Category: lgbt

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lgbt video game writing advice

The Shitty Trans Take of Remothered: An Analysis

One of my social activities is playing horror video games with my friends. Which is to say, my housemate does the hard part of actually driving, and me and my best friend sit and watch and offer helpful advice like “oh god, run away!” because we are both giant weenies who forget how to use a PS4 controller when we’re startled. The most recent game we all played together was Remothered: Tormented Fathers. Which we were super excited to play because it’s won a ton of awards.

Remothered is a Clocktower-style game, where you’re basically trapped in a limited map (here it’s three floors of a massive mansion) with an effectively immortal monster that can kill you if they catch you. You have to hide, sneak, use distracting items, and spend a lot of time running in the hopes that you’ll get far enough ahead of your pursuer to dive into a closet–and remain calm when they come hunting past your hiding place. In that mechanical sense, it’s a really good game because all of that is incredibly scary. At the beginning of the game, you’re being pursued by the owner of the house, Richard Felton.

On October 11, we played through several chapters and got to one of the game’s big reveals, which I will spoil here because I think it’s a shitty reveal: Richard Felton is actually the mysterious Jennifer who is mentioned throughout the first several chapters of the game! Shock, horror: the sickle-wielding man who has been chasing you through his house–while wearing only an apron and a pair of rubber farm boots–is actually a woman!

When the reveal came, the three of us actually groaned. For me, I’d had a feeling this was coming, and had kind of braced myself for another shitty “trans person as monster” horror moment–and I was sadly not wrong. As one of my friends eloquently put it, this has been done and done again since Psycho. It’s nothing new or particularly creative–though I will say that Remothered is the first one I’ve personally encountered where the reveal wasn’t transfeminine. Regarding the really damaging trans narratives that are particularly endemic to horror movies (and which to a one center around the shock of the reveal, clearly intended for the titillation of cis audiences), I suggest reading:

So anyway, back to Remothered. I typed out my disappointment on Twitter and forgot about it… until, bizarrely, the creator of the game responded.

I have some thoughts about this as a writer, but let’s set those aside for later. First, all right. Let’s analyze why I feel the way I do about Remothered.

The relevant story related to the reveal can be partially summarized as: Jennifer’s father, upon returning home from Ethiopia, decided that he wanted a son rather than a daughter. He forcibly transitioned Jennifer over into a male identity; how much physical alteration was involved is not explicitly stated, but we know there was at least drugs and mesmerism happening to suppress Jennifer’s female identity. “Richard” then grew up as a rather tortured and unhealthy person with “hormonal imbalances” who refused to undergo examinations when being treated for ill health. “Richard” had an arranged marriage that was quite rocky until the couple adopted a girl named Celeste as their daughter; but as Celeste grew up into a young woman, “Richard” began to remember being Jennifer more and more and thus became a threat to Celeste’s safety, thinking that killing Celeste would at last exorcise Jennifer. (This led to Celeste’s disappearance, which is the initial reason the player character comes to the Felton house. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s beyond the scope of what I want to talk about.)

In the following discussion of the gender narrative, I’m going to use the name Jennifer and the she/her pronoun set to refer to the character we start off knowing as “Richard,” because it’s pretty plain that Jennifer is a cis woman who was forced by her father to take on a male identity and characteristics. I will also note here that while I view Remothered as another brick in the transphobic horror genre wall, I don’t know if it’s entirely correct to address Jennifer as a trans person. She’s a cis woman who is forced to “become” trans by the alteration of her body and identity, which is a horror subgenre that’s not exactly rare. Since the entire storyline is evocative of trans bodies, I will refer to her as trans, but understand that I get this is a murky topic.

NOTE: “The character isn’t really trans” isn’t a defense when the shock/horror of the reveal hinges on the character troubling conservative societal boundaries of gender, which trans, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming people do by our very existence. There has been a long conflation in popular media between trans people and cis people who crossdress, for example, because the entire point in comedy or horror is the challenge the character presents to strict heteronormative society. Whether the character is “really” trans or not, these images and characterizations can feed into incredibly damaging tropes.

First of all, we cannot ignore the “surprise, trans!” reveal, which is a staple of horror and a thoroughly shitty, harmful device. It serves to reinforce the “deceptive trans person” trope, which gets used in the real world as a justification for violence against us (e.g. it’s the foundation of the “trans panic” defense). Narratively, it is also a device that serves to distance the audience from the trans character; the audience is removed from the trans person’s perspective by the necessity of secrecy for the “shocking” reveal, and the reveal itself pushes them further by forcing them to reconsider their understanding of the character. In Remothered, the reveal comes on the heels of having spent several chapters with Jennifer, in her “Richard” persona, chasing the player character, Rosemary, around and trying to kill her; the reveal certainly is not an invitation to reach out toward her in empathy. Rather, it’s one of the game’s call backs to The Silence of the Lambs–and while there are many ways in which that movie is absolutely brilliant, it’s also incredibly transphobic.

Stories in which a cis character’s gender is swapped, often against their will, are common in a lot of genres. I don’t think this plot device must be inherently damaging to trans people. Often, it’s a way for gender to be explored, troubled, and questioned. Some of these stories might come from a place of cis people trying to wrap their heads around what it means to be trans and how it might really feel to know you are one gender when society violently insists you are another. Unfortunately, forced transition narratives are often done in a way that damages trans people and only serve to reinforce the violently conservative nature of binary gender in dominant culture.

This is particularly true of stories about a violent, coercive transition–but even that doesn’t have to be transphobic in its execution. For example, I think Lynn Flewilling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin is absolutely masterful. But you also get movies like The Assignment, in which a mad doctor conducts forcible gender reassignment surgery on a hit man, thus turning him into, oh the horror, a hit woman. The “gender reassignment as horror” trope can be incredibly damaging because it shows gender affirming care (particularly surgery) as a destructive, coercive, and terrifying process that removes cis people from their rightful bodies–which is literally the opposite of what it is. It also often serves to reinforce the essentialist and wrong idea that genital configuration and hormones define gender.

I give Remothered credit that it’s clear Jennifer’s transition also came with what is effectively extreme psychological programming via drugs and mesmerism. In this way it can be seen to lightly touch on the practices such as “conversion therapy” that have harmed and killed real LGBT people throughout the world. However, making a young cis girl–who is presumably straight, though this is admittedly never defined in the game–the subject of such coersion that makes her “trans” is a mirror view of the reality and erases its victims.

When Jennifer is forced to take on her male persona, she develops a plethora of mental issues due to the suppression of her identity. This leads her to become violent and murderous. She kills her own wife. She might have killed Celeste–that’s unclear. Jennifer does have an unhealthy obsession with her own daughter prior to Celeste’s disappearance, which depending on your reading of the lines, can seem pedophiliac. “Trans/gender non-conforming character as insane and violent because of their tortured relationship with gender” goes hand-in-hand with pretty much every other shitty, transphobic horror trope. (e.g.: The Silence of the Lambs and Insidious 2.) That in Remothered, this “insanity”-driven, murderous violence is linked with Jennifer’s struggle to reassert her gender feels like a particular punch at trans people, many of whom do suffer from mental health problems like depression and anxiety because of the way society treats us. I have personally gallows-humor joked that being closeted at my previous job made me feel like I was two different people in a very discordant way.

