The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [225]
Now, Black Jack being who he is, he seldom appears without some kind of sinister sexual overtone. Still, the Duke himself is not shown engaging in any really discreditable behavior as a gay man. He’s a major-league political plotter, and thoroughly conscienceless in terms of his goals, but beyond Jamie’s story in Outlander and the Duke’s vague remarks about Jack Randall, we never see him in a sexual context. In other words, his homosexuality is incidental; simply one facet of his character, but not one that particularly affects our perception of him as good or evil.
When he revealed himself (so to speak) as being gay in Outlander, I decided to keep him as a sort of grace note in counterpoint to Jack Randall—that is, making it clear that simple homosexuality was neither inherently evil nor regarded as such, whereas Jack Randall’s particular perversion was Something Quite Different. Most readers fortunately observed the distinction.
Lord John Grey
I could—as a few readers suggest—have included an admirable homosexual character in the first two books, as “balance” to Black Jack Randall—but that would be perversion of its own sort; distortion of a story for purposes of political correctness—and you already know what I think about that. It would also have been overkill; while homosexual people have undoubtedly always been represented in any population, to have a noticeable proportion of the characters in a story be gay is to draw more attention to them than is historically or artistically appropriate—unless the story is focused specifically on a gay community or deals with homosexual issues as a major theme.
However. I mentioned above my habit of looking back and picking up useful characters from earlier books. Having decided that Jamie Fraser was going to be “the Fraser, of the Master of Lovat’s regiment” who escaped the slaughter of the Jacobite officers at Culloden, I had the problem of figuring out just how he was to escape.
I could have managed it in any of various ways, of course, but looking back, I spotted the young man whom Jamie had met and overpowered on the eve of the battle of Prestonpans [Dragonfly, chapter 36, “Prestonpans”]. Now, I had intended him to meet that young man again, somewhere down the line, since John William Grey15 had made such a dramatic parting threat. I had no idea where they might meet, though.
At first, I thought the young man himself might rescue Jamie from Culloden. That didn’t seem quite right, though; the boy was young and essentially powerless, as well as being physically slight. I knew Jamie was wounded (because all the Jacobite officers in the cottage were), and I didn’t think John Grey would be able to get him away plausibly. Also, I wasn’t at all sure that Grey would consider his earlier rescue a debt of honor—he had promised to kill Jamie, after all.
An elder brother, though, would see the debt and the honorable necessity of repaying it. So far, so good—and no reason to assume any particular sexual orientation on Lord John’s part. But then, it was obviously necessary for Lord John to meet Jamie in person somewhere else, later—and the situation with the prison popped into my head immediately. What better sort of conflict? A man with a profound hatred of another man, put in a position where he holds complete power over his enemy—but is prevented by honor from using that power.
What better sort of conflict? Well, what if the man in the position of power finds his hatred being gradually… changed to something else? And then, what if the man to whom he tentatively offered his budding affection could not under any circumstances accept even the thought of it—owing to the secrets of his own traumatic past?
Well, heck, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to make things difficult. So we—and Jamie—discover that Lord John is gay, with concomitant complications.
However, Lord John revealed himself as a gay man because he was; i.e., that facet of his personality was key to the