cool things

[kindkit]

1) Relevant to my interests and perhaps to yours is Kai Ashante Wilson's essay Whither Queer: a Genre At Midlife and a Rec-List. Wilson looks at an issue I've talked about a lot: the historical lack of queer male characters in sff, and the current glut of queer male characters . . . written by and largely for women.

I had moments of intense recognition reading this piece (Judith Tarr! making note of books with queer men and hoping to stumble into them in used book stores!), and also moments of disconnect, because I've been involved in fic fandom for 20 years and Wilson has not; he is intensely skeptical of the influence of fanfic on contemporary sff. I hate it when people use "fanfic" to mean "writing I don't like," and Wilson does a certain amount of that here. He never entirely specifies what these fanficcy tendencies in sff are, either.

And yet, I can't say I entirely think he's wrong. When I read contemporary sff by younger authors (not just the queer male stuff, either), it does feel fanficcy to me, in ways I too find hard to pin down but often don't love. I read the first few paragraphs of Gideon the Ninth in a sample somewhere and bounced hard off that fanfic voice. (One of the few specific things Wilson mentions is ironic banter.) A lot of m/m relationships in contemporary sff are written using fanfic tropes and a kind of fundamental narrative structure or assumption that, again, I can't pin down, but it feels like slash fic to me. *shrugs*

I think part of what gets my hackles up, when people use "it's like fanfic" as criticism, is that I immediately think of the kinds of fanfic I enjoy. I forget that there's a ton of fanfic I don't enjoy but that is hugely popular, and that, I fear, is what's influencing professionally published sff these days. Anyway, I'd love to hear what other folks think of Wilson's piece.

As for his recs list, there's not much on it that I didn't know about, but I'm pleased to see Melissa Scott there (twice!)--Wilson's criticism of "the female gaze" in queer-male-focused sff does not boil down to "doesn't like women writers"--and also trans male writer Billy Martin (publishing as Poppy Z. Brite). Wilson's discussions of all the books are illuminating--I may have to give Water Horse another try--even if you don't agree with his general approach.


2) Samba Schutte, the actor who plays Roach in Our Flag Means Death, has designed an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United, an organization that fights homelessness among LGBTQ youth. OFMD-inspired without quite being referential (or copyright-infringing; I doubt David Jenkins would object but HBO/Max is evil). Beware the checkout process, though--it steers you hard to sign up for Shop Pay, a Shopify-based instant payment thing. You can avoid it by checking out as a guest, but I got confused and managed to sign myself up accidentally. Must remember to de-activate it once my order has processed.

Comments

[kindkit]

Picture me nodding along with all of your points.

this is the basic hurdle of "Is this in-character?"

Nodding extra vigorously. As much as I agree that people should write whatever they want to write (and subsidiary points like "it's a hobby" and "not everything is written especially for Kit, more's the pity"), I also think that a story posted on a public forum, described as fanfic about specific characters, should actually be about those characters and not about the author's autobiography/kinks/trauma. There's a lot I'm willing to accept as extrapolation from canon (I mean, I've written trans Izzy, and I write pretty much all the OFMD characters as substantially less muppety than they canonically are), but I think I should at least be able to see canon from the story. Or if not, the story needs to earn it, which they often don't.

Or, as you said, the author should say up front that this story is really about them. (Carefully not opening the can of worms labeled "How much of our fanfic is actually about us?")


SFF is a set of genres often concerned with having an "everyman/woman" protagonist who's meant to serve as the reader's entry point

Ugh. You've reminded me of why I hate portal fantasies where the MC wanders around for several chapters going "What? What do you mean magic is real? Impossible!" Or who wander around voicing all the reader's imagined prejudices (*cough*GenlyAi*cough*).

Everyperson protagonists are so irritating. I find myself much more invested in protagonists who are specific, who have a perspective and are deeply rooted in the world of the story. And, yes, I see your point about how the perceived requirement for an Everyperson creates a barrier to queer characters. One still hears stories of publishers wanting the queerness taken out "to attract a wider audience."

In re: the storytelling dodging the experience of being queer in a straight world: yes, I see that a lot in m/m romance novels. They'll be a bit of lip service to prejudice and the law, and then the characters will go off to live together in the English countryside in 1952. (Weirdly, there's often more emphasis on prejudice when stories are set in times when it would in fact be easier for queer men to go unnoticed, e.g. the 19th century.)

while I can enjoy other people's fantasies in fic, I do need them to be attached to a character I feel it can work for

*side-eyes all those fics where Ed and Stede end up raising Stede's kids*

Sometimes the vibe is a very particular one for social media subcultures I am not a part of

I don't quite follow you. Are you referring to literal Social Media AUs? (Which I blessedly didn't know existed until a few months ago, and I wish I could un-know.) Or more like "this is a very Tumblr-y sort of fic?"