Jennifer’s creepy obsession with Celeste, and the reveal that her father forced her to “become male” as a child also don’t get to be divorced from modern contexts, for all that the game takes place in the 1970s. Trans rights have become the next frontier on the culture war, since the right wing’s been forced to cede some ground to basic rights for cis gay/lesbian/bisexual people. And lately right wingers and TERFs have joined forces to spread scare stories about how the “transgender agenda” is coming after children–either as predators (see the bigotted funtimes of bathroom bills) or as demonic influences trying to “convince” children that they are trans and handing out puberty blockers like poisoned candy. As Jennifer reacts with increasing violence toward proxies for the femininity that she believes lost to her, that arguably plays into TERF and right-wing scare stories about trans people “recanting” when it’s too late or regretting their transitions. The [coercive] female-to-male transition of Jennifer by her father–literally a patriarch who brainwashes her–and the inescapable reality of Jennifer’s long-denied feminine identity also, intentionally or not, come across as particularly TERF-y in light of how rad fems treat trans men. I’m not going to link to examples of any of the aforementioned absolute trash. It’s easily googleable; just be ready to scrub your internet connection with bleach after going on National Review or the Federalist or Quillette. 

As Remothered continues and Jennifer goes from her appearance as “Richard” to wearing a dress, the visual narrative becomes extremely troubling–a transphobic gaze to go with the in-game eyeball stabbing. To begin with, proximal to the big trans reveal, we get a shot of Jennifer putting on lipstick while her blonde wig hangs in her face. To me, it immediately evoked a very standard kind of image we get in both overtly transphobic movies and Very Serious Movies About Trans People That Are Really For Cis Audiences: the moment that a trans woman (invariably played by a cis male actor) sits in front of a mirror and puts makeup on, depicting how pitiably (or disturbingly, in horror) she longs to be feminine but will never truly attain that state due to her physical differences. It may seem odd for me to have immediately grasped that feeling when Jennifer, a cis woman, is performing this action, but the facial features she has as “Richard” remain clear; she wears her hair dangling in front of her face to hide them. Jennifer’s attic hideaway, too, with its creepy collection of female-form manequins and dresses, implies an obsession with the unreachable feminine by a person socially constructed as male. By the coercive actions of her father, Jennifer has been made into someone that cannot comfortably exist as either gender allowed by heteronormative society, an underpinning that the game has little interest in examining.

Instead, we get a woman with “masculine” features that evoke the monstrous horror-movie nightmare of a trans woman, chasing a cis woman (Rosemary) through a dark and claustrophobic space and trying to murder her by filling her face full of ten penny nails. (And I doubt the players have forgotten Jennifer, as “Richard,” screaming at Rosemary that she is a “bitch,” a “cocksucker,” and a “cunt.”) So I suppose it’s an accomplishment that this game has managed to evoke terrible tropes about both trans women and trans men… because again, it’s not about whether a character is de facto a trans person, it’s about how the depiction will be conflated with and reinforce damaging cultural images of trans people.

As the game draws to a close, the last we see of Jennifer is her torture at the hands of and her death directed by another cis woman, Gloria. As Jennifer attempts to articulate what was done to her by her father, Gloria graphically cuts off her tongue with a pair of scissors; while the blood sprays and Rosemary screams at Gloria to stop, Jennifer becomes curiously silent. With her wig removed–another device that is often used in transphobic media to forcibly unmask trans women characters–Jennifer begins to cover herself with some sort of flammable liquid at Gloria’s orders, stumbling nightmarishly toward the captive Rosemary, who has become another proxy for the lost femininity she wants to violently extinguish. Rosemary sets Jennifer on fire with a lighter; the rest of the house is curiously non-flammable. The last we see of Jennifer is a burnt corpse, her lips bright red–lipstick or blood, it’s not clear–as Rosemary moves toward her final battle with Gloria.

Jennifer’s death is not a scene of particular empathy in its moment of occurence. Later, after Gloria has been defeated and lays dying, she and Rosemary do take some time in their curiously long conversation to talk about Jennifer. While at times Rosemary refers to her by her name and proper pronouns, there isn’t any consistency toward it; neither of the characters seem to grasp how they should talk about her. Gloria speaks of Jennifer as an object of disgust, a deviant. Rosemary brings her around to more empathy; at the end, even if they can’t stop misgendering her, they can at least agree that she was her father’s victim, now conveniently dead so that she can be safely pitied. She’s absent from the story of her own trauma, first rendered mute by Gloria’s scissors, then by death.

Jennifer fulfills in this way not only trans-person-as-monster, but also trans-person-as-victim. Her body became an instrument that others used to break her mind, making her into a creature incapable of existing outside of the darkened halls of her own home, a prisoner in the mansion as sure as a prisoner in the “masculine” body she did not want to have. Gloria and Rosemary pityingly speak of how Jennifer was forced to live as a man by her father… while often referring to her as a man. She is granted victimhood by acknowledgement of how terrible it must have been, to be forced to be someone she wasn’t. Yet this is the literal lived experience of countless trans, gender non-conforming, and other queer people throughout the world–none of whom spend their days chasing around cis women while wielding a nail gun, I dare say. Jennifer is ultimately a cis person’s image of the horror of “becoming” trans, and she’s equally obviously intended for a cis audience. She does not exist to challenge heteronormative culture, but rather serve as a warning of the madness that comes when someone is “forced” from their place in the binary. 

Taken by itself, I think an argument could be made that Remothered doesn’t deserve some of the criticism that I’m leveling at it. But this game doesn’t exist within a cultural or temporal vacuum. The main problem with “trans person as [pitiable] monster” is that it’s done so frequently, with any positive or even neutral depictions of trans people to balance it out nearly nonexistent. In horror, the lack of trans final girls and trans surviving heroes is incredibly pronounced. I am beyond tired of trans people only being the deviants that horror tells audiences they should fear.

Then there’s this:

I’m well aware that American cultural chauvanism is a thing, and I do want to be cautious about it. After reading that tweet, I spent about two hours trying different google search strings to figure out what the hell Mr. Darril was talking about, and I came up with nothing. I do want to be sensitive to cultural differences… however, this isn’t a case of me stomping into Italy, playing this game in its original language, and throwing an American temper tantrum that this doesn’t perfectly fit my experience. What my friends and I played is the official English-language localization of the game. At this point, if there is a cultural context or history that is fundamental to understanding the game that isn’t also readily available or internationally known, it behooves the creator to figure out how to communicate that–or risk being honestly misunderstood.

Which brings me back to those thoughts I mentioned I had as a writer. Envision me taking off my Video Game Player hat and replacing it with my Writer hat, which is rainbow-colored and dotted with cookie- and middle-finger-shaped LEDs.

