We’re halfway through Pride month (or about halfway through, who cares) and of course I have to talk a bit about queerness.

Last year I shared my LGBTQ representation icks because I am, at heart, a hater. Since I can’t rehash that, let’s talk about what makes good representation.

I may be a Very Lesbian, but I’m not the ultimate authority on the queer community. Nobody is. My perspective comes from all my personal hangups, biases, and lived experiences, which may not match everyone else’s.

Still, my perspective is likely useful to someone, particularly straight authors who may want to write queer content but want to be respectful about it. Always consider getting some second opinions and having sensitivity readers.

And, as one would expect, this article trends toward the lesbian zone because that is what I know. If you want the gay perspective, you will have to look elsewhere.

LGBTQ identities should not be a stand-in for a full personality.

You have to give your queer characters something beyond being queer. Please. I am begging you.

Cardboard cutout characters are everywhere, but they seem more common with LGBTQ characters because the writer wants to show they are Very Good and Moral. These authors want to provide Representation without considering anything else about the character.

In many cases, the queer character has a job and a label but that’s about it. They are the Lesbian Marine Biologist. They are the Gay Hacker. They are the Trans Spy.

Do they have any hobbies? No, just fucking their gender of choice so we know they are actually what they say they are.

With trans characters, the author will make the monthly shot or the pill a big huge deal with an extreme closeup on the needle going in. Then the character stares in the mirror and looks for an absence/presence of facial hair or whatever. They rejoice when their voice cracks or lament their lack of breasts.

This is icky and fetishy. Please don’t do that. Trans people are like anyone else receiving medical treatment. It’s not a Big Thing. It’s not much different than a diabetic giving themselves insulin.

Your queer characters, just like every other character, should be a fully realized individual with things far beyond their identity.

All my queer friends have other things they care about and – gasp! – different opinions about stuff. One of them is a computer developer. Another is a game designer (there’s a lot in the queer community for some reason). Another is a food chemist. We’ve got servers, dancers, bartenders, vaguely employed people.

I mean, shit, I’m a lesbian horse girl. Not a lot of us, but we do exist somehow.

And no, not every queer person is a super artistic creative iconoclast free spirit. While we might gravitate toward non-traditional professions and hobbies, as I have, plenty of queer people are completely normcore. They don’t paint, don’t draw, don’t dance, don’t live in an artist commune. If they didn’t bring a partner to family dinner, you’ve have no idea they were gay.

Of course, all my friends have different personalities. Some of my queer friends are spicy and opinionated. Others are sweet doe-eyed darlings. Some are braggarts, or talk too much, or are always causing drama. We have all the same character flaws as other people; we’re not a hive mind.

Let your characters be quirky so you have a well-balanced cast that can cause conflicts.

Sex is a small but not overwhelming part of our lives and relationships, just like with straight people.

Straight people do this weird thing where they assume if they have a gay character, that character must fuck or no one will possibly know they are gay. No, they can’t have a single bisexual man! How is anyone supposed to understand their bisexuality if they aren’t with both a man and a woman?!

I postulate this is because straight people have distilled us down to our sexuality (also the reason they can’t conceive of us having full personalities). It’s why you see straight people complaining about gay rights in terms of “not wanting their children to see that.” See what? We’re not banging each other in public. Or the extremely intrusive questions about our sex lives: “who’s the bottom and who’s the top?”

So, if you assume that sexuality is a verb, and it disappears if the person isn’t having sex, then of course you would feel bound and determined to make them get busy at least once.

While there are of course sex-crazed LGBTQ people, they make up a small segment of the community. The reason everyone flips out about bathhouses or Grindr is because straight hypersexuality has been normalized to the point that it is invisible, whereas the queer community has a microscope aimed at it constantly and all our seedier parts are turned into representative sins.

I would argue that LGBTQ people are more cautious with our sex lives given that practically a whole generation of us was wiped out by the AIDS pandemic. While we might not have to worry about unintended pregnancies from one-night stands (which are a plague in the straight community that everyone pretends doesn’t happen), we definitely have to worry about STDs.

Testing is common. It’s normal to let a new partner know you’re STD-free. Many people who engage in high-risk behavior are on prophylactics and it’s not a big deal.

And yes, plenty of us just don’t date. Our community is small and we don’t feel like looking; we’ve got other stuff going on. It is fine, healthy even, to have a queer person who doesn’t have casual sex, who doesn’t go on fifty dates a month, who isn’t really all that interested in expressing their sexuality with anyone else.

