to ask anyone who knows about books or publishing if this will be a dealbreaker

[myavatareatsveganpasta]

I've written a book. It took me about a year of drafting, revisions and research and I'm quite proud of it. I know how hard it is to get an agent and accept that the odds are against me though I've started to send out a few queries.

A couple of friends have well meaningly said the same thing to me though and it's got me wondering whether this could be an issue.

I am a middle class middle aged straight married woman and my main character is a gay man. He is portrayed sympathetically as a character who lives in a time and place where he cannot be out about his sexuality and ends up having to marry a woman with whom he finds a kind of happiness though obviously lots more happens in the story than that, and that's only one of the plot lines.

Friends said that they thought that in today's climate a straight woman writing about the LGBTQ community would be poorly received by agents and readers - are they right? Will agents discard my book without reading it because I'm writing about a community I'm not a part of?

Also, there is a character in the book who is very homophobic though she is clearly portrayed as a villain and comes to a bad end. Would that also not be ok?

Any advice welcome.

No, @MarkWithaC -- you're right. It's not in any way an exact, or probably even particularly apt, comparison.

As I said, I don't know anything about the EG book that was pulled/postponed, but given that I thought the single most godawful element of Eat, Pray, Love was that she very clearly viewed Italy, India and Indonesia as sort of amusingly foreign themeparks populated by amusing foreign stereotypes aimed at enabling American self-discovery, I thought that it might be in fact be no bad thing that she was made aware of Ukrainian sensitivities about Russia.