When I saw Chris Darril’s tweets, my first reaction wasn’t anger or shock. It was a sort of laughing, “Does this man not have any friends?”

Maybe things are different in the video game world. But a conversation that constantly moves through the SFF writer world, and a thing that older writers always try to communicate to younger writers is: you don’t talk back when readers leave negative reviews. Except in vanishingly rare circumstances (e.g.: pushing back on some transphobic asshole is willfully misgendering your characters) you will end up showing your entire ass on the internet and it will not cover you in glory. Don’t be like Anne Rice. There’s nothing quite like a property creator, who is generally in a much higher position of power than a lowly reader (or in this case video game player) coming down on someone and effectively telling them that “you don’t know how to eat!” It’s just not a good look, ever.

And when the reader/player is saying, “Hey, I felt hurt by this”?

You as a creator do not get to control how someone will react to what you’ve made. It’s incredibly frustrating, I know. I’ve had a few moments like that myself, and the urge to argue can be strong… but thankfully I have friends who will materialize out of the ether and slap my phone out of my hands. As artists, once we’ve sent something we’ve made out into the world, it’s no longer ours. It’s in the hands of a multitude of other people, none of whom are us, and all of whom will experience it differently through the unique prism of their lives. If we did a really great job communicating what we’re trying to say, most people will get it. But sometimes that’s not the case. And because we don’t have universal experience, we might have made something that a person will find hurtful because we weren’t able to see it from their perspective. It’s a feature, not a bug, I swear.

And this is the important thing, here, the part where the empathy of being a writer has to extend beyond the characters we create and out to the readers (or players, in this case): When someone says they felt hurt by something you wrote, you don’t get to tell them they’re wrong. You listen. You say, “Hey, I really didn’t mean it that way, and I’m sorry.” (None of that, “sorry you feel that way” non-pology crap.) Then you’ve learned something for next time.

I get it. It sucks to realize something you made isn’t being received the way you wanted it to be, but that’s part of the responsibility of creating art and putting it out in the world. It’s tough. But that’s the job.

So Chris, if you’re reading this, I hope you’ve found it educational. I’m really not interested in getting in some kind of Twitter feud with you over it. I’m not the one who will come out looking like an asshole.

Categories
lgbt

For the first time in my life, I don’t give a shit what the science says.

It’s a thing that happens in the cess pit of social media every day. Some anti-trans dipshit pops up with a declaration: “Science says there are only two genders!” (What they really mean is that there are only two sexes, which is wrong according to current science, and then conflating sex with gender, which is… also wrong according to current science.) The argument gets joined, most often by people who don’t fall into the cis binary, though I appreciate it when cis binary allies step up and start on a deluge of papers and evidence about how that definitely is not what the current science says.

This has also left me increasingly disquieted, and I want to try to articulate why. I want you to keep in mind that I am saying this as someone with a graduate degree in science, who has a deep love and appreciation for the great collective human endeavor that is the search for truth via the scientific process. At its absolute best, engagement with science is a deeply humbling experience that reminds us how small we are in the grand scale of the universe, how little we actually know, and how far we have to go. It reminds us that people working together, with open minds and honest intentions, can expand our understanding of the world around us.

That said, I frankly do not give a shit what the science has to say about my gender.

There’s a deep desire out there for us to be able to run our lives algorithmically, as if we are computers. I understand how that would simplify dealing with an extremely complex world, where sometimes there aren’t actually right answers. I see that urge every time there’s another spasm of what about-ism about “cancel culture” or some pop culture figure being thrown down off their plinth and revealed as a really terrible person. People struggle to build universally applicable standards and revel in pointing the finger at each other and screaming about hypocrisy when that universality breaks up on the rocks of humans being human. There’s always an edge case around the corner, just waiting to twist your mental ankle to the breaking point as you stumble over it.

So I get why it’s comforting to reach for science as a source of firm truths that should define “all” judgment. But frankly, that does ill service to science, when within our various disciplines there are things that defy simple classification (talk to me some time about mineral classification of sedimentary rocks, for example) or when the whole point is that there is always a window of uncertainty… though even that wiggle room we give ourselves for uncertainty isn’t a cheap algorithm for humans to run our brains on either, by the way. There are things so well-established by science that we get to say flatly they are true. Like gravity. Like climate change.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t particularly like my existence being boiled down to a game of who can find the most peer-reviewed papers to support or deny my self-definition. To start with, again as much as I love science, this kind of argument elides the hideous history of particularly the life sciences as tools to aid in oppressive social structures and deny the personhood of minorities. Science is still a human endeavor. It still suffers from the prejudices and quirks of the humans conducting it, and the incredibly faulty premises they can use as research foundations. For example, if you start from the assumption that there must be a reason some races are better than others and you’re just going to quantify it with science, your evidence and experiments are going to be bullshit from the get-go. And yet. (Or let’s talk hysteria, perhaps.) And this is not something that’s in the dark past of science, long forgotten; we’re talking the last fifty years, here. That’s not even touching the way non-scientists will happily mis-apply scientific concepts or simply borrow the language of scientific authority to justify the status quo–Social Darwinism, anyone? The cringe-y corners of evo psych? What sort of motivated reasoning about queer people has happened in the past and is still going on today?

Secondarily, I hate these arguments becoming a sort of quasi-scientific debate because the whole point, if you’re doing science right, is that given sufficient, well-support evidence, you will reconsider your position. Now, I don’t think that anyone on any side slinging links to scientific papers on Twitter or Facebook is coming from a position of good faith that means they’re willing to do that. (See.) But there’s still that breath of uncertainty that creeps in like horror. My friend, if you’re defending the existence of trans and/or nonbinary people with sheer weight of science, if that produced science were to turn against us, would you change your mind? Is my personhood conferred only by a weightier stack of new papers on one side of the scale than what the transphobes can put down on the other? Is my presence in your reality that tenuous?

And why does there need to be outside confirmation of my own words? I may not have a PhD in Alex’s Gender, but neither does anyone else. The life within my own skin is viscerally unknowable to anyone but me, which makes me the sole authority on who Alex is from moment to moment. It doesn’t matter what research comes out; there is no mass of evidence in the world weightier than the daily experiment of my own life and no instrument that can explore my understanding of myself except for my own mind. And perhaps because I am a scientist and I understand the limitations of my own knowledge and abilities, I can freely admit that the interiority of every other person on this planet is as alien and unknowable to me as mine is to them–whether they admit it or not–and I just have to take their word for it.

So no. I don’t give even the tiniest fuck if science says my gender exists or not. It exists because I SAY IT DOES. I am a person. And because I live and breathe, I deserve the basic fucking respect from other humans that the fact of my existence confers on me.

And if you say that’s not enough? You’re the problem.

Categories
lgbt politics

To my beloved Republican family member

(This was originally intended to be a Facebook reply, but it’s so long that it actually broke Facebook when I tried to post it. Or maybe the multiple links did it. Either way, go me?)

