Lia Declan's Musings

Queer Characters Are Normal Characters

When someone asks me where to find the queer books in my shop, I almost always feel the same tension in the room.

Sometimes the person stands at the door for a moment, scanning the shelves like the books might announce themselves. Sometimes they lower their voice on the word queer. Sometimes they don’t. I walk them to the section, I run my hand along the spines, and I watch their face when they realise that every book on that shelf is just a story. There are detectives, bakers, space captains, students, farmers, immortals, idiots, geniuses, romantics, cowards, parents, and people who should never be left in charge of a houseplant. They happen to be queer. That fact exists next to everything else, not over it.

This is what I want from this piece. I want us to talk about how to put queer people on the page in a way that feels that ordinary and that unavoidable. I want us to talk about how to do it without lectures, labels in the first paragraph, or finger pointing at imaginary straight readers who need to be educated at every turn.

Queer characters deserve better than that. So do you. So do your readers.

Writing “I’m queer” without announcing it

You don’t need to give a character a stage in the opening scene and make them declare a label to the room. In fact, if you write that speech too early, you risk turning them into a sign instead of a person.

Readers learn who a character is by watching what they notice, what they want, and what they remember. Desire does most of the work if you let it. A woman who walks into a café and focuses on the way another woman’s mouth moves when she laughs has already told the reader plenty. A man who can’t stop thinking about the way another man’s shoulders felt under his hands during a dance doesn’t need to declare that he’s gay in the next line. The reader is not an idiot.

History speaks as well. A character who mentions an ex-wife, an ex-husband, and a current partner of the same gender in the space of a page has already drawn a map. A character who talks about a long trail of almost relationships with women and one careful almost with a man has already put a question on the table. You don’t need to stop the story and introduce a glossary of terms. You only need to let those histories exist in plain sight.

For trans and non-binary characters, detail does the same work. A character who tucks a binder into a drawer before bed, or who checks a voice message and hears their deadname read by a robotic system, doesn’t need to stop and deliver a three page explanation of gender. A character who corrects a pronoun once and then goes back to the conversation has already given the reader the required information.

All of this rests on a simple choice. You decide that your reader is capable of paying attention. You decide that they’ll put the pieces together without a flashing sign in neon that says “This one is the gay one.”

Does that mean you should never write an explicit line such as “I’m a lesbian” or “I’m a trans man” or “I’m non-binary”? Not at all. Sometimes that sentence is the point.

If the scene is about a character finally saying out loud what they’ve only ever admitted to themselves in the dark, then that line belongs there. If the scene is a coming out moment with real risk and real stakes, then the words have weight. The problem only arises when you feel you must force those lines into every queer story, whether the scene needs them or not.

Let the character’s life show the reader who they are. Use the explicit label when the emotional moment demands it, not because you think you owe an information packet to every straight person who might open the book.

People first, politics present

You can’t write queer lives without politics. The world we live in turns queerness into a debate on a regular basis. Laws, sermons, headlines, and family rows reach into our houses and try to rearrange the furniture.

The question is not whether politics will appear. The question is where you place the focus.

If you only ever write queer characters as arguments with legs, you rob them of the right to be ridiculous, selfish, kind, horny, devout, messy, ambitious, lazy, scared, or brave. You turn them into walking answers to questions that straight people are asking. That isn’t representation. That’s unpaid labour.

Start from the person.

Give your queer characters jobs that take up space in their minds. Let them care about overdue tax returns and broken boilers. Let them miss the bus. Let them misjudge people. Let them fall in love with the wrong person for reasons that have nothing to do with internalised anything. Let them argue about film tastes, or music, or whether pineapple belongs on pizza (which, by the way, it doesn’t). Let them worry about money and health and ageing parents.

In other words, give them the same cluttered human life any straight character would receive in a well written story. Their queerness will still shape all of it. It will filter their experiences of school, work, family, and faith. It will matter. It just doesn’t need to swallow everything else they are.

When you do put overt politics on the page, keep the focus on the cost and the choice. Show who gets hurt and how they respond. Show who keeps their job and who doesn’t. Show who gets to keep living in the house with the garden and who ends up back with their parents. Let the readers see the system at work through what actually happens to the people they’ve grown to care about.

If you do that, you won’t need to break the fourth wall and lecture anyone. The story will speak for itself.

