Beyond Tropes: On Writing Straight Characters While Queer

I think often about the Saturday Night Live music video “First Got Horny 2 U.” Released in 2015, Kate McKinnon sings about how she discovered sexual feeling while watching Taylor Hanson from the Mmmbop music video (“and that’s when I could tell / that I was gay as hell”), Aidy Bryant was aroused by a dinosaur from Dinosaurs (“I would sit on my hands and scoot / to a man in a lizard suit”), and Cecily Strong crushed on “those kids who killed their mom and dad,” Lyle and Eric Menendez, dark-haired and intense in 1996 courtroom shots.

My new novel, The Absolutes, started as something like First Got Horny 2 U, but as a literary novel. Early desire is mysterious, hilarious, often shameful—I wanted to explore how these feelings could track through a life.

I outlined a young infatuation and a later love affair, which circle each other through time and memory in a widening spiral. The book has two asymmetrical acts: the short first section shows the protagonist, Nora, at the age of fifteen, living as an exchange student in Italy and filled with anxious passion for her sporty, stubborn, noncommunicative host sister, Federica.

In the longer second section, which takes place fifteen years later, Nora reconnects with a man, Nicola, whom she briefly met while attending a sporting event with Federica. Nicola is enthralling, a scion of an aristocratic family, dominant, married, and (Nora thinks) deeply connected to the world of art and literature that she most yearns for. She becomes his mistress and wrecks her life and sanity in pursuit of him.

Also, he is a rich straight white guy. As a queer person married to a non-cis-man, I’ve ended up with a weirdly straight book.

For the years in which The Absolutes was a draft, I avoided thinking about what these characters said about me. Sure, I’d encountered readers who thought my debut was a roman-a-clef—their assumptions about my having been a cult member both exasperating and validating, on the level of craft. But I told myself not to fixate on the fact that some future readers might think that the dirty mania in the new book was drawn from my life. And—success!—I wrote a book that I now find extremely embarrassing to think about.

Since the book has left its amorphous, plausibly ignorable state and entered the world, I am beginning to grapple with the characters’ allegiance to straightness. “Books aren’t about things, books are things,” is advice I’ve often heard. But the publication process forces reckonings with how we come to our subject matter, which has something to do with the author but not everything.

My writing process is only semi-conscious. When I’m writing, I find myself making decisions based on previous decisions, following character logics, layering on more thoughts than I can hold in my mind at one time. Characters and meaning build up to something beyond my grasp.

Of course, I did make some active decisions about characters. I considered whether Nicola should be a woman, but for him to behave as he does, with privilege, immaturity, and lack of consequences, it felt essential that he be a man. Nora has to grapple with her love for his totalizing power in her life. Part of what makes the relationship so alluring is its conventional power dynamics, the comfort of a well-trodden path. Nora enters a real-world fairytale of the commoner and the aristocrat. She wants him to set the terms, and to disappear into the trope. And there are many more straight tropes than gay tropes within which to be invisible.

This brings me to my own “First Got Horny 2 U.” My number one childhood crush came from Star Wars: Darth Vader’s torture droid, in “A New Hope,” though there’s no sex there, just a dynamic that captivated me for reasons I could not explain. Vader demands that Leah tell him the location of the secret rebel base, and accompanying him for the interrogation is the torture droid. It’s polished and black. It’s shiny and round. It is merciless. I used to stare at its photo in my Star Wars Visual Dictionary and think, essentially, “hubba hubba.”

“Write from shame,” advised Amy Hempel, whose workshop changed my life in college. I’d always found my interest in that droid deeply shameful, and so I began to pull at that knot—the torture droid makes several appearances as a childhood crush object in The Absolutes. What’s nice about the scene, Nora thinks, is that Princess Leah is innocent, commendably demure.

She’s going to feel a lot—without having to demand it. Nicola has much in common with the droid because he is iconic, callous, impermeable. Certainly such dynamics can take place among any combination of genders. But rich straight white guys tend to run the world, and this adds to Nora’s ability to feel exultantly irresponsible within their relationship. Because he dictates everything, she can stop worrying about making decisions for herself.

This is not a book about torture, but a book about giving oneself up, disappearing into another’s will, as an intense and perhaps misguided form of connection. My ambition was to portray what made Nicola beguiling. There’s an incredible wealth of novels of women-risking-it-all-for-ill-advised-love-affairs—truly this is my favorite kind of book—but such books often center around mirror metaphors. Strong protagonists but half-drawn lovers. What redeems these love affairs is that a woman has learned more about herself by the end.

But for Nicola, I wanted to explore him being a coequal consciousness on the page. The book is not at heart a satire or allegory; even the aristocrat is a human. Nora wants to understand him, to grapple with someone who is truly separate from her, to engage with another consciousness.

I am loath to make generalizations about queerness, but in my experience, queerness calls for engaging with each person as an individual, and sketching out new potential contours of how a relationship could be. This is what makes the book a love story. That Nicola is in some ways such a cliche heightens the gulf that Nora wants to bridge.

With its emphasis on early love and later love, its refrains and repetitions, this is a book of patterns and broken patterns. And even the straightness breaks towards the end, when Nora again meets her host sister, Federica, from half her lifetime ago. While Nora willed herself to be absorbed into Nicola’s image of her (she often wonders whether he is finding her or inventing her), Federica challenges her to try independence. Federica shows how much perspective Nora has yet to gain on a relationship that may, indeed, have harmed her. For a moment, Nora can see beyond the trope.

None of these characters are stand-ins for straightness or queerness writ large; I have no larger claim to make about gayness and straightness. I throw away the requirement to represent my own beliefs cleanly.

Instead, following Brandon Taylor’s clarion call in these (digital) pages, I wanted to go beyond the common signposts of queer narrative—coming out, suffering, violence—and move towards something character-driven, specific, and ambiguous.

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The Absolutes by Molly Dektar is available from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.