I don’t date, don’t feel like dating, and don’t have casual sex. I’m still a lesbian. That identity doesn’t vanish when I’m single; it just means that is the type of person I would date if I were dating.

Straight people are still straight when they choose to work on themselves for a while. The same is true of us.

While Baby Queers may make queerness their whole personality, older LGBTQ people usually don’t.

Hence why I sorta forgot to make a Pride post anyway.

A Baby Queer is someone who has just come out and is still rhapsodizing about their experience. They need everyone to know that they are whatever thing they are and blast it all over their social media.

If they started exploring their identity in the past ten or so years, they may have to find the perfect niche micro-label that matches their particular experience, which I suspect is mostly so they get a chance to explain their attitudes toward sex in exhaustive detail whenever anyone asks. Same thing with neopronouns. This is due to the extreme enthusiasm they feel about finally fitting in somewhere.

But eventually, maybe by their mid-twenties or so, they start to settle down, and their sexuality is only one thing out of many things they are because they’ve cultivated a life beyond self-identification. Like I mentioned in my post about audience and developmental psychology, adolescents and early adults are very focused on personal identity and their role in the world, so they are desperate to differentiate themselves from everyone else.

Annoying to us older queers, but understandable.

This is part of the reason why I don’t prioritize Uileac and Orrinir being gay in my marketing or blurbs. It doesn’t factor in my mind. They are who they are and they love who they love; that’s the end of it.

Also, it would be weird for them to have to say it all the time given how Breme is. Same with the feminism angle of the books. Homosexuality is normal in Breme and doesn’t factor into peoples’ assessments of them.

We may be the “gay friend” to straight people, but we’re just a friend to fellow LGBTQ folks.

Continuing with the last point, one pet peeve I have is when a (usually straight) author has one queer person talking about their queer friend to someone else, and they have to go, “Yeah, Anna – you know, the lesbian?”

We don’t talk like that because we don’t think about our friends based on their gender or sexuality. We use the correct pronouns, or we use “partner” and “spouse,” but their label isn’t the priority because, well, most of the people in our circle are queer.

Our community is small; hell, I run into my therapist in public sometimes because she’s also queer, and I live in a pretty big metropolitan area. Mentioning someone’s sexuality or gender identity would make it harder to figure out who we’re talking about because everybody we talk about is gay.

This is especially true about my trans friends. I don’t mention they are trans for any reason unless I am 100% certain the person I am talking to isn’t going to hate crime my buddy behind my back. Trans people are facing an onslaught of bigoted legislation in the US and other countries, so I refuse to do anything that will put them in more danger.

If we have to use a descriptor, it will probably be either an anecdote about the person (“Jess, the one who ran out on the bill that one time, ugh”), their job, (“Alec, you know, the aerospace guy”), or, if we don’t know them well, a physical descriptor (“Mia, the blonde one”).

Given that I have green hair, I imagine most of the time I am just described as “the green-haired chick.” I can’t change my hair color now; half my friends wouldn’t recognize me.

Lesbians have a completely different experience with feminity than straight or bisexual women do.

Straight women have a weird relationship with lesbians; studies show they are more likely to avoid a single lesbian but be fine with one in a relationship because they assume we’re all going to hit on them.

But they also just hate us in general, something lesbians have complained about for over a decade at this point. They’re uncomfortable with us even while they rabidly consume content about gay relationships, and they don’t take our struggles seriously. Feminism has been distilled down to abortion access while our unique struggles are considered a non-issue. They get angry when we point out microaggressions and tell us we’re overreacting.

Once, I got kicked out of a Facebook group for complaining about a woman using the term “girlfriend” for her female friend; I was told I had a stick up my ass and should shut up, then got banned when I rightly told this woman she was a bitch. Sorry, not sorry. Don’t care.

A fellow lesbian wrote about this issue in her article “The choices of straight women are inexplicable to me,” bringing up the very valid point that our complete lack of interest in men makes us almost a different species to other women.

Truly, genuinely … we don’t care about men. At all. We’re not man-hating; we’re man-apathetic. In the eyes of men, this means we hate them, while to straight and bisexual women, this makes us a bizarre, threatening force.

Straight women (and, to a lesser extent, bisexual women) will complain endlessly about men while still centering their entire lives around male approval. Since lesbians do not do that, we can’t relate to other women with the easy camaraderie. Men don’t matter to us.

