WRITING GAY

By Sharon May

In the poem “Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes asks “So will my page be colored that I write?” I can’t help but wonder if my writing will be gay. How much does our experience, our gender, our sexual preference, color our pages? 

Obviously, when I write lesbian characters I come to it from personal experience. I don’t know all lesbians but I have a first row seat into lesbian life. As a result, I should be able to create complex lesbian characters.

Despite that experience, I find writing lesbian characters difficult. I struggle to find Cindy’s voice; she is the young intern at the newspaper in the novel I am writing. Is it because she is too much like me that I can’t see her clearly? Or do I have too much material to choose from? Or does my memory of how young lesbians talk and act in the late 1970s escape me? I write female characters who are straight, and they are distinct in motivations, language, and conflicts. So it is something about lesbians I struggle with.

Ironically, I have always found male characters easier to write. It isn’t simply that I find them fascinating; I find women fascinating too. I can‘t say that I understand men or women any better than the other. I don’t identify with men more, though at 12, I had a lot more in common with them than I did my schoolgirl chums. I just can get into male characters quickly, and they are different from one another.

So what role does being a lesbian play in my writing? Am I supposed to write gay because I am gay? I am a lesbian, but I live in a world that is predominately straight, and extraordinarily male-centric in politics, literature, and power. So I walk in both worlds, my own private world and that of straight, male-centric society. I am the Other, just like the African American, Native American, and even the woman writer. As the Other, we usually are expected to normalize our world while capturing its flavor and uniqueness.

Preston has been called a stereotypical gay character by some straight readers as he hates sports, loves to cook, and is a mama’s boy. There are men, straight and gay, who fit this description. Am I stereotyping or capturing a reality?

I do wonder how the gay community will react to Preston as it prefers gays to be depicted as “normal,” like straight characters – if you can call them normal – concerned with daily life, work, and love, not drag shows, bars, and sexual hook ups. Not like Preston, who in the years just prior to AIDS/HIV, spends his time cruising and only looking for sex. He does settle down in the end, so maybe that will satisfy the uneasy reader.

I doubt “straight” writers wonder how their sexuality affects their depiction of their world. They probably don’t feel an obligation to the “straight” community to depict it fairly and justly.