I know I don’t normally even go here, but I saw your airy dismissal that LGBTQ rights will be “fine” under the Trump presidency and can’t really remain silent. Please don’t read this as me lecturing you, but rather trying to explain why I and so many of my LGBTQ siblings are terrified what’s going to happen to us.

There are a lot of reasons I’m extremely concerned about the Trump presidency, but I’m going to set everything else (such a mountain of everything else) aside just to focus on my perspective only as a queer individual. From that stance, the problem isn’t even necessarily Donald Trump himself. While he’s said a lot of incredibly hateful things that I’ve been horrified by, I don’t recall any being directed toward LGBTQ people specifically, other than the bitterly laughable “ask the gays” comment, which is right up there with “some of my best friends are gay” when it comes to eye-rolling. Hell, he even said he’d “protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology” after the Pulse nightclub shooting, which is… nice, I guess, though I could have done with a lot less being used to justify anti-Islamic sentiment and more addressing hateful domestic ideologies. But I honestly do buy the argument that Donald Trump probably does not give two shits if someone is gay or straight, and who knows, maybe he’s one of those lovely people who is equally misogynistic to both cis and trans women. (How refreshing.)

Rather, as a genderqueer and non-heterosexual person, the problem I have is with Mike Pence, and the Republican party as a whole. I saw you reel off the Republican agenda as you see it, and homophobia wasn’t part of that. I think it’s great that in your mind, it’s not. But we need to talk about the agenda the party has stated. Because I love you, but your personal take on the agenda is obviously not what the party as a whole believes, in their own words.

From the full, long-form Republican party platform:

From Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary:

Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values.

I don’t care how nice it sounds, this is a homophobic call to destroy gay marriage. If you read further into it, there’s direct criticism of United States vs Windsor and Obergfell vs Hodges, which are both landmark court victories for gay rights. And this isn’t just about gay people being able to get dressed up and have a nice wedding. This is about all of the countless attendant rights that come with a legally recognized marriage, including guardianship of children, inheritance, and the right of spouses to make medical decisions and even visit their ill or injured partner in the hospital. The reason this is important is so people like Mike Pence (yes, that Mike Pence) can no longer, say, try to keep a woman from being able to visit her dying wife in the hospital.

From The First Amendment: Religious Liberty:

We pledge to defend the religious beliefs and rights of conscience of all Americans and to safeguard religious institutions against government control. We endorse the First Amendment Defense Act, Republican legislation in the House and Senate which will bar government discrimination against individuals and businesses for acting on the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

FADA is something that scares the hell out of most LGBTQ people, because it’s basically Mike Pence’s RFRA on steroids. Setting aside for now the implications this will have on women, this bill would allow publicly funded programs/government employees to deny service to LGBTQ individuals based on their personal religious beliefs. This goes beyond protecting asshole clerks who want to deny marriage licenses and organizations who want to fire their gay employees, to very real danger to transgender individuals who can get denied medical care or protection when a provider decides they don’t like the mismatch between gender identity and genitalia. I suppose you can argue that this is not the intention of the law (which I would disagree with) but the point is that these actions would be protected and codified into law, and then be used to justify bigoted behavior that could seriously hurt someone. It might get fought out in the “activist” courts later, but that’s not going to save the people hurt in the meantime.

From The Tenth Amendment: Federalism as the Foundation of Personal Liberty:

In obedience to that principle, we condemn the current Administration’s unconstitutional expansion into areas beyond those specifically enumerated, including bullying of state and local governments in matters ranging from voter identification (ID) laws to immigration, from healthcare programs to land use decisions, and from forced education curricula to school restroom policies.

Emphasis mine. This is a direct attack on the Obama administration’s directive that students should be able to use the bathroom of the gender they identify themselves as. Anti-trans bathroom bills have been the new anti-LGBT line for a lot of local Republicans after getting so much pushback on the gay marriage issue. I personally received a lot of political advertisements on this issue when I was registered as unaffiliated, which is actually why I switched my registration to Democrat, because I wanted bigoted local Republicans to leave me the fuck alone. This anti-trans obsession often paints innocent trans women as sexual predators and puts them in constant danger for the crime of existing in public – and is also the reason I and many of my trans male friends still continue to use women’s restrooms, because you literally have to make a calculation of which bathroom is less likely to get me murdered. Trans people get murdered for their gender identity. I cannot emphasize this point enough.

And then we look at Mike Pence himself. People like to joke that the VP is a largely ceremonial position, but Dick Cheney showed us that didn’t have to be the case. And considering that Mike Pence is now in charge of the transition team, I think that indicates that he’s going to be taking a very active policy role. Which if you were an LGBTQ person, would scare the shit out of you.

I’ve already mentioned him a couple of times in relation to the platform, particularly his anti-gay marriage stance and the RFRA.

Mike Pence: “Congress should oppose any effort to recognize homosexuals as a ‘discrete and insular minority’ entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and ethnic minorities.” (source)

Considering the discrimination LGB-and-particularly-T people face in many places, this is unacceptable. And while Pence said that in 2000, his position has obviously not changed considering that in 2007 he voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Mike Pence from his campaign website in 2000: “Congress should support the reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act only after completion of an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus. Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” (source)

Mike Pence’s policies caused an HIV epidemic in Indiana. Part of this was due to his attack on Planned Parenthood (which provides screening) and things like needle exchange programs. (source) But he links HIV to sexual behavior himself in the above quote, and “institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior” is a common political euphemism for conversion therapy programs that try to “cure” people of homosexuality or being transgender by incredibly shady and damaging means.

Mike Pence was against repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He’s against gay and transgender people being able to serve in the military. (one source of many) Needless to say, he’s long been against gay marriage.

And here’s my favorite Mike Pence, from 2006, citing one of his reasons for being against gay marriage: “Harvard sociologist Pitrim Sorokin found that throughout history, societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family.”  (source)

Beyond the fears that we are going to have what legal rights we’ve gained ripped away, that right there is the summary of our fear and despair. Pence himself preceded that statement by saying that (paraphrasing here, obviously) that this totally isn’t about prejudice, but then blithely continued on that the homosexuals are going to ruin marriage and family and be terrible for children. It’s not that he doesn’t like us, it’s just that we’re going to destroy the fabric of society by getting our queer all over it.

Suicide is an epidemic in the LGBT community, and hits transgender individuals particularly hard. And it’s no fucking wonder, when we spend all of our lives being told that we are unnatural and apparently the reason for societal collapse because we want to be just like everyone else–you know, work, pay taxes, have families, have our loved ones with us when we’re sick and dying, and not get murdered or abused because someone can’t handle their own puerile imaginings about what we do in our relationships or what we have stashed in our shorts. Trans people get murdered with horrifying frequency considering what percent of the population we are. At least 26 have died so far this year. Here are their faces.

And things like bathroom bills? Contribute directly to harming our community. Having an entire political party that makes it part of its platform that our families are lesser – if not directly harmful to children – and we deserve to get fired or denied service for something we literally cannot control is a constant source of harm for LGBTQ adults and to the youth who can see damn well what’s on the horizon.

