To celebrate LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari is publishing a daily series of LGBT Heroes, selected by the magazine’s team of writers and special contributors.

Sarah Waters – Author
by BJ Epstein
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Many LGBT writers find their works relegated to special shelves, often festooned with rainbow stickers, in bookstores or libraries, and/or they find their own names constantly prefixed with phrases such as “gay author” or “known bisexual writer”. That must be frustrating for them, and it’s frustrating for readers, too, who just want to read about queer characters in everyday situations, without feeling as though queer lit is some niche genre of its own that holds no interest for anyone outside the LGBT community.

Sarah Waters is a writer who both seems to revel in the “lesbian” label and also manages to cross over into the mainstream at the same time. Her novels are literary texts that just so happen to feature lesbian characters and lesbian lives. With books such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, Waters doesn’t hide the homosexual content that seems to inspire her, and perhaps due to her beautiful writing and suspense-filled plots, readers are willing to follow her into territory that they might previously have deemed too challenging. What’s more, Waters has received the official stamp of approval in the UK through having some of her works adapted on the BBC.

There’s much to admire about Waters and her writing, and her commitment to queer topics regardless of the potential concerns for the publisher’s bottom line is one of the reasons why she’s a hero for the LGBT community.