Gaydar malfunction...

[wiseheart]

... or readers with pink-coloured glasses.


Not so long ago, I got a review for the apparently rather controversial Alternate Caretaker fic. The reader actually did like a story as well as my writing style, but s/he had a problem with the fact that it seems... more and more characters are turning out to be gay, which looks very very odd.

Now, what story did s/he actually read? Yes, Alternate Caretaker adopts the fanon idea that Tom Paris was raped in prison. And there's a remark about him having had a short affair with Ayala, during his first days in the Maquis, where he was a drug addict and an alcoholic, and Ayala had just got divorced by his Bajoran wife, for some weird religous reason, taking their kids with her. So, they both were broken and needed comfort badly, but Ayala kept loving his wife, and Paris was never again with a man, at least not voluntarily.

Two things mentioned in a character's past, in 16 frigging chapters! How does it mean that more and more characters are turning out to be gay? Where is it mentioned that either Tom or Ayala are gay to begin with? They are not. They had a frigging affair that lasted a few weeks, years ago, and that's it. Does that make someone automatically gay? I don't think so. Nor would being raped in prison do it, I daresay. In the contrary.

Or was my reader thinking of two male Ocampa characters, who lived in chaste companionship, as their wives had died at childbirth? I established the theory that after the elogium and the birth of children the Ocampas' sexual drive goes dormant, since they only live nine years anyway. So, how does it make them "gay" in the sense of the world as we understand it?

I'm all for exploring the subtext, but I sure as hell didn't write any of these characters gay. Granted, I do write - and read - slash. A lot, in fact. I like that sort of stuff. But I also write - and read - het stuff and gen stuff and whatever my strange imagination suggests me to write. I'm not ashamed by any of it. But I don't like it when everything I write is being looked at through the pink glasses.

This is not a rant, for a change. I'm just shaking my head in disbelief, mentally.

Comments

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

A lot of people have Gay on the brain. Darned if I know why they're so obsessed with the subject, but as you've discovered, they see (and are usually ofended by) "gayness" in the most innocuous things.