Writing Ourselves Out: Queer Characters Who Rewrite Their Destinies

I wasn’t much of a gamer when I picked up Gone Home (2013). In fact, saying I picked it up is generous. In reality, my then-partner-now-roommate was the one holding the controls, but we thought it would be interesting to play through this game together. He’d been trying to get me to play video games for ages, and here was a slow-paced queer game: perfect. The only problem is that I’d peripherally heard about this and another queer game that was out around the same time and that one of them had a tragic ending for the queer characters. I wasn’t sure which one.

As we played through, we uncovered notes and other evidence of a family in pieces. Katie has gone home to find the family home abandoned and is trying to piece together what happened. In part, we learn that her teenage sister Sam was struggling — and that she’d started a romance with a girl named Lonnie. It was the 90s in a small town in Oregon. Sam’s parents opposed their relationship and denied their daughter could be a lesbian. Lonnie, a cadet, was shipping out to begin her service. Every piece of evidence showed more and more was stacked against this young couple, even as it also showed the joy and love they found with each other.

Ah, this was the tragedy I had been preparing for. The disconcerting setting was adding up to a terrible end for our off-screen queer hero. I wasn’t sure what it was, yet, but I could see the writing on the wall. And that’s when the unexpected answer to this empty house is revealed. Their parents are on a couples counseling trip and forgot to tell Katie. Lonnie got off the bus and called. Sam is on her way to meet her in Salem. There is hope.

I was shocked when I started crying at this ending. A second-hand experience of a video game didn’t seem like something that would move me to tears. But partly because of the unfolding of the video game, and partly because of my incorrect assumption that it had an unhappy ending, I had expected to see Sam fall victim to the same old unhappy queer ending. To see her escape was such an unexpected joy, and it reminded me of so many queer people who have done the same. People who have had every door barred to them and broke a window instead. Who rejected the idea that they were stuck in their circumstances. Who wrote themselves out of their own destiny.

It was a moving experience, and one I didn’t expect to revisit in any other media — so I was surprised to have it happen twice more (so far) in my life.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, published in 2002, is one of my favourite books I’ve ever read. It’s intricately plotted, beautifully written, sexy and surprising. It’s also not exactly an upbeat queer story. It’s a Victorian historical novel that follows Sue, a “fingersmith” (thief) who is brought into a scam by a man called Gentleman. Her job is to pose as a maid for a lady named Maud. In this position, she’s then meant to convince Muad to marry Gentleman. He’ll have her committed and then Gentleman and Sue will share her money.

Of course, problems arise when Sue and Maud fall for each other. Unbeknownst to Sue — I did warn you about spoilers — she’s the one being set up. Maud and Gentleman have conspired to have Sue take Maud’s place at the asylum. When Sue continues to tell Maud to marry Gentleman, she knows Sue is trying to betray her. They are trapped in a spiral of both betraying each other, unable to see a way out. In the book, this results in Sue being committed to an asylum, eventually breaking free, a whole cascade of other plot twists, and the eventual tentative reunion of the pair. It’s not an unhappy ending, but they wade through a lot to get there, and we only see a glimpse of their possible happy ending.

The Handmaiden (2016), directed by Park Chan-wook, is the second adaptation of Fingersmith. The first was a BBC mini-series that stayed fairly loyal to the text. This second one, though, relocates the characters from Victorian England to Korea during Japanese rule. I was intrigued by how the change in setting would affect the story. The movie received critical acclaim, but it was also criticized for sexualizing the lesbian main characters. Fingersmith has an undercurrent of eroticism as well as a whole significant porn subplot, so it would be hard to adapt without a sexual element. Whether that came across as the “male gaze” or more authentic would be a matter of opinion. I also hadn’t (and still haven’t) seen much representation of this setting, so I was excited to watch it.

Despite the changes made, the plot of The Handmaiden stays close to the book for most of the movie. Then, just as it seems that the scheme the men around them have been orchestrating will consume them both, something changes. Hideko (the Sue character) confesses her love, and when she is rebuffed, she attempts to hang herself. Sook-hee (Maud) saves her, and they both confess what they’ve been hiding. They break that spiral of silence and betrayal. After more plot twists and getting revenge, they end up on a ship together, one disguised as a man. They look at each other and laugh as the wind whips around them. They are happy, and free, and are on a new adventure.