So I get that you’re not anti-LGBTQ, and many Republicans aren’t. I am hoping that people will stand with us when it comes to the constant attack on our very existence in society. I know that individual Republicans do and will; I have a very dear Republican friend in Denver whom I know always has my back (and I know he didn’t vote for this mess). But when you look at things like, say, the position on gay marriage of national legislators and see only three senators and two(?) representatives who are Republican, it’s difficult to have any kind of confidence that a significant number of Republicans would take a stand for our rights, let alone our personal safety.  So you’ll forgive me if I’m not holding my breath because for so long, the Republican party as a whole was silent about us dying when it wasn’t outright applauding.

There was silence about the AIDS epidemic. There is silence about the plague of suicide that haunts us because so many kids are trapped in circumstances where they see now other way out and no help on the horizon from a society hostile to their very existence. There is silence about us being murdered, or worse, Republican politicians stoke the flames of gay and trans panic with bathroom bills and campaign advertisements that claim trans women are sexual predators. Remember, I used to be a Republican, once upon a time. I’m a pinko liberal now, but I was still fiscally conservative when I left the party. What drove me away was the ever-increasing, virulently homophobic rhetoric coming from within the party, and from conservative media like Fox News. For me, there wasn’t enough tax policy to justify the harm it was doing to me, my friends, and my community.

And maybe your Republican agenda isn’t the same as the party’s, and I think that’s great. But if you voted for Trump/Pence, you still voted for a VP whose entire political career has been defined by his hatred of gay and transgender individuals. (And now, voted for an administration that wants to fill its cabinet with anti-LGBTQ politicians and professionals, most notably Jeff Sessions and Tom Price.) If you voted for any Republican who has endorsed the platform, you have to own that, just like I have to own that by voting for Barack Obama, I voted for his shameful drone warfare program that’s killed a lot of innocent civilians. I have written letters and made phone calls and protested against it, but that doesn’t mean I get to disown my part in putting him in office and what he’s done with that power.

And if you didn’t vote for Trump/Pence, that’s awesome! I really appreciate it. But please don’t dismiss my concerns, or my fear, for myself and my LGBTQ siblings. I’d like to believe we are going to be fine, that nothing is going to backslide, but I’d be a fool to count on it when the national government is being run by a cadre of people who say our existence is a threat to society.

Categories
lgbt personal

Let this be my act of defiance.

Let me start with a geology story. I promise, there’s a point to this.

When I was a geologist at the research company, I had a core come in. There was a ten foot section of it that I didn’t know how to describe. It was fine-grained, filled with burrows. So far so good. But the mineralogy was… puzzling. Not enough dolomite to be described as a dolostone, not enough clay to be described as a mudrock, not enough quartz sand and silt to be described as some kind of sandstone or siltstone. It sat basically at the nexus of all possible rock types for that environment and was definitively none of them. In absolute frustration, I dubbed it “shit rock” and wrote all my reports and captions accordingly.

Of course, this is a business. I couldn’t actually turn in reports to the client with the term “shit rock” used. So I had a long talk with my boss. The problem with geology, he explained, is that everything we work on is a continuum. So there will always be something that falls in that liminal state where you’re not quite sure what it is, and even if you wanted to do battle with the rest of the community to coin a new term, you’d just be replacing one borderland with two. You can write definitions all day that will define 99.999% of all the rocks out there, but then some son of a bitch is going to come in with the 0.001% case because there are a lot of rocks on Earth, and one in a million things happen more often then any of us can grasp.

There will always be rocks that defy easy classification. You eventually just have to dip your toe into the art rather than science and describe it how you feel fits best – and then be ready to defend your decision.

Which comes to me. A little while ago on Twitter, I said:

And then while I was taking a shower, because all my most important thinking happens in the shower or when I’m supposed to be trying to fall asleep, I realized that it was an empty thing to say without the rest of this post.

I’ve been nibbling at the edges of this for a while, trying to figure things out. But maybe it’s the scientist in me, I don’t like committing to anything unless I’m absolutely certain – and the thing about life is that absolute certainty is in shorter supply than most people would like to believe. Because what if I’m wrong? How do I defend something that I’m still figuring out? But I don’t feel like I have the luxury of wibbling quietly into the night any more.

Because you see, in this way, gender’s got something in common with geology. Everything works on a continuum. You will always find cases that defy classification, and no matter how frustrating that is, they don’t go away. And that is part of the beauty of the world, trust me.

So how do I define myself? Queer, for certain. Sometimes it’s easier to tell people what a rock – or yourself – isn’t than what it is. I’m not female. I don’t quite think I’m male either, but I’d have to give it a good few years try out before I could say for certain. Fuck knows, it’s taken me something like 34 years to figure out the “not female” bit, but GOD it has been a relief since I reached that conclusion. So my big request here is to please use a gender-neutral pronoun (they) if possible. Or if you just can’t make that work in your brain, because I know the verb conjugation gives people mental cramp at times, masculine (he).

And please, call me Alex. It started out as… not a joke, precisely, when I came up with my pen name. But it’s grown on me, like a much more comfortable skin.

But there’s a point to this, and it’s not just me sitting at my keyboard and crying. I’ve been doing that too often in the last forty-eight hours.

When I was a baby queer growing up surrounded by kids and adults who thought “smear the queer” was a perfectly acceptable name for a game that involved throwing balls at other people so hard it gave them bruises (and I was one of those kids, because at the time I didn’t know better), it was invaluable to me when I started seeing LGBT people openly be themselves. It told me that there were more options that I knew, that maybe I didn’t have to keep trying to jam myself into a mold I didn’t fit, and I could be happy.

Since the election yesterday, there’s already been countless stories of racism, sexism, and homophobia being flung at people with renewed abandon. I live in a place where it’s relatively safe – swing state turned pretty reliably blue state Colorado, in the Denver-Boulder area – to be out. So I think that I need to be as out as possible even if I’m not entirely happy with my R-squared values, because now more than ever it’s important to make it known that we exist. That we will not go away. That people who are like me, who live in environments where they are not safe, are not alone even if they can only hold that truth silently in their heart.

Sometimes, merely living, existing, is an act of defiance, denying the narrative that we are fictional, or merely confused, or unhappy, or intrinsically broken.

Let this be my act of defiance. Let this be the first of many.

– Alex

Categories
lgbt tv

Schrodingersexuality

So apparently the new Constantine isn’t going to be bisexual or a total fiend for cigarettes, but hey at least they managed to make him blond this time? That’s a brave creative choice there, guys. There is so much about this article that just gets on my pecs that I already ranted about it on Twitter, but I still have more than enough froth to lay it all out in long form too.

I really don’t give that much of a shit if Constantine smokes. Yes, there’s been some plot connected to it. And yes it’s part of the character’s image, but considering smoking is bad for you and there’s a concerted effort to make it less glamorous in the media, fine. I can buy that. But the bisexuality thing? I mean, I get that bisexuality has a long history of being portrayed as glamorous in the media and that there is a definite public health concern Oh wait, no. Wrong paper. Here’s right right one. It reads: fuck you.

