This kind of thing has come up before but I ran into someone today who said they write “lesbian stories” and they wanted to know how to frame conversations between lesbians, as though that was different than conversations between anyone else.

And they’re just wrong. Here’s why.As I said, this kind of thing tends to pop up a lot, especially with regard to young writers. These are people who are very much concerned with diversity and representation and all kinds of other really stupid things, because that’s what their university education has filled their brains with. In short, these are stupid leftists with no clue how the real world works.

So these people, they are supremely concerned about writing gay characters or trans characters or absolutely anything but the standard kind of characters that have filled books since time immemorial. I’m not against that. The most recent series of books I’m writing, the main characters are gay. That’s fine. I don’t care. But that doesn’t magically make them a different kind of character than if they had been straight. People are people no matter who they sleep with. That’s something a lot of people just don’t recognize.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that a lot of these leftist snowflakes are writing extremist positions. Their characters portray every extremist trope you can imagine about gay people. Lisps. Flouncing around. Behaving in extremely effeminate ways. Talking about nothing but sex all the time, even when it’s absurdly inappropriate. These are the things you see on bad TV sitcoms, but not a lot from actual adult gay people. Once you grow up, you don’t act like an attention-seeking whore. Life doesn’t work that way.

I had someone ask me once if their character was an asshole because they were gay. I suspect they were trying to get me to agree so they could call me names, but I told them no. They were an asshole because they’d made a conscious choice to create an asshole character. Their sexual orientation meant nothing. It was the terrible characterization that was to blame. Of course, they didn’t like that, none of them ever do, but they couldn’t go after me because I hadn’t taken their bait so they just stomped away so they could go hide in their safe space and feel superior. That is what these people do after all.

The fact is, everyone is human. It doesn’t matter what your gender is, it doesn’t matter what your race is, it doesn’t matter what your sexual orientation is, you are human and you are held to the same standards as everyone else. At least you should be but the left doesn’t want to look at it that way. Why? Because they are inherently racist, sexist bigots. They are looking to take people with arbitrarily chosen immutable characteristics and set them apart and there’s no other words for that except racist and sexist and bigotry. Instead of getting to a point where we’re post-racial and post-orientation and post-gender, where everyone is treated the same, that’s the last thing these people want. They don’t want less division, they want more division! They should be embarrassed by what they’re pushing but they’re not because this is how they get political power.

It’s really why I don’t read it when someone is pushing “gay-lit” or “feminist-lit” or whatever else. I’m not opposed to the idea, just to the method. Don’t try to make a point, especially a ham-handed point like most of these people do. Just write a compelling story with interesting characters. My own characters, they’re not gay to make a point. When I was thinking about them, that’s just how they felt to me. They came to me as gay so that’s what they were. It wouldn’t change a thing if they were straight, any more than it would change the story if they were short or tall or had blue eyes or green eyes. It just doesn’t matter and nobody in the story ever has a problem with it. Not once. Because the point isn’t to teach the audience some ham-fisted moral lesson. It’s to tell a story.

So the next time someone asks you about their gay victim characters or their feminist characters or whatever else, tell them to shut the hell up. It’s one thing if they’re doing it right, but the young and the leftist virtually never do. They’re just trying to spread dogma and it’s dogma that doesn’t even make sense in reality most of the time. Stop playing the victim card. It isn’t going to make anyone like you and it isn’t  going to make your book sell. It’s just going to prove you’re as big an asshole as your characters. That’s nothing to be proud of.