aurora light

the art of being a lesbian

first of all: happy lesbian visibility week!!!

it’s been really lovely seeing people talk about lesbian & wlw books of all stripes, including fiction & nonfiction. it makes me really happy to see people loving wlw stories!!!

but this also made me think about the fact that, to be honest, i very rarely talk about my books in terms of representation at all, and my characters being wlw (often lesbians, but also frequently bi women) is especially uncommon for me to specifically point out.

there are a number of reasons for this, and as a Real Life Lesbian, i figured i would talk about it a little bit here.

first of all, being a lesbian at all is an experience i myself took a little bit of time to get to. i have id’d as a lesbian for less than a decade; there are a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that being part of a DID system has some pretty significant impacts on your personal identity, and also the fact that being a lesbian, for me, was about pursuing joy rather than about escaping misery.

for me, though, while “lesbian” is a deeply personal and incredibly important word, it was recognizing my attraction to women that was the big step. growing up in fundamentalist christianity, i never had anyone around me who recognized and validated women’s attraction to women. no matter what i came out as at the beginning, that first coming-out process was genuinely terrifying and a huge step in my personal journey.

some of my main characters have defined identities. some of them have identities that are murky and uncertain. some of them hold identities that are harmful to themselves. some of them move from one identity to another. but all of them express explicit romantic and sexual attraction to other women.

to me, that’s what’s important for my characters. growing up, i was never allowed to know that these options existed, and while i celebrate other types of lesbian expression in media, this type of explicit attraction being showcased is something that even in my adult life i have often yearned for, more so than just knowing a character is gay.

the limitations of identity politics

no one really likes talking about identity politics, but it’s gotta happen here.

one of the things i think people often forget is that “representation” is inherently a neutral word. split has DID representation. sherlock BBC has lesbian representation. just because it’s bad representation doesn’t mean it’s no longer representation.

just because you have a group in your book—and, indeed, even because you are a member of that group—that doesn’t mean you’re going to represent them in a way that’s thoughtful and effective. it also may not represent them in a way that all members of the community think is positive forever—pocahontas (1997) was hailed as revolutionary by many native americans when it came out because it was the first time a native woman had ever been the main character of a major motion picture, but it’s a movie i myself have always been uncomfortable with because of the visual stereotypes it relies on to distinguish the “savage” indians from the “friendly” ones.

i personally don’t like identifying my books by representation any more than i like identifying my books by tropes OR by genre. none of these points give you a great idea of what the books are about.

there are millions of erotica books. there are many books with lesbians in them. there are many books with indigenous people. there are many books with the instalust trope. none of these things, by themselves, gives you a lot of information about what my book is about.

personally, i prefer to discuss the identities in my books in terms of what i’m trying to say with those identities. shion, for example, is a character that is written to be autistic, but is just treated as “weird and off-putting” because that’s how we’ve often been treated. i talk about shion being autistic a lot because a core theme of SHION is, “why are you writing someone off as being ‘weird’ and ‘unsettling’ instead of asking why they act the way they act?”

but i don’t talk about my characters being lesbians & other wlw, because their existence is really all i’m trying to say with them.

marketing sucks & is hard

one of the reasons people will reduce their books into tropes or representation or genre is because marketing is very, very hard.

marketing has ALWAYS been hard. people will point to this as a “tiktok problem”, as a “social media problem”, but in reality, the process of marketing a book has historically been both difficult AND usually not something the author has any control over. it has been frustrating to media authors, historically, having their artwork marketed in a way that will SELL, rather than a way that is true to their vision.

the easiest way to market is to just put together a few quick pieces of information about a book in a way that’s easy to digest. it’s more effective, in many ways, to sell via a 30-word trope/genre/representation discussion than to sell via a 200-word blurb about the actual book.

but for me, the “point” of writing is to get our artwork out there. we would be writing regardless; we’ve fallen deeply in love with the process at this point. for us, personally, it is more important to market our books in a way that feels accurate rather than a way that will be more effective.

every author chooses their path

notably, i don’t want to come off like i am judging the way other people choose to market their books or how you like to find books. this is just an explanation of why you might be surprised when you come across specific elements of representation in my books that i’ve never talked about.

harley, a FMC from SHION, is bisexual. the experiences of violent thoughts from nimue, a FMC in sacrosanct, are intended to be analogous to the experience of intrusive thoughts in OCD. eve, the MC from porcelain, used to be a woman with severe mental illness, something i don’t even really hint at very explicitly. both of the secondary sexual partners in SHION are trans women, even though one of them is never explicitly stated to be. asenat, a FMC from sacrosanct, is fat.

none of these are really things i’ve talked about in the marketing for my books, because i don’t really feel like they’re that important. to me, i write the type of people i know. i know fat people. i know trans people. i know gay people. i know people with severe mental illness. none of this is that special: it’s just the world i know.