Conflict without turning the book into a courtroom

Queer characters move through families, churches, mosques, synagogues, workplaces, schools, and small towns. Those spaces aren’t neutral. Sometimes they’re loving and clumsy. Sometimes they’re kind in public and cruel in private. Sometimes they’re openly hostile.

You don’t need to soften all of that. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. If you erase every instance of homophobia or transphobia, you create a world that doesn’t exist. Readers who live in the real one will feel the gap right away.

What you can avoid is the constant finger pointing.

The uncle who says something vile at the dinner table doesn’t need an author’s note hanging over his head that says “This man is wrong and bad.” The scene will tell us that if you handle it correctly. Show how the room reacts. Show who goes silent. Show who changes the subject. Show who leaves, who stays, and who calls him on it.

The pastor who preaches that queer people are broken doesn’t need a rebuttal sermon embedded in the next chapter. Show the faces in the congregation. Show the kid who hears those words and realises they’re not safe there. Show the parent who feels their stomach drop and looks at their child beside them. Show the moments after the service in the car park, on the walk home, around the kitchen table.

This isn’t about protecting bigots. It’s about trusting the reader. When you build cause and effect carefully, they can draw conclusions without you holding up placards. That restraint actually strengthens the impact of the scenes where you do choose to speak more plainly.

You’re writing fiction, not a closing argument. The verdict lives in the lives of your characters.

Normal without invisible

There’s a particular kind of normal I want for queer characters. Not the kind that scrubs out difference. Not the kind that pretends every environment is safe and welcoming. I want the kind of normal where a queer relationship on the page doesn’t feel like a special event.

Think about the way most readers react to a straight couple in a crime novel. The detective has an ex-husband, an ex-wife, a new lover, a rough patch, a divorce, a reconciliation. Nobody stops to say, “Ah yes, this is a heterosexual love story.” It’s baked in. The story can focus on the case without explaining the existence of the marriage.

Queer couples deserve the same treatment.

If you write a woman who comes home after a day at work and kisses her wife in the kitchen, you don’t have to pause to justify it. You don’t have to explain how they met, or what their families thought, unless the story actually needs that information. You can let them argue about takeaway menus and laundry while the real plot plays out somewhere else.

Normalising queerness on the page looks like this. The story refuses to treat heterosexuality as the hidden standard and everything else as a labelled alternative. The story simply shows the range of human arrangements that exist.

That doesn’t mean you never show danger. There are times when a pair of men walking hand in hand in a certain town on a certain night would be taking a risk. There are moments when a trans woman in a public bathroom has to calculate her own safety. You shouldn’t erase those realities. You should handle them with care and with an eye on the real costs.

The balance is yours to strike. Some stories lean into a softer world on purpose, because the writer wants to give queer readers a space to breathe. Some stories lean hard into the rough edges, because the writer wants to honour what they or others have survived. Both approaches can normalise queer lives, as long as the characters remain whole people and not symbols.

Writing for queer readers, not about them

The last thing I want to say is this. When you sit down to write a queer story, decide who you’re writing for.

If you write with an imaginary straight jury in mind, you’ll start to explain everything. You’ll sand down the parts that might make them uncomfortable. You’ll translate jokes. You’ll overuse labels. You’ll turn your character into a gentle tour guide through Queer Land.

If you write with queer readers in mind, you’ll make different choices. You’ll let in-jokes stay. You’ll trust that people can Google a term if they need to. You’ll treat labels as tools, not as fences. You’ll give your characters the right to be tired, or horny, or selfish, or devout, or bored. You’ll stop trying to make them role models and you’ll let them be human.

That doesn’t shut straight readers out. It invites them in properly. It asks them to meet your characters as they are, instead of demanding that your characters shape themself around outside comfort.

Every queer book on my shelves that really lands does the same simple thing. It treats queer people as people and lets the rest of the story grow from that soil. Whether the plot involves dragons, coffee, serial killers, bakeries, or spaceships, the core stays the same. Love, fear, shame, joy, grief, lust, stubbornness, courage. All the usual human mess, dressed in particular lives.

If you want to write queer stories, start there.

Let your characters live. Let their queerness be clear without announcements. Let their relationships sit on the page with the same weight as any straight romance. Let politics show through consequences instead of lectures. Write for the people who’ll see themself in your work, not only for the ones who need convincing that those people exist.

If you do that, you’ll help build a body of literature where queerness isn’t a genre that needs a warning sign. It’s simply part of the world the story recognises as real.