Existence is its own justification.

I just had a conversation about this the other day with my husband. I should point him at this post. :)

If people are offended by what you write and the characters you put in there? You don't need 'em. The rest of us will read extra.

I get worried about getting it wrong.

No one takes offence if your female character ends the relationship but I worry that if you write about a relationship where one male is gay and the other bi-curious if the second man ends it because it was just a phase is the gay community going to be insulted and assume badly.
What about writing a lesbian who is the villan of the plot? Is it acceptable to write that or would I have to make up for it by creating a lesbian character who is heroic and selfless even if she doesn't have a clear role in that story. It's difficult to show that sort of thing for me because anything I write is more action driven and in the middle of a war its hard to introduce everyone's girl/boyfriend because they are too busy panicking and grabbing their swords.
It doesn't help that I don't know any gay people, at least not well enough that they would tell me that they where gay if they where.

So if I write what I know then everyone who is open about their sexuality would be straight, but I don't think that gives me any less right to try my hand at this writing lack.

Personally, so long as it's not a trend in someone's writing, a lesbian as a villain and such doesn't bother me. It's when it's a recurring thing. Or when I big deal is made out of the villain's sexuality but not anyone else's, like her being a lesbian is somehow linked to her being a villain.

Write it. Write it all. Make fun of lesbians the way you would make fun of straights. Think of your creations, colour them in, put them in your world. Make them saints, make them shitheads. Make them both saint and shithead at the same time! They are Just People. Gay guys can be shitheads as much as straight guys. There are black racists. There are black people who have suffered for years, and still not hate them who did it to them. Do not feel forced to portray under-represented people as only good and wonderful, because they aren't. It's not important that they are nice, it's not important that they are good, it's important that they are there.

Most importantly: Don't let anyone tell you what to do, not even me. I am not important. I am an anonymous blob of words on the Internet. What is important is how you feel about your stories.

Actually, middle-of-the-war panic is just the right place to mention that your character wishes her girlfriend was there backing her up - or is really glad that her girlfriend is safe, far behind the lines. Even if no one knew that Jill is a lesbian, and defaulted to assuming she has a boyfriend, or is chaste.

Or while Jack is tucking the picture of his girlfriend back into his pocket, Jill is also tucking the picture of her girlfriend back into her pocket.

Post battle, when soldiers write 'Dear Ma/Pa/Lover, I'm fine, just a little cut, hope I don't lose my foot' You can have a character write to a same-gender lover. Its been done before - dear wife and dear girlfriend from the same soldier.

You may be mistaking gayness for the entirety of the character, whereas its actually one aspect of a well-rounded character.

This is a really good point that I was just coming here to make far less articulately; thank you for saving my sinus infection addled brain from having to come up with the right words.

I worry that if you write about a relationship where one male is gay and the other bi-curious if the second man ends it because it was just a phase is the gay community going to be insulted and assume badly.

Gay relationships mostly end for the same reasons straight ones do. "Just a phase" could be seen as insulting, so unless it's vital to the story I'd go with some other reason. But the 'gay community' is not monolithic. Sure, when a celebrity formerly involved in a same-sex relationship later has an opposite-sex partner, a bunch of gay folks will express outrage. But at least an equal number of gay folks will call the first group out on their intolerance.

It's difficult to show that sort of thing for me because anything I write is more action driven and in the middle of a war its hard to introduce everyone's girl/boyfriend because they are too busy panicking and grabbing their swords.

You've got to have a lull in the combat sometimes. In addition to what others have pointed out, if the lover is also present on the battlefield, such lulls are the traditional time for Glad-To-Be-Alive sex.

Suggestion: If you're concerned about a character possibly being problematic, look at the rest of your cast of characters and see if there is someone else who may also be bi/gay/queer. The problem people usually have is when the only queer character is shown to the the bad guy. (Even then, I do agree with other people who say that it's mostly a problem if it's a repeated theme in your stories... but if you HAVE other queer characters IN the story, that shows pretty thoroughly it's not your outlook on queer people, just this one character.)

Thank you so much for writing this. As a white girl, I'm still a New Yorker - I expect to walk down the street and see a variety of colors/genders and hear at least five languages, speckled with English words that I can understand. And I know they're using different languages because the melody of a Russian conversation is different than French or Bangladashi or Pakistani.

