Homosexuality != Edgy

All right, folks, I'm gonna lay it out right here and now. If you write a story whose entire existence revolves around the fact that a character is gay in a transparent attempt to be oh-so-avant-garde, you have written a bad story. I think we passed the point a long time ago where guys having sex with guys and women having sex with women were enough to make any given narrative "edgy".

Do we have an understanding, Internet? There is no edge.

Writing about characters who happen, by some stroke of coincidence, to prefer sexual relations with their own gender has as little bleeding-edge art quality to it as writing about characters who have bottle-blonde hair or work on farms for a living. It's just an aspect of character. If you're straight, does it dominate your entire bloody existence? No. It's just something you happen to be, just like you also happen to be an insurance salesman or an astronaut or The Goddamn Batman.

Batman never gets laid. Does anybody give a shit? No, because he's too busy going out and being awesome! His sexual preference is almost entirely incidental*. Can you imagine Batman manufactured as a character solely for the purpose of being an exemplar of straightness? How fucking boring would that be?

So here's the thing. It's all well and good to write gay characters. I do on a regular basis. But you can't let what gender they get hard/soggy for be the only thing that defines them. Gay folk are people, not sexual preference incarnate. It irks me especially when a writer does something like, say, write a story in which a homosexual man is married to a woman for no good reason. Ostensibly to hide his sexual preference, but from who? The only people who give a shit anymore need a good hard smack upside the head anyway. Everyone else on the planet just goes with it. Unless you are extremely personally religious there is no need to deny yourself like that in this day and age. And at that point you are the one who needs a smack upside the head.

Just thinking about that story makes me want to punch someone in the throat.

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You guys don't know what it's like to be straight. It's horrible.

* Which is not to say he shouldn't go ahead and get it on with Talia al Ghul. Because rrowr.