Yes, yes, I hear you say, that's all very interesting and you're a clever chap who uses big words and quotes Aristotle and posts pictures of Simone de Beauvoir's ass, but what does it mean for the storytelling? (Or, I might be hearing the voices again...mustn't rule that out.) I can only tell you what it means for my storytelling, which is fortunate, because this little solipsistic corner of the web is in fact largely about me.
There's a certain kind of character arc that deals with a person who's coming to grips with his own transgressive nature--coming out of the closet, for example. The tale centers on the internal struggle, the external hardships, and, if everything goes well, at the end of it all the character stands revealed as whole, fully clothed in his new personhood.
I'm not interested in that kind of story.
At one point when I was figuring out my own freakiness it was good to hear tell of others who were doing the same thing, but now that I've got all that settled such stories just don't move me the way they used to. I'm interested in characters who have normalized themselves, who are surrounded by people who've done the same. No tortured internal conflicts about identity, no confronting a hostile world from a place of uncertainty. What I'm interested in are the freaky characters who meet the world from the same solid place of courage and conviction as non-freaky characters. Most of the heroes of contemporary popular fiction don't suffer from questions about their heterosexual white male- or femaleness while they're fighting wizards or making out with vampires. As far as the fundamental facets of their identities go, they're settled. This frees up story space for more important things like spells and fangs and explosions.
It also frees up space for extraordinary things to happen to people just because they happen to get caught up in events, rather than because of who they are. A fine example of this is what Joss Whedon did with the character of Tara Maclay. Sure, she was a lesbian, but that was less important than the fact that she was a kick ass witch, and when she got shot and killed, it was because she was in the path of a random bullet that had nothing to do with homophobia. She died a fine and senseless death, just like any of Whedon's other characters might.
That's what I'm all about right now: characters for whom their transgressive nature is simply part of who they are, as unremarkable as the most whitebread citizen living in the most ordinary town in all of flyover country.
Which sounds dull...until you think about about what polyamorous, bisexual, and transgendered characters who have completely normalized their sexual proclivities might be like. Now, I'm betting--and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--that most of you aren't rampaging bisexual polyamorist transsexuals who would greet such characters with a profound Meh. These are folks who have made the unusual usual. They're perfectly happy, except insofar as they've got the same problems as anybody else--firebombings, destruction of major cities, living in a surveillance state, that sort of thing.
The reason I'm doing this is simple: I've had enough of people being defined by what they do with their genitalia. I'm tired of gay, straight, bisexual, and the whole LGBTQI letter salad. I want to read stories about people who've moved beyond the sexuality-as-identity framework, so that's what I'm writing now.
In other words: I want to normalize transgression.
Which pretty much means I want to do exactly what the Falwells and Robertsons of the world say The Homosexuals™ want to do with their pernicious agenda.
And that amuses me to no end.
Ian Wood lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he used to threaten to write novels before deciding to actually write one. His fiction has appeared in Thieves Jargon, Letras Libres, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Underground Voices. You can find him online at www.writebastard.com.
Permanently archived: http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/48-non-fic/248-0710-wood3
Shortlinked: http://frsh.in/cw