Incidentally, 'nouvelle cuisine' is totally English. Totally. Or how would this English speaker understand it? Similarly, certain 'non-norm' clothes and phrases have been co-opted and pass for white, so they can slip into books under the radar.

At least these days you can write interesting and diverse characters and get them published. That's only been possible for a fairly short time. It wasn't until the cover art for the 2011 audiobook edition of Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky that the publishing world finally acknowledged that the protagonist was black. Since the book was published in 1955, he had to sneak that one in under the radar, but the clues are there.

He was a little less subtle in suggesting that the lead character in Starship Troopers was Filipino, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was one reason the book was flat rejected by Scribner's. Among the many things that annoyed me about the movie adaptation were Rico getting a 'racial upgrade' and Shujumi getting demoted to extra so a white girl could usurp his Crowning Moment of Awesome.

The people who bitch about your characters because of their ethnicity, identity, or orientation don't matter. Remember, outrage is far more likely to move someone to speak out than approval. Folks who agree with you are less likely to feel the need to comment. Back in the day, we called that the "Usenet nod." Each person who expresses praise is orders of magnitude more representative of the population at large than each person who complains.

I just want to cry--thank you. I'm a 52 yo black woman who reads fantasy and loves sci-fi movies. I used to joke with my husband that maybe we shouldn't have kids, cause its obvious black folks don't make it to the new millenium.

I don't even want to make it a 'black' thing--come on--you've got to live in a tiny, tiny town for there to be NO ONE that isn't straight, white male/female.

This about made me cry.

I'm white but have Cherokee ancestry. I was homeschooled, and Dad made sure we were well-educated on Native American history. I remember being told when I was seven or so not to tell anyone I was part Cherokee (I'm 1/8) because people would treat me differently. We technically (long story) lived on another tribal reservation, and I saw how people treated them, the kids who were my friends. I take after my mom's side in looks, and I pass; my sister and half brother don't always, and my dad doesn't always either. If they're out in the sun, and tan, the features become much more obviously Cherokee, and people do treat them differently. It's usually subtle, but it's there.

So as a kid, I would look for books about Native American kids. Guess how much luck I had there? Outside of The Indian and the Cupboard and Julie and the Wolves, which both have problems, I don't remember any. I still don't really see Native Americans in fiction, especially in SFF. When I found Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books with the Indian analogues (I'm blanking on their names), I about cried.

I don't really talk about this much because for all intents and purposes, I am treated as a white person. If I can get my dad to actually give me the goddamn information for genealogy (he's being a dick about this), I'm within where I could register with my tribe. But because I'm not on the rolls, people generally object to me talking about it. I can understand why, because my experience is very different from someone who grew up on the reservation, but that doesn't erase my lineage, nor my desire to read books about people like me.

Partly because of that, I also went out of my way (and still do) to read books about other people that aren't white. Thankfully, I grew up in an area that is... well. I joke that it is crunchy-granola land; very white liberal with a good amount of multiculturalism. So, the librarians would put out on display specifically books about POC, along with books about queer people, etc. Not that I exactly found many SFF books that were multicultural, but I found a lot of kid's/YA that were.

And then I got into reading SFF and the field totally changed.

I'll give SFF credit for writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey, who really did help me realize that being bisexual (although I use queer at this point, since bi/pan has connontations that don't fit me) was not a bad thing. Marion had lots of lesbian characters in her Darkover setting, some of whom I had some very strong fictional crushes on, and Mercedes also had a lot of queer characters in her stories. Background characters, too, which I also look at as much as the main characters. My Dad went through a fundie phase where "gay people are going to hell", and these books really helped me a lot to realize that what my Dad was saying was BS. Because I couldn't see these beloved characters being hellbound, so someone had to be wrong.

I was suicidally depressed much of my teen years. Reading books about people like me? Books that helped me to realize that being me wasn't a bad thing? SAVED MY LIFE.

So FUCK those assholes who say that writing diverse characters isn't important. It fucking well is.

all this a million times and more.

I can't count how much frustration I've had trying to find characters like me in any kind of fiction - half-Asian, bisexual transman, I'd be lucky to get the first even, and it's one reason I try to make my writing diverse so that someone else someday will hopefully not have to go through that same frustration.

I made such a happy noise.

I'm curious - which book/series/etc is the transman in?