During a recent #GayYA chat, Lucas and Robin both expressed dissatisfaction with the term “Just Happening to Be LGBTQ”.  We asked them to tell us more about it . This is Part 2 of the  post they wrote for us on “Just Happening to Be Gay”.  Do you agree?

Robin: I think there is a tendency to lump “about being LGBT” and “coming out stories” in together. Whereas I don’t think either one of those things can ever really stand alone. But whether a character is especially focused right now on coming out or on saving the world or on getting onto a reality TV show or whatever, if they’re LGBT, it’s going to matter.

If two boys are on a date it’s a different thing than a boy and girl going on a date. They have to think about things like “Is it safe for us to hold hands here?” “If he’s not out, then how will we handle it if we see someone we know while we’re out together?” etc. Straight couples, not so much, usually.

Lucas: Not to mention the unknowns of sexuality before the date even happens ― the LGBT community isn’t usually a “visible” minority. If a boy has a crush on another boy, the first thing he has to wonder is, “Is he gay too?” and potentially “How do I ask him out without the risk of getting punched in the face?”

Robin: Oh yes! Yes, this, so much! Looking for tiny signs and then being CRUSHED when you realize you misinterpreted them.

Lucas: Been there!

Robin: “I think she’s into me! She was totally flirting with me during gym! … Wait, why is she making out with that dude?”

OK, now I’m just having flashbacks. This is embarrassing. But anyway! Yes, all the tiny ways in which LGBTness makes day-to-day life, especially dating, a very different animal.

And no, as the writer you don’t have to dwell on those things ― we always have to make choices about what to include in our stories. So one could decide to leave that stuff out, if one were primarily concerned with making the character’s sexuality NOT the focus of the story. But then, I would argue, one would be a disingenuous storyteller. Disingenuous to LGBT teens, who deserve to have their entire stories told, because that hasn’t actually been happening for very long.

Lucas: I think even if you don’t focus on it in your writing, it still has to be present, or the character isn’t realistic.

I think there’s such a breadth of what stories do need to be told. All aspects of LGBT life, especially in high school.

It doesn’t need to be about coming out ― though we still absolutely need coming out stories. But LGBT teens need all the types of stories that straight teens have had for decades. We’ve had the stories about drug addiction, for instance. But how is that different when the addict is LGBT? Does that affect why they’re an addict, or how they deal with it, or the other problems they must deal with simultaneously?

Robin: Also? This may be controversial but I think even in gay-utopia alternate universes where coming/being out isn’t an issue, I still want to know stuff about the character’s LGBTness.

Lucas: Absolutely. Just because it’s a non-issue culturally doesn’t mean it’s not going to affect the person. They still have to deal with being in the minority, for instance.

And (speaking of controversial), while escapism is certainly nice, and I’d like to think about a world in which being LGBT is completely within the norm, if you manage to write a story where being LGBT would truly not affect the character at all (which as the entire previous discussion suggests, I don’t think is really possible), that seems to no longer be dealing with an issue that speaks to me as a gay person. To me, reading about an LGBT character is about dealing with being an LGBT person, even if just in the small ways.

Robin: Wow. Hmm. I can see that. I can also see the case, though, for losing yourself in a fairy-tale-like world with yourself cast as the hero, where you don’t have to suspend disbelief about the heterosexual romance. I think that holds particular value for teens who truly just want to forget about their LGBTness for a while.

Like, I watched Princess Bride over and over and over when I was eleven, and if there had been a Princess Bride with Wesley as a chick, I’d have watched it at least 80 gazillion more times.

Lucas: Ha! A fair point! And I certainly can’t speak for all LGBT people or writers out there. But even then, as we’ve discussed, it would make a difference to the story, small as it may be.

Robin: Right! If, in Princess Bride, Wesley had been a chick, it would have totally emasculated Prince Humperdinck. Even better comeuppance! But I would want to see Prince Humperdinck actively addressing the fact that Wesley was a chick and that he, the Prince, was obviously not doing it for Buttercup in that department.

But mostly they’d all still just have spent the movie running around the hills swordfighting and such, same as ever.

Lucas: Haha, yep! And Buttercup would too have been dealing with more than just not being in love with Humperdinck.

No matter the situation, making a character LGBT is going to affect the story. Even if it’s just in a small way! It is, in fact, those small ways that matter most.

They’re what make the difference between a character trait like that being tacked on, and having actual organic, realistic characters and situations.

