Gay Male Protagonist

[king of nowhere]

the part about the "relatable" make me think, i always relate more to the side characters. in stormlight, i relate more to adolin. in mistborn era 1, to ham. in mistborn era 2, to marasi. probably because i'm a natural follower. i don't know if i'm alone in this.

 

[theropunk]

Honestly I'd love for cosmere to have more gay characters, especially because the ones we do have aren't really at the forefront. For example, Shallan is technically an LGBT protagonist because she was confirmed by Brandon to be bisexual (if my memory serves me correct, i dont have a WoB about it on hand though) but functionally, she serves as straight because she has yet to have any real passing interest in anyone besides male characters (other than her debatable infatuation with Jasnah in WoK but I don't really think that counts because it wasn't INTENDED to be attraction to her) and I think it would be great to explore that more. Right now I don't know if any of the ongoing cosmere stories have much potential for a gay male protagonist though, but i would be open to it. I could see it very possibly that when Renarin has more of a focal point, he could be written to be gay alongside everything else, but I wouldn't bet on it because nothing has really hinted on it at the moment, which sucks. I think right now the character slated to be openly gay in stormlight beyond Drehy is probably Jassnah, as it's already been implied she doesn't really have a desire for a relationship with men. Therefore I think it'd be pretty likely her sexuality gets explored in the future. Idk, I have a good many personal headcanons on character sexuality but this is more talking about things that would actually be done in canon. (but feel free to ask me about my headcanons as well! I enjoy talking about them).

[theropunk]

Just now, theropunk said:

Honestly I'd love for cosmere to have more gay characters, especially because the ones we do have aren't really at the forefront. For example, Shallan is technically an LGBT protagonist because she was confirmed by Brandon to be bisexual (if my memory serves me correct, i dont have a WoB about it on hand though) but functionally, she serves as straight because she has yet to have any real passing interest in anyone besides male characters (other than her debatable infatuation with Jasnah in WoK but I don't really think that counts because it wasn't INTENDED to be attraction to her) and I think it would be great to explore that more. Right now I don't know if any of the ongoing cosmere stories have much potential for a gay male protagonist though, but i would be open to it. I could see it very possibly that when Renarin has more of a focal point, he could be written to be gay alongside everything else, but I wouldn't bet on it because nothing has really hinted on it at the moment, which sucks. I think right now the character slated to be openly gay in stormlight beyond Drehy is probably Jassnah, as it's already been implied she doesn't really have a desire for a relationship with men. Therefore I think it'd be pretty likely her sexuality gets explored in the future. Idk, I have a good many personal headcanons on character sexuality but this is more talking about things that would actually be done in canon. (but feel free to ask me about my headcanons as well! I enjoy talking about them).

Oh, I almost forgot, I think in terms of Mistborn stuff, I genuinely could also see Marasi as being gay (and her initial 'attraction' to waxillium being more comphet) but still, not really much potential with the existing male characters (though I wouldn't put it past Wayne to have a bit of a bi streak, seeing as he was perfectly content with Melaan using a male body)

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, theropunk said:

 I wouldn't put it past Wayne to have a bit of a bi streak, seeing as he was perfectly content with Melaan using a male body

that does not count, because, as wayne himself said, she's still her. she's just her with a different outfit.

I can totally understand him. if i had a girlfriend with cool shapeshifting powers, i would not be put out by her being able to assume male form. oh, i would not find her particularly attractive in male form. i would definitely not want to have sex with her while she's in male form (though if she wanted to experiment, i could be persuaded to go along with it for her sake). but still, it's her. she does not stop being her when she shapeshifts.

and i'm not alone in this perception, because i have another friend whom i got into sanderson who was initially squicked by it - not for the male-on-male potential, but because melaan is a shapeshifter, and not a real woman. as in "eww, this is a strange alien creature putting on the shape of a human". but then i explained him that kandras have a distinct gender identity, and that melaan is female regardless of what form she takes, and he was fine.

so, 100% of the interwieved sample of heterosexual male would be ok with a shapeshifter as long as he had a female gender identity.

