Is a Disabled Lesbian Protagonist Too Much?
The protagonist in my novel, Unswerving, is disabled. And she’s a lesbian. As the novel opens, she’s been severely injured in a car accident and is trying to rebuild her life and forge a new identity as a woman with a disability. She cannot reach her girlfriend, also injured in the crash but transported to a different hospital and now discharged home to her homophobic parents. A dedicated physical therapist on the rehab unit, also a lesbian, becomes over-involved trying to help, upending her own life in the process.
A novel centered on a disabled lesbian… hmmm. A woman in my writing group said, Isn’t this too much? And the physical therapist is also a lesbian? Is this disability fiction or lesbian fiction? Maybe it should be one or the other, more easily categorized. If I want to write about disability issues, she implied, I should keep all the characters straight. I bristled. So we want marginalized groups to be represented in literature, but only one thing at a time, please? But wait… isn’t everyone talking about intersectionality?
The concept of intersectionality was first introduced in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who discussed the intersecting social identities and related systems of discrimination faced by Black women in America. It’s now used to describe the cumulative ways in which multiple forms of oppression overlap and affect the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups and as a lens through which to consider representation in literature and popular culture.
When I first came out in 1980, the only lesbian fiction I knew was The Well of Loneliness, written in 1928 and banned in Britain for its portrayal of unnatural practices between women. I lapped it up despite its tale of tragically thwarted love and social isolation, because here was a novel with the feel of classical English literature but not centered on heterosexuality. A few years later I recall passing around a dog-eared copy of Rubyfruit Jungle and celebrating its pivot to humor instead of tragedy. In 1986 my friends and I packed the Castro Theatre in San Francisco to whoop in delight watching the groundbreaking happy ending to the movie Desert Hearts, based on Jane Rule’s novel. We celebrated a trajectory that didn’t end in nervous breakdown, suicide, or conversion to heterosexuality—and a beautifully evocative sex scene. We buzzed with excitement as we exited the theater.
Gradually I saw lesbians becoming increasingly mainstream in literary fiction, with celebrated authors such as May Sarton, Sarah Waters, Alice Walker, and Jeanette Winterson leading the way in developing multidimensional lesbian stories. Yet for years the usual focus of anything involving a lesbian character was the coming-out process: who to tell, how to handle the reaction, how to gain acceptance. I confess to still being pleasantly surprised when a character in a Netflix movie or series just happens to be a lesbian; she may or may not be in a stable relationship, but the plot does not revolve around her angst about being accepted by her family and the world around her. The Lincoln Lawyer (the 2022 version) and Always Be My Maybe are recent examples where secondary characters’ lesbianism is not even remarked upon; it’s just there. I sit on the couch with my wife, thinking, Wow, we’ve come a long way, baby.
Disability representation, however, has evolved more slowly. Before turning to creative writing, I worked for many years as a rehabilitation nurse practitioner, helping patients adjust to life with a spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, or stroke. I developed friendships in the disability community, people who taught me to identify ableist stereotypes in fiction and popular culture. I came to see how in classical literature, from Shakespeare’s Richard III to Ahab in Moby Dick and Mr. Rochester’s wife Bertha in Jane Eyre, characters with disabilities have been portrayed as crazy monsters or pathetic victims lacking their own agency. My love of reading was fostered by children’s classics such as Heidi and The Secret Garden. Only in retrospect do I see the crippled-child meme, with disability being “cured” by fresh air, love, and attention.
In a trend that mirrors the complaints about lesbian representation up until the 1990s, it remains rare for a story involving a disabled character to have a trajectory that ends in neither cure nor suicide. In 2016 I joined disability rights advocates on the picket line outside our local movie theater for the opening of Me Before You, based on the 2012 bestseller, protesting its message that a disabled life is not worth living: the protagonist, despite the benefit of a caring family, immense wealth, and a loving partner, travels to Switzerland for assisted suicide, presented as the only feasible option.
I’ve also been forced to re-evaluate my admiration for Oscar-winning performances of abled-bodied actors playing characters with disabilities. The Academy loves such a transformation: think Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot or Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. These are amazing performances, but now they appear to border on mockery.
