The Importance of Gay Heroes That Don’t Die

There are many tropes. Busty, blonde damsels. Brittle, brunette mistresses. Feisty, red-headed warriors. Alternatively: White-Male-Hero-With-Somnolent-Eyes-Yet-Aerodynamic-Cheek-Bones vs. Anything. Or the ever-plotless vengeance against a villain with no real motivation for villainy save an inscrutable need to inconvenience Our Hero. We know these tropes well. They’re practically family. If one came to your door and asked to come in, you might check for a judicious nod from your mother, but you’d open that door.

A lot of people defend these tropes with the tired line: “Stereotypes exist for a reason!” But this isn’t true. “A Reason” implies pragmatism independent from the subject in question. With tropes, as with all stereotyped impressions, the ‘Reason’ is the persistent employment of the trope itself. Stereotypes reproduce themselves through psychic breeding only, taking novel concepts and warping them into familiar perceptions for the sake of the trope’s survival. It’s easy. It’s an algorithm that derives a kernel of false recognition for us to swallow and be happy with, knowing we’ve understood something for what it is.

But we haven’t. Not really, because tropes are such nastiness. And–while a great deal has been written on the subject of tropes at large–I’ve spent a lot of time combating one trope in particular. And it’s the oldest trope there is.

Heterosexuality. Specifically in heroes.

Anthropology (and the Ivory Bungalows of Social Science In General) have a lot of words to delineate heterosexuality: heternormativity and heterosexiness are my favorite. I’m not going to parse these terms in this post, but I’ll simplify my aim here: stories featuring gay characters exist, but examining the narratives of these characters reveals their true use, which is often to reflect and condone the dominance of heterosexuality through the demise of something homosexual.

Exceptions to this exist, but as a general rule you’re going to find a necessary note of tragedy rotating around a gay character, and it’s almost always tethered to their alternative sexuality.

These are important stories to tell, because in many ways they are reflective of a larger narrative that is lived every day in the many particulate lives that make up the LGBT*Q community. But the Tragic Gay Character isn’t everyone’s story, and it’s not unreasonable to expect literature to populate itself with a variety of portraits–some tragic and some triumphant–that may or may not concern someone’s minority status.

I was never in the closet. Not really. I might have thought I was in a closet growing up, but it was a very transparent closet, and my brief foray into ‘bisexuality’ was a perfunctory performance at best (sorry 8th grade girlfriends Hannah and Destiny!). I recognize the novelty in my situation (and I confront my privilege readily), but I must also admit that I felt a certain amount of shame merging with The Queer Community without some trial of traumatic tumult. Everyone had these lovely triumphs, these stories that tested their metal, and all I had was a photograph of myself as a toddler wearing my grandmother’s clip-on earrings.

(Diamonds, tastefully set within golden filigree frames, thank you very much).

Call me irresponsible, but I’d love to see a character, in fiction or fantasy or otherwise, with a substantive journey from A to B, with accomplishments of the body and spirit, with a simmering romance and steady imperfections…that is also coincidentally gay. Or trans*. Or ambivalent about labels. Or just not straight.

Call me reckless, but I’d love to see a plot that twists through mazes of mystery, that hurtles over heavy upsets, that crashes headlong into immovable opposition, that winds itself through the hairline cracks of conflict, that blooms into smooth epiphany…and has next to nothing to do with a character’s homosexuality. Or a male-bodied character’s mid-morning decision that yes, today is the day I put on those high heels and actually leave the house so that the world will experience me as I experience me, which is as a lady.

It’s okay to normalize these identities in literature, movies, and shows, because these mediums are often fictional in content, and so the fact of a character’s unquestioned identity can be lent a fantastical legitimacy. The lack of bigotry towards a gay character (as they slay dragons and barter with fairies and transcend laws of space-time) should not be the snag that makes a reader go, “Well, this is baffling.”

What’s baffling is this: As a gay person, I was raised by media that told me my most noble use was self-immolation. I was taught that my heroism is derived from my persecutions, and not my actions, and that’s never been true for me. Not once. 

So, by all means, kill off your novelty gay character through sacrifice, or perhaps a lust-driven pivot towards villainy, but make sure you’re not capitalizing on the aberration of their identity when you decide they don’t make it to the end. Make sure it isn’t, in fact, their sexuality that excludes them from the winner’s podium. Because that podium is markedly straight (and white, and male), and it’s bland to look at, and for many of us it’s hard to celebrate the Humanity of these fables when any character that looks like us, talks like us, acts like us, or resembles us in any way, is the means to an end they will never see.

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Toni Morrison has many incredible quotes, but my favorite is, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Well thank you, Toni. I’m trying 🙂

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