This was a revelation to me, in a story I know so well. It takes the moment in the story where readers think, “If only they spoke to each other!” and say, “Well, what if they did?” It erupts these characters into a new possibility. It reminds me of the queer history of fanfiction: how often have queer fanfic writers rescued doomed queer characters and relocated them to give them a happy ending? How often has fanfiction been a site for excavating buried queer identities, imagining characters more complexly? To be fair, fanfic is not always about imagining a happier ending for characters, but it’s often a place where writers comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

It’s freeing to imagine that running parallel to these stories of queer tragedy and suffering is a version where they made a different decision and found a new possibility for themselves. In stories like Fingersmith and The Handmaiden, it can feel like the whole world is against our characters. Everyone around them is hostile to their queer relationship. Their community, country, time period deny their existence. It’s easy to be pulled into the quicksand of that. That’s why these stories speak to me: they painstakingly establish the impossibility of these characters breaking free of their circumstances — and then they do it anyway. It’s as if these characters have written in their own escape hatch in a story that was meant to punish them. And if that isn’t an expression of queer pride, I don’t know what is.

I’ve talked about a video game and a movie adaptation of a book, but of course, I also have to talk about a book. Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki is a beautiful and ambitious novel that’s almost impossible to summarize. It’s a hopeful and contemplative character study with found family and queer joy — and it includes some of the most brutal, difficult scenes of transmisogyny I’ve ever read. (Definitely look up content warnings for this one.) It’s a sci-fi story about alien refugees who start a donut shop to disguise their ship. It’s a fantasy story about a woman who makes a deal with the devil for her violin talent and now must find the last of seven souls to sacrifice to the same fate in order to save herself. It’s a contemporary novel about a young trans violinist runaway. And even taken together, those descriptions only scratch the surface.

Shizuka thinks she’s finally found the seventh violinist to convince her to take her place so that she can be free of her curse. Katrina is grateful to be taken in and mentored by such a famous violinist. But as Katrina improves, Shizuka begins to care more about her and struggles to imagine convincing her to sacrifice her soul. Meanwhile, Shizuka is also getting close with Lan, the refugee donut shop owner, and they seem to be a good influence on each other. As time runs up for Shizuka to complete her end of the deal, it seems like there’s no way out: either Shizuka or Katrina will have to be sacrificed. The wonderful thing about a genre-blending story, though, is that a fantasy problem can have an unexpected sci-fi solution. Lan fixes her spaceship and takes off with Shizuka. While the devil may have a lot of power on Earth, he can’t compete with a spaceship.

Prior to this escape, Katrina found out Shizuka’s plan and was willingly going to offer her soul up to save Shizuka: this was still so much better of a life than she had ever imagined, and she felt it was a fair exchange. Besides, she wanted to protect this person who had become family, and who accepted her after so much pain and rejection. The ending seemed to be narrowing to an inescapable conclusion.

So as I read the conclusion with tears in my eyes, I imagined their ship as bursting out the side of the back cover, propelling itself outside of this narrative. These characters rejected the options available to them and invented something entirely new.

Queer stories with happy endings aren’t new. We’ve come a long way since the days of lesbian pulp fiction when an unhappy ending for the queer characters was guaranteed. We’ve gotten through the worst of the Bury Your Gays TV shows, knock on wood. It’s not the mere fact of these stories having happy endings that moved me. Instead, it’s the building towards an inevitable conclusion, one so familiar from generations of tragic queer media, and then subverting that expectation. It reminds me of shows like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power that play with classic queerbaiting techniques only to follow through on the canon queer content where so many shows previously have failed to.

On one level, it’s a reminder of just how far queer depictions in media have changed. Queer characters aren’t considered to be synonymous with suffering and tragedy. Even if they experience some of that in their story, they aren’t doomed. They have just as much of a shot at a happy ending as straight, cis, allo characters.

It’s also a reminder that all of us have the opportunity to radically change our lives at any time. Of course, some of us have far more restraints than others, but it’s worth examining which of those are imposed and which we choose. Is there an opportunity to blow up your life and start something else? Each of these stories ends with a beginning. I don’t know how Lonnie and Sam’s relationship turned out. I don’t know what happens to Hideko and Sook-hee once they reach shore. I don’t know where Shizuka and Lan end up, or what they do there. But they get a fresh start, and that’s beautiful in itself.

I’m not someone who enacts a lot of change in my life. I prefer routine, most days. I tend towards comfort. But even if I don’t choose it, it’s freeing to remember that at any time, I could change my life.

I’m reminded of a poem I stumbled on more than a decade ago that still often rolls around in my head. “they say that humans / are meant to be nomads,” it begins, and it ends:

i don’t know if that’s right
but sometimes i get that feeling
that if right now i put on my sneakers
and walked out the door
i could go forever