[AonEne]

7 hours ago, theropunk said:

Shallan is technically an LGBT protagonist because she was confirmed by Brandon to be bisexual (if my memory serves me correct, i dont have a WoB about it on hand though) 

Nope, someone said that they read her as bi and Brandon said something along the lines of “I’m honored”. He’s never said he intended to write her that way, and he would have brought it up by now. (By the way, you can edit your post next to the quotes, and the mods prefer that we do that instead of double-posting.) 

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

kandras have a distinct gender identity, and that melaan is female regardless of what form she takes 

I’m pretty sure MeLaan has outright said kandra don’t all have a distinct gender identity. Some do and I think she’s one of them, but others very likely are gender fluid or neutral or any other nonbinary identity. They’re also very good as a species at taking on new identities and seem extremely relaxed about that type of thing in general. 

[The Awakened Salad]

On 03/05/2020 at 10:57 PM, AonEne said:

As shocking as I know this news is gonna be for you guys, no, I’m not.  

But you could be the shard of Happiness, because you always bring smiles to people’s faces 

I’m sorry for derailing this thread

Edited May 5, 2020 by The Awakened Salad

[AonEne]

17 minutes ago, The Awakened Salad said:

But you could be the shard of Happiness, because you always bring smiles to people’s faces 

I’m sorry for derailing this thread

Oh my goodness, thank you so much.  

I’m sorry for helping derail it 

[twenty second of the sun]

I think that when Brandon does decide to write a gay male protagonist, he will do wonderful job of it.

[Honorless]

 

4 hours ago, twenty second of the sun said:

I think that when Brandon does decide to write a gay male protagonist, he will do wonderful job of it.

If he decides to write one. It isn't just Brandon's decision however much his opinions may have evolved. He has a mostly conservative reader base.

[king of nowhere]

5 hours ago, R J said:

 

If he decides to write one. It isn't just Brandon's decision however much his opinions may have evolved. He has a mostly conservative reader base.

I wouldn't know about that. Sure, there's plenty of people in this forum who are fellow mormons from utah, but brandon's got millions of fans worldwide, they can't be all mormons from utah.

admittedly, i don't have any idea about the demography of brandon's average fanbase, but i assume it should be quite differentiated.

furthermore, brandon already made clear that he writes what he wants to write and he does not chase the public. he made a lot of speeches about it, that if you write what you think the public will want instead, you won't have passion in your writing, and the quality of it will drop. he mentioned a point in his life when he tried to write a grimdark novel because they were the fashion at the time, and it didn't work at all, and he decided afterwards that he would write for his own sake, and if he never got published for it, that was fine. He's also pretty rich by this point, so if he were to alienate half of his fanbase - with a subsequent drop in sales - it wouldn't impact him.

no, brandon often writes stuff because he wants to try it. he may want to try a gay male protagonist at some point, or he may not. i'm pretty sure pressure from the fanbase either way won't factor hugely in his decision.

[AonEne]

On 5/29/2020 at 5:14 AM, king of nowhere said:

I wouldn't know about that. Sure, there's plenty of people in this forum who are fellow mormons from utah, but brandon's got millions of fans worldwide, they can't be all mormons from utah.

I’m a Latter-Day Saint (the term we’d prefer people to use now) from Utah. I’m also queer and one thousand percent in support of rep. Religion has a role in someone’s level of conservatism, but it’s not something that automatically decides it. And place really doesn’t factor in at all - there are more LDS people in Utah, but they’re not any more likely to be conservative, I don’t think. 

Agree with the rest though. Brandon does listen to his fanbase, but in the end he writes what he wants to. 

[Efebre]

And from Spain, and here there is a big Brandon young fanbase. IDK the rest of Europe. I think that in fantasy in general people want more LGTB representation. BUt it has to be write right

[Steel Inquisitive]

20 hours ago, AonEne said:

I’m a Latter-Day Saint (the term we’d prefer people to use now)

Lol that's totally different where I live. I called my friend an LDS and she visibly cringed and asked me never to call her that again. She informed me that where we live they still want to be called Mormon. 

I think its silly to get upset over labels anyways. We're all people.