When asked about this at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour Sunday, executive producer Daniel Cerone ran down the various editions of the character that have existed since the demon fighter was introduced in 1985 to suggest his sexuality is not a crucial aspect of the character (nearly all of the character’s relationships in the comics have been with women). “In those comic books, John Constantine aged in real time,” he said. “Within this tome of three decades [of comics] there might have been one or two issues where he’s seen getting out of bed with a man. So [maybe] 20 years from now? But there are no immediate plans.”

So let me get this straight:

  1. Being bisexual totally isn’t important to the character.
  2. In fact, it’s so unimportant that we are making a conscious choice to leave it out.
  3. I mean, he mostly bangs women anyway, and that’s all that matters. He’s barely bisexual at all. You wouldn’t even know to look at him.
  4. Sexuality is so unimportant and he screws so few men, he’s basically heterosexual, amirite?
  5. And maybe we’ll make him bisexual in twenty years, so quit your whining.

Am I missing any part of this absolutely scintillating argument? (Also, double bonus fuck you points to EW for spending almost the entire piece on the issue of the cigarettes because that’s totally more important than representation.)

What really chaps my ass is the way this just reiterates and promulgates the idea that bisexuality is something that is defined by outside observation, instead of something we get to define from within ourselves. It’s not math. You’re not bisexual just because you you’ve crossed some magical ratio threshold and they take away your straight or gay card and replace it with a license for wanton promiscuity, confusion, or other bullshit stereotype of your choice. I’d still be bisexual even if I died without ever having a girlfriend. Why? Because I fucking said so.

It’s hurtful. It’s insulting. How can it be anything but hurtful and insulting (and goddamn frustrating) when we basically get told over and over again that we’re lying, mistaken, or just plain wrong about one of the most intimate, personal matters of our own goddamn lives?

Look, I totally get that it’s not easy to viscerally understand how someone can be attracted to something you’re not. But unless you’re a giant asshole, we’re way past the point where matters like love and attraction get discussed as a matter of choice. And here’s the thing: you don’t have to understand how we can be attracted to both men and women. You just have to accept that we know better than you how our own thoughts and emotions work since we’re the ones thinking and feeling and shut the fuck up.

Our sexuality is not defined by interaction with our environment or by your observation thereof. We’re not fucking Schrodingersexual. This is not rocket science. This is basic respect.

Categories
lgbt movie

More on the Ender’s Game Thing

Lionsgate has apparently copped to just how many people are pissed off about OSC being a giant homophobe. They’re hosting a benefit premiere of the movie for LGBT groups.

To a certain extent, I feel for them. Ender’s Game is a novel that’s been screaming for a movie for years. It has everything you could want. Except for the part that the author is a giant homophobe and people don’t want to support him because he gives money to anti-gay organizations. (Unsurprisingly, I am one of those people.) They picked up a good story with a giant lead weight attached to it, and they’ve been fighting against that ever since. That… really sucks. Honestly, Ender’s Game was a very special novel to me when I was growing up, and I wish I could feel good about going to watch the movie.

But then again, this should not have come as a surprise to them. It’s not like OSC waited until the movie was in production and then came out of the closet (hur hur hur) as a homophobe. He’s been saying that for years. In fact, I used to read his blogs and regular articles until the homophobia came up, at which point I had to stop because it was too upsetting. This happened over ten years ago, so yeah. It’s not a surprise.

Lionsgate trying to offer the olive branch with the benefit premiere just gives me even more conflicted feelings. Because it does make me happy that they’re trying to do something. But they’re the ones that stepped into the middle of this mess to begin with–did they think people wouldn’t notice? And would the amount of money coming in from such a benefit premiere outweigh the support given to the author? I have no idea.

I want there to be more good science fiction movies. I really do. I’d hope this would be one of them. But… but. I’m glad Lionsgate has stepped up, but why didn’t they see this coming from the beginning? It feels like a response to a PR nightmare, not necessarily a real acknowledgment of the fundamental problem.

Lionsgate would like us to separate the art from the artist. I wish I could. But not today, I’m afraid, and I don’t see that changing when the movie comes out. I wish things were different. I really do.

Categories
lgbt movie things that are hard to write

Still Not Going to See Ender’s Game: Separating the Art From the Artist

Orson Scott Card would like us to be tolerant of his anti-gay marriage views, now that we’ve won. The point is, apparently “moot.” I call bullshit on that one.  DOMA may be dead, and the language of that decision may be what will make the rest of the dominoes fall, so to speak. But the point is not moot. Gay and lesbian citizens still can’t get married in the majority of states in this country, many of which have enshrined homophobia in their constitutions. Transgendered Americans are still even further behind when it comes to having full rights to be who they are. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that there are rights beyond marriage.

So no, the issue is not  moot. The issue will not be moot until every one of us is equal under the law. Telling ourselves that we have already won and stopping the fight before the finish line would be foolish indeed.

And even if victory is inevitable (oh how I hope that it is), OSC is still in prime position to fund the foot dragging and last tantrums of a lost conservative cause. So no, I don’t think it’s time to forget that yet, not when he hasn’t backed down, hasn’t changed his mind. He’s just been overruled.

What about separating the art from the artist? You don’t have to like someone and their views to like their art, to consume and support it you know.

I’ve had this argument with friends before, specifically in regards to Orson Scott Card. It’s an uncomfortable subject, and I have conflicted feelings about it. Not in the least of which is the fact that when I met OSC in person years ago, I thought he was a pretty nice guy, and he gave me some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. He’s very likeable in person.

Then I remind myself that, as a bisexual woman, he thinks there’s something wrong with me and would want me to be a shamed, second-class citizen if I had fallen in love with a woman instead of a man.

But separate the art from the artist. It feels like a horrible twist on “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

There is a reason, for the most part, that I don’t actively seek out the opinions of artists. Sometimes knowing too much ruins it. Sometimes knowing too much means you can no longer read or watch or listen to a piece of art you enjoyed without thinking about how the artist has harmed something about which you care deeply. Sometimes you wish you just didn’t know.

But artists are people just like the rest of us, and they have opinions, and they have a right to express those opinions. Wil Wheaton points this out eloquently and often whenever someone complains about him daring to have politics out loud where people can see them. And like for everyone else, the freedom of an artist to express an opinion is not the same as the freedom to have no consequences because of it. When we’re talking about artists like OSC, his voice is louder than that of many others because of his art. He has a platform. We, his fans, built that platform for him with our support.

If we do not like what he is doing with that platform, I don’t think we are in any way obligated to continue that support.

But separate the art from the artist. Why can’t you do that? Shouldn’t you do that?

Does art happen in a vacuum? Is it truly a thing separate from the artist? This isn’t just an academic question for me, when it comes to Orson Scott Card. I read Ender’s Game as a teenager. I literally finished the book in twelve hours, unwilling to put it down. It had a lot of meaning to me.

