Lev AC Rosen
Books:
- All Men of Genius
Inspired by two of the most beloved works by literary masters, All Men of Genius takes place in an alternate Steampunk Victorian London, where science makes the impossible possible.
Violet Adams wants to attend Illyria College, a widely renowned school for the most brilliant up-and-coming scientific minds, founded by the late Duke Illyria, the greatest scientist of the Victorian Age. The school is run by his son, Ernest, who has held to his father’s policy that the small, exclusive college remain male-only. Violet sees her opportunity when her father departs for America. She disguises herself as her twin brother, Ashton, and gains entry.
But keeping the secret of her sex won’t be easy, not with her friend Jack’s constant habit of pulling pranks, and especially not when the duke’s young ward, Cecily, starts to develop feelings for Violet’s alter ego, “Ashton.” Not to mention blackmail, mysterious killer automata, and the way Violet’s pulse quickens whenever the young duke, Ernest (who has a secret past of his own), speaks to her. She soon realizes that it’s not just keeping her secret until the end of the year faire she has to worry about: it’s surviving that long.
Yep, there’s a gay dude in my book. And yeah, I probably put him there because I’m a gay dude myself. But also, I did it because, on the whole, steampunk doesn’t have many queer characters.
I’m not going to give you lecture on how diversity is important in fiction and we need to see more women/POC/LGBTQ characters, because hopefully you already know that. It’s not about giving minority readers someone to identify with – if the writing is good, any reader should be able to identify with any character – it’s about diversity of perspective. Characters should be able to show readers new ways of seeing things, and if they’re all straight white men, there’s not much range. I’m not saying all straight white men think the same, and obviously a straight white man and a latina lesbian can think many of the same things, but they most likely will have had different experiences. And that’s important to show in your characters.
So yes, we need more LGBTQ/POC/women characters in our books, and especially in our steampunk. There’s a movement on now within steampunk to get more minority characters out there, and to get out of England, which is fantastic, but I think people aren’t quite sure what to do about LGBTQ characters. The Victorian era, to the minds of most, was a time of sexual repression. If people were queer, it wasn’t the sort of thing that was mentioned. Oscar Wilde was jailed for being gay, after all. But none of those perceptions are exactly accurate. The Victorian era was on many levels obsessed with sex. Some smutty literature of the time, such as Autobiography of a Flea is graphic by todays standards, and there are mentions of homosexuality in it (negative ones, but it was clearly something that people were aware of). Many queer people were fairly open about their love affairs – moreso in Paris, admittedly, but many in London. True, these were artists and aesthetes, people who didn’t fit in with “good” society despite their social standing, but they were there. And Wilde’s jailing was not for being gay. It’s a far more complex story, and I highly recommend reading The Judas Kiss, the play by David Hare which was composed with many quotes from the actual trial.
So queer folks existed in Victorian times, and saying they didn’t isn’t an excuse to keep them out of steampunk. And there are some queer steampunk characters out there, but for me anyway, they often seem very minor, sometimes more stereotypes than people, not really human, just tools, or occasionally, amusements. And I’d like to think that queer characters deserve better than that. Just having the characters isn’t enough – they should be fully realized, as dimensional as any other characters in the book. Otherwise, it’s not worth the effort, and is accomplishes very little – and sometimes does more harm than good.
So yeah, I put a gay guy in my book. And part of me is really annoyed with myself, because he’s a poet, and a dandy, attributes I associate with stereotypes – and I worry if I haven’t done what I see elsewhere – create a flat stereotype, not a real person. But I hope that by spending scenes in his head and showing how the others feel about him, I’ve managed to elevate him beyond the stereotype. I wish I could have spent more time with him. And as I work on the later books in the series I find myself doing so – making him much more important as the books go along. And then I find myself grinning and thinking ‘ha! If I sell these I will sneak a gay central protagonist into a form of non-queer literature! I will make the straight people read a book with a queer main character!’ And I wonder how much of that attitude is warranted. I know plenty of straight people who have no problem reading books with queer protagonists. Do I really need to take the position that I’m being sneakily subversive? I’ve written books with queer central characters before – true, they haven’t sold, and I’ve been told if they did they would most likely be marketed as ‘queer books’ with a smaller audience and such.
Queer books? We need a subdivision? I’m already working in steampunk, which is part of SFF - how much smaller can my audience get? So maybe I do need to be sneakily subversive. Maybe that’s why the only queer steampunk characters I’ve seen have been more tools than people, maybe that’s why I feel guilty that my one queer character couldn’t completely change the way everyone thinks about LGBTQ people. And I’ll say it: I wish it could. But I can’t do that, and it’s not solely my responsibility. I’m not entirely sure whose responsibility it is. But there should be more LGBTQ characters, as long as they’re people, not the stereotypes we’ve seen for so long, and have come to expect, and know we’re supposed to laugh at, but seldom do – then each new person (fictional though they may be) can help change a person’s mind, ever so slightly, as well as make a work of fiction better.
So what do I do? I just write. And I try to make sure I give my queer characters the same amount of human-ness as everyone else, which is to say, I think of them as people, not tools, and I hope for the best. And if I fall short, I’m really sorry. I’ll try to do better in the future.