The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [224]
A few of the other complaints I see regarding the treatment of homosexuals (virtually all from readers who have only read the first book of the series) are based simply on misinterpretation. Two or three letter writers urged me to consider the possible ill effects of Alexander MacGregor’s suicide on young people struggling with awareness of their sexual orientation—surely I ought not to be suggesting that discovering one is gay is grounds for killing oneself?
Putting aside the larger question of whether it is a novelist’s responsibility to address every possible mental response that every possible reader might have, and handle these in such a way as to maximize the (collectively hypothetical) readers’ self-esteem, in the context of Modern Enlightened Thought,12 the simple fact is that there isn’t the slightest indication anywhere in the text that Alexander MacGregor is gay.
In other words, he didn’t hang himself out of shame at discovering his sexual nature—he hung himself for the much more sensible reason that he couldn’t stand being raped and tortured. Most people would find this distressing, I daresay, no matter what their proclivities.
The Duke of Sandringham
Now, the Duke of Sandringham actually is gay; that’s evident from the story that Jamie tells during supper at Castle Leoch [Outlander, page 482–487 (U.S. paperback)]. Frankly, that scene was an accident, and so was the Duke.
One of my chief reasons for writing Outlander was to learn how to write. Consequently, I very often tried to write a specific sort of scene, simply because I didn’t know how to do it, and wanted to learn. When I wrote this dinner party scene, I had no idea what would be said, or how it might fit into the book at large; it was simply that I had never (at that point) written a dialogue scene involving more than two characters.
Most dialogue scenes in novels do involve only two characters, for good reason; it’s very difficult to handle a conversation with several participants without either losing track of who’s saying what, or hopelessly confusing the reader. I had written several dialogue scenes in a row, involving two characters—Jamie and Claire—and had begun to find this monotonous. So I thought I’d try a scene in which a number of people take part in an ongoing conversation, just to learn how to do that. Hence, Colum’s dinner table, and the conversation that evolved into Jamie’s rather ribald story, inviting comments from his hearers.
The story itself did evolve; I didn’t plan it. However, in Outlander, the Duke is a shadowy character who never appears onstage; he was simply a prop at that point, and—as the hilarity at Jamie’s story makes clear—homosexuality was not regarded with any particular popular revulsion in the eighteenth century.13 In the social context shown, it was rather simply accepted as one known idiosyncrasy of this particular nobleman. I found no particularly negative attitude toward homosexuality anywhere in the Scottish sources consulted; a rather scornful dismissal of the behavior of James I14 being about as far as it went.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I do not plan these books out before writing them—I certainly didn’t plan the whole series (I couldn’t very well, since I didn’t know it was a series). However, when working on a book, I often do suddenly perceive a good use for elements or characters from a previous book.
So, as I was writing along in Dragonfly, and wondering how to make the necessary connections between the Scottish Highlands and the French Court (since these connections did exist and were historically important), I thought of using the Duke. He was, after all, the only member of the nobility appearing in Outlander, and as such, he might well have entree to the Court of Louis XV, as well as be associated with the Stuarts.
I had already written the scene [Dragonfly, chapter 10, “A Lady, with Brown Hair Curling Luxuriantly”] in which Claire first meets Alexander Randall; the Duke’s presence provided both a simple explanation for Alex’s presence in France—and a Really Useful connection to the