softness
instead of dying and trauma and violence
I read a story today. I can’t get into the specifics; this is one of the burdens joys of being a publisher. I get a lot of manuscripts sent to me, and I hold them in strict confidence. They don’t even get shared with family or friends. I digress. Back to the story I can’t give you details about. I can say this much—there was no death of a queer character. Nobody was disowned. No one experienced fresh trauma. None of the characters were rejected or hated or punished or isolated. No one was displaced, no one was left to fend for themselves.
By the time I wound my way through the last few pages, I had this barely noticeable hollowness inside, like something squirming, unable to sit still in the quiet. You see, I’ve come to expect violence. I’m accustomed to the narrative we have all been fed and believe is some normal rite of passage for queer stories. We get traumatized. We have to learn to be crafty and resourceful due to isolation and a lack of belonging. And so many of our stories still live under that umbrella despite us seeing and knowing and believing that there has to be more to us than that kind of thing.
The story in my hands was gentle and sweet. It didn’t feature anyone questioning the worthiness of a queer character. It wove words of belonging and legacy and family and community together into an intricate braid of pure loveliness, and I had no idea how to feel about that.
I was bewildered.
What kind of world could we build if our imaginations were filled with this sort of thing? If we dreamt in the soft colors of having our needs fulfilled, if we were more often shown to be loved and cared for?
There is so much awful stuff in the world around us. It’s horrifying. And I’m not here to sell you optimism or [gasp] hope. But I do think there is value in asking some basic questions not just about the stories we have told and been told, but about the structure that narrative keeps feeding into and from.
Who does it serve?
There will always be shelf space for the books that came before, for the stories about all of those hard things we faced and need to talk about. And maybe there is also room for something unexpected, something simple and sweet, something warm and tender, so that we can start to learn to tell our own stories in their best light.
If you’re so inclined, tell me in the comments what kind of story you would like to read that [maybe] doesn’t fit the trend.
Your trans friend,
Robin
So important, Robin. My parallel experience was reading ‘new woman’ stories from the 1890s to 1910s. In those stories the woman could usually only have her independence by choosing death at the end. Reading them a century later I realised that conditions had to improve before these women could even imagine a world in which they could be both free and alive. Until we are all free, none of us is free. Any story in which the protagonist has to overcome problems unrelated to their transness gets my vote.
I can't wait to read this book you can't give details about yet!