One of the categories that my book is sold under is “LGBTQ Sci Fi.” This is accurate – the main character, Orr Vue, is a man who loves another man. But it also feels like… stolen valor, in a way? It’s something I’ve been trying to get my head around as I do publicity for it.

I am a cis man, married to a cis woman, and I have loved men. I haven’t dated men, or slept with men, but I know what it’s like to think about a man all the time, to wonder what he thinks of me, to take any excuse to spend more time with him, to have the contours of his body appear in my mind unannounced.

But the truth is, my attraction to men has never been quite strong enough to overcome my fear of the consequences of acting on it. In a world less rigidly divided, I probably would’ve dated men. But when I was a teenager, “bi” meant “gay” and “gay” meant “bad,” at least as far as men were concerned. I clung to my attraction to women, as if it were a talisman that would protect me from scorn. I had the luxury to choose to pass.

So yeah, writing a protagonist who fucks men, in a world where nobody cares who he fucks, was cathartic for me. But even so, when people talk to me about the queerness of the book, they often refer to Orr as gay. And don’t get me wrong, I’d certainly rather they call him gay than straight. But Orr is very obviously horny around women, too. He’s horny around everybody. He’s a trash-talking, hard-partying disaster pansexual. And yet for many people, all that nuance is erased the moment he makes out with a dude. It’s the exact tendency that teenage-me was afraid of. I push back against it where I can.

So yes, there are queer elements in the book. And yes, those queer elements come from my own experience, at least to a certain extent. So why do I feel like a fraud when my book is labeled “LGBTQ fiction”? Well, because even though I know what it feels like to love men, I don’t know what it feels like to suffer for it.

I’ve never been ostracised for my preferences. I’ve never had other men fear me or threaten me because of who I love, or what they fear about themselves. I’ve never had preachers or politicians single me out, make me a scapegoat. Have I been repressed? Maybe. Afraid of the fullness of myself? Probably. But I have always been “safe.” And categorizing books is, at the end of the day, a marketing tactic. I don’t feel entirely comfortable benefiting from a classification that I don’t think I’ve “earned” with suffering.

But I don’t want to erase that part of the book either, any more than I want to erase that part of myself. I hope someone will read my book who feels the way I do about all this — who dreams of a world where loving whoever you want isn’t a political statement. So I guess I feel the same way about the genre classification as I do about my own attractions: there are no easy answers, no simple divisions. And maybe that’s the point.