LRT, can we please talk about how there's a massive difference between cishet people writing fucked up queer storylines vs. queer people writing fucked up queer storylines?

Queer people processing our own personal struggles and accepting ourselves as flawed yet redeemable human beings is not the same as cishet people making monsters of us yet again.

Cishet people will never deal with the ramifications of adding another evil queer to the collective cannon. Queer people will deal with it, and some of us will make that choice and it's our choice to make. We're coming at it from a totally different place.

As the kinda queer who mostly only hangs out with other queers, I encounter some queers who are great... but some who are jerks, or assholes, or abusers. I'm gonna write about the whooooooole spectrum.

Because here's the thing about treating the queer community like everyone is an angel: it makes it very easy for the demons to get away with their shit when we all keep covering for them for the sake of "the community."

But we also need to recognize that ALL people of any kind in any community fall in the massive area between totally good and totally evil.

I just have zero interest in writing any character as a role model. Or personally being a role model, if we're equating "role model" with "flawless example of perfection we must aspire to." That shit has made me almost give up my career way more than anything else ever.

I am a messy queer person and I will always write messy queer people with lots of flaws, some flaws that they never overcome, because the point of a story shouldn't always be a character achieving perfect enlightenment and everyone is happy forever.

But damn if it doesn't irritate the hell outta me when a lazy cishet writer jams another queer-coded one dimensional evil antagonist at me, and they get less shit than when I write a queer person who *checks notes* doesn't explicitly ask to kiss someone before kissing them.