Writing Queerness in “Tillandsia”

Welcome back to Queering the Narrative!

This week I wanted to do something very different — and special — to celebrate both the return of this blog and the fact that I’ve had my first story published in a pro-rate fiction magazine!

(This isn’t my first ever publication — check out a full list of my published works.)

Today I’m gonna be talking about my short story Tillandsia, recently published in issue #2 of Solarpunk Magazine. Specifically, I’ll be focusing on how I introduced and described my queer characters!

Setting

Tillandsia takes place in a world where people have learned to use plants to directly power machinery, and generally have a very good grasp of biotechnology and how to use it to improve standards of living. The characters are all from a region of Turtle Island/North America called The Great Lakes Collective, which I purposefully don’t go into a lot of detail on but which is a largely decentralized, diverse collection of peoples.

This setting lends itself to a couple of things with respect to the queer characters.

In the Collective, a character’s queerness isn’t all that notable. Queer people just exist in the Collective, so coming out doesn’t happen in quite the same way as in our world. Plus the crew of the Tillandsia know each other well, so there isn’t necessarily a reason for them to bring up their own identities.

All this is to say that I did not follow my own top-tier advice of letting your characters come out in your story, and that’s okay! The advice I give  is setting and story dependent, and sometimes it just doesn’t fit. That doesn’t mean I left all my characters ambiguous, though -- I did a couple of things their queer identities clear.

Characterization

When writing Tillandsia, it was my intention for all of my characters to be queer in some way (I rarely actually write cishet characters), but in my own self-critical opinion I achieved that with varying degrees of success.

Mack

“Mack could see the tattered leaves around it wavering as float gas leaked out, and knew if he stuck his nose into the draft his voice would rocket above even its pre-T octave—these days, the Tillandsia was lifted almost entirely by helium.”

Mack is a transgender man who uses he/him pronouns. Mack doesn’t come out at any point in the narrative — there’s no reason for him to tell his crewmates, who’ve known him a while, that he’s trans, and there’s no low-intensity moments on-screen with Emma in which he might have the chance.

Still, I did some work to make it clear that Mack was transgender. The first way I did that was by a dual reference to his voice and his HRT. The quote above references “pre-T octaves” — before he started testosterone, Mack would have had a relatively high-pitched voice. By referencing that Mack once had a different voice, and naming “T” specifically rather than puberty, I make it clear that Mack’s changed voice was the result of HRT, which is a pretty solid indication that he’s trans.

I continue to reference Mack’s HRT later on, when he enters his wife’s lab and notes the bioreactors she uses to make their hormones:

“Tucked off to one side were the bioreactors Myra used to synthesize Mack’s testosterone and her own estrogen, the single zoological deviation from her botanical specialization.”

This provides the double-whammy of also hinting at Myra’s trans identity.

Myra

Mack’s wife and the Tillandsia’s “biomech” — the one in charge of all the bioengineered things on the airship — is a trans woman who uses she/her pronouns.

Now, what I didn’t do with Myra was have Mack take one look at her and think to himself: “Man, I love my trans wife!” While this would have been a perfectly valid response for anyone upon seeing their incredible trans partner, it’s also a great way to yank your reader straight out of the narrative.

Instead, I used many of the same tools to introduce Myra’s transness that I did for Mack. In the same sentence in which I named Mack’s artificially-produced testosterone, I also mentioned that Myra synthesized her own estrogen, which would indicate that she, too, is utilizing HRT. Mack’s mention of a pre-T voice and his artificial testosterone make a pretty solid combo to code him as trans, but the thing that really hammers home Myra’s transness to me is the following quote:

“Mack leaned down and kissed her, her stubble catching slightly on his own—when they were aloft, she tended to have as much facial hair as he did. “Who am I shaving for?” she’d often say. “It’s just us up here.””

This showcases Myra’s stubble, and is one of my personal favorite lines in the whole story. Now, of course, cis women can also have facial hair — PCOS beards are a thing — but combined with all the other hints in this narrative, this really hammers home that Myra is trans. To reinforce this just a bit further, though, I also make mention of her voice:

“Her voice was rough, shaky, deep—she’d let it slip low in her grief, and it had the same resonant rasp of wind through the boughs of an old tree.”

This is in contrast to Mack’s voice having once been higher, and specifically calls out that Myra has let her voice slip low — implying that, like many trans women, Myra has undergone vocal training, but in this very trying situation isn’t making a conscious effort to maintain a more “feminine” register.

These collected hints help cue the reader to Mack’s  and Myra’s transness. Still, if I were ever to expand Tillandsia into a longer story, I would probably make some room in there to explicitly name their trans identities.

Lux

Lux, the Tillandsia’s pilot, is nonbinary. This was made apparent to the reader through the simple use of they/them pronouns for Lux. As I’ve talked about in posts about introducing nonbinary characters, a quick and easy way to mark a character as nonbinary is to utilize gender neutral pronouns or neopronouns for them.

Still, though, I provide no context for what specific nonbinary identity Lux might hold, painting with a very broad brush that might resonate with some nonbinary folx but failing to give much in the way of specific-identity representation. So that, too, is something I could improve upon in a longer version of the story.

Kat and Emma

In my brain Kat, the Tillandsia’s gunner, and Emma, the refugee they are rescuing, are both sapphic. Thing is, I never make any indication whatsoever that this was my intent in the story — and so it doesn’t count as representation!

Word-of-god doesn’t count, no matter what some certain famous transphobic authors would like to believe. Not every person who reads Tillandsia is going to read this blog post to find out that Emma and Kat are queer, and so the representation therein has failed.

This, of course, is simply another avenue for improvement in a potential longer version of the story!

Conclusion

I don’t think my queer rep was perfect in Tillandsia, but I do think it was good. I strived to include varying identities (representing not just multiple genders and sexualities but also races, body sizes, and ability statuses), and I think I accomplished that goal and for the most part was able to communicate my characters’ queerness through the narrative. I did that by leaning on explicit mentions of gender identity (like Lux’s pronouns) as well as by drawing on my own emotional experience with gender (such as Myra’s facial hair).

That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with some more standard content, but until then stay safe, stay healthy, and keep writing!