Back in the bad old days of the early 20th century, queer fiction had to have an unhappy ending in order to get published. Much like the Hays Code required movie villains to get their comeuppance, there was an unspoken rule that homosexual characters needed to come to an unhappy end – and if they died, all the better.
Thus the title of Eric Rofes’ book, I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves, a non-fiction account of queer suicide. I swear I remember a book or movie that the title came from, but I haven’t been able to dig it up online (maybe it’s in Boys in the Band?).
E.M. Forster wrote Maurice, a book with a gay couple who have a happy ending, back in 1913. Because of that, he never tried to get it published. It was published in 1971 after Forster’s death.
By the time I was old enough to read queer fiction in the 1980s, the majority of it fell into three categories (I’m excluding literary queer fiction here):
- Coming out
- Dealing with HIV/AIDS
- What one magazine called “trendy boys in heat” – the trials and tribulations of sex and romance within the white, upper-middle-class set
Coming out and dealing with AIDS are and continue to be perennially important subjects. Lots of queer folks struggle with coming out. If you’ve accomplished it, you also know it’s not a one-and-done. You never stop coming out: every new workplace, friend, trip, etc. is an opportunity for you to do so. And AIDS continues to cast a shadow on the gay community, even with PrEP and HIV treatments.
Once I realized I only wanted to write gay fiction, I decided to take a different direction. I wanted to show:
- Proud gay men,
- Living fulfilling lives, and
- Achieving happy endings.
Stories where being gay could still be an issue in their world, but where the characters had come to terms with their sexual identity and place in society. Gay men (and eventually other queer folk as I broadened my horizons) whose gayness informed their lives, but did not constitute the sum total of them. Flawed, funny, sweet and troubled characters.
I continue to use that definition for every story I write. It’s been my guiding star since 1991, when I wrote my first gay character, a cheery positive pornographer (the story, fortunately, remains unpublished and lost to time).
Fiction is life as the author thinks it should be. Real life has enough unhappy endings; why not create worlds where everyone gets what they deserve* at the end?
*Some characters may not get a happy ending exactly, but all the good ones get some form of self-actualization.