“I Love That You Made Him Gay”
When I was 20 years old, I wrote a science fiction novella which for all its narrative potential was flawed beyond structural and grammatical repair. I had just started to take writing seriously and made all the common mistakes new writers make: abounding clichés, barely-fleshed scenes, a cringe-worthy voice more amused with itself than the story. Despite these problems which, at the time, I had no idea how to repair, I knew the story had a heart.
The heart belonged to a man whose male friend had been hijacked and murdered in the depths of space and who had lost his parents the same way, in front of his eyes, as a child. And while he seemed on one hand to be a hackneyed, hard-boiled detective zooming around the future as the Everyman Space Opera Anti-Hero, seeking revenge against his friend’s killer, underlying this was something that made him resonate with me.
My protagonist loved his friend. He understood the impermanence of life, and he had found someone who he truly loved more than himself. I knew this as soon as I had finished writing the novella, which ended with the protagonist standing over his friend’s coffin, talking to him as if over mugs of coffee, with a familiarity we are lucky to have even once with someone in our lives.
When I had an acquaintance read over the manuscript, the acquaintance commented that the final scene was the most poignant of the story.
Then the acquaintance said, “I love that you made him gay.”
I was surprised. I didn’t have any opposition to writing gay characters, but that wasn’t the way I had seen the character when writing his story. I had seen the bereaved and the deceased as fraternal childhood friends. I thought, what about the story indicated that the protagonist was gay? As if it was just another error in the narrative that needed fixing.