Robin: Yes. And the dangerous thing is when you try to write around those traits in the name of making sure your character “just happens to be” whatever.

Well-rounded characters are well-rounded in every single aspect of their being. You need to sit and think about the impact of every single aspect of your character’s identity on how they act, how their lives work, etc. Even when it’s hard. As it often is when we’re writing about characters who are different from us.

Lucas: And it needs to be a conscious choice. If you do it, do it because it’s what right, because it’s what you want to do. Not just to have a token LGBT character (who “just happens to be” LGBT)!

For those of us who are, it does affect us in huge ways. There’s not a day goes by that the fact that I’m gay doesn’t make some difference in my life. Even if it’s that I had the opportunity to take part in this chat!

Robin: Haha, yes. (Although of course our ever-lovable non-LGBT friends are welcome to chat as well. GayYA is a discrimination-free zone!)

What about the rest of you? How do you feel about the “just happens to be” terminology, if you’ve come across it before?

Lucas J.W. Johnson writes speculative fiction, queer fiction, and YA fiction — often all at once. Visit him at http://lucasjwjohnson.com, http://silverstringmedia.com or on Twitter at @floerianthebard.

Robin Talley writes LGBT YA and apparently spends a lot of time thinking about lesbian versions of Cary Elwes. Visit her at http://www.robintalley.com or on Twitter at @robin_talley.

During a recent #GayYA chat, Lucas and Robin both expressed dissatisfaction with the term “Just Happening to Be LGBTQ”.  We asked them to tell us more about it . This is Part 1 of a 2 Part post they wrote for us on “Just Happening to Be Gay”.  Enjoy! (Update for #BestofGayYA readers: Part 2 is up here!) 

Robin Talley: So we discovered in a recent #gayya chat on Twitter that we’re both peeved by, and have gone so far as to blog about, the frequently expressed desire by many readers to see more books with characters who “just happen to be LGBT.”

Now, I can understand where people are coming from when they say this, but nonetheless it drives me up the wall. And you too, right?

Lucas J.W. Johnson: Absolutely. I’ve seen it when talking about real people too. And I know what they’re meaning to say. They’re meaning to be supportive, to say that being LGBT isn’t the only thing that defines a character. Which is true. But that’s not the end of the story.

Robin: Right, totally. I think with books people usually just use the phrase as a shorthand term for when they really mean something like, “I wish there were more paranormal thrillers with LGBT characters in them.” Which is obviously a very understandable desire.

Lucas: Yes, and one that I share! The problem I find with it is that the shorthand term almost seems to downplay that part of the character, like them being gay isn’t really important.

Robin: Absolutely. If a character is LGBT, I as a reader WANT to know about that aspect of the character’s life. I want to know about it now as an adult reader, but I would’ve wanted to know about it a lot more when I was 16.

People don’t just “happen” to be anything. And there’s a certain dismissive tone to the “just happens to be” phrase that I think is generally not intended. Just “happening” to be LGBT is not the same thing as just happening to have green eyes.

Lucas: Exactly. Unlike, as you say, having green eyes, being LGBT hugely affects a person in many many ways.

Robin: It very much does. If the main character of a story is knowingly LGBT, and the story doesn’t take place in an alternate universe in which sexual orientation and/or gender identity is a complete non-issue, then to some degree the book has to be at least a little bit “about” that, if it’s an authentic representation of the character’s life.

Lucas: Yep. You can’t just pass off that aspect of the character. It will affect how they grew up and developed, their relationships with parents and friends, obviously their love life, and their relationship with society as a whole.

Robin: And little day-to-day things too. Especially if we’re talking about high school, where your social life is your ENTIRE life.

Lucas: And not only is the social life your entire life, but it’s when you’re first really discovering your sexuality, having your first relationships… It’s hugely important.

Robin: Not to mention that the bulk of teenagers’ time that is not actively engaged in the having of a social life is spent talking with other teenagers ABOUT their social lives.

When I was a teenager I didn’t read books with LGBT characters, because I didn’t know such things existed (I was stuck furtively renting Go Fish from my local independent video store for cultural representations of lesbianism, which messed me up but good), but if I had, and the story hadn’t addressed that aspect of the character’s life, I’d have been pretty darn frustrated. I mean, the entire reason I started watching Buffy was to see Willow get her gay on.

Lucas: Ha, right??

