Are we going forward or backward?

It’s a question I ask myself so often these days.

As a writer, I see things changing in my community, sometimes with great pain, as we all try to learn to be more inclusive of people of different orientations, gender identities, skin colors, and mental acuity. These changes come in fits and starts, and sometimes they are accompanied by primal screams and the gnashing of teeth, but still, we move steadily forward.

I was reminded of this while reading the transcript of a remarkable speech given at RWA this year by Suzanne Brockman, a romance writer who has been writing gay characters for almost two decades. In the speech, she recounts how she was told to axe a gay character in 1992:

…it was then, between our discussion of penis and RWA that [my editor] gave me a revision note that broke my heart.

Because even though it was gonna be another eight years before you said, “Hey, Mom, I’m gay,” I saw you clearly, Jason, and I knew. You were like that Pink song. Fuckin’ perfect.

So when my first editor of my first published romance novel told me that I’d have to change my beloved small-town sheriff because he couldn’t appear in my book just casually, openly gay as I’d written him, I laughed. This was a secondary character…

But she wasn’t laughing, so this time, I said: “I’m sorry, WHAT…?”

She told me that traditional romance readers were very conservative and they did not want to read books that included even the briefest mention of gay people. She said, “You have to make the sheriff straight.”

I said, “You can’t be serious. It’s 1992. The real world is filled with gay people.”

One of them—you (her son) were playing with your sister in your bedroom, down the hall.

I argued. How were readers ever going to expand their worldview if they didn’t get to meet characters like my adorable gay sheriff…?

But this was non-negotiable. “We’ll get letters,” she said. I remember that so clearly. She said, “Readers will be offended, and they’ll write angry letters.”

Read the whole thing. Seriously. It’s amazing.

But it made me realize how far we’ve come, and how many things have changed for the better for the queer community.

And yet, we seem to be on the precipice of a monumental backslide. Here in the States, we may soon have a Court hell-bent on ongoing so much of the progress we’ve made in the last forty years. We have a President whom I fear will not want to relinquish power. And we have a pretty solid 40% of the country who sees nothing wrong with any of it.

So are we moving forward, or falling back?

It’s too soon to tell.

I will keep writing. I will keep fighting. And I will pray that we find our way forward.