Title’s a bit of a mouthful, eh? First questions first: “the hell are you talking about, J? What time before change? Are you high?”
Not right now, no, but thanks for asking.
It’s Pride month. June is, and today is the last day of June; ironically, my local Pride parade isn’t held until early July and so I always forget that it’s June rather than July.
It’s not quite a non-sequitur, I promise.
Representation in writing comes up a lot. For fiction and non-fiction, and it can be a very contentious issue from calls to increase it to claims that it is inaccurate in certain contexts: historically, usually. “But gay people didn’t exist before 1983,” they claim, ignoring histories of actors, emperors, playwrights, and Gilgamesh himself. “But trans people didn’t exist before 1997,” they scream, ignoring WWII spitfire-flying world racing championship drivers, imperial cousins, disciples of the Bible (in this author’s opinion) and potentially Gilgamesh again.
They’ll claim it for anything. That people of colour have no place in a period romance, despite Shakespeare making clear reference to them – despite Pliny the fucking Elder making reference to them – as if anything, quite frankly in the entire world, was invented yesterday.
We’ve always been here. We’ve always been in the stories. We weren’t created in the sixties or the eighties, but there has been a drive of late – the past few centuries – to erase us from the stories.
I worry that something supposedly put forth by us is falling into that same camp.
See? I told you it wasn’t a non-sequitur.
“We’ve always been here. We’ve always been in the stories.”
The Narrative of Change
Some representation in media is about things which simply are. Culture, heritage, descent: representation of people of nations, of colours, of cultures, in situations and stories – these are things which are (though some, such as culture, can shift). If your protagonist is Black, they were born Black (barring uses of magic or peculiar technology, I suppose), and the fact of it has never been in doubt. It has likely been an ever-present fact of their circumstances.
Some things in representation can be divided into a before, and an after.
It’s not limited to LGBTQ+ issues. Certain aspects of culture, religion, political alignment; anything that can be changed, which is to say perhaps the majority of things about a person. Outlook. Priority. I’ve seen it recently especially spoken out against regarding LGBTQ+ issues, though, so I’m focusing on that.
There is an ongoing debate about whether someone is born gay. As a pansexual nonbinary person myself, I can’t settle this debate and I’m not arrogant enough to try to claim to here and now – what I can tell you is that I have seen people from both sides of the debate, lay claim to both sides of the debate.
I have seen gay people claiming birthright, and those who claim it is a choice, and both use these as ammunition for their calls that this facet of them be respected. I have seen homophobes claim both that it is a fact of birth and that it is a choice, and vilify it regardless.
Sexuality, sensuality, gender identity, any of the many things under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, this comes up. I’m not here to talk about that debate in anything more than as set dressing, for my following point: usually there is regardless, a before and an after.
Whether I was born gay, or whether I evolved gayness, or whether I chose to become gay, does not matter. There was a time before which I embraced it, at the very least. A time before I was aware. A time before change in my perception, or a time before change of myself, or a time before change in my awareness, it doesn’t matter.
As a child, I knew of gayness. My parents watched Will and Grace with me, and Friends with Ross’ lesbian wife; I had gay cousins, and I knew it, and it was fine.
My own evolution of my awareness of my sexuality and identity – and all the wide things that identity represents – isn’t really the subject of this essay, but it’s important to me that I mention some at least. I am gay, but I didn’t always know I was. I always knew gay was a thing, but I didn’t know that it was me.
Maybe I wasn’t gay. Maybe I was but just wasn’t aware, but either way I certainly wasn’t conscious of it. I have been through experiential journeys of my own, I have followed friends and lovers and family members through similar journeys of their own.
It’s important that we represent these things in our writing, in our art, fictional or otherwise, but to me there is a type of representation which is particularly important, and it is one which is sometimes called upon to be absent: the representation of the time before change. The time before it is outward and known, at least.
Some people say we should not write stories of trans people before transitioning; I can see the emotional logic in this. When I think of my (many) trans friends, I would shudder to write a story about their younger selves with their deadnames. I retroactively adjust their places in my memory: one of my best friends has always been a woman. Perhaps she used to look a little different, but she has absolutely always been a woman in my mind.
I would never write a story about her as a boy. To me, she simply never was one.
