Discussing YA: How Queer Characters Make Your Book More Realistic

Look, queer people exist. You don't have to like us, you don't have to want to write about us. But we exist. And if your fictional world doesn't at least acknowledge that we exist, it's gonna feel unrealistic, and at least a third of your readership is going to think you have ingrained homophobic tendencies. Seriously.

I can not tell you how many times I've had the immersive experience of a book ruined simply because it felt so unrealistic that every character in it was heterosexual.

And the thing is, you don't even need to write queer main characters. I mean, you should, yeah. Representation is important, and a big chunk of getting over ingrained self-hatred and internalized homophobia is about seeing healthy, happy reflections of yourself represented in fiction. But that said, if you, for some reason, be it personal preference or publisher interference or just the fact that you're one of those trash human beings who really thinks queer people are evil, don't want to or can't, write queer main characters, you can still include them.

Stephanie Perkins included two gay dads in Lola and the Boy Next Door, which created valuable representation and added a note of realness to the novel, but they were still minor, background characters. Kiera Cass mentions that girls can like girls without ever introducing a lesbian character in her book The Heir, and Marie Lu show both minor and major characters having same sex attractions without it taking up the focus. Jessica shirvington had a gay couple develop as frenemies, to friends, to lovers in her Violet Eden series, while only confirming it as romantic in the last book.

You can include diverse depictions of humanity's interaction with sexuality and gender without it being all about that, or taking focus from other aspects of your work.

Look, I'm not here to argue that queer people aren't evil. Why? Because it's 2016, and I don't feel like I should have to defend us in that way. If you're still hanging onto those beliefs, you're delusional, and I can't cure mental illness and paranoia through a computer screen.

What I can do is reason with you, so here's some reasoning: ignoring the existence of queer people, no matter what you think about us, both marginalizes a chunk of potential readership and also makes your art suffer.

It doesn't feel realistic to read a book where every single character falls into a straight romance with a heteronormative bow wrapped around it.

It doesn't feel realistic to read a book where every single character is just presumed to be straight when we know so little about them.

It doesn't feel realistic (or entertaining) to read a book where characters so obviously fall into a storyline or situation where an exploration of their sexuality or deviation from the straight 'norm' would make for a better journey or story, and watch it not happen.

I can name a slew of YA books where queer people just ... don't exist. Readers can handle queer characters. What's more, we want them.

A large fraction of your readers, even if they aren't queer people themselves, know someone who is gay, have a relative who is lesbian, are in a club at school with a kid who's trans, are talking online with peers who are asexual - if you think they aren't ready for this representation, or that they aren't actively interested in reading it, you're dead wrong.

There is no end to the benefits of writing a queer character, or having these conversations. At the end of the day, the only one you really need is this, though: we exist. We exist in the real world, and our absence in your books is out of place, a glaring elephant in the proverbial room, and it hurts the quality and tone of your work.

If you're too afraid to write queer characters because you think it will somehow bog down or ruin the entire book to have a gay person in it, you should probably be worried about your writing skills as a hole. Just saying.