If you’re representing lesbians in your fiction, you need to consider what that means in terms of male relationships and how we experience the world. We’re not performing for men and, in many cases, not for women either.

Your lesbian character may have male friends, but these relationships are going to have different dynamics. They may be warmer or friendlier because there is no performance. They may be more transactional, more direct. But there shouldn’t be sexual tension or those giggly nerves that straight women get.

Queer relationships cannot be understood by heterosexual dynamics.

Uileac and Orrinir are men. There is not a man and a woman. There are two men. Both of them are different flavors of masculinity, to be sure, but they are both men. And it is crucial to understand that you can’t reframe gay relationships in terms of the hierarchical, patriarchal dynamics of a man and a woman.

Now, lesbians are a bit different. We often do slide around in terms of who is more masculine or more feminine, perhaps because society has always subordinated femininity and determined that masculinity is aspirational. You see this in the fact that butch/femme relationships are common, while butch/butch and femme/femme are seen as little unusual.

Most of my lesbian friends in relationships take on different genderish roles, particularly if they chose to have children together. After all, unless they adopt, someone’s gotta have the baby, and it’s probably going to be the more feminine one.

Does this mean you can slap “male” and “female” ideas onto a butch/femme and call it a day? No. Both women are still going to have challenges in a misogynistic society.

They will face unique types of discrimination, too. The femme is probably going to be told she can be turned straight, while the butch is going to be called a hairy disgusting man-hating lesbian. Femmes may be side-eyed for performing femininity without centering men, while butches will be punished for not performing femininity in the right way.

Regardless, we each see ourselves as women, but different flavors of woman, just like men have different flavors of masculinity. You can think of it like shades of the same experience. Bisexual women also have similar complex feminine grades while also engaging in female/male relationships, but that’s a whole different can of worms that I’m not going to step into because it’s not my place.

If you have to impose some binary on either type of relationship, it might be more like ying and yang. Dark and nurturing versus bright and aggressive. Nourishing and deep versus hot and fast. This typifies both Uileac/Orrinir and Cerie/Haniya in my books without restricting either to a heterosexual dynamic.

Trans people also have a different relationship to their gender because of their lived experiences.

I will keep this brief because I don’t want to step on toes, but trans people are going to feel differently about their gender. Trans women face unique challenges and often have a more complicated relationship with femininity than cis women, mostly because they are constantly policed for performing gender.

Too girly? Trying too hard. Not girly enough? Man in drag. And so on. Which of course takes an immense psychological toll. Trans women are terrified of being hate crimed and, unfortunately, it’s a real possibility depending on one’s location.

I beg of you, please do as much sensitivity reading as possible on trans people so you don’t perpetuate damaging stereotypes. You should get multiple sensitivity readers, too, because every trans person you meet has a different story.

We don’t always go straight (hah) to our true identity.

This requires a bit more sensitivity because you do not want to unintentionally make it seem like you can make a lesbian straight or that bisexuals are confused. Still, a lot of us cycle through labels based on how safe we feel in society and whether we are still dealing with internalized homophobia.

Lesbians decry the Gold Star Lesbian because for many of us, that wasn’t a possibility. We were pushed into compulsive heterosexuality or didn’t feel safe enough to turn down a man’s advances. Being a Gold Star Lesbian means one had the privilege to explore one’s identity at a young age, wasn’t pushed into dating men, and had access to information about lesbianism anyway.

I did not have access to information about LGBTQ identities. At all. I sort of knew they existed but no one talked to me about them until I was in high school. And, as I’ve said before, my father beat the hell out of me when I came out as bisexual and called me a whore. Obviously I was not going to tell him that, well actually, I don’t want men at all. Bisexual was my “compromise identity” to keep myself safe while still accessing the LGBTQ identity in some way.

That doesn’t mean it was a phase. I did mean it completely. I simply had no idea lesbianism was even a thing or was possible for me before I went to college, and it took longer than that to be okay with identifying that way.

I would say, though, that this kind of representation requires sensitivity. It also requires deep interiority so that we can see the misalignment between what the character says and what they feel inside, which keeps it from seeming like a sudden reversal and more like a discovery.

Because the queer community is small, we often have to cohabit with people we don’t like.

In many straight depictions of the queer community, there are dramatic blowups and fallings-out and people who don’t talk to each other anymore.

