It’s difficult not to get caught up in the swirling scandals that are engulfing every facet of modern society. I have nothing but admiration for all those women and men putting their stories out there. I’m fortunate never to have experienced anything too bad in my time, but I’ve been reminded of various conversations I’d had over the years. One, directly related to my writing, has stuck with me.
This man whom I respected and considered a friend (at the time) pointed out that I didn’t portray men in my novels as particularly nice. It’s taken me a while to realise that what he actually meant was that they weren’t prominent and at the heart of the plots. Now, for a self-avowed writer of lesbian fiction, that’s not exactly a big shock to me, but I did go through the characters in my novels to work out if the men were all evil. Shock horror – they’re not.
Matt in But By Degrees is lovely, not exactly based on anyone I know but just a nice, decent guy. Even Michael doing what he does (trying to avoid spoilers here) is understandable when you look at it in context (I think, feel free to argue). In Valerie, the two prominent men are Drew and Ed. Drew’s an idiot and a bit of an arse but I don’t write saintly characters, male or female. Ed, too, has his faults, although I’m very attached to Ed as the kind of guy I’d like my nieces to grow up around.
Looking back, this friend made a judgement on Drew mainly and that rankles. I’ve known many guys like Drew and I get on with some of them. Just because a character – or human being, for that matter – has some flaws, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily jump into the “bad” camp. I’m not keen on that camp at all, to be fair. Life’s made up of grey people and grey areas a lot of the time, and that’s something I try and put across in my fiction.
I don’t write lesbian fiction because I want to write about men. Nor do I brush them out of existence and pretend that women don’t have male friends who can be a bit irritating sometimes. I write stories that are about lives, centred on lesbians, and men are on the periphery of those lives. What’s so wrong about that?
