Difficult to Categorize | 3 | Is it LGBT?

Yes!

An uncategorical chorus of up-votes for that one. Both Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch and its precursor Part 1: US Open 1987 are extremely LGBT. There’s all the many lesbians plus gays throughout, along with definite bisexuals and at least one pivotal character who’s sexually transitioning. Start to finish, I’ve got this category covered.

Yet I didn’t publish Part 1 as LGBT (I put it up in the Sports Fiction category) specifically because that book contains no more than a smidgen of one lesbian sex scene not even involving the lead characters and I figured anyone coming for LGBT would want more sex. Because I would. That being, in my mind, the main part of the pact between LGBT author and reader, who through the magic of publishing meet in a space with that sign right on the roof: LGBT. Meaning: Here will be sex of that kind described; lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgendered sex acts will be depicted. For me and I suppose for my cohort, whoever we are, having the LGBT option at all makes the ADULT and Erotica tags feel strangely redundant and hair-splitting.


Is this generational? As I reflect, now, I recognize that to touch and arouse sexual feelings might appear as a chore and not a duty to the modern-day LGBT writer. Who might just want to write about characters while steering clear of their sex lives; maybe they want to write LGBT action with no sex at all—only, antiquing or something. Solving or committing murders at major antiques shows or racecourses. Teaching at a local community college while also being a shape-shifter. It’s possible. Writers who might have decided that if there were sex scenes they’d call it ADULT and stamp it Erotic but there are not, there aren’t any sex scenes, such writers could be publishing novels at this very moment and tagging them LGBT without a qualm. For all I know, Middlemarch with its shameless excess in the lesbian sex scene department might be greeted like an interloping pervert in the normal, default, ADULT-filtered LGBT catalogue—where the unwary moms of school-aged children go to buy their lesbian books, an old exhibitionist slouched in a playground raincoat.