And yet.

At the reading where I met OSC, someone in the audience asked him a question: As a Mormon, did he try to put his religion into his work? And OSC gave what I thought was a very true and important answer that has stuck with me—he doesn’t try to do that. Preaching at your audience never turns out well. But he said that his religion is fundamental to who he is, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it comes out into his art in subtle ways.

Because as artists, even when we are imagining ourselves as other people, we are the ones doing the creating. I am a white, bisexual woman, and I’m sure that no matter how hard I try, my experiences will always subtly reflect in how I create. Because it is my art.

Can you truly separate art from the artist? How do you deal with, say, Chris Brown and Roman Polanski if you like their art but cannot support them as human beings?

Art does not occur in a vacuum. And while you can appreciate art as good or bad without knowing the person behind it, regardless of the person behind it, consuming that art does in fact mean you are supporting its creator. And by supporting them, you are complicit in their causes. I have joined in boycotts of companies when it was revealed they were donating money anti-gay groups. Why should an artist be any different? Because he wrote some books I like? I’ve eaten Chik-fil-A sandwiches and nuggets more often than I’ve re-read Ender’s Game.

If you can separate the art from the artist, maybe that makes you a better person than me. Feel that way if you like. But I cannot support someone who believes that me and many of the people I love and esteem are not full human beings. Orson Scott Card chose to use his platform to denigrate LGBT people. I can damn well choose to take a tiny sliver of his platform, a platform I joined with countless others to help build, away.

Categories
lgbt marriage

Congratulations, Maine

Same-sex marriage was legal in Maine as of midnight tonight, with couples lining up to receive their marriage licenses first thing in the morning. Maine was one of the three states that approved same-sex marriage by popular vote this year; the other states that have legal same-sex marriage were all made so by the legislature or judicial decision.

I’m really happy for the loving couples in Maine that will now be able to marry. Seeing pictures from Maine, from Washington have just put me in joy overload. When you see other people who are that happy, there is no way to avoid feeling happy yourself, and maybe getting a little teary-eyed because your heart just overflows.

And feel the tide turning.

Categories
lgbt sigh

Little Boy Wears Awesome Shoes, Adults Freak the Fuck Out

Just a quick break from thesis hell to link to this: Photograph Of Little Boy Wearing Pink Shoes To Preschool Sparks Heated Blogosphere Debate

Which really reminds me of this: 5 year old boy dresses up as Daphne for Hallowe’en, other moms have gender panic

The little son of one of my kung fu buddies has an amazing pair of bright pink crocs with sparkly jewels on them. The kid loves those things, it’s adorable, and they keep him from getting glass in his feet, so it’s win/win, right?

Something just really bugs the shit out of me about the “but if you let your boy wear pink shoes, he’ll get bullied” argument. Because beyond letting bullies win, wouldn’t that just reinforce the stupid cultural more that the bullies use to excuse their shitty behavior? And frankly, if there are bullies, they will find a way to be an asshole to your kid no matter what. They make fun of your clothes and you change your clothes, so next they make fun of your hair, or that you wear glasses, or that you’re smart, or whatever. Living life because you’re afraid someone’s going to say something mean to you is no way to live.

And I would think that’s no way to force your kid to live. But I’m not a parent, so I can’t really speak authoritatively on that. Parents? What say you?

Also, I feel like the “but bullies!” argument is just lipstick on the pig of “but pink will make him gay” argument. Because it’s still about fear that a little boy will be perceived as gay – not that there’s anything wrong with it, there are just mean people who obviously aren’t me, say the concern trolls. It really feels like a more subtle take on the the same old shit, just spoken in a concerned voice to make it less ugly because people have finally realized that we’re fucking done with accepting overt homophobia.

She explained to him in the store that they were really made for girls. Sam then told her that he didn’t care and that ‘ninjas can wear pink shoes too.’

Rock your shoes, kiddo. Haters gonna hate, life is short, get out there and make it work.

Categories
lgbt worldcon

[Worldcon] LGBTQ in SF&F

Friday (August 31) at 1930: LGBTQ in SF&F
Panelists listed in program: Mary Anne Mohanraj, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Kevin Riggle, Catherine Lundoff, Barbara G. Tarn

Disclaimer: These are my notes from the panel and my own, later thoughts. I often was unable to attend the entire panel, and also chronically missed panelist introductions. When possible I try to note who said something, but often was unable to. Also, unless something is in double quotes it should be considered a summary and not a direct quotation. 

Lundoff: While there are definitely more LGBTQ characters, there are fewer large publishing houses putting out books by LGBTQ authors.

Riggle: Is it a change in identification? Let’s talk about bisexual erasure later.

Mohanraj: Lesbian is claimed as a political identity by bisexual women. Which may be less in play now than it was in the mid-90s. So maybe the demographic hasn’t changed, just the labors.

Heuvelt: Netherlands was the first country to legalize gay marriage and no one cares what you hard. He’s “heard that might be different overseas.” Yet oddly in Holland the representations in fiction seem more conservative, fewer LGBTQI characters than you see in English literature. It was a symbol in his fiction for being “other.”

Mohanraj: had her agent basically tell her that gay is okay as a coming out story if that’s the point of the story, but otherwise it risks alienating a large chunk of potential audience if it’s not for the main point. Thinks it’s present throughout publishing, but is much worse in YA.

Where have you seen awesome queer representations in sf/f and where do they fall short?

Mohanraj: Talks about Captain Jack, notes nowadays in Doctor Who/Torchwood it’s all cute flirty girl on girl action. Two formative people: Mercedes Lackey (Magic’s Price series) – don’t know how she managed to get that published when she did. And Samuel R Delaney. Ellen Kushner’s Sword’s Point, Lynn Flewellyn’s series.

Riggle: It’s easy to find incidental characters who are LGBTQ but not main characters. Recommends Elizabeth Bear.

Lundoff: Small presses that specialize in queer sf/f: Lethe, Blind Eye, Circlet (erotica, but branching out). In larger presses, Galactic Spectrum Awards look at award list; shows nominees, finalists, and winners. Tiptree Awards given for sf/f that expands gender roles/representations. Authors: Jay Lake, JA Pitts, Melissa Scott (now republished), Jo(e?) Graham, Jeff Ryman, Hal Duncan, Lee Thomas (horror)

Heuvelt: Are gay characters there for a reason, or are they “accidentally” gay? Is there something about sf/f that makes the queer characters more attractive to write about? For him it was more purposeful because it was a symbol.

Mohanraj: I don’t like it way gay is used as a symbol. Should straight be used as a symbol? Gay is just my life, so I would never use it as a symbol.

Riggle: Fiction parallels reality. So queer people exist in real life and should in fiction too.

Mohanraj: Parallels to the awful racial literary past of white as a symbol of freedom. (Asian lady escapes arranged marriage and marries white guy instead.)