At the same time, there was a time that I thought I was a boy. I still let people think I am one, often, because it is easier – because I do not have an easy, well-known place to plant my flag. There was a time I thought I was straight. There was a time I thought I was monogamous.
All of these are untrue, and in hindsight many of them were untrue long before I realised them. I was most certainly and undeniably polyamorous even as a young child, reading stories of princesses forced to choose between two suitors and thinking just how absurd it is that a princess must choose anything at all. I was all but certainly pansexual – or at least panromantic – as a child as well, having similar thoughts and similar dreams about boys and girls in my classes.
I didn’t know, though.
There is a story of me. One which starts with a young boy – or at least someone who thinks they are a young boy – and which involves a slow evolution of, at the very least, awareness and understanding, over the course of a life.
It is an important story, I think. It is important that we are represented, but it is also important that our change is represented – our journey – and that means showing the time before change.
“I am gay, but I didn’t always know I was. I always knew gay was a thing, but I didn’t know that it was me.”
The Story Left Untold
Some people think this is something which shouldn’t be done. A story which should not be told. They will claim – from, at least self-reportedly, being on the side of LGBTQ+ – that it is homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise “anti” to show this sort of story.
That it would be transphobic to tell a story of a young person using male pronouns and an assigned male name, in order to have that person then grow and through the course of their growth begin to use female pronouns. To have them take a new name.
Not just deadnaming, they say (or some of them do), but the whole of a dead existence. It makes the trans woman in question look artificial, they say, or some of them do.
They say that it would be acephobic to write a story of a young person living a highly sexualised life because that is what they think is expected of them: would be offensive to show them being sexual and seeking out sex (because what they’re actually seeking is acceptance) and then entering a relationship that begins sexual, that starts with sex to the point of friction before they eventually admit to their new partners that the idea of sex makes them struggle not to vomit.
Offensive because it makes their reality seem like a phase, these people might say. That it is offensive to the asexual people in the audience who should not be depicted as sexual at any time, in any way – as if someone having sex with a person is the same as that person being sexual.
They say that it would be erasure to write the story of a woman dating only men, expressing interest only in men even to herself behind closed doors, before eventually reaching a certain point in her life where she begins to admit to a curiosity in the feeling of another woman’s lips pressed to hers.
Homophobic, they might say (and some have said), to show a lesbian kissing men in any instance, even before her recognition. Homophobic to have a bisexual or pansexual person being presented as straight.
All of these stories are real ones. Ones I saw from standing right there myself, or ones I have lived.
They might say (and I have seen them say) that it is phobic at all to depict these as processes of change, I think in part because if there is a time before change and a time after change it implies the existence of two states which can be transitioned between. It suggests that a bridge can be crossed in either direction.
We wouldn’t want to provide any ammunition to those who think one can “go back” to being straight, after all: this, I think, is the core of the “born that way” ideal. I certainly agree that said group needs no more ammunition from us, save for perhaps that provided at high velocity.
As I said, I won’t try to settle whether we were born any way. I can tell you with certainty we were not born knowing it, though. We were not born knowing anything at all, except for to stop breathing when submerged, the dive reflex reflecting almost the sum total of an infant’s knowledge.
We learned language. We learned concepts. We learned of attraction and its different types, learned of how a person could be, and only after that could we begin to learn what we were – even if, in hindsight, there were indications of it before that point.
I can point to stories from my childhood that show my various states. My latent polyamory, my budding pansexuality, my sometimes arms-length distance from certain social concepts of sex and romance – I don’t know if I was born that way, but I was not born knowing it.
Everyone figures it out their own way. Everyone has their own pitfalls with it. That is why, to me, it is so important that we do show the time before change: not to imply in any way that we can change back, but to show how the change happened.
I don’t think writing of the existence of a wall could be construed in any way as a call to destroy that wall, to un-make it in the inverse of how it was made.
It could, however, provide something of a blueprint or at least inspiration for someone looking to build one of their own.
“All of these stories are real ones. Ones I saw from standing right there myself, or ones I have lived.”
The Importance of Representation
Representation helps us know what our options are. We are pattern-matching creatures, and we self-identify based on the world in which we live; if we are surrounded by people who look like us, we think of ourselves as one of a group. If we are surrounded by those who do not, we may think of ourselves as outliers. As other.
I suspect, if you have read this far into a clearly gay essay, you may already be aware of all this.
