Thanks for the t-shirt link! Also thanks for the Wilson link, which I'll be taking away to think further on.
I read almost exclusively SFF as a kid/teen/early 20-something, and then largely stopped. (Of the authors mentioned in the essay, I still really vibe with Samuel R. Delany's work - and I was very into Billy Martin's books as a teen but the appeal didn't stick for me when I got older, personally.) In retrospect, the accessible metaphorical queerness of SFF and the way actual queer content could sneak onto the shelves and be found by way of the Lambda Awards list that secretly lived in my wallet back in the day was a big part of that.
In the last few years, I've kept meaning to get back into reading more SFF or trying out romance, and the unprecedented amount of queer material in those genres has been a major motivating factor. But I just keep bouncing off almost everything I try, in a way that I generally haven't with the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf.
I've been reading fanfic pretty much unceasingly for the last 25 years, but I'm aware that I read at the fringes of it. As a result, I know what I'm bouncing off in both published queer SFF and a lot of more popular fanfic, but I honestly can't tell if the queer SFF I'm trying is too fanficcy, or if both it and 'mainstream' fanfic have become more influenced by the romance genre and modern mainstream YA, or if romance and YA themselves were influenced by fanfic first, or if it's all just an expression of some bigger influence of internet age marketing forces.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-06-15 07:29 pm (UTC)I read almost exclusively SFF as a kid/teen/early 20-something, and then largely stopped. (Of the authors mentioned in the essay, I still really vibe with Samuel R. Delany's work - and I was very into Billy Martin's books as a teen but the appeal didn't stick for me when I got older, personally.) In retrospect, the accessible metaphorical queerness of SFF and the way actual queer content could sneak onto the shelves and be found by way of the Lambda Awards list that secretly lived in my wallet back in the day was a big part of that.
In the last few years, I've kept meaning to get back into reading more SFF or trying out romance, and the unprecedented amount of queer material in those genres has been a major motivating factor. But I just keep bouncing off almost everything I try, in a way that I generally haven't with the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf.
I've been reading fanfic pretty much unceasingly for the last 25 years, but I'm aware that I read at the fringes of it. As a result, I know what I'm bouncing off in both published queer SFF and a lot of more popular fanfic, but I honestly can't tell if the queer SFF I'm trying is too fanficcy, or if both it and 'mainstream' fanfic have become more influenced by the romance genre and modern mainstream YA, or if romance and YA themselves were influenced by fanfic first, or if it's all just an expression of some bigger influence of internet age marketing forces.