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

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hmm, well, there's that Chaz Brenchley fella: his early thrillers are not reliable in this regard - he notoriously said that no one gets a free pass, into or out of his books - but the epic fantasies, The Devil in the Dust et seq or Bridge of Dreams et seq, those certainly feature gay characters who don't die. Also that Daniel Fox person, Dragon in Chains et seq: you have to wait a while, but there they are. Not dying.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Two widely disparate books are the only ones that occur to me: The Mask of Apollo, by Mary Renault, which is notable in that the onstage deaths happen mostly to characters who are understood as het, or whose sexuality we don't know. Meanwhile all the characters who are explicitly gay/coded as gay survive the book just fine, if I remember correctly.

The other one is The Silver Metal Lover, in which Gay Best Friend is kind of one-dimensionally campy but does make it to the end of the book alive and well after having had a sex life and all.

Oh, wait--Francesca Lia Block's books have a lot of gay/bi characters who have a very good track record of surviving to the end of the book and getting on with their lives. There are one or two minor characters who are tragic and victimized and melodramatic, but the mainstays are Dirk and Duck from the Weetzie Bat series, and the title characters from Violet and Claire, and most of the characters in the short stories in Girl Goddess #9.

I recognize that a lot of people find Block insufferable, but I have a deep and old love for her work in general, and I can still remember particularly how weird it felt when I read Witch Baby as a kid and there was a same-sex couple who were reasonably well-adjusted people and had a good relationship and didn't die.

Tom and Carl from the Wizards books by Diane Duane--well, I know they're secondary mentor characters, but it would have been easy for Duane to kill one or both of them and send the protagonists out for revenge. Instead of which, they're still standing while many other secondary characters have bitten the dust.

I would have used the word "queer" for convenience in the above comments, except that I'm uncomfortable using reclaimed slurs. Mind you, I'm not saying this to shut you or anyone else down. But I feel weird about it when it comes to me using the term. On one hand, it's such a handy blanket term when "gay" would be too specific. On the other hand I don't want to sound like I'm using an insult/a slur/speech that I'm not entitled to; also, I've spent too much time around people who used it as a slur. So I'm conflicted. Do you ever feel this conflict?

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

I sent you Bridgers some time ago, did I not? It does not really count as a book, being unpublished.

[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.

[chomiji]

The Northern Girl by Elizabeth Lynn

Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh (lousy things happen to the gay characters, but hey, lousy things happen to almost everyone in that book)

Don't know whether you want manga, but here:

The manga series Samurai Deeper Kyo (both negative and positive portrayals of gay people; the most prominent of them is still alive and leading a productive, fairly contented life at the end, as part of a community)

The (short) manga series Antique Bakery

The manga series FAKE

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

Mercedes Lackey may not be what I call quality writing (just a guilty pleasure), but her Valdemar books have several queer characters, a few of whom don't die. The Vanyel triology involves 3 queer characters, 2 die (1 in book 1, 1 in book 3), the other lives to a ripe old age- the deaths have nothing to do with their sexuality, though. The Winds and Storms trilogies have another queer character- Firesong (and a queer supporting character at the end) who doesn't die either. In fact, she does the "here's a pair or trio of queer supporting characters" thing in a variety of her books.

There's also the entire social structure of the planet O, in some of Ursula K. LeGuin's short stories (I think in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea)- where a marriage is 4 people, two men, two women, and each person is supposed to be sexually involved with one person of each gender (trying to summarize briefly).

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Since I haven't seen them here Black Wine and A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey both feature queer characters who have various foibles and follies but live and die the same as other people (one of them is an accident heavy book, the other one has a serial killer tucked into its folds).

Gwyneth Jones has a series starting with Bold as Love that has a variety of characters with gender fluidity and features a trio of bisexual polyamorous heroes who go through a ton of bad shit, but don't die for being queer. Also, it's an Arthur pastiche set against the backdrop of British Green politics and folk festivals.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Hmm. There's Joel Lane's novel "The Blue Mask". Caveat: there's a queerbashing at the heart of it, but the central characters do make it to the end. There's a lot about Genet in there, odd story-games, and a play (I think Joel actually wanted to "adapt" a Genet story for that, but the estate wouldn't let him).

[weirdquark]

Laurie Marks? Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic. (And when it exists, Air Logic.)

[genarti]

I was going to mention Diane Duane's Middle Kingdoms (Door Into...) books as well. The mentioned trigger warning for the second book absolutely is worth mentioning, but the world in general seems to run on a pansexual default assumption, and I can't think of a single character who's confirmed straight. Or confirmed exclusively gay, for that matter.

I've only read the first of Tanya Huff's Quarters series, Sing The Four Quarters, although I believe bookelfe has read and reviewed all of them. But that first features a bisexual protagonist, who is a) married to another woman, and b) pregnant by a man (they have an open relationship at least in terms of one night stands while traveling, but this one featured some unexpected consequences). And all three of them survive the book just fine, IIRC.

[nnozomi.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind a comment from a random passerby: how about Melissa Scott's SF? Most of her heroines tend to be lesbian or far-future equivalent thereof, and there is relatively little killing off of anybody--or, when queer people do die, as in Burning Bright, there are enough other queer characters around that it's "somebody died," not "the LGBT character died." My favorites are the duology Dreamships and Dreaming Metal, where now that I think of it there seem to be practically no het relationships at all among the various main characters. (Also spectacular world-building.)

[rosefox]

*turns on comment tracking*

Can we also exclude books where the queer character is left alive but miserable/alone/grieving while everyone else gets a happy ending?

[rosefox]

Oh right, recs! Anything published by Blind Eye Books, and particularly Ginn Hale's books. The story "Marigolds" in Long Hidden is a lesbian story with a happy ending. :) And I just discovered Solace Ames's queer kinky romances and I love them to BITS.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Chaz Brenchley novels (and Daniel Fox, and Ben Macallan) don't kill off the gay characters. Some of them, yes, but not all of them, and not the only ones.