Things are changing; we now have actors Zack Gottsagen (The Peanut Butter Falcon), Micah Fowler (Speechless), and George Robinson (Sex Education) playing characters with their own real-life disabilities. In the recent Netflix adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, the actresses cast to play Marie-Laure, as a child and then a teenager, are both legally blind.
However, token disabled characters remain pervasive, used as one-dimensional foils to evoke pity or simplistic admiration for overcoming adversity, and characters with disabilities rarely interact with each other. Author and activist Kenny Fries, with a nod to Alison Bechdel’s test for representation of women in movies, has proposed the Fries test: does the work have more than one disabled character; do the disabled characters have their own narrative purpose other than serving the needs of a non-disabled character; and are the characters’ disabilities not eradicated by cure or killing? Not many works meet these criteria.
Prejudice or discomfort with a minority group is often based on unfamiliarity. We know that, as people discover that their neighbor, their pharmacist, their barista, or an athlete on their favorite team is gay or lesbian, being queer becomes normalized. Likewise, the thought of a significant disability may be unnerving in the abstract, and initial contact may evoke unease and fear of one’s own vulnerability. But further connection reveals individuals with disabilities to be humans with strengths and weaknesses just like anyone else. And positive portrayals in literature and popular culture play a significant role in dispelling ignorance.
In this, my second novel, I wanted to create characters that defy the ableist stereotypes of people with disabilities as tragic victims. In the era of #OwnVoices, I have to offer the disclaimer that unlike Tave, the primary protagonist in Unswerving, I do not personally have the experience of living with the new onset of a disability. I am fortunate to have two friends, both women with quadriplegia, who served as beta readers, providing feedback and validating my writing from this perspective. As the novel progresses, Tave meets other characters with disabilities who are leading productive lives, and who introduce her to a new community and adaptive sports as a source of joy. So yes, it passes the Fries test.
But I also wanted my main character to be lesbian. Because why not? Author Jeanette Winterson has questioned the need for a separate category of lesbian fiction, as if straight fiction is for everyone, but anything with a gay character… is only for queers. I’m a lesbian, and it was time for my writing to reflect that. And I wanted to explore the risks of overstepping boundaries in the healthcare professions. Relationships between a male patient and a female nurse are a common trope in romance novels, but I wanted to go in a different direction. In my novel, Beth, the physical therapist, becomes over-involved trying to rescue Tave, and when her girlfriend discovers that the patient she’s obsessed with is a lesbian, their relationship unravels.
When the woman in my writing group—let’s call her Sarah—wondered if this was all “too much,” I was caught off guard. I think I said something flippant about not everyone with a disability being straight. I’d been in workshops long enough to know that I didn’t need to embrace every comment or suggestion, but Sarah’s feedback was usually insightful, and it weighed on me. The next day she called me, contrite. “That was so insensitive,” she said. “Loaded with assumptions and heterosexual privilege. I’m embarrassed.” Apology accepted. But she’d prompted me to examine my own unspoken fears: maybe potential editors would find the novel hard to categorize. Writing my “elevator pitch” had been difficult, identifying “comp” titles a challenge. Yet altering the novel to make the characters heterosexual didn’t feel like the right solution. Fortunately, Unswerving eventually found a home at the University of Wisconsin Press, which has, among other things, a focus on LGBTQ literature. Interestingly, the acquisition editor shared with me that he has a family member with a spinal cord injury.
One could argue that Unswerving, by focusing on a woman adjusting to life with a disability, is the equivalent of a coming-out story; it does not accept the disability as a small background detail hardly worthy of comment. The integration of characters with disabilities is not as established as the presence of lesbians that I’ve been celebrating all over my streaming platforms. But maybe in the not-too-distant future I will be pleasantly surprised to see characters with disabilities of all types and various sexual identities who just happen to be disabled and who have their own agency, with a narrative arc that does not center on the disability itself. And a disabled lesbian protagonist will not seem strange at all.
Barbara Ridley was born in England but has spent most of her adult life in California. Her work has been published in journals including Mud Season Review and Forge Literary Magazine, and she has a debut novel, When It’s Over (2017). Her second novel, Unswerving, was published in 2024 by the University of Wisconsin Press.