Suzannah Rowntree

Details are at this link: https://www.pilgrimartists.com/festival/2026-submissions/

I'm afraid I do not! I wanted to write it specifically because I'd never seen it done anywhere else, especially not in this genre, and also because I believe that it's right to represent the gamut of human experience in fiction but also to start from the basis of writing what you know, and the people I know best who are queer/same sex attracted are all Side B/Side Y.

Having written it myself, I now have an appreciation for why it's so rare - it's hard to get right if you haven't experienced it yourself (I have to credit my wonderful sensitivity readers for patiently working through my misconceptions with me over multiple books); but a lot of Side B/Side Y people aren't in a position to write it themselves—their position may make them simultaneously unacceptable to many not just in their church community but also in their queer community.

First, I personally haven't found it difficult to have a Christian character choosing to live out the traditional Christian sexual ethic in fiction. I did make things easy for myself by making my Side B/Y character bisexual and giving her a shippable love interest of the other sex. But, having witnessed a very happy one in real life, I reckon I could also sell a mixed-orientation relationship. And, having experienced prolonged singleness myself, I would absolutely be able to sell celibacy as well. It helps if you're writing historical fiction where it makes sense that characters want to adhere to a traditional Christian sexual ethic; it helps if you're writing fantasy where you can create other religious or magical reasons to abstain as well. You just need to communicate why the character's choices are fully consistent with who they are, without trying to be preachy (which is ALWAYS an artistic failing). Part of this means recognising the diversity within the queer community itself! Write queer characters who AREN'T Side B/Y Christians!

Second and even more importantly, the underlying cultural poblem here is that there are lots of good and compelling reasons to choose celibacy or chastity, including for straight people. But we live in a culture both inside and outside the church that sees romantic experience and sexual self-expression as the highest earthly good. This is something very peculiar to the late modern age; it doesn't need to be the case. I do think there are more ways than Christian teaching to justify sexual or romantic abstinence in fiction (broadly speaking, not just in relation to same-sex relationships). One might, for instance, abstain from pursuing a relationship:

- because your love interest is in a relationship with someone else, as a way of prioritising their good above one's own (see: CASABLANCA for a straight version).

- because the relationship would be self-destructive (see another straight example in Silvia Morena-Garcia's GODS OF JADE AND SHADOW).

- for religious motivations other than Christianity (eg the Jedi in STAR WARS).

- to focus on some other calling or vocation (I read a book recently where the heroine is on a quest to find a unicorn and chooses not to have sex because of that).

- because of asexuality.

What I really want to ask about is the last box, the "is there another reason not to date?" box where the flowchart ends (I should have spelled that out before and I'm glad you pointed out the decision tree necessary to get there!). That's where the only options other than "just get together already!" that I've seen have usually been religious in nature (though not necessarily Christian, I should also have clarified that), and also where the character reasoning tends to be hard to write compellingly; if you have any thoughts as an experienced writer I would be really eager to hear!

So for me as an author, the question is not - can I show a character choosing to forego a pleasant and otherwise good thing for a purely religious reason. The question is, would this character make this subjective choice in a believable way. If they can't, one shouldn't force them to make the choice. And the truth is that in real life, religion is always bound up in all those other things. It may in itself be a calling. It may in itself be the thing preventing one from self-destructing. It may itself be the reason to put the good of another above oneself. The Faith is a faith for all of life. It is not a discrete thing, unattached to anything else. And I know from my friendship with a same sex attracted person in a mixed orientation marriage, it helps in this situation to find joy and desire in what you have. My friend isn't in that marriage out of nothing but religious duty. They love their spouse and their children!

Of course there are many queer/SSA Christians who are not in my friend's situation and we shouldn't hold that up as the norm. But as a heterosexual person who would love to be partnered but amn't, I also focus on the joy in loving sacrificially, following a calling, and being true to myself, as well as in the love of a God who knows me better and more deeply than any human ever can.

It's in finding that joy that you convince the reader of the subjective truth of the character's choices, no matter what the motivation is. And the motivation doesn't have to be pure religious faith, because it so rarely is IRL.

(I hope you remember I was reading A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians off the back of your newsletter, or otherwise that was a very strange ask)

I'm afraid I do not! I wanted to write it specifically because I'd never seen it done anywhere else, especially not in this genre, and also because I believe that it's right to represent the gamut of human experience in fiction but also to start from the basis of writing what you know, and the people I know best who are queer/same sex attracted are all Side B/Side Y.

Having written it myself, I now have an appreciation for why it's so rare - it's hard to get right if you haven't experienced it yourself (I have to credit my wonderful sensitivity readers for patiently working through my misconceptions with me over multiple books); but a lot of Side B/Side Y people aren't in a position to write it themselves—their position may make them simultaneously unacceptable to many not just in their church community but also in their queer community.

