Whenever I’m developing a main character for a work of fiction, certain traits jump out at me immediately, as they do in real life when I meet someone for the first time—the more observable aspects such as physical appearance, gender, age, race. As I come to know a character better—again, just the way I get to know someone new—I learn about the character’s education and work experience, family relationships, habits and hobbies, love life. As I delve even deeper, I look to discover aspects of psyche that can reveal motivations for behaviors: goals, traumas, values and principles. And kinds of sexual desire and experience.

Sex is by no means relevant to all the stories I write, but sometimes it is central. Over my 35 years of writing fiction, I have chosen, as a political act, frequently to explore and present characters’ sexuality. Having grown up in an environment where gay sexuality was rarely discussed, and then only as the object of ridicule, I have joined many other LGBTQ writers who assert our sexuality in our writing for the purpose of countering silence and repression, to give voice to the voiceless, to contribute to the published range of human possibility so that readers can find themselves in a culture of diverse self-expression.

This does not mean that I, or other writers, wish to live the sexual lives of our characters any more than a mystery writer wishes to become the serial killer in her novels. These are characters, they’re made up. Which brings me to the central decision-making point any time I make up a character’s sexuality: what is appropriate for a particular character in particular circumstances?

When developing the main character in my novel, Yeled Tov, about a religious Jewish teenage boy wrestling with his budding attraction for other boys, I needed to consider what sort of sex he would fantasize about. As a virginal innocent, this character’s fantasies would be filled with huggings and kissings, but little else. Not only wasn’t he ready for more, he wasn’t ready even to let himself fantasize about much more. For him, fantasizing about romance with another boy was, itself, completely taboo. What he needed most was to be able to acknowledge his attraction to a boy, and to accept these feelings without self-condemnation or guilt. For him, such self-acceptance would constitute total liberation. So, when writing sex in the novel, I decided that restraint was paramount.

Contrast this with The Grand Sex Tour Murders, my novel about a serial killer stalking a group of young men engaged in a gay sex competition throughout the bathhouses of Europe where they earned points for having as much anonymous sex as possible. Of course, given the premise, the novel needed to include lots of sex. However, sex was so transactional for these characters, that I realized they would think and talk about sex in mechanical terms—who’s doing what to whom with which body part and for how long. No emotional content, not even eroticism. In fact, I purposely avoided writing erotic scenes because, with limited exception, the characters were not experiencing eroticism, which takes time—they had to engage in as many sexual encounters as possible in a given time frame in order to earn as many points as possible. Nevertheless, the novel contains key moments of deep intimacy that come from sharings revealed not through sex, but through intense conversation and private expressions of affection outside the context of the sex competition.

As in real life, sometimes characters long for more than their life experiences can offer. I once wrote a short story about a straight man whose wife was dying of complications from AIDS. As he lay in bed beside her, he experienced deep guilt for fantasizing about making love with her in a way he knew she could no longer accommodate. He felt guilty for his anger at her lack of desire, even as he totally understood its medical source. His desire and guilt were expressions of his deep love, and revealed his anticipation of the ultimate loss. I needed to present his fantasies as different from his reality.

Another example: for my collection, Domestic Affairs, I began writing a short story about a single adult gay man just coming out of Covid lockdown isolation. He had spent a year or more without so much as touching another human being. I needed to consider which aspects of human contact were right for him at that particular moment. Was he so traumatized by the fear of intimacy that he would continue refraining from any physical contact? If so, for how long? Or, was he the sort to abandon all caution and to run to a sex club and go wild with as many men as possible? My feeling about this character was that he would react to the combination of trauma and sexual need with cautious determination—he needed sex, but was still mindful of lingering Covid fears. As a metaphor, I created a situation where hands and arms started growing from his ceiling and floor such that the hands could reach down to caress his face and up to caress his crotch. There were no visiting torsos or faces that might spread a respiratory virus, so, as his first foray back into the world of sexual interaction, he was comfortable giving himself over to this riskless sex (well, there was the risk of chafing). This was what this character could, so to speak, handle.

Sex is as much, or as little, a part of fictional characters’ lives as it is, or isn’t, part of real people’s lives. Each time I create a new character, my role as writer is to have fun figuring it all out anew.