I’m always happy to see great collections of QUILTBAG recommendations, so I wanted to open things up to everyone reading this. Did you have any particular favorites in 2011? What were they, and why did you love them?

A lot of people have asked me what the OA is going to say about this. Honestly, I need to confess something here. For ages, I saw people referring to Amina Arraf’s blog, and I never actually went to check it out. I was busy and overwhelmed with all the other things I needed to do, so I had it on a mental backlist of things to get around to one day maybe when I had a free moment. Then I started seeing the pleas for help in freeing Amina, who had supposedly been kidnapped by the Syrian government. Again, I didn’t actually click through. I felt guilty about it, but I was still extremely overwhelmed. So I never signed any petitions, and I never tried to spread awareness or anything like that. A lot of my friends and colleagues did, though. I mean, a lot. And when the truth came out, it was just awful to watch all those people go through shock, outrage, denial, and despair. I felt it, too, and I know it would have been worse if I’d actually gotten invested in Amina’s plight before the truth came to light.

There are a lot of ways in which this whole thing is upsetting and damaging to real people who are not fictional constructs, but marginalized members of society. LTGBTQIA Syrians, for instance, and disabled lesbians.  I don’t have a lot of coherent words to post about this, so I’m going to share a few links today.

Liz Henry (of Geek Feminism and Feminist SF, and whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at WisCon), was one of the people who uncovered the hoaxes. She has a very concise summary of that process in her post, “Chasing Amina”. Liz is careful not to attack the man behind Amina’s blog, but she’s also very clear about how this did real damage to a lot of people:

Yet in leaving smokescreens of lies, the shells of Amina and Rania, AmandaLynn and others I could name, the hoaxer hasn’t just hurt the people who thought they were close to Amina. They wasted the time of a lot of activists, human rights workers, journalists, and people concerned about Syrian politics. By their lies, they harmed the fabric of social trust. Lies and hoaxes do damage to communities. The hoaxer did political damage.

Minal Hajratwala (author of the Lambda winning memoir, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents) posted about her interactions with Amina as well. She didn’t know Amina wasn’t real, and tried in good faith to help both before and after the supposed kidnapping. Minal points out the problematic exoticism inherent in this hoax.

Amina was an idealized projection, the white man’s fantasy of an oppressed yet courageous Arab women. Bright, reckless, courageous, American, fighting patriarchy and Islamic repression at once: She was the perfect superhero, the perfect wet dream.

It is ironic that the hoaxster, in his mea culpa, says he wanted to contest “the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.”

And finally, Daniel Nassar (a pseudonym for a gay Syrian journalist) wrote an article for The Guardian all about how this hoax negatively impacts real LGBTQIA people in Syria. “The Real World of Gay Girls in Damascus” paints a very different picture from the one Amina described, and is well worth the read. One of the most troubling things to me is that in the comments on that article, many readers question the identity of Nassar, who is using a pseudonym to protect himself. Some people need their identities to remain hidden for reasons of personal safety, and Amina’s hoaxer has made it harder for those people (who usually have a harder time speaking out about injustice in the first place) to speak up and be taken seriously.

I’m very open about my identity because I can be. I know that there are real people in various places (some close to me, and some very far) who don’t feel safe telling people who they are. I always hope that as more people like me are willing to be open, more people generally will start to take the diversity that does exist in the world around them as a given, and not as something to be afraid of, or attacked. That’s why we’re all about celebrating LGBTQIA content in speculative fiction. Visibility is a step towards acceptance. When people do things like this Amina hoax, they set the rest of us back by destroying some of the good faith and trust that we as a community have worked hard to build.

If there’s one thing I hope comes out of this mess, it’s that maybe some straight white able-bodied men who might have previously thought that pretending to be queer, or a person of color, or disabled, or any other sort of marginalized person was a good idea, will think again. Please, if you want to be an ally, the best thing you can do is to be honest about who you are from the start.

It’s early yet, but if we come up with great ideas now, we’ll have more time to execute them well. Send us your thoughts! And of course, if you’d like to help out, let us know that, too. You can comment here, send a message to the google group, or e-mail me at julia@juliarios.com.

This Sunday there will be a memorial Twitter chat in honor of Joanna Russ. To participate, just log into Twitter at 1400 (2pm) Eastern Daylight Time on the 8th of May, and follow the  #FeministSF hashtag. Several OA members and other people who are interested in feminism and speculative work will be talking informally about Russ and other pertinent subjects.

Congratulations to OA founder Natania Barron, who became an associate member of SFWA this week! You can read recent story “Without a Light” in the first issue Fantastique Unfettered (which is open for submissions for issue #3 right now).

