Don’t Dip Your Pushy Straight Writer Pen In Someone’s Gay Blood

This article falls under the category of that good old-fashioned term we call cultural appropriation. I know a lot of you straight white writers…especially the straight women…don’t like the term and you don’t like hearing that you are doing something wrong. That’s because you are so deeply rooted in your straight white privilege you don’t think you CAN do anything wrong. You believe that everyone should be able to write about whatever they want. Unfortunately for you, times have changed and that’s not how it works anymore. Now pay attention. Those of us in marginalized groups are speaking up.

This particular article is focused on white authors appropriating black authors, but the concept can be applied to any other marginalized group. It’s no secret that this happens to Asian content, and God only knows straight white women writers dominate the gay romance market to the point of nausea. This is something new, too. When I started getting published with gay publishers in the 90s most stories and books were written by gay men, about gay men. I’m not talking about readers. I’m talking about authors/writers. 

It’s a particularly brilliant article because it begins by exploring classic authors who did, indeed, push beyond the bounds of what they knew. But it goes deeper, and it gets into cultural appropriation. And I happen to believe gay men are a minority and we have our own history and culture that no one else can know unless they’ve lived it first hand. I’m talking about when a straight white author only writes gay content or Asian content. There was a TV show recently that was a huge hit, but the actors really got fed up because it was written by straight white TV writers and they never allowed input from people who are actually Korean. So even though the show was a hit, it crashed and burned eventually. I think that’s going to be the future for all content that is culturally appropriated, from straights writing gay fiction for monetary gain, to non-Asian people writing Asian content. 

They give a good example here with the mainstream book, The Help. This is how it backfires. We know. You can’t hide it. 

In literature one of the most famous examples of white people crossing that line and writing as a black person is the case of Kathryn Stockett who wrote The Help in 2009. That book spent 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, is based on the lives of black, female, maids in America’s southern states in the 1960s. The book is written in the voices of two black women and is set in Jackson, Mississippi during racial segregation and Klu Klux Klan lynchings; it is also written in the idiomatic “black” vernacular (“You is smart, you is kind, you is important”).

Here’s more.  I have seen this in gay books time and again, especially in Brokeback Mountain…a gay book with a straight woman author. There were scenes and dialogue that just did not make sense to me as gay man and I never would have written them that way. 

I know a lot of you are not going to like this, but that’s too bad. This is the way the world is going and I plan to go with it. 

With that said, don’t dip your straight writer pen in my gay blood anymore. We’re done. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this in time. It’s not going to disappear and you are already starting to look very foolish.

As a side note, things have actually gotten better over the years. At one time there were straight women passing themselves off as gay men just to sell books. One was caught hiring a gay man to do a guest appearance somewhere. Another was caught plagiarizing straight romance novels with gay characters. And there was this male male romance blog with a stupid name like “Chicks with Dicks” that was so offensive to me at the time I gagged whenever I went there. Thankfully, most of that has disappeared. 

   The Wizard of Pride

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