[AonEne]

21 hours ago, Steel Inquisitive said:

Lol that's totally different where I live. I called my friend an LDS and she visibly cringed and asked me never to call her that again. She informed me that where we live they still want to be called Mormon. 

I think its silly to get upset over labels anyways. We're all people.

Ha, I will say, Mormon is easier to use as a noun. I just go with what the church asked because I don’t want to offend people, but if I ever meet your friend I will say Mormon. I think it’s less “getting upset” and more that they wanted people to focus more on the “of Jesus Christ” bit, rather than thinking we were a church of Mormon or something. 

[Honorless]

On 5/4/2020 at 2:25 AM, theropunk said:

Honestly I'd love for cosmere to have more gay characters, especially because the ones we do have aren't really at the forefront. For example, Shallan is technically an LGBT protagonist because she was confirmed by Brandon to be bisexual (if my memory serves me correct, i dont have a WoB about it on hand though) but functionally, she serves as straight because she has yet to have any real passing interest in anyone besides male characters (other than her debatable infatuation with Jasnah in WoK but I don't really think that counts because it wasn't INTENDED to be attraction to her) and I think it would be great to explore that more. Right now I don't know if any of the ongoing cosmere stories have much potential for a gay male protagonist though, but i would be open to it. I could see it very possibly that when Renarin has more of a focal point, he could be written to be gay alongside everything else, but I wouldn't bet on it because nothing has really hinted on it at the moment, which sucks. I think right now the character slated to be openly gay in stormlight beyond Drehy is probably Jassnah, as it's already been implied she doesn't really have a desire for a relationship with men. Therefore I think it'd be pretty likely her sexuality gets explored in the future. Idk, I have a good many personal headcanons on character sexuality but this is more talking about things that would actually be done in canon. (but feel free to ask me about my headcanons as well! I enjoy talking about them).

That doesn't count. We've never seen Shallan express sexual or romantic interest in another female. And was that WoB even a confirmation or more of a tacit support of fanfics and such

On 5/4/2020 at 2:27 AM, theropunk said:

Oh, I almost forgot, I think in terms of Mistborn stuff, I genuinely could also see Marasi as being gay (and her initial 'attraction' to waxillium being more comphet) but still, not really much potential with the existing male characters (though I wouldn't put it past Wayne to have a bit of a bi streak, seeing as he was perfectly content with Melaan using a male body)

Wayne & MeLaan seems more of a gender identity thing. But we could count MeLaan.

Marasi, I wouldn't mind but this is still headcanon territory.

 

Hmm... I still feel a bit sceptical. But who knows, maybe Brandon would surprise us like Richard Morgan did.

[AonEne]

19 hours ago, R J said:

That doesn't count. We've never seen Shallan express sexual or romantic interest in another female. 

Someone’s almost certainly going to mention Jasnah, so building onto this, rep in this day and age should be explicit - nothing that homophobes can roll their eyes at and go “Shallan’s just admiring her, she doesn’t have a crush on her. What, a woman can’t think another woman is pretty anymore?” Because quite honestly, that seems like the most likely option to me too, that she’s simply admiring her. At best, it’s Shallan having a minor crush and thinking Jasnah is hot. In the end she married Adolin. Which, if she was bi, would not invalidate her! I don’t want anyone to mistake me as saying bi people can’t marry the opposite gender and still be bi because some people do think that and that’s a problem. 

But yeah, Shallan does not count as representation. I’m positive that if Brandon had intended her to be, he would have confirmed it by now. But in all those posts about how he wanted to write more queer characters in the future, he didn’t bring her up. (Which doesn’t mean you can’t headcanon her as whatever you like. You can headcanon anyone. But headcanons will never be rep.) 

[Kingsdaughter613]

On 2/19/2020 at 10:17 AM, Bliev said:

*applause*

First off, thanks for the link--I will be scrolling through that for sure!

