Lia Declan's Musings

Someone wrote a review of one of my books saying, ‘This is the reason our kids are “choosing” to be gay,’ and I felt my whole body get hot. Not because the insult hurt my fragile little feelings in some way, but because it revealed exactly how little thought that person gives to the weight of their own words. This was my response.

I want to start by saying, there is a living person on the other end of that sentence. There are kids who read things like that and learn exactly who is safe and who isn’t. Not because I said something, but because you did. You chose to throw that sentence at me out of some sense of righteous anger, and you chose to aim it at them, not for them.

I want to make something completely clear: I don’t ‘glamourise’ queerness. I don’t sit at my desk and write recruitment pamphlets, I write stories. I write characters who happen to be queer in the same way that characters happen to be straight, or left-handed, or prefer tea over coffee. I write worlds where queer people exist without becoming a circus act for straight people. I write truths that come from the lives people like me actually live. If that feels like an attack to you, then the problem isn’t in my stories, the problem is in your aversion to something that doesn’t fit inside your assumptions.

You say kids are ‘choosing’ to be gay; queerness isn’t some sort of fashion trend that kids put on in the morning because it looks good in selfies. Do you have any idea how much easier it would be for so many of us if we could simply choose not to be queer? Do you understand how many of us have tried? We didn’t look at a book cover and decide to rearrange our entire lives, and deal with your type of disapproval, for the fun of it. We looked into our own hearts and finally stopped lying about what was already there. If books have any role in that, it’s not recruitment, it’s relief. It’s the instant that a scared teenager realises that they’re not alone and that they are not broken.

My queer fiction is not written for your comfort. It isn’t marketed to your Facebook group. It is not shelved in the children’s section with glitter on the cover. My queer fiction is written for people with a certain level of emotional maturity, who know how to read context. It’s written for people who want stories with blood, and love, and history in them, stories where queer characters get to live, love, work, screw up, and keep going. If your ‘concern’ for children leads you to attack fiction that you were never the audience for, then you are not protecting kids. You’re patrolling culture.

You worry that kids will see queer people in books and films and decide that queerness is the only way to be cool. Let me flip that back on you. For generations, kids saw only straight people in stories. They saw straight couples, straight marriages, straight happily-ever-afters. Nobody stood on a soapbox and screamed, ‘This is the reason our kids are choosing to be straight.’ Nobody panicked that the presence of straight romance would negatively affect them. You only panic when queer people claim the same narrative space that straight people have always occupied without question.

What you really mean is, ‘This is the reason our kids feel safe enough to come out.’ You mean, ‘This is the reason they won’t hide themselves to make me more comfortable.’ You mean, ‘This is the reason the old lie doesn’t work anymore.’ Of course, you feel threatened. A world where queer kids see themselves in fiction is a world where your control over their story begins to fail. They start to imagine futures that don’t run through your narrow definitions. They begin to understand that they are allowed to exist without apologising.

In turn, I will not apologise for giving them that opportunity. I will not apologise for putting queer characters on the page and letting them be normal and messy and tender and flawed. I will not apologise for writing work that tells some kid in some small town that their life can be more than shame and fear. You can clutch your pearls and shout about decadence and downfall. You can write comments about ‘choosing’ to be gay. My answer will stay the same. I write truths. I write fiction that treats queer lives as worthy of being seen. If that unsettles you, then you can close the book, walk away, and leave the stories to the people who need them. I don’t need the €1.18 royalty I got when you accidentally purchased my book.

And for the record, my work is not for those who stroll in with outrage and bigotry. My work is for readers who understand that stories can save lives, quietly, one page at a time, long after your ridiculous comment has been forgotten.