I set off into the world wanting to write the next great gay love story, but every time I pick up a pen, the words seem to rush away. They feel as disconnected from me as I do from them.
There is a story in me that needs to be told. I like to think that by writing queer and trans characters I can write something that would have let younger me thrive. Yet my fingers hover over a keyboard at the first hint of dialogue or exposition. My characters are flat, trope-riddled things that I delete as soon as I meet them.
I’ve never been good at writing characters that don’t have a fragment of me caught somewhere inside their thoughts and actions.
My first attempts at writing introduced me to lost, conflicted, masculine girls. Girls who were always introduced as boys, who struggled in a patriarchal world that told them femininity was weak and fragile; they chose another path. They were girls who were always picking away at some small sliver of justice until their nails bled. They missed femininity, found comfort in it, but could never stay for long.
Writing became the lens through which my own identity continued to bloom. I wrote butch lesbians, then bi women, as I grappled with my sexuality. These women were no longer the fiercely loyal teenagers I wrote in high school; instead they had finally come into the fullness of their masculine power. They wore toxic masculinity like leather jackets, smoked cigarettes loosely, and slicked back their short hair like nothing mattered in the whole world.
As college progressed, I met characters who crossed over gendered lines. I explored femininity and masculinity through gender conforming and gender variant characters. I began writing men, realizing that I was suffocating inside a gendered box. The men I wrote were often gay. They expected love and acceptance but never found it where they thought they would.
I stopped disclosing the gender of my characters. They became voices, bodies, thoughts, and actions, but never genders. They were everything and nothing at the same time that I was everything and nothing. Gender became a burden I had to carry to my classes, having to explain the pronoun choices I made until I eventually gave up. I was tired and so were my characters.
Now my characters feel as disconnected from me as I do from them. They are heavy and hidden. I can almost see them through a haze of uncertainty. I’ve never been good at writing characters that don’t have a fragment of me caught somewhere inside their thoughts and actions. How am I supposed to write them when I don’t even know what my own identity is right now?
lynneggler 