Streets;

This post is not about making iron-clad Rules for Good Rep.

This post is about actually paying attention to your community, and the communities of the people you are portraying in your writing, and putting a little thought into finding the underrepresented and portraying it. It’s also about taking a breath and absolving yourself of the need to do it perfectly as a marginalized person. There is no perfect way to do it, because no group is a monolith.

I’m just a little weary of having to manage moral scrupulosity in myself and my community.

If I followed this rule to the letter, as a queer author who loves tragedy, I would not be allowed to write a single-character work of tragedy and make it queer. You know? Can we be messy? Can we let each other be messy?

And the post is also not limited to queerness.

If one does not like how the usual stories go — if one feels unseen — then the solution is more stories, rather than clamouring to take away other people’s pens.