Why is sex scarier than death?

Seriously, people. Why?

I ask partly because it always infuriates me that you can take a kid to see a movie where people die all over the place, but God forbid you should let them see anything sexual. Murder’s fine, but sex… That might cause them to turn into… what? An adult? Are they going to age on the spot? I asked this question at the (wonderful) Phoenix Convention a couple of years ago, when I was being quizzed about werewolf stories. My feeling about reviving the werewolf was – and is – that I’d do it in a heartbeat if I could think of a way to make them interesting without making them about sex, because the sex=fear equation, in this decade, is just too infuriating to me. The kind book I did not want to write was basically Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf. Not because it isn’t any good – it’s a visceral and gripping bit of storytelling, and my intellectual exhaustion with the themes aside I thought it was impressive – but because I didn’t want, for myself, to go digging in that mineshaft. Duncan’s book, for sure, doesn’t shy away from the sex-and-death-and-werewolves discussion. The main character’s appetite is prodigious and varied and mired in self-hate. But I don’t want to go there because I want people in general to stop seeing sex as a source of horror. I realise that they won’t, of course, but I don’t choose to lend myself to that perception.

But mostly I’m asking because of this whole (insane) Gay YA thing.

In brief: the two writers of a YA novel with a selection of characters were told to straighten out their gay protagonist. The book isn’t a sex-fest. No one does anything more dramatic than kiss. It’s hardly Caligula.

But clearly to some people it’s a disaster that YA writing should have positive gay characters in it for gay kids to relate to. Downfall of civilisation right there. And those people make their feelings known loudly to school boards and libraries and what have you, and this scares some commercial concerns.

Which is a reason, by the way, to do more of it rather than less.

So I just want to say, quickly, before I go on to a related issue: Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, you rock. Do your thing. You are excellent.

And in this connection [mild non-spoilerish minor revelations below]:

Angelmaker features characters of the same sex who are in a relationship. It’s obviously not a YA book, but it’s worth saying out loud that no one at Knopf or at William Heinemann so much as mentioned it to me. It simply was not an issue. Nor did my agent, Patrick, so much as comment on it. No one had so much as an indrawn breath. Nothing. Because they are all good, solid, sensible people.

In fact, my sole concern about these characters is that someone will feel that they are titillatory rather than lovable, which would sadden me. As it happens, I didn’t sit down and think “this person is going to be gay”. I actually had one character drawn as voracious at first, sleeping with a variety of exciting people because that was what they wanted to do, in a kind of James Bond kind of a way. Then bit by bit some of the scenes disappeared and I was left with an essentially straightforward same-sex relationship. Well, all right, a complex and probably pretty painful but loving and largely monogamous one. And I love the characters. They delight me and they make me happy and sad. That’s the only metric I have for whether they’re real.

In a sense, because you can’t ever actually get inside someone else’s head, you can’t know what attraction feels like to anyone else, never mind people of other genders. Thomas Nagel’s essay in Mortal Questions, What Is It Like To Be A Bat?, makes a pretty compelling case that you can only ever know what it would be like to be you experiencing someone else’s perceptions – even assuming that you could do that. So the question of representing someone else’s sexuality – even someone you made up – is impossibly difficult. All you can do is say what you think you’d feel and hope people can relate. It’s no good just writing down the way you feel or the way others describe their own feelings. I’m very familiar with the paradox: once, in the middle of my utterly wretched film career, I transcribed a conversation between two slightly tipsy executives discussing dating directly into a script. At the next meeting, they objected: “no one talks that way!” In vain I responded that they had – they said that since no one did, they couldn’t have. Sadly (or reassuringly, given that I didn’t really want to become a crazy stalker) I hadn’t taped the whole thing.

All of which has taken me a little far afield from my original intent, which was to say that, as with genius, so with sex: you can’t write about it directly because you can’t know what it’s like. All you can do is hint at it. With genius, that usually means you just allow a character to understand something no one else does, probably at great speed. If excellence is an ability beyond that of others, genius, perhaps, is a capability beyond the direct comprehension of others. Sex – attraction, sexuality, passion, desire – is familiar, but at the same time opaque. So all we can any of us do is hint, sketch, and hope like hell.

So that’s what I did.