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Showing results for tags 'diversity'.
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I always found this topic interesting ever since writing became a more serious hobby of mine when I was a senior in high school. One of my first stories that I ever written that was not a short story had a lot of representation of different races and ethnicities like Indian, Chinese and Italian. However, I thought more deeply about this topic when a friend/acquaintance from the LGBT Resource Center of my university talked about the difference between representation and presentation a few months ago. Essentially, he talked about how a character needs to be a character first, meaning the character has to have development and personality rather than just fill a checkbox because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I thought that was very insightful, especially since we were talking Mass Effect: Andromeda, and how the video game had a transgender NPC whose first line to the player was about how they were transgender. The character was basically there just to fill the transgender checkbox rather than be a fully-developed character whose identity may or may not have had an impact on their individual storyline. On a side note, a patch was released to address the issue of the character since it caused plenty of controversy among gamers and others alike. To the writers here, do you think about representation when you are writing your stories, and is it important to you that certain groups of people are represented? For me, it not so much the characters that I want represented in my stories, but the culture instead. For example, my story Halo has a lot of representation in terms of Filipino culture and mythology. I really wanted to showcase the uniqueness of the Filipino people by representing their culture in my story, like the food, and the mythology that is still relevant to many people of the Philippines like the creatures. Later in my story called Hero Wanted I really want to have characters from several different countries like the Philippines (of course) and Japan. However, I need to keep in mind that they need to be characters first before I start representing their identity because I believe having a character whose only interesting aspect is their identity and not a combination of other factors is just making that character one-dimensional, which can be become obvious to the readers and take them out of the world of the story in my opinion.
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I suspect some readers may consider the cast I surrounded CJ—the protagonist in my ongoing series—unrealistic. The diverse group of supporting characters could be construed as wishful thinking at a time our country seems divided along so many lines. I beg to differ. IT IS NOT A FANTASY. A few weeks ago, I traveled to New York to celebrate my 60th birthday; I was reminded how lucky I’ve been with the people I’ve surrounded myself with. A caring, loving group of humans, the world would be better if we had more like them. Brunch at an apartment in the Upper East Side, a museum visit to see the David Bowie exhibit, cocktails at a hipster pub in Brooklyn, and ice cream at a place where the line doubled upon itself and spilled out the door. And through it all, constant conversation and laughter. One person I’ve known for forty years, their spouse around thirty. Another one I met thirty-five years ago when we joined the same board of directors; their spouse I met a decade later. One is a fan of my stories on Gay Authors—my work having fans is the weirdest feeling—and we’ve chatted for a couple of years but this was our first live interaction. The other two—a father and son duo—I met for the first time that day. The seven individuals I spent time with on that one day are proof the world I describe isn’t fantasy. We were adults and children, men and women, gays and straights, married and single, Christians and Jews, Asian, black, Hispanic, and white, USA and foreign-born. Many of them had only me in common when the day began. When we parted, contact information had been exchanged by most of them. Those few hours we shared are proof we all can get along. That the melting pot is alive and well. And that when we look past our differences, we might just discover a wonderful person who will enrich our lives. I know those surrounding me that day have made me a better man and I thank them for it.