I’m not saying that doesn’t happen ever, but it’s not as common because we stick together. We don’t have the privilege of cutting off the haters; we’d have to cut off everyone in our circle.

This is the magic behind the joke that everyone in the lesbian community has dated each other and is still on good terms somehow. “Oh yeah, my ex is here to help me move in with my new girlfriend, and another ex is dating yet another ex. Then I’ve got a wedding to attend with a fourth ex – but don’t worry, I only dated one of the brides. Haha.”

So queer fallings-out are often more like a sustained awkwardness where we keep running into one another until the statute of limitations has passed on the original spat and we are on mild speaking terms again. The relationship may never reach its former level of intimacy, but we can see one another in public without fighting or making snarky passive-aggressive comments.

I am much more likely to go no-contact with a straight friend because they can usually be excised without blowing up my whole circle. They were on the outside of my clique anyway.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s more common for straight women to hit on lesbians than the other way around.

Fun fact. Lesbians can smell each other. I’m serious; this was identified back in 2005. We react to pheromones differently than straight women and can identify one another based on these subtle olfactory cues. So it is true that we experience femininity differently than straight women and that our brains are wired a bit more like men’s (but not quite; we’re separate from them too).

Not only do we sniff each other out, we also note the cultural aspects of lesbianism. But given that we’re not always sure and may not realize how exquisite our gaydar is, we don’t approach one another as readily as a straight woman would approach a straight man. We don’t know if the other woman is out, if she’s interested, if she’s working on herself right now, and we’re afraid to ask.

So the trope of lesbians taking forever to ask one another out is true too.

Since we’re terrified of being wrong and offending another woman or being labeled a predator, we aren’t out here hitting on straight women. It’s too risky. We do fall in love with straight women, but we’re unlikely to act on that desire, especially if the woman has been upfront with her identity.

Straight women, on the other hand, often see lesbians as a fun little fling. As they may tokenize lesbianism, misunderstand the lesbian experience, or assume that a lesbian will realize it’s “not that serious,” they will flirt incessantly with lesbians. They want to try it out without consequence, perhaps to affirm their heterosexuality. They may also just be flirty by nature and see it as harmless play.

In some cases, this may be malicious. In other cases, it’s due to insecurity. The straight woman can’t conceptualize of flirting with another woman as being misleading, so they extract compliments or try out their favorite lines. They want a “safer” form of validation, a reminder that they are sexually desirable without having to act on that attention.

I’m not saying every straight woman does it, or even that a large percentage do, but I’ve been on the receiving end of this multiple times since coming out. Meanwhile, me and my fellow lesbians won’t hit on a girl even when they’re out because we’re scaredy cats.

In other cases, a straight woman will automatically assume that a lesbian is attracted to them and get offended for no reason, despite the lesbian giving no signals whatsoever that this is true. Some lesbians have theorized this is because straight women can’t conceive that, just like them, we have preferences, so they think we all want every woman in our life. Untrue.

I would personally posit that this is because straight women’s experience with female attraction comes from toxic straight men, who cannot conceive of liking a woman without wanting to fuck her unless they’re related to her. Straight men judge women based on how much they want to have sex with them and treat them accordingly.

So in a straight woman’s mind, we are categorized as “straight man-adjacent,” when that is completely untrue. We were socialized under the same patriarchal oppression and female camaraderie, even if our experience isn’t quite the same. We can, indeed, be just friends with women – even fellow lesbians. Gasp.

Would it be enticing to have a lesbian fall hopelessly in love with a straight woman? Absolutely. Agonizing. Delicious drama. But would a lesbian act upon their desires publicly? No. They’ll pine and yearn and long – and, perhaps, be devastated when the straight woman decides to play around.

Queer representation is important. I wouldn’t be on a five-year mission to represent it if I did not believe that. However, we aren’t just straight people who date our own sex, and trans people aren’t just cis people with different parts. We have our own little world that doesn’t always align with the dominant straight culture.

Most of us have had to become culturally bilingual, and we act differently with straight people than we do in our own community. We understand the straight experience because we’re surrounded by it all the time, but straight people haven’t necessarily taken the time to understand us.

If you want to represent us, you must take that time. What I have shared here is a starter pack, a sampler of what you will want to explore. But, like with representing any community, it’s best if you talk to those in your life who you love and who know its inner workings.

Spend time with us outside of Pride, as a thoughtful ally and observer. That will give you more insight than any article ever could.