The Gay Historical HEA

Whatever the era with historical heterosexual fiction, once the hero and heroine have been through the required conflict, warred with their parents, or their countries, found each other, lost each other, found each other again, blah blah blah, they can finally fall into each other's arms, get married, shack up and it is assumed that never a cross word will pass their lips and the happiness will begin.

But--what about two men in love? Writers of gay historicals have to somehow convince their readers that--despite most eras pre Stonewall/pre-Wolfenden being downright dangerous times to be gay--the characters in our books have chosen to take the risk, and wish to stay together come what may. Or that they've managed some way to be together which flies a little under the radar

But how best to do it?

Obviously, we know that there have been homosexual men since men were invented. I'm sure that Ug looked out of his cave one day and saw Ig waving quietly at him and he either lost all interest in dragging any females back to his cave, or realised why he didn't want to. It might not have been too worrisome for Ug and Ig to set up cave together, far away from everyone else, but when you move forwards in history a bit and the Church gets all "burn the unnaturals" it becomes a little harder for a writer of the genre to finish off a story in a neat and believable manner.

Despite the very real dangers for gay men (particularly from the Renaissance to the early 1970s, and depending on where you live, even up to today) there have always been men who have risked all, and there are a few well documented cases of men who have "got away with it."

Two couples who spring to mind are George Merrill and poet Edward Carpenter - and Ralph Hall & Montague Glover who were together for close to thirty years and fifty years respectively. If these four men managed the "Yours until death" endings, then we know that there must have been many others.

But it's still a knotty problem for a writer who wants to base his or her story in the past. Up until the beginning of the 19th century one could still be hanged for homosexual activity, and in fact in the first quarter of the 19th century, more men were hanged for homosexuality than for murder.

How have I dealt with it in my books? (look away if you don't want to be spoiled, but Happy Ever after/Happy for Now endings aren't really secret, are they?)

1. Standish. I dealt with it by simply not dealing with it. I got some criticism for this, as I used a Gone with the Wind kind of ending - and I left it squarely for the reader to decide whether or not the couple would have got back together. As to the practicalities of this, it wouldn't have been too difficult. Rafe was super rich, and it was this that had prevented him from being prosecuted in the first place--so he had that protection, and this, hopefully would have prevented any further problems for Ambrose. They intended to live in Rafe's estate in Wiltshire, far away from prying eyes and the madding crowd. And if things did get hot - they could have retreated back to the continent.

2. Transgressions. The couple are together at the end of the book. Again, I leave it to the reader to decide how they would progress in the five minutes after the book ended. David is a deserter from the King's Army--and Jonathan is a trusted interrogator in Cromwell's army. Not an easy future for them, to be sure.

3. Frost Fair. This was managed by having (similar to Standish) the two men enter into an employer/employee relationship--whereby Gideon becomes the valet to Joshua. This is a device used by many gay regencies and Victorians as the "gentleman's gentleman" had almost unrestricted access to his employer and it would have been easier to be alone together, particularly for men of different classes. Lee Rowan does this admirably in the book which is coincidentally called "Gentleman's Gentleman."

Other methods used: Many of Alex Beecroft's men are officers and gentlemen in the English Navy and thereby are even more under threat, for it is a hanging offence on ship as well as on land. Her (and Lee Rowan's sailors too) snatch what time they can when it's safe to do so, and are pretty much resigned to doing their duty and hoping that they stay on the same ship as each other. Joanne Soper-Cook's homosexual detective Raft "shares rooms" with Freddie, his paramour, and this--in more innocent times--was something that could be disguised as "two friends sharing the bills." No one remarks (and why should they?) when Mr Pip and Mr Pocket share rooms in Great Expectations, or Holmes and Watson do the same in the Holmes series. (although it gives the slash writers a field day!)

Charlie Cochrane uses this device in her Cambridge Fellows series. To all intents and purposes they (at the beginning of the series) share adjoining rooms, and later they move into a house together. Quite normal in those days. No one batted an eyelid!

The important thing is...you can use any method at all, but I feel it has to be believable. Sadly, I’ve read more than one story where the author just threw all realism to the winds and had their homosexual regency couple marry in church. It is true that in around 1810 -1813 there was a vicar --the Reverend John Church—who famously performed homosexual weddings, but of course they were anything but legitimate!

I have to say that I’m often envious of writers of heterosexual historical romance, because they can simply end a book by having the couple throw themselves at each other and promise to marry the other – and it is a challenge to find realistic solutions to the love that dared not stick its head above the parapet, but it can be done, with care!

Erastes
www.erastes.com

Erastes writes gay historicals, and her first book for Carina is "The Muffled Drum" (set during the Austro Prussian War) and will be out in July 2011. It's full of soldiers, horses, angsty love, drawers and many many buttons.

