Though I write many personal stories and non-fiction pieces, I’m also a novelist. It’s been a long road, and as most writers know, it doesn’t get any shorter. Recently, when asked what I want from publishing, I flashed back to the moment where publishing became my goal.
My daughter reads voraciously. She loves everything from The Great Gatsby to Harry Potter. After she read an early draft of one of my novels, she obsessed over what was meant to be a secondary character. It happened to be a big, gay warrior, in love with a svelte gay concubine.
She talked about them constantly. Even lobbied for another character (a child) to become their foster son. Gave them a ‘ship name. Amused, I wondered what about these characters struck her so much. For some reason it never occurred to me it was because she is also gay, and had not seen enough LGBT characters in Science Fiction/Fantasy. In a society where her ability to have rights often relies upon who is fighting for them in office, I suddenly saw how important it was for her to simply see someone like her in a fantasy world.
In my childhood, the first book I fell in love with was P.C. Hodgell’s God Stalk. I bought it used, and it was the first time I’d seen a female protagonist who was bold and flawed with a quirky sense of honor. Identifying so hard with Jamethiel Priestbane’s always-awkward character, I have followed her story for the over twenty years it’s taken Hodgell to write it. Her character is what made me want to write. I wanted to see other characters I could identify with.
I wanted that for my child. We began scouring SF/F books for LGBTQ inclusion. At the time there were few, or at least that showed the characters in a good light. If I went back to the seventies and eighties I could find a few, but they often contained outdated ideas of gender and sexuality. Mercedes Lackey’s The Last Herald Mage Trilogy is one of the few that mostly held up (though there are definitely some stereotypical ideas about gay men.) I went back through my work, and looked at my LGBT characters in a new light–not just as LGBT characters, but what they might mean to someone.
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I’m excited to say the publishing industry also noted the lack at about the same time. They called for more representation of LGBT (and other underrepresented) stories. Over the past few years, LGBT representation has grown exponentially. From Renly Baratheon in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to Fenris in Beth Cato’s Breath of Earth. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare to The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan. My daughter’s personal library has grown, too, filled with stories that resonate with her the way my first beloved character did for me. In a world where her rights often rely upon legislation and debate, she at least knows she’s loved for who she is in one universe.
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S.M. Roffey is a writer, mother, former early educator, comic book lover, and volunteer cosplayer who lives in the Northeast with her genderqueer spouse and 3 LGBTQ kids. By day she is a virtual assistant to #RevPit’s Jeni Chappelle, and at night she writes adult fiction fantasy. She has studied Anthropology and Early Education, and her personal essays have been featured on The Good Men Project, Shethority, Huffington Post and BlogHer. She is currently writing a novel and blogging about books and writing at www.smroffey.com.
