It’s officially June, which means it’s officially Pride Month & of course I’m celebrating as a bisexual lady 💖💜💙 For everyone who falls under the LGBT+ umbrella, I hope that it’s a month of feeling free to express and celebrate your identity—and especially if anyone feels they have to stay closeted/doesn’t get to experience Pride with family or friends, you have my affection and best wishes 💖
Since this is a newsletter about my writing, I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge the LGBT+ representation in The Blood of a Divine, the gothic historical fantasy novel I am querying. So allow me to put a spotlight on a few LGBT+ related snippets from the book! (which I also posted on Instagram, if you’d like to give it a like there, too 😉)
You may note that I’m leaving out names from some of these quotes because although the queer identities of the main cast are important to me & to their character arcs, some reveals come as a surprise in the pov of the character narrating (and it might be a surprise for some readers to find out which of my characters are not straight!).
The only character whose queer identity I can talk about without being vague is Adrian because in the same chapter that I introduce her, she meets a lady at a bar and they hook up—so Adrian’s sapphic identity is not ambiguous at all from the moment we meet her—although later in the story, it does come as a surprise to our MC Ehren that she’s not only into women, but also into men and of course, as you may have seen me talk about previously, she eventually falls for him 🔥.
Very important note—TBOAD is historical fiction and it takes place at a time when people in Europe had to hide their queer identities or risk arrest, and women could even go to jail for wearing trousers! While there were secret societies and many people posed as straight-passing in public, queer people of course existed in historical times—and in some places/cultures, as you will see in TBOAD, people were bold enough to be themselves in public with no fear of the consequences! But even the words “gay” and “bisexual” didn’t exist in 1899 as the way we know it today and people often did not use labels at all to represent gender or sexuality despite being under the LGBT+ umbrella in modern terms.
However, we have many examples of queer and gender-nonconforming art, writing, and real people who were known throughout history—even if it’s subtext or barely subtext, like in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was a great influence and help for writing about the 1890’s London/Europe gay scene. While it’s a necessary challenge to show identity rather than state it in historical fiction—and every person is so much more than their sexuality, so it’s not like it should come up the first time characters meet each other—queer people absolutely existed in the year 1899 and they have existed since the most ancient human civilizations.
And although it’s important to be able to say “I have this many bi/gay/trans/ace etc. characters in my book”, sometimes a story needs to have that part of someone’s identity be something that both characters and readers discover through the story—because maybe the character whose journey it is doesn’t even know it about themselves at first!—and that self-discovery happens for one character in TBOAD. As someone who can speak to the experience personally of not realizing she was bisexual until her mid 20’s and assumed she was straight most of her life before that, this was a storyline/aspect of the character that deeply resonated with me, and I think it’s important to write stories and to publish books that represent the experiences of bisexual people who don’t realize that their physical and/or emotional attraction to multiple genders is valid until well into their prime adult years.
So anyway, yes, The Blood of a Divine has multiple queer characters! 🌈✨ and although the main romance in this book is between a male and female character, I’m gonna drop another friendly reminder: male/female relationships that consist of one or more bisexual partners are still queer relationships and being in a M/F relationship does not negate or ‘cancel out’ anyone’s bisexuality 💖💜💙
and on that related note…
here’s a meme I made earlier this week for Ehren & Adrian’s romance… 😂
True romance…🌹
(lol but really, I love Ehren & Adrian’s dynamic and how their relationship progresses from beginning to end, and I’m sure you will, too! 😘)
And to circle back on the subject (on a serious note this time)…
I know bisexuality is unfortunately not everyone’s romantic cup of tea in real life or fiction, and those same people who look down upon bisexuality/treat it as if it’s not a ‘real’ sexuality will refuse to acknowledge how discriminatory and prejudiced that is while being the same people who say they ‘support gay rights.’ And unfortunately, there are a lot more people out there like that than you think…
In my previous professional career, I had to hear my own colleagues express specifically biphobic sentiments about the very people they were counseling—and it sickened me because I had not come out to those coworkers at the time, and I never came out publicly at work after that because not only did I have to wonder what those people would say about me behind closed doors or how much less they might talk to me as I continued to work with them, but by not coming out, I got to hear what they really thought about bisexual people while they assumed I was straight.
So of course when it comes to publishing, which is a new professional avenue for me, I have to be careful of who I choose to work with. It’s the reason I’ve been very upfront about my bisexuality on my public profiles and query letters—because I would rather have someone reject me and my book from the jump for being written by and featuring a bisexual woman rather than find out later—say, in the editing or submission process—that they want me to cut out my bi characters/storylines/scenes or make them “choose a side”—or they simply don’t want to represent me anymore after they find out I’m bi.
That’s why I’m choosing to be loud and proud about my bisexuality on my writing platforms before I have an agent or a publishing deal and that’s why the only audience I really care to appeal to with The Blood of a Divine is the queer community (and especially the queer BIPOC diaspora community) because I really don’t care to make my book more marketable to straight, white audiences—although I think people of any gender or race would enjoy TBOAD.
Anyway, I wrote a historical fantasy book about gods and vampires featuring BIPOC and queer characters because this is the kind of book I want to read and these are the characters I want to read about!
Before I close out this newsletter, let me also remind you that I am going to be featured in the Pride 2024 Issue of Haunted Words Press, Bleeding Hearts Beat Still!
So I get to feel especially proud this Pride Month! 🥳🌈🌈🌈🌈✨✨✨💖💖💖
The issue will be up to read for free on June 15th, but if you’d like to support Haunted Words Press, you can order a physical copy of this zine on their site!
Thanks again for subscribing—and for reading if you got this far!
Take care,
-Jazmin