Once upon a time in the Midwest, in the 1980’s, a pudgy middle-aged author, wife of one and mother of two, set out to write a Civil War novel, using a portable manual typewriter so lightweight it scooted on the kitchen table. (For the young whippersnappers who don’t know about manual typewriters, cavemen used them, which was difficult because paper hadn’t been invented yet. Electricity hadn’t been invented yet, either, so they had to work by campfire.) The pudgy middle-aged author was writing a love story between a British expatriate doctor, who became unwillingly involved in the Underground Railway, and a local woman who was probably important. (It’s been twenty-plus years and the pudgy middle-aged author—now a pudgy-plus old author getting ready to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary—doesn’t remember anything about the heroine. She thinks she was blonde. Maybe brunette. Don’t remember, except that she had hair.)
The little portable typewriter did its best and was eventually replaced by a second-hand IBM Selectric. (The young whippersnappers don’t know about them, either. Instead of keys they had balls with letters on them, but electricity had been invented by then and they were electric. And noisy.)
The first draft of the Civil War story plodded along. A minor character came into the story, another expatriate Brit, an actor named Kit St. Denys. The pudgy middle-aged author wondered where he had come from. But she knew by then that characters pretty much did what they wanted. He was interesting so she decided to let him stay long enough to stir up trouble for the lovebirds before he would go back to England or get killed, whatever. Clackety-clackety-clackety went the Selectric ball. The book was drafted. It was allowed to sit and age whilst she worked on other things, mostly job, housework, and family, and dreamed of the money and literary awards soon to start rolling in. Clearly the woman was delusional.
The used Selectric was replaced by an Olivetti electronic typewriter with two diskette drives and a separate screen with little green letters on a black background. The frontier of technology had been breached. The book was drafted a second time. And a third.
But during these revisions something weird and a little scary was happening. The hero doctor, whose name was Nick Stuart, showed an increasing and unplanned interest in the actor, Kit St. Denys! In fact, he seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about him, and the actor had an amazing ability to push the good doctor’s buttons. The actor also seemed to be occupying a puzzling amount of the story. Alarming! Bizarre! Doctor Nick seemed to have lost all interest in the woman (whoever and whatever she may have been). The pudgy, middle-aged author was bewildered. These were her characters, her story, her words—but where were they coming from? The doctor and the actor seemed to be (gulp) homosexual! Horrors!
This tale was being written in rural Illinois in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s, in a town with an evangelical church on every other corner. Gay issues didn’t exist because there weren’t any of Those People in town. The pudgy middle-aged author suspected that wasn’t true, but didn’t really know. She didn’t know any gay people (oh, yes, she did. She just didn’t realize it). She had never even seen a gay book. Sermons on Sunday against sinners, including social drinkers, adulterers, dancers, and sodomites may have left no doubts in other peoples’ minds, but they left her feeling uneasy and questioning.
And yet—here she was, with typed pages bearing homosexual characters! Where had they come from? Why couldn’t she get rid of them? She threw out pages, revised the story, and here they came again. The manuscript was hidden away for a couple of years. Stubbornly she got it out and again tried to make it a straight Civil War romance. No dice. As if that weren’t bad enough, the minor character of Kit St. Denys was becoming so important to the story he seemed to be taking over. Handsome, charismatic, brilliant, tortured, and definitely interested in the doctor in a very unorthodox way. What was the poor author to do? Grimly she decided to let the characters get it out of their systems, and do what they wanted to do and see what happened.
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