Are lesbians taking over crime fiction? Let’s hope so! Laurie R. King for president!

It’s hard for the straight world to get a handle on what life is like when you grow up without a single role model who is so secure in her sexuality that it doesn’t matter any more. Where everybody knows and nobody really cares. This is where we want to get to. I don’t know of a singe “lesbian” author who isn’t heartily sick of the label and will continue to be until the world starts referring to everyone by their sexuality. On the other hand, as Stella Duffy says, “I do also want those 14-year-olds who are scared and shy and not yet out and have no access to a wider world to know that there are other possibilities out there, and I appreciate that my being called a ‘lesbian writer’ does sometimes give them a chance to find me, my work, others like me (like them).”

Which is the reason we do it – or part of it. Because we were all scared, lost 14-year-olds once, and we know how much it mattered to have something that normalised who we were.

We are everywhere now. But until McDermid’s Report for Murder was published in 1987, every single work of “lesbian fiction” on my bookshelf had a plot that wholly or partially revolved around the protagonist’s angst about her sexuality, the constant fear of being outed and, frequently, her hopeless love for a straight woman, doomed to heartbreak. Then McDermid proved to the risk-averse world of publishing that lesbian characters didn’t hurt sales, and particularly not in a genre where the protagonists are, almost by definition, on the margins of society.

As she points out, “lesbians are particularly suited to the crime novel because the detective is both transgressive and discounted by society. And we don’t actually have to do anything like drink too much or be emotionally screwed up to meet those criteria. We just have to be ourselves.”