Second, you make a wonderful point about how others' identities become a point used for the growth of other characters and not something that stands alone, and I think that's exactly right. Being gay *is* part of who someone is. We are all collections of identities--personal and social--that make us who we are. Some are more salient in some spaces than in others, and just because you don't always see yourself as centrally "heterosexual" because it's not salient to you in every space doesn't mean it's not central to who you are. Shallan's heterosexuality is critical for her character because it defines her attraction to Adolin and her entire arc toward self awareness. Vin and Elend's heterosexuality is also highlighted. Ranette is only a Lesbian as a foil to Wayne's heterosexuality, not to help us understand her better so her own character can grow. And how many people list Kal and Bridge 4's reaction to Drehy as evidence of how "cool" they are but fail to discuss what it must be like to be Drehy? I think Brandon has opportunities for growth and because I think he's an excellent writer with a good heart, I hold him to a high standard.

I also don't think it's fair to say "you can't force someone to write XYZ". Of course not. Verbalizing our concerns is not forcing--it's pressure, sure, but we can't *make* him do anything. What we can do is say, "here's what I expect from an author who values people like me, and if he/she doesn't do this, then maybe I won't read anymore because they aren't made for me." You can find that to be "forcing" but I see that as exercising our own self care and autonomy. (not to say that Honorless or anyone else is threatening to stop reading, but just generally speaking.)

It's like me starting Dresden Files and being annoyed with all the "hormones" and "heaving chests" that he talks about. So juvenile "male". He's not written for me. And I don't see myself in him. And that's okay. And if I cared about the author, I might have spoken my mind on it. But I don't, so I just don't read them. Or when we talk about tropes of female characters in video games or comics as being unrealistic and not fully fleshed out women--but rather mechanisms for male growth (i.e., women in fridges). 

Oh, and thanks for everyone for the lit recs. I am stoked!

Just to note: Shallan is bi. Statistically, most bi people end up in heterosexual relationships eventually, so her ending up with Adolin makes sense. But it doesn’t make her any less LGBTQ.

[Honorless]

3 hours ago, _Shallan_ said:

Out of Morbid curiosity, I am interested in a list of authors in fantasy that do not include lgbt content in their stories.  That's the real test, but google is not showing me anything.

That's not morbidity. It's a simple matter of subtraction. See the list of works with positive LGBT representation, count the no., then subtract it from the total no. of all fiction.

Then because some people would still whine, multiply the result by 10, which would still not be even 1% of total literature.

Then you'll get the other whiners because even the original no. was wayyy too much rep for them.

Play these two types of people against one another, et voilà.

[Oakrobin]

I listened to an audio book not that long ago that was going out of its way to have LGBT characters all through it as well as trying to force the reader to be gender fluid accepting. It was laborious... the plot started great but as soon as writers try to become “political” in their inclusions and explanations about those inclusions i couldn’t deal with it.

 

a writer that I feel pulled off the sexual orientation or characters in their books was Trudy Canavan in the black magician books.

this is of course only my opinion and I look forward to discussing it. 

[Aspiring Writer]

@Honorless Okay, I have noticed that in modern content, a good and recent example being the storming Rise of Skywalker Lesbian kiss that they removed for the Chinese release, which is just disgusting. As you can tell by my name, I am trying to write my own book, and I have gay leads, One of which is a lesbian and the other a Bi-sexual male. My approach is to not treat them uniquely and just write them as people (Especially in my setting where being gay is not considered bad/different/etc. so there wouldn't be any real struggle because of this). And when I ask myself if I have a reason, my reason is normally 'It just fits'., and I think that's the difference between how representation in modern content starts to differ. They add them in just for the label, just to say they have them, and they treat them as different people or just flat out ignore them. With Rannette, the intention doesn't seem disingenuous, though she is certainly a side character that we see little of, and we haven't even seen her girlfriend with her.  Not sure why they feel different. 

[+Bliev]

1 hour ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

Just to note: Shallan is bi. Statistically, most bi people end up in heterosexual relationships eventually, so her ending up with Adolin makes sense. But it doesn’t make her any less LGBTQ.

Of course not. Bi-erasure is a definite thing, and problematic as well. I was unaware of the canonizing of her identity as bi though, though it was my mistake for not discussing her bi-curiosity that had been established up to this point.

Her hetero marriage still remains a central part of the story, but I should not have conflated that with identity. 

