Heroes

History has weight.

I sometimes see complaints about historical (or contemporary) fiction in LGBTQ groups on Facebook. The sad story, the impossible love, the violent end to romance—these are too prevalent in LGBTQ fiction. Where do we get to be the heroes? Where do we get to see happy endings for us?

It’s a fair question but I’m left with a counter question: How real do you want the fiction to be? Could Oscar Wilde’s story have been much different than it was? How do you write his happy ending unless you’re doing speculative fiction/alternative history?

My novella, Cary and John, is somewhat historical in that the letters between the men are written in the early 1970s, but there is also a contemporary part, the narrative between the daughters of the men. They are not, to put it mildly, queer activists. When I first started shopping the manuscript around, one gay publisher responded in part, and I quote, “. . . too much page time was given to the daughters, whose homophobia overwhelmed the narrative and was not moderated even at the end.”

I could argue about the subtle shift that I think the daughters make by the end of the book, but I admit it is subtle and little bit the point. That moment when the shift begins was what I was most interested in writing about. I gave the titular characters as happy an ending as I could, given their circumstances, but without expanding the scope of the book drastically, any more than a subtle shift was all the daughters earned. Yes, I could have expanded the scope of the book, but that wasn’t the story I had to tell.

Certainly, LGBTQ folk are not alone in this. I hear similar frustration from other communities. Why are so many books about American Black experience centered on slavery? Can Native fiction writers escape the weight of lost land and residential schools? Obviously, there are very good books by Black and Native authors that do not center those experiences, but the weight of being racialized in a way that resulted in those atrocities are still in the background. How can they not be?

And I begin to ask, myself only until now, what if our desire to see ourselves as the hero of stories really just wanted to be part of the empire story? To read a biography of any U.S. president will center on his presidency and whether or not he was a good leader or not. Even if he’s assessed as less than heroic, he became president “because,” not “in spite of.” A biography of Wilde will focus on his literary accomplishments, but it’s a bit “in spite of” him being gay. Would Harvey Milk’s political accomplishments be noticed at all if he’d not been assassinated? Are there happy endings for Rudolf Nureyev, Liberace, Rock Hudson? Are what we want when we pine for happy endings, are we wanting to be more powerful, more traditionally successful, dying of less politicized causes?

This may be why a some BIPOC fiction has turned to futurism. It’s a way of envisioning a future where the previously oppressed can unambiguously end up a hero with a happy ending. It’s envisioning the redemption and reversal of a long history of injustice. There’s something sad as well as victorious in a movie like Black Panther, where we have to invent a place that remained untouched by European colonization. It’s an attempt at “what could be” as well as “what might have been.”

Jesus died a death of political and religious intrigue. His hero story is upside down, a nobody who should have disappeared into the history of other nobodies executed by the state. Whether you’re a Christian who believes in a literal resurrection or a Christian or atheist or other religious who sees the resurrection story as a myth like the story of Zeus becoming the supreme god of the Greek pantheon, the power of the story continues on in the lives of millions of Christians, but it is not a hero story in any classical sense of the word.

I confess I want gay heroes. I want gay heroes who have happy endings. But I’m beginning to check my desire, to see if it’s because I want to take part in the overarching stories of power and imperialism. I take part in those stories daily as a white man, an inheritor of the comfort and position afforded me by European colonialism. If there are heroes for me, perhaps it is in the community that some slaughtered saint left behind.