Outer Alliance Spotlight #25: Lee Thomas March 12, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #25. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is horror author, Lee Thomas.
Lee has been writing for as long as he can remember, but only submitting stories for publication since 2001. He won a Stoker Award for his first novel, Stained, and went on to win a Lambda Award for The Dust of Wonderland. Currently his short story collection, In the Closet, Under the Bed, is up for another Stoker.
Lee is gay, and writes horror feautring queer and straight protagonists for adults and young adults under the names Lee Thomas, Thomas Pendleton, and Dallas Reed. He has short fiction forthcoming in Dead Set, Darkness on the Edge, Armageddon Lightshow (Bloodletting Books), and Best Gay Stories 2010 (Lethe Press). Two of Lee’s novellas, The Black Sun Set (Burning Effigy Press) and Focus, co-written with Nate Southard, will also be released this year as standalone books.
In addition to his personal website, Lee maintains a LiveJournal and a Facebook page. He is the chair of the 2011 World Horror Convention, which will take place in his current hometown of Austin, Texas. He lives with one good dog, one good cat, and one evil cat.
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OA: You’ve already got one Stoker and one Lambda Award under your belt for Stained and The Dust of Wonderland, and now In the Closet, Under the Bed is up for another Stoker. How does it feel? Are you excited, or is it old hat by now?
LT: Excited. It never gets to be old hat. I love to hear that a single reader has enjoyed my work, so for a group to come together and honor it with an award nomination is thrilling. I’ve been nominated for a number of awards multiple times (this is my fourth Stoker nomination), and it remains just as exciting now as when I received the first one.
OA: Stained and The Dust of Wonderland are both set in Louisiana. What keeps you coming back there in your fiction? Is there a personal connection, or does it fascinate you for other reasons entirely?
LT: Years ago, I flew to New Orleans to attend my first Mardi Gras, and I felt the oddest thing upon stepping off the plane. I hadn’t seen the city or experienced a single thing in Louisiana yet, but there was this overwhelming sense of being “home.” Strange. I ended up moving to New Orleans for several years and loved every minute of it. It’s an amazing, unique place that nurtures the creative mind. Sadly, work took me to other parts of the country, but I still hope to move back one of these days.
OA: In the Closet, Under the Bed is a collection of stories featuring gay men. Did you set out to create the collection on that theme, or was it a matter of serendipity?
LT: Serendipity I suppose. I had written a number of stories featuring queer characters – quite a few about closeted men – and many had been published in horror magazines and anthologies. A friend and fellow writer, Steve Berman, suggested I collect the stories and even suggested a publisher – an imprint of Haworth Press. Well, they bought the collection and then the imprint folded, leaving the collection orphaned. A new press (Dark Scribe) emerged a bit later. They were very open to horror and didn’t shy away from queer content, so when I proposed the collection, they snatched it up.
OA: As the chair of the 2011 World Horror Convention, you’re obviously very involved in the horror community. How do you feel it treats queerness? Have you encountered a lot of discrimination, or has your experience been mostly one of acceptance? Are there any things you’d like to see change?
LT: I’ve been fortunate. When I first started publishing, I made a number of friends and built a good readership in the horror community. They were open and friendly to me, and my work appeared in a number of publications that contained primarily “straight” content. That noted, horror is a conservative genre with a number of conservative people involved. Thirty years ago it was a club for straight white guys, and queer characters – along with women and people of color – were rarely treated with any level of respect. That was perfectly acceptable to the audience then, because it represented the status quo. What’s frustrating is that some writers (and editors) don’t seem to realize that the status quo has shifted in the last three decades, and this clinging to an outdated social norm severely limits the potential of horror fiction as social commentary. Certainly, there are instances of homophobia and a desperate clinging to tradition by some, but most horror writers and readers – as with any intelligent group – see beyond issues of sexual orientation and can assess the value of a work (and a writer) using legitimate criteria. So yeah, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Prejudice exists, but I don’t think it’s dominating the genre.
Still selling gay-themed books to mainstream publishers is difficult, not because they hate the gay community, but because the sales numbers on previous gay-themed works – with minor exception – have not been particularly high. Whether they’ve put promotion dollars behind those titles or not, who can say? I consider this an economic prejudice, and it applies to a number of minority groups. The track record for queer titles isn’t good so it makes it easy for editors to pass on them, even if they feel the work is exceptional. I’d like to see that change, but it will require a vocal and active readership, using their wallets to move things forward.
Fortunately, we have a thriving small press industry for queer books, and many of those publishers are open to speculative lit, whether it’s science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Titles can reach an audience. I’d just like to see them reach a much larger one.
OA: You write under several different names. Is there a logic behind which books are credited to which name? If so, how does that break down, and if not, how did that happen?
LT: I’ll try to make this comprehensible. My given name is Thomas Lee Pendleton (friends call me “Lee.”) When I began submitting fiction, I did so under the name Lee Thomas, because I liked the way it sounded. It struck me as simple yet memorable. When I began writing for the Young Adult market, I wanted to delineate that work from my adult work so I used my given name. More or less, it was a courtesy to readers, because someone who likes what Lee Thomas writes may find what Thomas Pendleton writes a bit soft. I didn’t hide behind either name – never made it a secret I was the same guy. In the span of a little over a year, I had five or six titles coming out under the Thomas Pendleton name, so to keep the market flooding down, Dallas Reed was born. So far, those are the only names I’ve published under, but it’s still early in my career so who knows what people will be calling me in the years to come. Ha!
OA: How do you know your evil cat is evil? Are there signs the rest of us should be looking for in our own pets?
LT: There’s knowledge in his eyes – calculation and intent. The mayhem he creates has purpose, and I feel one day his dark plans will be revealed, and he will rise, but it will be too late for mankind by then.
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Thanks, Lee! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out In the Closet, Under the Bed.
Comments»
Loved what you had to say about finding home in a place that was new to you–I understand that.
And cool that you have different names for different types of story–it makes sense. So you wrote softer stuff after first writing harder stuff? That’s interesting. I wonder how many writers go in that direction (from harder to softer) and how many go in the other…
Thank you for the comment!
I still write harder stuff under the Lee Thomas name. The other books were for young adult audiences, and that category requires a softer, less graphic approach. I enjoy writing both and will do so until someone tells me to stop.