Another teal deer about queer invisibility, writing manuals edition

[bodlon]

Non-confession confession of the day: I actually find books on writing useful. Not in a rote technique sort of way -- writing stories is not like assembling an IKEA wardrobe -- but because they give me additional points of reference.

It's the same reason one might use a map to climb a mountain. The cartographer is sharing useful data, but having that data in hand does not magically get you to the top of the giant rock. That still takes labor. The map just makes it easier to organize that labor and undertake it safely.

This is all to the good, I think. And in fact is not why I am sitting here with a fifteen-year-old copy of 20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias, wondering how hard I can throw it at the wall without waking my roommate. I am, in fact, holding it -- and have owned it since my teens, despite my occasional fits of book rage -- because of that road map factor.

I'm frustrated because this particular road map is infused with a very particular worldview -- specifically, a somewhat old-school heteronormative one -- at odd and inescapable intervals.

For a book that came out in 1993, 20 Master Plots is actually reasonably progressive. The text for the chapter on Quest plots consistently uses feminine pronouns. Race gets somewhat less attention, but at least exists. This doesn't surprise me much; Tobias is an educator, and educators do actually have to engage these things more often than a lot of the general population in order to serve a diverse student body. Queerness of any stripe, though, is conspicuously absent.

This is the part of the conversation where people have rolled their eyes at me before. Or chuckled. Even people I generally know and trust to be good allies have gone, "Oh, Christian. Seriously?"

Go ahead. Pat me on my adorable little liberal noggin for being oversensitive. I'm used to it.

Because here's the thing: it's not that every text in the world should have to overtly contain positive depictions of people like me. In fairness to Tobias, 1993 was the year that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was touted as progress. And really, 20 Master Plots isn't the problem per se.

The problem is that the percentage of texts that do include trans and queer narratives still doesn't seem to round up to even 1% of everything published in a year. Stories that include us air on television with warnings about adult content when equally explicit straight narratives do not. Concepts like faith and virtue are inextricably linked in this country with attitudes of discrimination and cruelty. One of this year's Republican front-runners practically campaigns on the idea that any relationship I'm in is equivalent to incest, pedophilia, and bestiality. Every day there's another article about a murder or a beating that could have happened to somebody I care about. Or me.

It's exhausting.

So when I'm in full work mode and run into a world where any whiff of romance is straight, gender is always binary, and "Girl Meets Boy" is presented as a charming, modern subversion of "Boy Meets Girl", the only response I've got is to visualize a hyperdestructive Dragonball Z-style exploding monster quake with me screaming at the epicenter.

Cathartic as that is, it does sort of distract me from my actual work.

None of this is Mr. Tobias' fault. The problems in 20 Master Plots are symptoms more than they're causes. He is probably a perfectly lovely individual. In fact, I'd be curious to see if later editions of the text have been updated to be more inclusive.

But oh, it's a final straw issue. It's a canary in a coal mine issue. And it would be nice if the response I get when I mention it could be something other than a headpat and a roll of the eyes from friends who are cis, straight, or passing/read as such. I want my friends to be just as angry, just as disoriented, just as exhausted. I want them to notice. Even better, I want the Ronald B. Tobiases of the world to notice what they're doing and make it better.

Then again, I also want the sane people of the world to revolt against racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic nonsense and demand better of their teachers, their elected officials, their books, their movies, etc. instead of voting for Rick Santorum in primaries and trying to pass "don't say gay" bills, and railing against contraception, marriage parity, and so forth.

At least then I'd have enough willpower left over to ignore a couple of pronoun choices.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com