Sae asked David Wong:

So, I'm an enormous fan of your work and want to say that all three of your books mean truckloads to me! Thank you! That said, I wanted to know if any of your future books will have LGBTQA characters (or if they already have and my mind is blanking)! FVaFS had a really diverse cast in terms of race, but it felt like pretty much everyone was straight and cisgender. Is this something you've thought about at all?

David Wong There haven't been among the main cast of the JDATE books, no. There are in Suits but it didn't come up in the plot. The dilemma that writers like me get into is we feel like if we're going to have a gay or trans character, that we need to devote an entire subplot to it, since how the characters react to, say, finding out a female friend is trans, helps define their personalities to the reader and you don't want it to just seem tacked on. So then if the "the boys find out their friend is gay" subplot gets cut, then so does that character. Which is stupid, it doesn't need to be a whole production, and the end result is that they just get excluded completely.

To give you an example of how I wind up overthinking this, there's also the issue of JDATE being a horror/comedy in which everyone in the universe is ridiculous and/or incompetent. It would be very easy for any scene with a trans character to come off like their gender identity is supposed to automatically be hilarious or terrifying. I definitely don't want that character to turn out to be a monster later - that would come off like cruel symbolism.

Likewise, Suits takes place in a future that's got frightening elements if it's not an outright dystopia. So if I have a trans character there and everyone just accepts it as normal, half of the readers will think I've thrown that in as a cautionary, scary detail ("Yet another scary thing about the future!!! These deviants are accepted as NORMAL!!!"). This is also a book of flamboyant characters and exotic personalities - so I also don't want it coming off to the reader like I'm throwing that in as just another "weird" character ("And this MAN used to be a WOMAN! You never know what you'll see in Tabula Ra$a, friends!") which is how they've been portrayed in most Hollywood movies up to now. Again, I don't want that.

I want that to just be a part of who the character is, and to just move on. But the knowledge that half of the readers are going to be sitting there saying, "What is he trying to say here? What is his position on this issue?" makes me worry about it so much that I wind up just not touching the issue at all (which is really the worst possible way).

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