It’s Not About You

I’m going to say a thing. Probably a lot of people won’t like it, but I’m really at the point of saying “too bad.” Because this is exhausting and frustrating and I am just plain old sick of dealing with the ongoing fights in queer author spaces, most of which are driven by white people. So here goes.

Dear white queer non-cis-male people, it’s not about you. #OwnVoices is not about preventing you from your right to issue stories about (mainly white) cis gay men having relationships and/or sex with each other. It’s just not.

Dear white cis gay men, it’s not about you either. You don’t have exclusive rights to the hashtag. #OwnVoices includes you, and you 100% have the right to tell your stories as you see fit. I’m with you. I have your back. But do you have mine? I like to hope so, but I haven’t seen it so far.

There’s some value in having a much calmer and kinder conversation with and about cis gay men who are pushing back against other people writing their stories. I also think it’s worth talking about the cis-hetero allosexual (i.e. not asexual) women who are writing exclusively or primarily about gay cis men, even if they are not the majority.

We should definitely have a discussion about how those stories are written and whether they might be perpetuating some harmful ideas. Yes, even queer people with marginalized identities within LGBTQ+ spaces can do harm. That’s a matter of asking ourselves if a particular story, told in a particular way, might not be ours to tell.

Other things worth discussing are the erasure of women and other non-male people in literature and how certain bodies and identities have priority in queer lit. We should spend some time thinking about the number of queer cis women who are deeply invested in writing exclusively about cis gay and bi men. This troubles me as a person who doesn’t fall neatly into binary gender or sexuality categories. I rarely get to see myself in books. On the rare occasion that I do see something similar, my identity is often treated as something like A Very Special Episode when it’s written by a cisgender person.

And that is why #OwnVoices is so vital to me. I am not here to tell anyone, particularly queer folks, who they can or can’t write about. But I am here to say that there are some things distinctly lacking in any discussion that begins or ends with attacking #OwnVoices.

#OwnVoices is not now, nor has it ever been, about silencing white queer people. It was meant to do the opposite as well as making room for people of color, religious minorities, disabled folks, neurodivergent people, and more to tell our own stories in our own words. It was also meant to allow queer women (cis and trans), trans men, and non-binary folks to tell our stories in our own words. And it was meant to make space for people at the intersections of any combination of those identities.

Cisgender men are socially prioritized. In queer spaces, cis gay men are prioritized. So a queer person who is not a cisgender man writing primarily or exclusively about them is, in general, not a massive problem on its own. People have pointed out, rightly so, that transmasculine folk have used writing about cis gay men to explore gender identity. Bi women have written about bi men for similar reasons. Women’s voices, particularly queer women, have been drowned out for a long time, and this is sometimes a way to be heard (though I would argue a somewhat troubling one). Some have compared writing about cis gay men to gay men doing drag, which I think is apt (and has some equally bothersome elements, which has also been pointed out—both of those can sometimes participate in misogyny, for example).

Obviously this writing can still be done in problematic ways, and that should be addressed. I would suggest that those of us who are not cis gay men and yet are concerned by it should speak up about those elements (overuse of certain demeaning tropes, lack of understanding about issues facing gay men, misogyny, and the framing of certain topics like gay conversion, e.g.). We also ought to apply pressure on actual cisgender, heterosexual, allosexual women regarding how they write about and view our community. That’s not to say cis gay men shouldn’t speak up, but we should show our solidarity here and call-in our peers.

Following that, I would suggest everyone take a couple deep breaths and step back. We all could do with removing cisgender male as the default setting. White cis men are not “normal” with everyone else being “special.” Not in hetero spaces and not in queer spaces and not at the intersections of those with race, disability, and neurodivergence. When the primary thing going on in queer lit is boiling fury over who gets to tell cis gay men’s stories, then everyone else is forced to wonder if our stories are even worth telling.

This is particularly true if we’re not writing about cis lesbians (or aren’t cis lesbians ourselves). Lesbian fiction has its own fully-formed community, with its own issues of who is or isn’t welcome. I don’t want to minimize that or the problems some writers have faced when they don’t follow those rules. But lesfic is still by far less popular and less well-advertised than gay lit. This is magnified for people who don’t fit into a binary system and whose writing doesn’t either.

I’m about to release a new novella, a YA story that is very much #OwnVoices in every way. But because so much attention and energy is devoted to playing tug-of-war with white cis gay men’s stories, I am left wondering if anyone will care. Will they want to read about what it’s like to grow up genderqueer, bisexual, and interfaith during the peak AIDS death years? Or do they just want to fight about whether it’s objectifying to write about Navy SEALs fucking each other?

All I’m asking is that we open our eyes to some much bigger problems in both queer lit and queer real-life circles. We are not always good at being inclusive, and constantly hurting each other over who has more right to uphold the white cis male default is harming all of us.