Edited September 27, 2020 by Bliev

[Kingsdaughter613]

On 4/13/2020 at 0:33 PM, king of nowhere said:

aren't there some specific parts of the bible that specifically condemn homosexuality?

i'm not an expert and I'm not even religious, I'm asking this for personal curiosity, but I know there are some very strange prohibitions in the bible, like a prohibition of wearing clothes made with two different materials, or something if that kind. I'd be surprised if they said nothing about homosexuality after that.

See also: live and let live. I keep suggesting that.

On the other hand, how many of those named people are confirmed heterosexual? If we want to care about true statistics, we have to avoid the pitfalls of data handling. You are taking 160 names and assuming that each one of them is heterosexual until proven differently, and that's a reasonable stance to have when meeting people because the vast majority of them are indeed heterosexual. but when it comes to counting, we can only compare the confirmed gays with the confirmed straight.

And there are a ton of minor characters whose sexuality is never mentioned. how about denth and tonk fah? we never saw them with any lover. How about Yeden? the lord ruler himself? It's one of the points I tried to raise early on, when i said that there's a lot of people in the background that we know nothing about: in the end, any book doesn't have room to expand on the personal life of most characters. And sexuality/gender is generally not something very important for a story.

Also consider that in a heteronormative society that isn't particularly aware of homosexuality, most people will assume that they are heterosexual by default. Many people discover that they are homosexual later in life. And in a society with arranged marriage, or simply one where people marry young, several gay people will still marry someone of the opposite sex. Some won't even ever realize; they will be sexually unhappy but never know why. In a prudish society where sexual pleasure is considered sinful (like the one we had until a couple of generations ago) people won't even know that they are supposed to be sexually happy. But here I'm going on a tangent.

But what I mean is, we can't even put on our list of "certainly heterosexual" many married characters. Take all the ladies at court in elantris. what are the chances that none of them is a lesbian? well, perhaps one or two of them really are, but they had an arranged marriage as common for the nobility. how about all of adolin's former girlfriends? just because they were in a relationship with him, perhaps they will discover later in their life that they are really on the other side.

there's also the observer effect. people tend to hang around other similar people. homosexual people tend to hang around with each other, because they have something in common. so they tend to form closed groups, which have less contacts with groups of heterosexual people. that's why people in the lgbt community know a lot of other lgbt people, and people who are close friends with them also know a lot of lgbt people, but most heterosexuals know one or two gays, or perhaps none at all. So, if the protagonist is straight, and the book focuses on him and his close friends, there is less chance that some of them will be gays. for the same reason, if we had a gay protagonist, I would be really surprised if he was the only gay in the book. I'd expect him to have several gay friends/aquaintances.

Heck, 160 names must be close enough to the amount of people I know, and 2 confirmed gays are exactly how many I know, too (technically, one lesbian and one transgender; not counting my bisexual aunt). Because for most of those 160, I don't know them enough to know if they may be gays. because I've never been close enough to those lgbt people to get introduced to their friends. it's not random chance. I'm sure if I had spent more time with the transsexual guy or the lesbian woman I would have met a lot more lgbt people, but it didn't happen.

And so, 2 confirmed gays over a cast of 160 named characters, when filtered through those lenses, are actually a sensible statistic. They certainly feel real to me, because they are consistent with the amount of lgbt people I experience in my life.they are consistent with the amount of lgbt people that most heterosexual people experience in their lives.

 

The Jewish Bible implicitly compares male (not female) homosexuality to bestiality, and forbids both in the same sentence. It also forbids sleeping with your wife while she has her menses and forbids marrying your ex-wife’s sister while the ex is alive. All of these are considered cardinal sins, which is why we read this on the Day of Atonement. (Ie. Tomorrow) Other cardinal sins include idolatry and murder. Please note that idolatry includes most forms of Christianity- at least for Jews, but possibly not non-Jews.
 

On a more immediate level we don’t care who or what you’re doing, so long as you don’t call yourself an Orthodox Jew if you ARE doing it. Just like you can’t worship the Trinity or be a murderer (unless you’re killing Nazis, in which case you get the ‘wipe out Amalek’ exception) and also be an Orthodox Jew. You can totally be in a gay relationship and be Jewish though and, assuming you are respectful to the community, we will happily claim you.

