Posted by Charlie Kenny, Co-Fiction Head for Issue 10.1
Alice Mattison writes: “Writing about people from any marginalized group can be scary. It’s also bad for your imagination to put limits on it. You ought to be free to become anyone when you make up a story” [sic] (74). This raises an age-old question: should non-queer people write about the LGBTQ+ community? If you asked fourteen-year-old, newly out Charlie, the answer would have been a hard “no!” Back then every queer person I saw on T.V. or in books were always written the same—as a gay, not a person. The only time I ever saw someone like me not as a stereotype was when I saw or read something written by another queer person. Continue reading