When I was young, I didn’t think I was gay, because I wasn’t like Will or Jack in Will and Grace. They were forward, self-knowing: they were proud about it, at least to the camera and often to the world as well, and I didn’t feel like I was them. I related more to Susan, Ross’ wife who I personally believe was bisexual and always intended to be but before a time that such a thing could be easily broadcast on the networks; she was claimed as a lesbian, but the way she acted felt more familiar to me.
Will and Jack were depicted post-change. We saw them as gay, only as gay, and as nothing but gay. Susan we heard of as Ross’ wife. In flashbacks, she was mentioned as his girlfriend – as a straight woman, albeit with some jokes to the contrary – and I think this was important. This is why I started to feel resonance with her.
Another character who I sort of admired on this was Jack Harkness from Doctor Who (and, later, Torchwood), whose own opinion on the matter boiled down roughly to “whatever, everything’s good!”. His openness appealed to me and felt familiar, but it was characters who explored which truly opened my eyes.
Characters encountering attractions for the first time. Characters feeling confusion. Characters who were not gay and always had been, but characters who were starting to understand it for the first time.
Largely because I was also starting to understand it for the first time.
We need to show this. Erasure isn’t always active, it isn’t always taking a baseball bat or a surgeon’s scalpel – or a violently burning torch – to history. It isn’t excising the chosen names of people past and replacing them with deadnames instead, or at least it isn’t always.
Sometimes it’s just not telling a story.
Erasure can exist in simple silence. Not something retracted but something never said in the first place, and if we shy away from showing the time before change out of discomfort and awkwardness – and it is uncomfortable, and it is awkward – then we risk leaving people without a path forward.
If my friend had not been polyamorous, I would likely never have realised that I was. I never would have spoken about it with my then-girlfriend, now-wife (or at least, spouse). We never would have opened up our minds and our hearts to others. We wouldn’t have met and gotten together with the partner with whom we’ve now bought a house.
My wife and I have been married for over eleven years, dating for thirteen-ish. We’ve been dating our other partner since before Covid, and we co-own a home, and we are very much in love. All of us.
Without the stories of others, I probably would not have any of that.
Without seeing other people before and after, and during changes, during revelations, during struggles and confusions and self-angers and those horrid moments when someone deadnames or misgenders theirself and you can see the fury in their eyes – without depicting that, at least somewhere, at least sometimes, we risk losing it.
It’s a path full of awkwardness. Full of discomfort. Full of hellacious pain, sometimes, as well, and it’s natural to pull away from pain.
I understand wanting to live in a world like Jack Harkness. Wanting to just shrug and smile that gorgeous John Barrowman smile and say “what the hell?” and do whatever, and one day we will get there.
The path will be full of awkwardness. Full of discomfort. Full of hellacious pain, sometimes, as well.
I don’t think we should only write transitive stories. I think having established characters who are what they are is fantastic. I think having stories that have non-traumatic transitions is wonderful. I think stories that don’t necessarily go into a time before change is good.
I worry, though, for what happens if that is all of our stories.
We need to have that discomfort shown, somewhere, somehow. Was your transition (gender or otherwise; your life transition from one state to another) flawless? Was it without its quirks, without irks, without you occasionally wanting to throw yourself into a wall?
I doubt it.
If every story of a gay person is only Jack and Will, and we never have the awkward gay teens and pre-teens uncertain of what’s happening or why or how to be, then all of those awkward gay teens and pre-teens in the real world don’t get to see themselves anywhere. Not on screen, not on page.
Maybe, this means they don’t notice what’s going on. Maybe they look at Jack’s biting sarcasm and unrepentant horndoggery, his affected voice and his fashion obsession, and they think just like I thought, “well, that can’t be me. That isn’t me.”
Now that I’ve grown? Now that I’ve tried it (not that any experience is a prerequisite for being gay, of course), I can tell you that I am absolutely Jack. I am Susan. I am captain Jack Harkness and I’m damn proud of it, but it didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t wake up that way.
It was a slow process. It is still ongoing. I’m still refining my self-awareness, my self-definition, my self-image.
It will be a process that will continue to have its awkwardness. Its discomfort. Its hellacious pain, perhaps, at times, but it will be so, so worth it in the end – as it has been worth it up to this point.
My journey – your journey, the journey of millions – deserves to be shown.
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