As a writer, choosing to make a character LGBT isn’t something I can just tack on. It’s not like I plot out a story, develop some interesting characters, and then say “Oh, hey, one of these guys should be gay,” and then make it so. It’s a conscious part of developing a character, and an integral part of a character’s development.

Robin: Totally. My protagonists are always LGBT (though sometimes the particular letter in question surprises me), so I always know that out of the gate, and that informs every decision I make about them when I’m constructing them. I have to decide who they’re out to, when they came out to themselves, how much self-loathing they’re dealing with, how their particular set of friends feels about their orientation and/or identity, how it’s affected their relationships with their lifelong BFFs, and on and on and on. Not to mention figuring out how the LGBT social circles work in their particular environment, community, universe, etc.

Lucas: And even minor characters should have enough of a character of their own to warrant that choice having some effect on the actual writing of the character.

Robin: Totally. One of my favorite things to see in a book is an LGBT side character whose sexual orientation or gender identity is organically woven into the story in a really interesting way, even if it’s not integral to the main plot. My favorite example of this is always the best friend character in How to Ditch Your Fairy — her crush on an older female athlete is just tossed into a scene offhandedly, but it feels very natural. Though I have to admit, I’d always rather the LGBT character take center stage rather than being a side character.

Lucas: Right. When I’m writing a main character who’s gay, and it’s not the primary focus of the story to any degree, it’s not about him coming out or dealing with the reactions of people around him ― but he still has to deal with the reactions of people around him, and he still has different love interests and difficulties than he would were he straight. It affects everything he does and deals with, even in just a small way.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 of Lucas and Robin’s conversation coming tomorrow! In Part 2, they discuss coming out stories, utopian worlds, The Princess Bride and writing Gay YA!

Lucas J.W. Johnson writes speculative fiction, queer fiction, and YA fiction — often all at once. Visit him at http://lucasjwjohnson.com, http://silverstringmedia.com or on Twitter at @floerianthebard.

Robin Talley writes LGBT YA and apparently spends a lot of time thinking about lesbian versions of Cary Elwes. Visit her at http://www.robintalley.com or on Twitter at @robin_talley.

Young adult is a category filled with the documentation of firsts—first love being one of the most common. Any story about a teenager is going to be about self-discovery. So it stands to reason that a lot of books about GLBT (or “queer” to cover the gamut and then some) teens will be in large part about the process of coming out.

Personally, I was 28 when I came out and it felt like being 15 again. So if being a teen is about coming out, coming out can sometimes seem an awful lot like being a teen.

That said, some readers are beginning to bemoan the lack of other stories in Y/A with major queer characters. Does every book about queer teens have to be about coming out?

I say absolutely not. Coming out may be an angsty, teen-y experience in many ways, but it is not always so very angsty as to merit a whole novel. Other stories need telling, too. For the kid (or adult reading over a kid’s shoulder) for whom coming out isn’t or wasn’t an earth-shattering process, or for the ones who just want to read about something else, having lived enough of it already, those stories could and should take all kinds of forms.

The fact is that once you’ve gotten past that initial hump of coming out to yourself and to the most important people in your world, it’s not all that interesting to be queer anymore. “Gay” Y/A is going to start needing more than “gay” as a theme if it hopes to engage readers.

As a lesbian in an eight-year (extralegal) marriage with two kids under seven, I can attest to the fact that marriage is pretty much just marriage. My annoyances with my partner are much the same as my straight friends’ annoyances with their husbands. And while living in a heterosexist culture may impact my life in negative ways (eg: the extralegality of my marriage), so does living in a patriarchal culture as a woman, so does living in a racist culture as the (white) mother of African American children

Cultural biases definitely impact people’s lives, but let’s face it, the romance novels people love don’t dwell very much on how much sexism sucks, even though the main characters are usually women. The stories are much more about the specific details of the main characters’ circumstances. While sexism may put certain hurdles in a heroine’s way—perhaps she has to buck convention and marry someone her father doesn’t like—the story is about her relationship with the hero—not the argument with her father.

It is not the duty of fiction writers to make anyone a better person, nor to educate anyone nor to throw life rafts to the drowning. But fiction does have the potential for those kinds of effects (and their opposites and much in between). And if expanding the horizons of readers in general, giving queer kids a glimpse of how It Gets Better, or just affirming that they are people, are people, are people just like their peers, is anywhere at all on a writer’s list of goals, portraying the just-plain-human nuances of relationships between characters who are also queer, should be a to-do.