Riggle: Nightrunner and Swordspoint are an interesting counterpoint. Swordspoint, the main character being queer is no problem, just who his lover is. In Nightrunner he feels like it didn’t matter enough either way for him to enjoy the story. It was so backgrounded that it didn’t matter enough to the story. (clarified: the relationship didn’t matter enough, not the queerness.)

Audience: Are LGBTQ authors taken seriously, or are they in the sort of “ghetto” that scifi/f authors were generally in within the 50s, where they weren’t taken seriously.

Mohanraj: They are taken seriously, but like women and POC authors you still have to struggle to get out of the ghetto to BE taken seriously. Once you are there though you are serious. Example from south asian literature. Women’s books there’s always a red sari, with a female body posed, and just parts of the body, very static, with flowers or fruit. When a woman writer managed to win an award, her covers start looking like those on books written like men – full bodies, blue serious covers, a sense of motion. Assumption that women writers are writing for a certain small audience and then in order to be considered by the wider “pot” you have to struggle. Salman Rushdie has had this struggle; people still try to stick him in the ghetto, is referred to as a Commonwealth writer rather than British writer. Patterns are still holding across the board. If you are a LGBTQ author people assume you should kind of have to write about LGBTQ characters and you get pushed that way by the establishment.

Heuvelt: Doesn’t recognize these problems from a Dutch perspective. No one cares that he’s gay/has a boyfriend.

Riggle: Why do you think the popular authors are from decades ago and not now?

Lundoff: There was a social movement to support it, like with the well-known feminist authors of the past. Comprehensive social movement making a lot of noise, gives you access to a wider audience. We don’t have a movement in the same way; less urgency. Most novels with LGBTQ characters right now are romances. Not a whole lot of sf/f. Small presses/bookstores in the past proved to the big publishers that there was a market. But now there’s been a shift where the support has gone toward romance rather than sf/f. Delaney is still in print for example, but with small presses and university presses. The authors are still around but they’re producing in different publishing structures than where they would have been 20 years ago.

Former editor from Strange Horizons: They have been getting more and more LGBTQ characters to the point they don’t notice any more. 10 years ago he wrote an editorial asking for more stories like that, and got complaints that LGBTQ character would overwhelm the story and make it ABOUT that. Not the case.

Mohanraj: As a teacher her students are very hesitant about branching out. Even if they are a POC/LGBTQ/woman their default stories tend to be about straight white men. If they had no hesitation what would the market look like?

Audience member notes military sf author who wrote a good story and included a gay character (?) and got shut down by his audience. This happened very recently

Mohanraj: Notes that John Scalzi is v. liberal. And people read his military SF and assume he will be conservative, then find out his real views and get very offended and throw a lot of pushback his way.

Audience: Gay filmmaker; one motivation of his and contemporaries to push back against the terrible representations of gay life by straight people. Has been shocked by the number of straight people writing gay characters; it’s not them representing their personal experiences.

Tarn: They are people who have emotions and are in love; the gender of the other person is not important. It’s love. She has done research. Not a big fan of write what you know because she’s a fiction author and is bound to make things up.

Mohanraj: Difference between really problematic writing – straight men writing “lesbian” porn – and those trying to be respectful and checking. Real concern about LGBTQ authors being crowded out. Falls on the side of write about whatever you want, just be ready to take the flack if you mess it up.
Carl Brandon Society. We didn’t just want to do exploration of race/ethnicity, but wanted to encourage POC authors. That is not the same thing.

Riggle: There needs to be an openness to the lived experiences of queer people, because if you are straight and writing about LGBTQ people, your audience is likely to be queer.

Mohanraj: Question of responsibility. If you are going to borrow material that is not your own life, you need to be ten times as respectful.

Heuvelt: Isn’t this inherent in sf/f?

Audience: Historically sf/f has been about people who don’t fit. Talking about a Martian versus talking about someone from the gay community is still going to strike the same misfit chord.

Heuvelt: I’m a mountain climbing and all mountain climbing movies suck. But the audience doesn’t know that. How is that all that different? If it’s not a perfect representation does it hurt?

Mohanraj: There are systems of oppression that don’t include mountain climbers though.

Audience: Oppressed communities complain we are erased, but now we’re simultaneously complaining that we’re represented because it’s not perfect. I would rather we get shown more as long as it’s not really horrible! The point is about exploring. To hell with write what you know, it precludes exploring.

Audience: All fiction writers are liars. We need to be able to write what we don’t know.

Mohanraj: Writing the Other – find this book, good exercises for writing people who aren’t like us in an intelligent way.

Riggle: Writing the other versus writing FOR the other. Straight depictions are unsatisfying because they are written for a straight audience.

Bisexual erasure book rec: Shauna Macguire starting with Rosemary and Rue

SLASH!
Riggle: Slash doesn’t work for him because it’s written for straight women. Hasn’t yet encountered any slash he found compelling.

Audience: Most of the women I know who write slash are queer. Same thing as saying there’s no good science fiction.There are some queer guys that write slash. The best stuff doesn’t feel like it’s appropriating gay culture.

Audience: (woman) There’s a huge following for this slash fix for Sherlock that was written by an actual gay guy. Google either abundantly queer or absolutely queer to find it.

Mohanraj: Read slash as a teenage and didn’t see it as erotic, more liked it because it was about letting men be emotional.

#

This panel was very interesting, but to be honest I also felt like it was kind of a mess that never quite gelled and couldn’t quite stay on task. I also tend not to be a fan of panels where the audience jumps in to participate beyond questions, unless the member of the audience is someone that can be pointed to as an expert. I think with the panel already wandering a bit, the audience jumping in just made everything more scattered.

Also, please note that my use of “queer” within the notes is as it was used in the panel. Toward the beginning Mohanraj established that was her preferred term and no one had any objections.

I found the question about characters being “purposefully” versus “accidentally” gay an interesting one. I’ve written characters that have organically decided their sexualities on their own, and others where the choice was purposeful because of how it fit into the plot. I don’t think choosing that factor in character necessarily transforms it into a symbol. There are experiences (particularly in modern or historical fiction) that an LGBTQ character is simply going to have that a straight character won’t, and that might be integral to the story you’re trying to tell.

I also found the point about “writing the other” versus “writing for the other” very interesting. Of the stories I’ve had published, none of them have really been about “the other,” come to think of it. While I’ve written stories with male main characters, all my published ones have had female protagonists, some of whom are straight, some bisexual, and one lesbian. (All of which are identities that I, as a bisexual woman can identify with a fair amount of ease.)

I kind of wonder if this is a sign that I need to work more on bettering my male characters… (Though the majority of my stories have had female protagonists, and I don’t really feel that bad about it because male protagonists are in no danger of becoming extinct as a species.) Next challenge to set myself as a writer, maybe, once I finally nail down this short story thing to my satisfaction. (HAH.)

Also, I would like to note, in a stroke of delicious irony, after mentioning bisexual erasure (and then me asking about it, selfish little bi-girl that I am) the panel adjourned without ever getting around to talking about it.

Oof.