight and had a girlfriend, but why would that be any better or different than him being gay?

Good representation provides normalcy. Bubble is not about the protagonist's coming out journey and does not muse on how being gay makes him different. He is in a relationship with someone he misses very much, and that's something a vast majority of us can relate to. While I am a gay person, it does not define my life, it is just a facet of it.

Furthermore, characters in any piece of fiction are just people. This provides a unique viewpoint for some readers, making the connection that a trans person thinks and feels in the same manner as anyone else. They get hungry, they have to work jobs they don't like. However, they have experiences and voices that are different and valid.

For others, it gives them comfort to see aspects of themselves in media.

When I was growing up, I was starved for representation. It's something that we can take for granted very easily. Even as gay male characters get more and more recognition or cameos in primetime television shows, which still doesn't feel like enough, many others are falling to the wayside. Bi erasure comes to mind, in particular.

Representation is one of those issues for me wherein its solution is in its practice. When LGBT+ and people of color characters are just as "commonplace" as others, it will be resolved.

Until and even after then, I will write LGBT+ characters because they have every right to exist.