I first learned about gay people when I was three. The house my family rented had been previously occupied by two deeply closeted gay men in the military. One shot the other, and then shot himself. I never learned more about them than that.
A few year’s later, my best friend’s mom, who had been straight her entire life, discreetly moved in with a very butch woman named Paula. She insisted for two years that they were roommates, even after Paula became violent with her, and she had no one to turn to for support.
A few years after that, my own mother relayed her one encounter with “lesbians”––a pair of bisexual girls who seduced her college boyfriend into a threesome, thus ending my mother’s relationship.
A few years after that, a friend pointed out to me the one gay bar in Tucson. I’d seen it many times, but didn’t know what it was. The bar was in a plain, brown square of a building with no sign and the street-facing windows were entirely covered in thick black paint. (They still are.)
The takeaway to my young queer self was obvious: Certain stories should not be told. Certain lives should be buried, or hidden away, out of view. Queerness is not only shameful and obscene, but could very well get you beat up or killed.
Books about queerness when I was growing up weren’t much better, and the unfortunate themes of women-loving-women narratives are marked by fear, secrecy, and violence. Look no further than the bastion of optimism that is The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, “the most depressing lesbian novel ever written,” as one critic put it. Or Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinstein. Both protagonists suffer immense abuse, trauma, and violence due to their gender identity and sexuality. In Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, implied lovers Ruth and Idgie sort of get to live happily for a little while, but first Idgie is tried for murder (Ruth’s abusive husband). Then Ruth gets lady-parts cancer (because of all the sinful scissoring?) and dies. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, protagonist Jeanette is excommunicated from her God-fearing family and town, made homeless, and is forced to survive on her own. And it’s one of the more uplifting stories to come out of the ’80s!
What about movies? A quick tally: High Art (death; drug overdose), Foxfire (mistreatment, attempted rape, abuse), Lost and Delirious (suicide, return to straightness), Heavenly Creatures (murder, life imprisonment), and so on. Even But I’m a Cheerleader, the funny, crowd favorite of the ‘90s, revolves around a queer conversion camp, where literally every queer teen is rejected by their parents simply for being who they are.
Why am I telling you this?
Because words matter. Stories matter. Every tragic end to a queer person––in books, on TV, in films––drops a stone into a bucket of a young, impressionable heart, until one day they are so heavy that they can’t get up, and they don’t even know why.
Of course, a lot has changed in the last 20 years. And we’ve come a long, long way since my (admittedly not wildly progressive) Arizona upbringing. Many more hopeful and nuanced LGBTQ+ narratives are now available, well-received, and well-liked. But in spite of these immense strides, one of the biggest hurdles queer characters’ in media portrayals still face is that they can’t seem to stay alive. Killing off queer characters is so prevalent that it even has a dedicated, ever-expanding trope: Bury Your Gays.
This is why we need more hopeful gay stories. And this is why every story I’ve ever written, including my latest novel, Love Where You Work, has been a rebuttal to the bury your gays trope––and to the horrid messaging that tells queer people we’re expendable, depraved, broken, lesser-than, or confused heterosexuals on brief gay detours. (Another common queer lady narrative, aside from death, is a “return” to straightness.)
Love Where You Work tells an everyday lesbian love story, where the tragedies are limited to not enough alternative milks in the office fridge and a love interest who doesn’t know who Kristen Stewart is. This isn’t to say the characters don’t face hardships; they do. Because we all do. But the hardships aren’t limited to death or invisibility.
Not only do the queer characters NOT die, they learn to live with abundance, joy, and ordinary devotion.
Every day that queer people are alive and happy and resilient (even in fiction) is a rebuttal to those limtiing, untrue narratives that many of us swallowed in our formative years because we never saw the joyous freedom that comes from living authentically, and didn’t know there was an alternative to fear, rejection, or shame.
Hopeful queer stories open doors for people who didn’t know such happiness was possible or that they could wish for it themselves. They show us what new worlds could look like, or old worlds made better, because they’re viewed with new eyes, new dreams, and new visions.
This isn’t to say that we need to view the world (or all of our books) with rose-tinted glasses or pretend that tragic stories don’t exist. They do and they always will. But this is also to say that we can do better. And we must do better.
We need books that showcase not just how we survive, but how we become, and more importantly, how we remain. We need realms filled with the brilliance of queerness that’s not under attack, denial, or threat of violence. We need word seeds and word breaths and word reimaginings that depict the world as inhabitable, joyful, and profoundly, ordinarily alive.
We need this not only for the next generation of queer people––many of whom are already leagues ahead when it comes to knowing who they are and being unapologetic about what they want––but for all people. Yes, straight people benefit from hopeful queer stories, too. If the only representations of a culture or subculture you see are marred by tragedy or stereotypes, then those representations form negative associations and often lead to biases, prejudices, or outright hostility.
I remember reading a book about the famous Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is a way to identify implicit bias (that is, hidden biases we hold that we might not be aware of), including race bias, but also bias against people with disabilities, obesity, and queer people. It’s extremely difficult to decrease one’s implicit bias, and in the book, the author tried over and over again to decrease his bias against Black people. Nothing worked, despite his sincere attempts. And then one day, he took the test and his bias went down, seemingly out of nowhere. He realized it was because he had been watching the Olympics that morning, which showcased the incredible feats and strengths of Black athletes. It was an antidote to the racist and stereotypical images he saw every day. Consuming resilient queer stories can have a similar effect. It’s one of the many reasons why visibility and representation matter.
If you had told the closeted, terrified queer person I was back in Arizona that I would grow up to be very out, proud, and to experience the immense privilege of writing three humorous, radical, queer books (with many more to come), I wouldn’t have believed you. I had no frame of reference. I was too blinded by the mirror society held up for me to see my own stark, vulnerable luminosity.
Every piece of art we create that affirms the truth at our cores is a radical act. It holds a small light up to the darkness that surrounds us, not only for ourselves, but for anyone else who needs to see there’s a universe of possibility waiting for them.
