Coming out...or not

[sistermagpie]

Recommending a nice post by bluefall here on characters leaving the closet. There's nothing I can really add to it, but the basic idea is just that slash so often deals with ostensibly straight characters, and so writers often deal with the characters themselves coming to the realization of being gay, but sometimes the process of coming out to other people

Comments

[neotoma]

This is interesting, because I am dealing with this right now...

I have a character who basically jumped forward 15 years or so, and was a rather conservative person back then. He's not dealing well with the changes is society or his family. Especially because his nephew/protege has a best friend who has come out of the closet in the meantime.

I'm trying to keep him sympathetic to be fair to his fans, but he's going to say embarrassing things rather often. It's hard to keep him tolerable as a protagonist even though he's being casually offensive.

[sistermagpie]

Is this Barry who's coming back after 15 years? I was just reading a story today where he was being conservative compared to Ollie.:-D

But I love that he would say embarassing things--good for you having him do that things that are casually offensive. I hate it when people deal with an issue, especially when you're dealing with people from a different time period, where everyone starts out knowing the correct view and the bad guy only forces himself to be offensive to get taught a lesson. I would look forward to seeing a nice guy from 15 years ago be an idiot. And probably his nephew would be too--not because he's a jerk but because he'd probably be jumping on him for things you just can't expect from somebody out of date!

[neotoma]

Yeah, it's Barry. He's making Wally *facepalm* with embarrassment, and if you know Wally, you know *he* has a track record of saying dumb things out loud, so Barry is being especially offensive.

But I'm working on a scene where Barry says something insulting about Piper in front of most of the Justice Society of America, and gets *glared* at by Alan Scott (the JSA's Green Lantern) who is basically as conservative as you can be -- but Alan's son is out, and even though Alan refers to his son's lover as "Todd's good friend", he won't tolerate someone actually being rude about it.

[neotoma]

Also, what story did you read? One of the issues, or a fanfic? Either would be worth it for me to track down, because I know Wally, and Barry only through Wally's flashbacks and weird time traveling encounters with him.

Wally obviously idolizes him, but Wally tends to put people in boxes and not notice that they've changed, or that he's categorized them wrong to start with.

[sistermagpie]

That story sounds great! The story I just read was a flashback and it was on S_D. Here's a link