Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.
When I started, there was more of a cultural assumption that many readers would find gay characters irrelevant or repugnant.
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.
Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.
Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.
There are sometimes concerns about being respectful with a gay character, and you either end up with a tiptoeing quality or an all-out cliche.
I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character's sexuality is fascinating. It's a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it's such a personal thing.
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