There are no stars at all for some of us

[sovay]

Hey! Internet! I've just been talking about how much it sucks when a novel kills off its queer characters. Especially when there's, like, one of them and they're the one who doesn't make it. Can someone point me toward a list of books where that doesn't happen? Spoilers, whatever.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking particularly of Stealing Fire, but Jo Graham's Numinous World series is really good for that, overall: there's usually a couple of queer characters and at least one genderfluid character in the recurrent reincarnational melange, and no one ever dies just for their sexuality. If they die, they die because of the way their other characteristics interact with the time and situation.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

(You could also make a case for Tom Ripley, who survives all his adventures without ever seeming to completely realize his own essential queerness, let alone the fact that he seems to have unwittingly married an equally stealth lesbian who can perform heterosexually when called upon. One way or the other, I find him hilariously entertaining, and I love the fact that Patricia Highsmith allows him to get away unscathed.)

[sovay]

One way or the other, I find him hilariously entertaining, and I love the fact that Patricia Highsmith allows him to get away unscathed.

I noticed on re-read a few years ago that one of the villains of Mary Stewart's The Moon-Spinners (1962) is strongly coded as gay and it doesn't have anything to do with his being a jewel thief. I found I liked that very much. His name is Tony Gamble, which he makes a disarming joke of—Gamble by name, gamble by nature; he has faintly camp manners and moves as economically as a dancer, but instead he's a jack-of-all-trades at a new hotel in a small village on Crete. He's graceful and humorous and he's the one the author allows to get away, facetiously promising to send the heroine a postcard from the Kara Bugaz. Her cousin thinks he never will, but I like to think he sent one from somewhere.

And Mary Stewart just died, at a very respectable age, but I am still going to mourn her.

[sovay]

I'm thinking particularly of Stealing Fire, but Jo Graham's Numinous World series is really good for that, overall: there's usually a couple of queer characters and at least one genderfluid character in the recurrent reincarnational melange, and no one ever dies just for their sexuality.

Awesome. I haven't read anything by Graham, despite knowing that she's written at least one classical novel. Reincarnational melange?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

In each book in the series, the characters are essentially the same people reborn into different bodies. So the person who was a female prophet/priestess in Black Ships becomes the male slave-turned-soldier of Stealing Fire, then becomes one of Cleopatra's handmaidens in Hand of Isis...and all the people around this person are also the same. Their friend becomes their parent, their lover becomes their nemesis, etc. Recognizable yet different, the core the same, everything else changed.

[sovay]

Their friend becomes their parent, their lover becomes their nemesis, etc. Recognizable yet different, the core the same, everything else changed.

What a fascinating conceit. I will have to check these out.