Diversity in Fiction

This may come as a shock to some people, but…

All experiences are not the same.

Shocking, I know. Whether you’re straight or queer, black or white. Your individual experience is not going to be the same as your friend’s or even your sibling’s. Everyone lives through things differently; everyone encounters different things. But that doesn’t mean they should not be recorded or expressed through art.

I am a queer/bisexual black(of American origin, so mixed background), gender nonconforming individual. I am also, for all intents and purposes, still largely in the closet. My partner knows, a friend or two here and there know, and while they don’t fully comprehend it, they accept me. Coming up as a kid, I always knew I was different. My parents didn’t cope well with my clothing choices, my mannerisms, and for awhile, I tried to conform, and my life was easier for a bit. But it never felt right. I always felt that I wasn’t being true to myself. I grew up in the suburbs of a big city, I’ve dealt with and seen things a lot of of people haven’t. My experience is not going to be the same as, say, a white person from the Midwest, someone from the West Coast, or even someone with similar stats as me from a different economic bracket.

As you might imagine, finding fiction where I can see people like myself represented in any capacity is a daunting task. Naturally, when I started brainstorming the world of Nasu and its characters, I drew upon my personal knowledge first.

A big part of my personal experience involves pushing my own feelings to the back, ignoring them to make others comfortable while the people around me make assumptions and say things they think don’t pertain to me. Some of that is some biphobic nonsense. People not understanding what it means, people feeling that bi individuals need to take a side, to not be wishy-washy, that they’re sluts for not being able to decide. These are real things that you hear, even from people you love. And personal relationships are complicated. As revealed as the book goes on, Phil and Jerome have that kind of back and forth where they rib each other about such things. Not everyone has someone they feel comfortable with like that. I didn’t, for a long time. The inclusion of such dialogue or a relationship isn’t to support the way of thinking, but merely highlighting that this happens to people. It’s happened to me and people I love. To leave that out would be disingenuous to the type of characters and the type of world I try to create.

In Nasu, I made Phil a bit like me. An oddball to those around him. Part of that decision was his occupation. He’s a male nurse, a position that is STILL pretty rare to find men in. As of 2018, in the US, only 9.6-13% of nurses are men, which is at an all time high from 1960-1970 (though the numbers seem to change depending on what publication you’re reading.) Long, slow progress, but progress nonetheless. But no transition is without issue. Just because there are more of them, does not mean most people visiting hospitals or doctors offices encounter them. As a person who was admitted to a hospital 4 times in a 6 month span, they were conspicuously absent to the point I made a mental note of it. there were plenty of male orderlies, but actual nurses dispensing medicine, taking blood, administering actual care? I met one.

This does not mean that Phil is wrong for his choice of work. This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be doing this. It just is. Sometimes it’s OK for things to just exist without carrying some larger message. Though, the message could be that, despite the ribbing and teasing and lack of acceptance, Phil does his job with pride anyway. I wish I’d had his bravery for a lot of things.

Phil is also half Puerto Rican. Torres is a last name common for people with his background. I don’t really like othering my characters with lengthy descriptions of their skin color, hair texture, eye color, and such things, though there are exceptions when someone differs from the majority of the cast or they have a trait that makes them stand out. As a reader of color, I personally take huge issue with people my particular shade of brown and darker being repeated referred to in terms of  food or furniture. And on the other hand, being pale is not tied to one ethnicity. It isn’t a positive or negative thing, only indicating a hint at lack of sun exposure or melanin in the skin. If there are no negative things attached to that descriptor within the context of the piece, I don’t think the word itself is inherently problematic. A word choice other people wouldn’t choose? Definitely. But, pale as a derogatory term is a leap to be sure.

Did you know a sizeable number of Latinx people don’t speak Spanish? I’ve known a few of these people, seen them struggle with their identity. Again, not positive nor negative. Not idealizing. It’s one of those things that just exists. This is the experience of someone who exists. There is no set number of boxes a person has to tick for their ethnicity and existence to be valid. Phil, like most characters with a little effort put in, is an amalgam, based on a lot of different pieces of the lives of actual people. It might be a long shot that someone with all these different qualities exists, but it’s not impossible. But even if he doesn’t, the sum of Phil’s parts still speaks to people on some level, or rather, I hope it does.

This is why I wrote Nasu. This is why I started writing characters that you won’t find in 5 out of 10 books you’ll pickup (no shade meant). There is just more out there than the standard play by play of representation. That’s what I want to read, and that’s what I want to write.

Admittedly, some of these things might jar some people with how they’re presented or that these situations exist, and for some of them, they should. Being exposed to perspectives other than your own is a good thing. A great thing even. If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing.

There’s more I could go into, but I’ll refrain as I think I’ve already made my point pretty clear.

Different kinds of people have different experiences.

That doesn’t make the generally accepted ones better, and it doesn’t make the others worse. Not all stories are going to be clean or nice or full of friendship and hope and acceptance. And even if they do have those elements, they don’t have to start that way or stay that way. Life isn’t always neat, happy, cheerful, or clean. Just like people, you can’t carve it up into pieces and fit them into boxes and arbitrarily decide what works and what doesn’t. Can you imagine how boring it would be if every single story stayed along the same tracks and showed the same experiences? No one venturing off and exploring different facets of the human condition? Everyone would start to feel the same. Comfortable, vapid, shallow.

I’ll say it again for the people in the back: There are as many different takes as there are different kinds of people. And they all deserve to be heard. Gatekeeping as no place in fiction. Period. You don’t get to invalidate someone else’s experiences and the way they choose to express it because you don’t like it. If you’re uncomfortable with something that doesn’t fit your cookie cutter expectations, you should take it as a sign that it might be time to broaden your horizons.