deborahjross | Entries tagged with queer issues

"Sadly, in the first years after Ryan came out, I let my fear keep me from understanding, cherishing and embracing my son. Instead of protecting him, as I intended, my fear and reluctance backfired, causing a far greater danger and crisis than any I had ever imagined. This is not just our story; I have heard from hundreds of men and women whose experiences of rejection and alienation from family members have sparked downward spirals of depression, addiction and despair.

I wish someone had told me what I did not know: that having a living, breathing gay child who challenged me and caused me to be uncomfortable and uneasy, and whose desires caused me to lose sleep at night because of fear and worry, was vastly, immeasurably, infinitely better than having a gay child who is dead."

While Your Child Is Still Alive: A Letter to Parents Who Aren't Ready to March in the Pride Parade | Linda Robertson

Malinda writes:

When it comes to bisexuals, there are a whole lot of issues around biphobia that are not faced by lesbians, gay men, or non-bisexual trans folk. There are so many awful stereotypes about bisexuals as promiscuous, deceptive, or just plain confused. Sometimes the very existence of bisexuals is challenged by lesbians or gay men (“bisexual is just one step on the way to gay”). Sometimes queer folks feel threatened by bisexuals because they fear their bisexual lovers will leave them for a straight relationship. And then there’s the extreme sexualization of bisexual women on the part of so much mainstream heteronormative media. All of these stereotypes are messed up, and they are distinct to bisexuals.

Finally, I think there may be a perception floating around our culture that bisexuals are sort of a watered-down version of gay, and this is a big problem. This perception enables mainstream cultural creators to think: Oh, I should have some LGBT representation, let’s stick in a bisexual girl (this would never happen with a bisexual boy, because of a host of issues around homophobia). Then that bisexual female character can have a fling with another girl to attract attention/check the “diversity” box, but meanwhile she can mostly be involved in a relationship with a man, so she largely appears straight. (This has been the story line of so many TV shows involving “bisexual” characters over the decades.)

In case it’s not clear, I want to underscore the fact that I think this is wrong. This kind of representation of “bisexual” women essentially erases the existence of people who are bisexual. It’s flat, two-dimensional, bad storytelling based on stereotypes that primarily serves to underscore even more stereotypes.

Read the whole post here: On Bisexual Characters and YA Literature | Malinda Lo

My daughter blogs at Open-Minded Health on a variety of topics related to sexual minorities. Today she reports on a study of the mental health effects of concealing sexual orientation in men who are behaviorally bisexual but do not identify themselves as gay. None of the participants had told their female partners that they'd had sex with men. Over half felt it was too embarrassing to disclose, and 63% indicated they would lie if asked.

The researchers found that concealment of same-sex sexual behavior was associated with depressive and anxious symptoms. However, disclosure was not significantly associated with mental health. In other words, “coming out” may not improve the mental health of bisexual men. They also found that concealment was indirectly associated with internalized homophobia. Perhaps reducing internalized homophobia is a better psychotherapeutic treatment than encouraging disclosure?

The abstract is here.

I had to become someone else to write the things that were important to me.

Let me back up a little. You’ll hear this phrase, “write from the heart,” a fair amount as you navigate the world of writing advice. When I suggested the topic to Deborah, she immediately pointed me to a podcast in which Betsy Wollheim of DAW spent fifteen minutes giving just that advice. So I want to talk a little about why it’s important, why many people don’t do it, and how you can.

Writing from the heart is scary. It means exposing yourself to the world. In a way, it’s like having an intimate conversation with hundreds or thousands or (if you’re lucky) millions of strangers. It’s talking about the pain of breaking up, the fear of not having enough to eat, the loneliness of losing a parent, the depressing reality of falling short. It’s talking about falling in love, about the joy of discovery, about those words your mother said when you were six that you carried with you all your life. It can mean describing your journey from realizing you’re different to realizing that that’s okay.

If this scares you or disturbs you (in an emotional sense rather than a horror sense), that’s good. Tap into a place where you’re not comfortable: those are the raw places from which powerful writing comes. You guard them because they are important to you. And when they are important to you, that passion comes across in your writing. When you put yourself on the page, the reader can feel that, because your characters reactions feel authentic.

Here's how I did it: I’d been more and more openly gay for about a decade when I moved in with my then-boyfriend (now husband), but I still kept it private from my co-workers and other casual friends until I got a better sense of how it would be received. What was fueling my writing then was the urge to show gay characters falling in love, the way I was falling in love. And I wanted to write them in the aesthetic I was discovering, using animal-people to represent character archetypes.

This was important to me, but it was also scary, not just because of having employers who knew, even then, how to use search engines, but also because I would be writing intimate emotional details. Hidden behind other characters, yes, but it would be exposing who I am in ways I didn’t even do with people I’d worked beside for years.

So I created a new identity. I wrote stories, then a novel, then another novel.( Read more... )

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Deborah's Journal

A safe & friendly place to talk about writing and life

Entries tagged with queer issues

From Huffington Post: While Your Child Is Still Alive

Link: Malinda Lo: On Bisexual Characters and YA Literature

Disclosure and Concealment of Sexual Orientation in Bisexual Men

GUEST BLOG: Kyell Gold on Writing From The Heart

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November 2020

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