By Rachel Greene, © Dragonsteel
As the New Year passes, and we’re all starting to recover from the holidays, I thought I’d finally write something I’d been considering. I was going to make such a post before Wind and Truth came out, but things got busy—and beyond that, this felt like an issue to let the community talk about for a while before I weighed in. So, with an eye toward my more conservative readership, let’s talk about why I think it’s important to put gay people in my books.
When I was a teenager, first discovering fantasy, I enjoyed the Dragonlance books. I still remember—to this day—the powerful effect it had on me to read, in the author’s bios, that Tracy Hickman was a member of my same church. I lived in Nebraska, in a region without a lot of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—I believe I was the only one in my entire grade at a rather large school.
Discovering Tracy was a member of the Church meant something relevant to me. It made the job of being a novelist more real to me. Rationally, I didn’t need such validation—anyone can be a novelist and write whatever they want—but to a young man who often felt an outsider, this was a powerful statement of possibility. I will be forever grateful to Tracy for adding that little off-handed tidbit in his bio at the end of the books, mentioning that he liked to play organ at his local LDS congregation.
One of the next book series I read was Rose of the Prophet, also by Tracy and his writing partner Margaret Weis. I ended up liking this series even more than Dragonlance, and while it’s a been a long time, (and I can’t honestly say how well the approach to an Arabian-inspired fantasy holds up in a world with much more attention on such things), I maintain a deep and abiding fondness for it. In that series, one of the main protagonists is gay—and though such things weren’t talked about as overtly in Rose of the Prophet as they might be today (it was the 80s), the text made very clear his orientation, and included a same-sex romantic plotline.
As a youth reading this, I was at first confused. Wasn't the gay character a representation of the “them” in the “us vs them” of the world? Why, then was he written with such positivity? When we are young, our perspectives tend to be binary in this way; I should like to think that as we age, we are able to add more nuance to this thought process and conversation. But before I dig further into this, let me tell you about reading A Study in Scarlet around the same time—one of the original Sherlock Holmes novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. I was a big fan of the series, and read through the entire collected works, starting with the short fiction and ending with the longer works.
To my surprise, I found in A Study in Scarlet a rather bad and inaccurate portrayal of my religion, and the history around it. It was a shockingly weak section in an otherwise excellent story. (And, if you think this is going too far, do know that Mr. Doyle later apologized—in person, in Salt Lake City—for the portrayal, which was made without the proper research.)
I realized something that day: authors write for a lot of reasons, and I’m not one to pick which reasons are better or worse. But in my case, I wanted to do as Tracy had done, and try my best to portray people different from myself with care, attention, and respect. I came out of the Rose of the Prophet series feeling extremely grateful to Tracy for trying his best to be the person who expressed what I feel is the soul of New Testament teachings: love and empathy.
Was Tracy and Margaret’s perspective on this matter the most authentic? I can’t honestly say, as I don’t know what their own backgrounds are; I’ve met both, but my conversations with them have been surface level. I’m certain that many people reading this can point to stories where the author’s lived experience does an excellent job of expressing what it is to be gay. I don’t think this was the goal that Tracy or Margaret had; it is my impression they didn’t try to express what it is to “be gay.” They had a character they wanted to write, and if they were going to write him, they wanted to do it well.
If I want people to use empathy, research, and respect when they write about someone like myself—unlike what Mr. Doyle did—then I need to do the same for everyone I write about. Because of this, those have become my ideals: empathy and respect.
When I approach a character, particularly a primary viewpoint protagonist, I don’t look at the larger political spectrum;, I look at the individual needs of that specific character. I speak to primary sources who are similar to my character in many ways. I do my research, and learn how people want to be portrayed. I try to get inside the character’s head this way, and do my best to represent them in a genuine, respectful way. Because that is how I want to be treated.
I want to live in a world where we always give each other the benefit of the doubt. If that is to be the case, I must make efforts to do that myself.
It is not my place to tell people how to respond to my work. This post isn’t here to attempt to do so. However, because of my faith, I know that some of you out there might be experiencing some of the same confusion that I did as a young man wondering about “us” and “them.” Others of you out there may be confused why this post is even necessary, since the fact that gay people exist indicates that merely including them, and their lives, in stories shouldn’t be controversial.
Still, I feel it important to explain—as my entire professional life, I’ve tried to pull back the curtain regarding my process. So, I aim these words toward those of you on the more conservative end, who genuinely wish to know what is going on inside my head. And I wouldn't mind, when these discussions appear, if you linked to this post to give at least some nuance to the conversations.
I do consider myself an ally to LGBT+ people, and you can find more of my feelings on that elsewhere. However, that’s not why I wrote Renarin as gay. I wrote Renarin the way I did—multifaceted, with a great number of things making up who he is—because I wanted to try seeing through his eyes, and if I was going to do so, I needed to do it well. That is something I consider to be an artistic mandate. I also consider it a religious one, as I best relate to the teachings of Christ in the context of trying to understand my neighbor.
I created Renarin as a character long before this was as much of a hot-button issue as it is now; a time when I leaned a different direction politically. This was always going to be his path. I long for the days where not every choice had to be a statement—but maybe that world never existed. Maybe there will always be an instinct to divide the world into the “us” and “them.” I was very capable of doing that by myself back in the 80s, with no internet or social media to spur me on.
So let me just say this: Renarin’s story in these books is the one I wanted to tell for him from the beginning. I’m not trying to indoctrinate or placate. Nor is doing things like this a recent development for me. I put the first openly gay men into the Wheel of Time back over a decade ago, because I felt it was who they were as expressed in Mr. Jordan’s notes. My plan was for Renarin to be gay when I wrote Way of Kings Prime in 2002.
Why? Because my stories are the way I explore the world, and the way I understand the people in it. And this is the way that I attempt to achieve one of my primary goals in life, that of learning to be more empathetic.
Brandon