Concerns about 'good representation' or the heterocentric belief that adding other central qualities to a queer character may be 'putting a hat on a hat'

I've begun to be awfully tired of good representation. By which I mean, good representation as a central value. If we just had more good stories with lots of queer people in them, representation would take care of itself. I do wince a bit when I see people calling for more stories about toxic queer people or "bad gays" or whatever, in these times (and also because stories about horrible people are not personally my jam, and I find the common failure modes of queer characters--the joyless sexual exploiter, the sleazy opportunist, the hot but all-devouring narcissist--particularly grating.) But luckily there are about a million degrees of characterization between the perfect queer cinnamon roll and the toxic nightmare.

Thank you for the recs! Now I have a nice list of ideas, instead of fruitlessly searching amazon and mostly finding more m/m romance (sometimes called sff, but still romance) written by women.* I meant to check out Marlon James's books ages ago, after I heard him on a radio show, but then I forgot.

(*Possibly necessary disclaimer that I think women have every right to write about queer men. Some of them do it very well! But it becomes a problem when their voices are getting published almost to the exclusion of queer men's voices.)

[delphi]

There's a lot I'm willing to accept as extrapolation from canon (I mean, I've written trans Izzy, and I write pretty much all the OFMD characters as substantially less muppety than they canonically are), but I think I should at least be able to see canon from the story. Or if not, the story needs to earn it, which they often don't.

That's where I'm coming from too. I'm aware that a lot of what I write strikes people as baffling even by fanfic standards, so I'm unsure of my own leg to stand on regarding this one. But while I love a lot of fic that diverges from canon, I'm always starting with my feet in canon when I click on a story, and I want the text to be able to lead me along to where it's going. I can follow easily when it's clear the concept is "What if we dial down the comedy and dial up the emotional realism," or "What if we dial up the unreality and have a farce," or even "What if the stakes being lower in this modern AU means that everyone's a little more chill" and "What if we flipped the protagonist-centered morality around for the antagonist," but it's harder for me to come along when it's a matter of multiple canon events and characterizations being substantially changed based on author preference without any explanation.

In re: the storytelling dodging the experience of being queer in a straight world: yes, I see that a lot in m/m romance novels. They'll be a bit of lip service to prejudice and the law, and then the characters will go off to live together in the English countryside in 1952. (Weirdly, there's often more emphasis on prejudice when stories are set in times when it would in fact be easier for queer men to go unnoticed, e.g. the 19th century.)

Absolutely. And the thing is, it's not like I'm craving more oppression or struggle in my historical romance. In even the most difficult times, there have always been countless couples about whom you could write multiple novels with only the conflicts and triumphs that were completely separate from where their sexuality intersected with the wider world. But in a lot of the queer historical romance I've tried, it's recurringly felt like queerness only exists to add a bit more forbidden-ness to the relationship or - more often - to have the interpersonal conflict fall neatly into an oppressed/oppressor framework, where much of the friction or action is driven by other characters being unfair to a blameless protagonist. It's not like there's any one way or any one list of ways for a character to feel like someone who's gone through one of the thousands of ways to process being queer in a certain time and place, but...I don't know. Most of the m/m romance from the more recent wave of it that I've tried feels like it's missing something I want.

I don't quite follow you. Are you referring to literal Social Media AUs? (Which I blessedly didn't know existed until a few months ago, and I wish I could un-know.) Or more like "this is a very Tumblr-y sort of fic?"

More like the latter. And to be clear, I didn't mean that disparagingly. For instance, I'd say that a lot of Billy Martin's early work - and a lot of horror, especially gothic horror - falls into the category of books where the characters largely exist to be vehicles for the general vibe. It's just that modern New Orleans and rural goth was a vibe I was into as a teen. But when I wrote that, I was in fact thinking of a certain geek subculture or collection of closely knit geek subcultures that I often see on Tumblr.

(*Possibly necessary disclaimer that I think women have every right to write about queer men. Some of them do it very well! But it becomes a problem when their voices are getting published almost to the exclusion of queer men's voices.)

I wish I knew more about where the publishing industry is at right now. Which is to say, I wonder if the concept internally is actually about putting out LGBTQ literature to any real extent or if it's primarily just about providing a marketing demographic of fiction readers (which I suspect likely skews towards young women) with something they previously weren't getting, with a disconnect between that thought and why that niche was not already filled. Who are the up and coming queer male authors who aren't finding publishers because their market is seen as distinct from the one above? Given how much of the current m/m SFF out there feels very YA and New Adult, is male authors' work assumed to be too adult for the zeitgeist?