 

We just don’t like people telling us our religion is wrong, or that we’re bad people for believing in it and following its precepts. We have some... history with that. Like 2000 years of forced conversions, massacres, and exiles type history... We tend to think anyone saying something similar is of the same vein.
 

I have no idea what Christianity and Islam did with the line when they co-opted our religion.

@Bliev I don’t know if it’s been officially canonized, but a certain scene in a certain soon to be released book coupled with a previous WoB would indicate she is. And I can’t say more without hitting spoiler policies.

Speaking of erasure, Mixed Orientation Relationships are never really discussed, let alone written about, no matter how much I’d love to see one.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Kingsdaughter613

[+Bliev]

5 minutes ago, Kingsdaughter613 said:

 

@Bliev I don’t know if it’s been officially canonized, but a certain scene in a certain soon to be released book coupled with a previous WoB would indicate she is. And I can’t say more without hitting spoiler policies.

Speaking of erasure, Mixed Orientation Relationships are never really discussed, let alone written about, no matter how much I’d love to see one.

Yeah, I actually had to check which board I was on before I replied to you. :-)  I wrote that before the preview chapters, but had missed the WOB. Thx.

And agreed so much on your second point here. I tend to feel that writers are so often limited by their own experiences, pulling in what they know and, kind of only that. It's one reason I love fantasy so much--it is, in theory, so much freer of a genre, to play and innovate. But we so rarely see that innovation in relationships in books, as you mention. It's kind of maddening. You can create whole other species and worlds and magics, but...they're all still male and female and heterosexual? They even all look the same. So strange. Even among the variety of species on earth there is a wide variety of sexes and reproductive capacities that manifest and such complicated beauty in it. 

[Kingsdaughter613]

20 minutes ago, Bliev said:

Yeah, I actually had to check which board I was on before I replied to you. :-)  I wrote that before the preview chapters, but had missed the WOB. Thx.

And agreed so much on your second point here. I tend to feel that writers are so often limited by their own experiences, pulling in what they know and, kind of only that. It's one reason I love fantasy so much--it is, in theory, so much freer of a genre, to play and innovate. But we so rarely see that innovation in relationships in books, as you mention. It's kind of maddening. You can create whole other species and worlds and magics, but...they're all still male and female and heterosexual? They even all look the same. So strange. Even among the variety of species on earth there is a wide variety of sexes and reproductive capacities that manifest and such complicated beauty in it. 

The Vorkosigan books are some of my favorites due to all the ways Bujold plays with the concept. I mean, Aral is Bi from the beginning. A general, from a hyper-masculine society, and he’s bi. And it’s so unimportant to who he is that I completely forgot for multiple books until it came up again. (His son is the usual main, and Miles is decidedly NOT thinking about his dad’s private life.) It’s just part of who he is, but only a part.
 

And Beta! Where you wear earrings to specify your sexuality. To a very specific extent. Also: the Herm population.

 

I honestly don’t think Brandon is capable of writing like this yet, though. He still struggles to write romances. His best relationships are more parent/child-esque, or platonic friendships.

[The Awakened Salad]

5 hours ago, _Shallan_ said:

Specific names of authors who do not would be nice.

doing a google search gave me hundreds of pages worth of recs with lgbt friendly novels, but it's much harder to learn of the authors who do not include mention or existence of lgbt  unless they trigger some sort of outrage mob on twitter.  Even Brandon was hit by it a few years ago when he wrote a blog about his own mormon views on lgbt and gay marriage.

Since then he has included more mentions of it in his books in Mistborn era 2 and Stormlight archive.

J.K Rowling is going through it right now because she dared write a novel in which a trans is serial killer.

It depends on what you mean by “including LGBT+ characters”. Brandon has two gay characters, but I wouldn’t personally say that his books have good representation, as those two characters are very minor in the scheme of things. Lots of books do this, and it’s still rare to find a queer lead or major character, especially in fantasy.

As for the list, I don’t think there would be anything definitive out there, but I think it’s worth noting that for every one book with positive explicit queer representation, there are many more with no rep or negative rep.