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]

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!