On that note, I'm wondering now if I should start trying to find my next SFF reads by imprints rather than by online recs. The YA/New Adult marketing machine is a heck of a thing. I was just thinking the other day about how many books I have on my shelf from Arsenal Press (a small Canadian press with a lot of queer offerings, albeit leaning more toward non-fiction, literary fiction, short stories, and poetry), but how outside of two of their books ending up as Canada Reads finalists recently, I rarely see any of their stuff come up on book blogs or other social media when I'm searching for new things unless I'm doing a very specific intersectional searc. Something more up my alley has to be lurking out there, under all the marketing push for the stuff that's not quite my thing, and I bet/hope it's together in the same place.

[kindkit]

it's recurringly felt like queerness only exists to add a bit more forbidden-ness to the relationship or - more often - to have the interpersonal conflict fall neatly into an oppressed/oppressor framework, where much of the friction or action is driven by other characters being unfair to a blameless protagonist

Yes, and to my mind it's in the top 10 most irritating ways to tell a story.

I tried to write a original m/m romance once, and I didn't get very far because writing a novel is HARD. But at least most of the conflict between the two MCs had its origins in a disparity of money, power, and social status, and even the Wicked Rival was a decent-enough guy who just really didn't get the whole true love business and had other things on his mind anyway. It's the sort of thing I wish other people would write. KJ Charles was getting close to that, once, but then (perhaps around the time she quit her day job and had to start pumping out 3 novels a year?) she moved back into a more traditional formula.

if the concept internally is actually about putting out LGBTQ literature to any real extent or if it's primarily just about providing a marketing demographic of fiction readers (which I suspect likely skews towards young women) with something they previously weren't getting

The latter, I suspect. My sense from the writers I follow on Twitter is that publishing is incredibly dysfunctional, that it's following film in wanting only blockbusters, and if that means repeating the same formula until the audience indicates they won't buy it anymore, so be it.

Who are the up and coming queer male authors who aren't finding publishers because their market is seen as distinct from the one above? Given how much of the current m/m SFF out there feels very YA and New Adult, is male authors' work assumed to be too adult for the zeitgeist?

It's interesting that to the extent there seem to be any queer men writing genre, it's horror. Which isn't fully going for that same audience of 15-25 year old women, although based on the recent kerfuffle about "cozy horror," I think it may be starting to.

[delphi]

(*Possibly necessary disclaimer that I think women have every right to write about queer men. Some of them do it very well! But it becomes a problem when their voices are getting published almost to the exclusion of queer men's voices.)

Just going back to this bit because it's relevant to the next bit, but oh yes, I totally took that as a given re: where you were coming from. I also think - to go off on a tangent - that a lot of the broader discussion of this on Twitter grossly overinflates how many of the writers in question are straight women, or identify as women at all, and ignores the longstanding complications of queer 'representation' as it breaks down on gendered lines within the community. Overall, my sense is that it's less about who's writing what and more about what the industry is comfortable publishing, from whom, and for whom. The less ideological and more practical issue being where that leaves writers who express or embody things outside of that comfort zone.

It's interesting that to the extent there seem to be any queer men writing genre, it's horror. Which isn't fully going for that same audience of 15-25 year old women, although based on the recent kerfuffle about "cozy horror," I think it may be starting to.

I agree, although this is now an area where I'd want to do a historical scan of queer male writers in science fiction versus horror. Because while I can think of several big names in the science fiction world, both in terms of people openly writing about queer men and those sticking more to allegory, my gut says horror has always been more of a home for that - possibly because queer horror has always been deemed more palatable than queer optimism/banality?

I'd also say to the extent that queer men (and possibly straight men writing m/m?) are writing genre in big ways these days, it's in comics. Maybe not in pure numbers, given the size of the relative publishing worlds, but I suspect in terms of proportion, especially when scoping for the biggest mainstream publishers. I'm really interested in how that actually played out behind the scenes over the last decade. (I think Image was, weirdly enough, a crucial part of it, but I'm not sure of exactly what politics among the Big Three saw this happen.)

I tried to write a original m/m romance once, and I didn't get very far because writing a novel is HARD. But at least most of the conflict between the two MCs had its origins in a disparity of money, power, and social status, and even the Wicked Rival was a decent-enough guy who just really didn't get the whole true love business and had other things on his mind anyway. It's the sort of thing I wish other people would write.

It's certainly the sort of thing I'd be here to read if you ever took another run at it!