Several people have commented that one of the villains of my latest historical novel, Seductive Secrets, is gay. (Since that is known almost from the beginning, I wouldn’t consider that a spoiler). The heroine, Isobel, has been abused by her late husband, Harry, and associates sex with pain and discomfort. I thought very carefully before making Harry gay because I knew I’d get the response that has come from some quarters.

I don’t want to defend the book, or comment on other aspects of it, just this issue. Neither should this be seen as a defense of the book. It doesn’t need it. You either like it, or you don’t. If you don’t, I’ll just have to try harder next time, and if you do, thank you. So on to the point of this piece.

Can you make your villains gay? In the recent past, no. Gays, especially gay men, have been persecuted, ridiculed and even executed for their sexual orientation. I write historical romances set in the mid eighteenth century and at that time ‘sodomy’ was illegal and punishable by the death penalty. It was enacted, too. Very often, the offence was used as an excuse to punish a different crime, fencing stolen property, for instance, or even spying, but it was still enacted. Homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom until the 1960’s, although by then you couldn’t be hanged for it, only disgraced and ruined. Oh goody. There’s progress for you.

So when gays were finally accepted into society, there was, and still is, a tendency to go the other way, and imply that gays could do no wrong. Put that way, it’s obviously nonsense, but the inclination is to give them the benefit of the doubt, to try to depict gays in positive ways. They’ve had it too hard for too long. Acts against them are seen as bigoted and unfair. Which they are, if they’re being persecuted for their sexuality.

But I still believe that nobody, gay, straight or bi, deserves to be classified according to their sexual orientation. Being gay doesn’t make you good, or evil, or any of those things. It just makes you gay. And yes, I’ve known a lot of gay people in my life, and not all of them have been admirable or even pleasant. Most have. Sometimes the circumstances in which they’ve been forced to live have pushed them into behaving in less than perfect ways. Sometimes, they’ve just been unpleasant people. Usually, they’ve just been – people.

Everyone is responsible for his or her actions, and having created sympathetic gay characters in the past, I thought it was time to have a gay villain. No, that’s not quite right. Harry came to me gay, he worked as a gay character, so I decided to go with it. He’s not a nice man. He realizes Isobel is a complete innocent, the fault of her mother, and uses that against her, tells her that painful, humiliating sex is the norm, or rather, doesn’t tell her otherwise. But Harry is not a villain because he is gay, to do that would truly be to enter the world of bigotry and prejudice. He’s weak, and he would have been weak if he was straight. He’s also dishonest and a coward. He never fully accepted what he was, and he forced his guilt on to someone else. Isobel. She is seventeen when she marries him, knows little about sex, and Harry used that, and blamed her for his failures. Harry never faced what he was, and used his sexuality as an excuse.

Giving gays equality means to see them as people, good and bad and in between, and not to define them by the gender they happen to prefer to have sex with.

So what do you think, readers?