First, I personally haven't found it difficult to have a Christian character choosing to live out the traditional Christian sexual ethic in fiction. I did make things easy for myself by making my Side B/Y character bisexual and giving her a shippable love interest of the other sex. But, having witnessed a very happy one in real life, I reckon I could also sell a mixed-orientation relationship. And, having experienced prolonged singleness myself, I would absolutely be able to sell celibacy as well. It helps if you're writing historical fiction where it makes sense that characters want to adhere to a traditional Christian sexual ethic; it helps if you're writing fantasy where you can create other religious or magical reasons to abstain as well. You just need to communicate why the character's choices are fully consistent with who they are, without trying to be preachy (which is ALWAYS an artistic failing). Part of this means recognising the diversity within the queer community itself! Write queer characters who AREN'T Side B/Y Christians!

Second and even more importantly, the underlying cultural poblem here is that there are lots of good and compelling reasons to choose celibacy or chastity, including for straight people. But we live in a culture both inside and outside the church that sees romantic experience and sexual self-expression as the highest earthly good. This is something very peculiar to the late modern age; it doesn't need to be the case. I do think there are more ways than Christian teaching to justify sexual or romantic abstinence in fiction (broadly speaking, not just in relation to same-sex relationships). One might, for instance, abstain from pursuing a relationship:

- because your love interest is in a relationship with someone else, as a way of prioritising their good above one's own (see: CASABLANCA for a straight version).

- because the relationship would be self-destructive (see another straight example in Silvia Morena-Garcia's GODS OF JADE AND SHADOW).

- for religious motivations other than Christianity (eg the Jedi in STAR WARS).

- to focus on some other calling or vocation (I read a book recently where the heroine is on a quest to find a unicorn and chooses not to have sex because of that).

- because of asexuality.

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.

The answer, so far as I see it, is that like many historical periods, the medieval period ended in a backlash. Sadly for them, this backlash has lasted an unusally long time. In broad strokes:

- in THE RENAISSANCE (1400s-1500s), humanists rediscovered the value of going back to original source documents to get at the truth of what had been said in them. This gave scholars a much more accurate view of what historians, scholars, and holy books like the Bible had actually taught, free of later, less accurate accretions. Unfortunately, the lesson the Renaissance humanists took from this was "new books bad". Anything that had been written in the medieval period - for instance, scientific treatises that pointed out the obvious errors in Aristotelian thought - was now viewed as worthless. Thousands of medieval books were lost, destroyed, or torn apart for spare parts because Renaissance humanism considered them valueless. It was here that thinkers dubbed them "the middle ages" - they were what came between the real history of the ancient world and the "rebirth" of the Renaissance. 

- in THE REFORMATION (1500s-1600s), humanist primary-source scholarship revolutionised how people viewed and studied the Bible, leading to the Protestant Reformation, originally a movement designed to prioritise the old sources above later medieval traditions such as indulgences, transubstantiation, and ultimately, the entire Roman church hierarchy. While (as a Reformed Protestant myself) I view the Reformation as a net positive and a movement that itself was deeply medieval in origin, this did ultimately lead - despite a lot of early Reformers' best intentions - to a sharp break with, and critique of, the medieval church.

- in THE ENLIGHTENMENT (1600s-1700s) many Enlightenment thinkers viewed religion as antithetical to reason. Writers such as Edward Gibbon valorised the pagan, pre-Christian world of Ancient Rome and viewed the medieval period as a time when superstition ruled over reason. (Somewhere, the medieval period's most influential figure, Thomas Aquinas, is facepalming). This is where the "filthy, stupid, superstitious" view of the middle ages really got started, and the existing term "The Dark Ages" was hard-welded to the medieval period. 

This view has remained influential ever since, as you can tell from the fact that we still use the Enlightenment's own self-aggrandising term for itself, and are having trouble letting go of its views on the middle ages. So influential has the view of the medieval period as uniquely dark and barbaric become, that it's now commonplace for ANYTHING stupid or brutal to be attributed to them. Medieval people knew the world to be round, enjoyed regular baths in purpose-built bathhouses, had a policy against making accusations of witchcraft, and understood the value of using antiseptics in wound care. But the opposite views are regularly attributed to them (mostly from the 1500s and 1600s, when witch hunts came into style and bathing went out of style). Why? Because we all know that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were times of rebirth and wisdom, so any dumb things that happened in history couldn't possibly have happened then; they must have happened in medieval times.

The 21st century has seen a nasty new development in this intellectual wrangle over the middle ages described by Amy S Kaufamn in THE DEVIL'S HISTORIANS. Certain far-right groups have chosen to embrace the idea of the brutal middle ages to justify their own religiously motivated brutality. I've seen these people argue that Richard I, leader of the Third Crusade, would have been against interracial marriage (in fact, he famously proposed that his sister Joanna should marry a brother of Saladin in order to settle the war). I've seen them argue that medieval religion made no critique of the knightly warrior ethic (in fact, the Peace and Truce of God movements, some of the most successful popular movements in history, were designed by the church to rein in the violence of the knightly class). I could go on.

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.