Discussion: LGBTQ+ Representation

As the world is slowly changing into a more accepting place, it is becoming increasingly common to find LGBTQ characters in books. However, a lot of the time these characters are just thrown in to show 'diversity' and rarely get their own storylines. Being pansexual and my gender being 'well who tf even knows certainly not me', I've got quite a lot of thoughts I'd like to share with you guys on this matter.

In most series nowadays, there is what I like to call the 'token gay'. This person is generally (but not always) a cisgender white male. They are one of the less important side characters. Most of the time they are shamelessly fetishized by straight females. They are usually single and 'tortured' by their gayness, or perhaps they do have a partner but even then the relationship is always the least developed and it's fairly obvious the author doesn't really give a shit. Sometimes it might be a well developed character but their gayness is brought up ONCE and literally never mentioned again. Unfortunately this is true of one of my favourite authors, Sarah J Maas. Aedion mentions being bi once. Mor has one conversation with Feyre about being gay. Helion is a stereotypical gay guy. It pisses me off when people say SJM has a lot of sexually diverse characters because when you compare them to the amount of straight relationships in her books, there's really nothing. The only way I will call her diverse is if Mor and Viv's sister have a well rounded, emotive relationship in ACOFAS and their relationship actually develops properly.

Another thing authors do that annoy me is confirm that characters are gay outside of the actual book. There is never a hint of it in the actual book itself, but they'll take to Twitter and be like 'I'm so happy to tell you that *insert character name here* is gay! Yes they were gay along!'. Like bitch, no they weren't. You just want to seem more diverse. Unfortunately there is no better example of this than JK Rowling. She takes characters that she probably knows the fandom think are gay and confirms it on Twitter. So far she's done Dumbledore, and confirmed Seamus/Dean is a thing, but she 'didn't want it to distract from Harry's story'. Bitch are you for real?!? It is blindingly obvious that she had not made them gay when originally writing the story, which I can pretty much prove. Dean and Ginny broke up in chapter 22 of THBP, the day of Aragog's funeral which was April the 22nd. We're going to assume Dean was not cheating on Ginny, therefore the earliest time they could have started dating was the end of April, although if I remember correctly Dean was cut up about it for a while so let' s say it takes him a month to properly get over Ginny, so the end of May. As he was dating Ginny he probably isn't secure in his sexuality and would not rush into a relationship with Seamus. So as British school usually breaks up for Summer near the start of July, we have a slightly over a month window for their relationship to begin. Then in DH we know Dean is on the run so he couldn't be with Seamus then. I'm assuming he went on the run straight away, just before the school year started. Therefore there is basically no time for this relationship to have taken place, so fuck you JKR. (I'm actually not 100% sure she did confirm this because I've only see a screenshot of the tweet but eh).

The rarest character of all; the genderqueer character. It's rare to find ANY books at all with genderqueer characters unless the book is specifically about being genderqueer. Even then the best you can really hope for is a trans character. Non-binary, gender fluid, demi-gender...according to 99.999999% of authors, these people don't exist! There really isn't a lot else to say because there is literally no examples for me to give.

Because I don't want to sound like a bitter bitch (I mean, I am one, but that's beside the point), lets talk about authors that are great at LGBTQ representation. Let's start with Rick Riordan. His first series, PJO, had no gay characters. His second series, HOO, had one gay character who was typically depressed by his sexuality (no hate towards Nico, I love that smol boy with every fibre of my being) but hinted at a relationship at the end. I wouldn't know how the Kane chronicles did because I only read the first two and tbh I don't even remember what happened because they were really boring. THEN we get to TOA, where the main character is bisexual, his son is gay and in a cute af relationship! There are also a pair of awesome lesbians! And then the gayest of all, the Magnus Chase series. Magnus' sexuality is whatever, it's not really important which I absolutely love, but more importantly there is a GENDERFLUID character! In a 'children's' book (even though most of his readers are late teens but whatevs)! You have no idea how much this one character means to me. Rick Riordan is a great example of how an author who shows no diversity can change and make his books more representative! He's so great.

I also love Cassandra Clare! Her series have got steadily and steadily gayer too, from one gay couple to many gay couples (pretty sure her gays outnumber her straights which is rare), a trans character, and possible poly relationship in the next book (I will die of happiness if this happens). I'm not going into as much detail here but she's awesome and her characters are all well developed and I would highly recommend her books!

There is still hope with authors like this and hopefully authors will continue to be more accepting of the LGBTQ community and make sure everyone is represented. If you have any thoughts about this topic, let me know! Email me at helloprinceling@gmail.com or DM me on Insta, @booktrillions. Thanks for reading this!

#discussion