New Respect for LGBT Writers

I’ve spent the last week or so working on a couple lesbian BDSM short stories.  They’re coming along really well, but one aspect of writing lesbian erotica (which would apply equally to gay male erotica) is giving me periodic headaches.  When writing a straight scene pronouns and possessives are easy; he/she, his/her, etc.  All of a sudden they’re a minefield, and I’ve developed an entirely new respect for writers for whom gay/lesbian erotica is a primary genre.

“She did this to her, then she did this to her, etc., so forth,” makes perfect sense in my head when I’m typing it because I know who is doing what to whom; but on the first editing pass I’m shaking my head.  I’m finding myself using character names or descriptors more often to deal with the issue smoothly, but I have to admit that it’s a challenge.

I’ve written enough bisexual female characters to have dealt with this issue often, but it never stood out the way I saw it after writing 5,000 words of it over the course of a week or so; to the exclusion of anything else.  This has turned into a better exercise than I expected, and even though the polishing takes a bit longer the stories are smokin’ hot.