How I do what I do

I have to admit from the outset that I don’t have a firm grip on how I write. To tell you the truth, I think that’s probably true of many, if not most, writers. I don’t know where I come up with some of the things that come out of my fingers…you know, the sort of instance where the author insists “the character said that,” or “I tried to make the heroine do X, but she just wouldn’t do it.” That’s all cute and cosmic and stuff, but the truth is there only is the writer and a blank piece of paper or, these days, screen.

Given the above, there are a couple of things that mark my coordinates in the universe of writers. One, I’m a pantser. Those of you who aren’t insane enough to try to do this may not be aware that as a group, we divide up pretty firmly into two camps: the plotters and the pantsers. Plotters plot. They lay out the whole story in advance and know what’s going to happen all along the way before they start on page one. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. They pretty much open a new document and start writing. Then, they keep writing until the story’s done.

I once managed to plot out an outline before I started writing the book, but the only way I could do it was to grit my teeth and promise myself that I wouldn’t have to stick to the damned outline if I didn’t want to. It was agony.

I generally used to think up two characters and an interesting opening situation and started writing. Since I started in (cough) 1990, I’ve learned that there are a couple of pitfalls I tend to fall into, and now I plan ahead how I’m going to avoid those before I start the story. I’m happy to report I never run out of pitfalls. So, I’m doing more and more planning as I mature as a writer. Which brings me to the next point.

Just about nobody is a pure plotter or pure pantser. I have one friend who writes an outline and then fills in the scenes and then the details for the scenes so that when she’s done, she pretty much just needs to flesh out her outline. She’s extreme. Most plotters work from a more general outline than that.

Even the most extreme pantser who writes romance knows some things about her story before she starts writing. She knows there will be at least two people who are destined to love each other but who have to overcome some conflict to be together. There will be a happy ending, usually following a dark period in which it appears their love can‘t succeed. Sexual tension will be a big part of the story, whether or not it’s expressed in actual sex. Most of us writers aren’t pure plotters or pantsers but are hybrids to some extent.

A second dimension on the plane of my writing lies along the continuum of what I call multiple-drafters and few-drafters. Some writers love to barf out whole books in what they sometimes call “sh***y first drafts” and go on to revise, revise, revise. Such writers thrive in forums like Book-in-a-Week or National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). They get it all out and go back and fix it. The few-drafters write more slowly, revise as they go along, and only need to polish (even if they do a lot of polishing) at the end.

I fall in the second camp. My idea of hell would be to take 50,000 words of stuff I threw at a page and turn it into a book. In fact, I hate revisions of any kind. (My editor can’t read this, right?) My friend, the extreme plotter I mentioned above, puts it perfectly. “Every day, I write six sh***y pages. The next day, I revise them and write another six sh***y pages.” That’s how I work. At the end, I have a book that needs a few pass-throughs before I send it in and wait for the inevitable revision letter. I don’t know of any evidence that the other method is better at avoiding revision letters than my method, so I’ll stick to mine.

I’ve met Chris Baty, the creator of NaNoWriMo, and truly, he and his creation are unmitigated Forces for Good. Someday, I will do NaNoWriMo, but when I’ve finished, I won’t have an entire book. I’ll have the first 50,000 words of a book. (Chris can’t read this here, right?)

So, I’m a slow-and-steady pantser. There’s one real danger at being that type of writer. If you write small amounts of material at a stretch, you’d better make sure that you have Discipline. Writing 1,000 words every once in a while will pretty much guarantee that you never get a book done. Discipline is where I shine.

I work at my day job four days a week. That gives me three-day weekends. I’ve found that 5,000 words per week produces enough pages to create finished stories on a pretty good schedule. Five-thousand words divided by three days is 1,666.666666666 words per day. That’s what I do. I have to take days off from time to time, but otherwise, I write those 1,667 words every Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I will literally stop in the middle of a sentence once I get to that magic number.

That was working for me until a publisher asked me to do an extra story I couldn’t refuse. Rather than give up working on my main work-in-progress, I decided to add another 625 words per day on my lunch hours at work. That gave me another 2,500 words per week. Slower than 5,000 words per week but workable.

Then, I got involved in blogging regularly. To do that, I added another 500 words when I get home in the evening. (That’s what I’m doing right now.) I’m almost fanatical about doing this. If you’re a slow writer, you need to be religious about your schedule, too, even if it’s an hour per day and you get 500 words done during that hour.

Writers write. Period. You may take months plotting out your book so that when you sit down to write it, you’re only fleshing out what you’ve already planned, or you can sit down at the computer and let your freak flag fly. You can write in marathon sessions, producing twenty, thirty, forty pages a day, or you can schedule regular hours during your weekends and reliably produce small amounts of text that finally build to a completed manuscript. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Just do it.

http://www.alicegaines.blogspot.com/

authoralicegaines@yahoo.com