seananmcguire:

It’s terrifying how easy it is to fall into the traps the stories set for us.

When I first started writing seriously–not fanfic, which is often serious, but is not Serious Writing in the eyes of our culture–I didn’t even notice that all my long-term love stories were about women getting with men.  Women being happy with men.  Women finding happily ever after with men.  I was a woman who preferred women, had known that about myself for some time, could even envision myself happy forever with my girlfriend of the time…but my happy endings, in fiction, were for women who loved men.  I felt uncomfortable when I encountered same-sex happiness in books that weren’t about The Gay Experience.  I didn’t know why, I just knew that I did.

Well, turns out that “why” was a thing called “internalized homophobia,” which being queer did not vaccinate me against.  But more than that, it was the schema of the stories available to me.  The structure of happily ever after, as I understood and had internalized it, was for a woman and a man.  As soon as I realized that, I became enraged by it, and began actively fighting against it.  Which is not to say “there will never again be a male/female happy ending in my work,” just that I’m working to make it Not The Default.

There is no default.  No one’s existence is a checklist.  We are all people, wildly diverse, wildly complicated, and we all deserve to see ourselves in fiction.  The only way we revise and overturn the schema is by allowing people to understand that no, they are not doomed to exclusion; there’s room for all of us.

There always has been.