There are plenty of ways to do it. I have a young adult work-in-progress set in the past and another (not Y/A) work-in-progress set in the future. Both feature many lesbian characters and include strong romantic subplots. Neither book deals much with “coming out” or homophobia, but I consider both to be realistic portrayals of lesbian life and love. How can that be?

My historical story is set in the 1870s and ‘80s, partly in the slums of New York City and partly in the mining country of the Arizona Territory. One of my main characters has been passing as male since running away from an orphan’s home at age nine. At the end of the story, s/he is 19 and happy to be a “man.” Her love interest is conventionally female and their relationship is not worthy of much scrutiny because it passes as heterosexual. As for the self-discovery that they love members of the same sex, it would be historically inaccurate to have them too upset about that. For one thing, passionate relationships between women were acceptable—even committed, life-long ones—in the Victorian era, for another thing, both of my characters accept the passing boy as male. S/he is male-with-a-difference to be sure, but basically, male.

The futuristic story is simply set far enough into that future to imagine that people just don’t care that much about sexuality and gender boundaries the way they do now. One reader was confused by this. She wanted to know why these women weren’t more worried about the impact of being lesbians. Then she wanted me to add an explanation to the story of why they weren’t. I reminded her that in the 21^st century, we rarely worry about being traded into arranged marriages as teens by our fathers, the way women did five hundred years ago. Nor do we ever sit around discussing how nice it is that we need not worry about that anymore. (Well, most of the time we don’t!)

Instead of being about being lesbians, my futuristic story is about challenges to the human race, as faced by two lead characters who struggle with having opposite values while being really attracted to each other. Oh, and they’re both women.

If we can’t imagine different worlds, we’ll never solve any of the problems in this one. Those different worlds could be frontier pasts, futuristic starships, or the internal landscape of an ordinary kid in the contemporary world who just cares more about the fight he had with his boyfriend yesterday than the fact that he has a boyfriend, rather than a girlfriend.

Shannon LC Cate is a write-from-home lesbian housewife and adoptive mom. She writes about writing at ShannonLCCate.com and about family life at Peterscrossstation.wordpress.com. You can find her on Twitter as @LilySea.

When I was a teenager, I faithfully devoured all six or so books I could get my hands on that had lesbian main characters. These were overwhelmingly coming out stories, and most of them left me balling my eyes out because of how depressing they were. The movies weren’t much better. Enter the world of fanfiction. Now that was something I could get behind! Okay, maybe they weren’t always the most well written stories, but at least they were about something besides coming out. I quickly began writing my own, and after many years of that I decided to branch off into something of my own.

Morning Rising was inspired by a friend’s issues with drugs, the ups and downs came so fast it was almost too much to handle. One day I sat down and started writing this, putting all that emotion to good use. Don’t be worried, it’s not an issues book or anything, it’s a fantasy novel all the way through. It follows Kara, sixteen and quietly in love with her best friend Dylan, as she wakes up in the world of Inbetween and learns there is so much more behind Dylan and her friendship than she could have guessed. Dylan is a princess from the Daylands, and Kara is her Guardian. They were both sent to the human world to hide Dylan from Demitar, the ruler of Inbetween, who wants to claim her because she was born of light and darkness. Whichever side she chooses, she will become their most powerful ally. As her Guardian, Kara is the only one who can help Dylan choose the side of light.

The book is pretty much everything I wanted to read when I was younger (and still do). The hero is a girl, a pretty bad-ass one if I do say so, and she gets to save the princess! They fight bad guys and use their magical powers, and sometimes they even get to kiss. This is what I was dying for. I know there are many fantasy novels aimed at adults in this genre, but I want some teen angst, not the risk of full blown, detailed sex scenes.

Now I would love to see this book sell amazingly, and I would love to see a movie made out of it. Unfortunately, even if the book does find an audience that falls in love with it, I know Hollywood isn’t out there making epic fantasy movies that center around a couple of teenage lesbians. That sucks. Why do they think there wouldn’t be an audience for it? Why does the story have to be defined by the two people who fall in love in it?

A lot needs to change before we will see shelves lined with books that feature gay characters as more than a stereotype or joke, by putting Morning Rising out into the world, I feel like I’m doing my part.

Morning Rising is the first in the Guardian of Morning series and is available for the Nook and Kindle for .99cents now!

Samantha Boyette lives in upstate New York. Her short stories have been featured in various websites and books, and she was the co-winner of the 2010 Textnovel.com online writing contest. To learn more visit www.SamanthaBoyette.com