Pronoun Issues vs Same Sex Coupling

On Writing Same Sex Coupling

Writing same sex couples is a tricky problem, largely stemming from pronoun issues.  Here are three of the most common ways to avoid those issues, and a smattering of suggestions that may be helpful.

Or not.

1)  The POV trick.
This is commonly used because it is the easiest way to avoid the issue of pronouns altogether.  In short, write in First Person POV.  This prevents any issues with pronoun confusion in the simplest way possible, by making the issue nonexistent.  However, this presents its own set of issues, the main one being....writing in the First Person POV.  Still, it is one of the best techniques to avoid the problem.

2)  Adjectives Are Your Friend.
This is the one I most commonly use, and it works equally well with either gender.  It has the side effect of increase the 'purple prose' issue, but it also leads to greater scene detailing and can potentially help characterization.  Essentially: replace pronouns with character descriptives, using adjectives concerning one character, possibly using pronouns for the other.
"The dark haired woman drew strands of hair from her face as she licked her friend deeply and slowly."
"With the dexterity her kind were renowned for, she drew her hand from her sex easily."
"She stared at the delicate waif's small, firm breasts; the svelte creature stared back at her."
Even out of context, the repetitive pronouns are less problematic; you have a sense of two people, experiencing different things.  The major downside is it leads to purple prose syndrome very quickly if overused.  The upside is that if you focus on emotional adjectives as well as physical ones:
"Donner loomed over him, his alien shadow huge upon the wall. He trembled silently in fear as he felt his prick slide inside slowly."
you can build characterization as well as avoiding pronoun issues even with minimal context. More context equals less pronoun issues if you use adjectives as well.  Note that the use of repetitive pronouns in the above examples is purposeful, as it would be easy to use further adjectives to reduce the pronoun use even more but defeat the purpose of the examples.

2a)  Speciesism.
A subset of the previous, this technique is commonly used when describing other races, classes of people, or divergent species.  More than simply using race names - elf,  halfling, human - it also applies to jobs (wizard+apprentice, familiar spirit+magical beast, spacer+asteroid belter, yakuza+ninja) and even racial phenotypes (sure to get you on the SJW badlist and piss off the politically correct).  By using well known and obvious characteristics of the characters as referents, you can avoid using pronouns on occasion.  Everyone does this; it happens in almost every story you read at some point or another.  What differentiates this from the previous section is that it's the most basic use of a descriptive, one so overt it's less a description than simply an obvious identifier for the subject/object of the sentence.  Combining this with number 2 above reduces the need for purple prose caused by number two.
"The dark haired woman drew strands of hair from her face as she licked her dwarven friend deeply and slowly."
"With the dexterity her kind were renowned for, the elf drew her hand from the human's sex easily."
"The monster loomed over him, his shadow huge upon the wall. He trembled silently in fear as he felt the demon's prick slide inside slowly."

3)  Show, Don't Tell.

The description of whom is doing what to whom is possibly the most important contextual cue you can give to your reader.  Without it, obviously it wouldn't be smut.  But by clarifying action/reaction, it can immediately become obvious who is doing what, as long as the context is made clear in previous and following sentences.
"The sleek, scaled alien woman moved close, one hand moving to the human woman's jaw and the other extending two of her three fingers and forcing them into her mouth.  She squirmed as she felt her tongue being stroked with long delicate fingers, her touch and movements surprisingly smooth and gentle rather than the sliminess and cruelty she had been expecting.  They moved a little too deep and she gagged; removing her fingers the alien stepped back quickly, alarmed."
Still pronoun heavy, but it is still clear whose mouth is being invaded by whose fingers.
"He towered over his victim.  Lying still, the other man was vulnerable, exposed.  He stepped over him, then knelt swiftly, taking his cock in hand and squeezing.  Gasping, the weaker man gripped the ground underneath him, his hard cock throbbing painfully.  The other's grip tightened and he cried out in pain, unable to help himself."
Positioning and knowing how is submissive and who is dominant makes the meanings clear.  In both examples, they could be made more clear by adjectives or descriptive, but the point is that they can work if taken in context.


Essentially, the problem with pronouns during same couple sex are most easily fought with description, context, and action.  By defining "who does what to whom" clearly, one can add characterization, physical description, emotional description, or point of view additions to the text to further clarify what is happening for the viewer.  The biggest danger is adding too much detail and turning it into purple prose, but that is sometimes the lesser of two evils.  On the other hand, there is often very little danger when you use the descriptions to add more character, build detail into the scene, and otherwise increase the visualization the reader can get from your work.

A few other tricks that may or may not help:

Switch out 'he or she' with 'the other [gender/person/identifier]' on occasion.

Using people's names in relation to what they are doing will help define and build context for later pronoun use, especially in a dominant/submissive situation.

Use descriptions of the sounds that people's clothing make or their bodies are making against objects to define whom is where and what they are doing, assuming they are wearing different clothing/against different objects.

Go back over what you have written a couple of hours after you have written it, and make sure that the scenes play out as you visualized them originally rather than trusting your immediate writing.  If it still reads clearly, you're set.

Thinking in terms of how the pronouns fall in context to what comes before and after is where you'll get the most mileage from them.  If you can't place a pronoun with a specific person after you've read the few sentences before the sentence you're wondering about, time to replace them with descriptors and adjectives.

Focusing on one specific character's POV can help avoid a lot of pronoun issues, as the main character will obviously be the narrative focus and therefore the use of pronouns to specify the main character will be minimized.

~XS