thetrashiestoftrash:

thetrashiestoftrash:

Just really tired of watching straight writers stumble over why they’re not homophobic for insisting that all their main characters are straight

[Transcript from Neil Gaiman’s reply: I’ve never, ever, ever, anywhere, said that Aziraphale and Crowley are straight. Come on, it’s okay to be mad at me for things I did or said, but you can’t just make things up to be mad about.]

“Canonically, which is to say using the text in the book, you don’t get
any description of Crowley’s sex life. The only thing the book says is
‘angels are sexless unless they specifically make an effort,‘” Gaiman
wrote. “You can infer, and (more to the point) you can imagine, and lots
of people have chosen, not unreasonably, to ship him with Aziraphale,
but you are still Making Stuff Up. It could be Making Stuff Up that
happens between paragraphs, or Making Stuff Up that isn’t mentioned at
all, but it’s still Making Stuff Up.”

There is a much broader trend of authors declaring, definitively, that their main characters are Definitely Straight, and that any interpretation of them as gay goes against their express wishes as the creator of the story. One of the more notorious examples was S. E. Hinton throwing a tantrum on Twitter at the suggestion that Ponyboy and Johnny are in love.

And sometimes it is not as explicit as saying “these two characters are straight, the end.” Sometimes it’s a wink and “well, you know, you can think what you want, so long as you’re aware that I didn’t intend them to be that way.” It’s sort of the authorial version of a guy who shouts “I’m not gay!! Er, not that there’s anything wrong with it,” when another guy flirts with him.

I adore Good Omens. And frankly, it’s a kick in the teeth to make a post about an overarching societal problem (which, if you’ve been here a bit, is something my friends and I have been talking about all day in response to another post that did not reference any specific work), and offhandedly mention in the tags that the current Good Omens hype is dredging up that problem, only for The Author Himself to arrive to… continue doing exactly the thing, honestly, by insisting that he’s never described the characters as straight (when he has definitely made a point of reminding us that gay fanfiction is strictly Making Stuff Up, as if we weren’t painfully aware that we have to create all our own content already).

This is what is exhausting. Authors and other creators are more invested in defending themselves than they are in finding out how they actually hurt people.

To end on a more positive note, K. A. Applegate sets a good example by acknowledging that queer readers deserve to see themselves in stories, doesn’t get defensive, and doesn’t try to pull a J.K. Rowling and claim the representation was there all along:

[Transcript from K. A. Applegate’s Twitter:
Makes @MichaelGrantBks & me so happy 2 think Tobias & Marco gave solace 2 kids reading #animorphs.
In retrospect, tho it was a long time ago, wish we’d done more to
overtly support LGTBQ kids. As 4 character backstories, we leave it up
to the fans to decide. They’re your books!]