Sunny Moraine has a new short story in Strange Horizons this week. “The Thick Night” is story both dark and hopeful with an interesting F/F relationship.

Congratulations to Katharine Beutner, who won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for her novel Alcestis! Here’s a writeup of that awards ceremony from Lambda Literary.

Next week is Outlantacon/Gaylaxicon! Several OA members will be attending this convention, which exists to celebrate queer speculative fiction, gaming, media, and fans. JoSelle Vanderhooft and Catherine Lundoff will be hosting a launch party for the print version of Hellebore and Rue. Steve Berman and JoSelle will be reading selections from the book, and we’re tentatively planning to have that serve as an OA meetup, too, so if you’re in that area, come hang out and talk awesome queer fiction with us!

That’s it for this week. If you’ve got thoughts on any of this, or news of your own, please let us know!

First, the sad news:

Joanna Russ has died. After she was admitted into hospice care earlier this week, today we learn that one of the best beloved feminist SF writers has left us. Russ was the author of The Female Man, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, and several other books, both fiction and non-fiction. When I ask people for influences or old favorites, they cite her almost every time. She’ll be much missed.

And now, something a bit more encouraging:

We Say Gay is a website where people can gather to protest Tennessee’s Don’t Say Gay bill (which, as we mentioned last week, would ban any mention of sexual orientation other than heterosexuality in Tennessee primary and middle schools). Mary Robinette Kowal‘s nephew, a Tennessee resident, is one of the group who started the site. The bill is going to vote on the 5th of May, so the time to speak up about it is now. You may sign the online petition even if you are not a Tennessee resident.

If you’ve got thoughts about either of these things, please feel free to share. We’d love to hear them.

*The Philip K. Dick award will be presented tonight at Norwescon in Seattle, and you can watch it live here. Elizabeth Bear’s Chill is on the shortlist (go back to last week’s podcast for more about that).

*Malinda Lo has a new story out! “The Fox” is set in the Huntress universe, and you can read it free online in Subterranean’s special YA issue.

*Via Maureen Johnson’s Twitter Feed, we learn that the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has cleared the Tennessee senate panel, and will go to vote on the Tennessee senate floor. This bill would ban any educational materials (including books! Like Malinda Lo’s Ash, for instance!) which present any sexual orientations other than heterosexuality from elementary and middle schools in Tennessee. If you live in Tennessee, now might be a good time to contact your senator and let them know how you feel.

*Finally, happy Earth Day!

On Monday, Jessica Verday posted about her withdrawal from a YA anthology. The reason? The editor felt that because Jessica’s story contained a gay romance, the publisher wouldn’t find it appropriate for the YA market. Jessica chose to withdraw rather than to change her (non-sexually-explicit) story. Choices like that can be extremely difficult and upsetting, even when you’re sure you’re making the right decision. I’m so glad Jessica did make that choice, and that she chose to share her experience with the rest of us. It’s important to talk about these things when they happen–sometimes extremely interesting things come to light. In this case, we learned that apparently the editor never actually asked the publisher, who, when they learned of the situation, said it would have been no problem.

Today, Jessica posted an update on the situation, in which she explained that even though the publisher asked her to reconsider her withdrawal, she declined. The good news here is that we’re able to talk about this publicly, and more and more people are coming out with supportive comments. Jessica is not being heaped with abuse from every direction, which gives me hope. There is strength in visibility, and the more people feel safe supporting decisions like Jessica’s, the better. We’ve been seeing more YA with queer content in the past several years, and I think things like this, painful as they are in the moment, are blazing trails for yet more acceptance. The bottom line to me, and to Jessica, and to a lot of other people out there, is that falling in love with a member of the same sex is not a shameful thing. It’s not unnatural. It should not be taboo in our society, and I think the best way to break down taboos is to expose them, examine them, and speak up for what’s right.

The editor says that she made an assumption in error, and that the content would have been okay with her personally. As Jessica’s entries (and the comments that follow them) point out, this kind of outlook is very disappointing. But because I know too well how easy it is to make mistakes, I want to give her the benefit of the doubt. It is my sincere hope that in the future she will consider LGBTQI content non-controversial, and be more receptive to including it if she continues editing anthologies. I don’t want vengeance. I want a better future. I want to live in a society where people don’t make these assumptions to begin with.

And as for Jessica’s story, I’m looking forward to reading it when it does become available.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. And special thanks to Corinne Duyvis, who initially brought this matter to the attention of the Outer Alliance Google group.

Reteaching Gender & Sexuality

Another group has started a project to try to make things better now instead of later. Put This on the Map urges us to rethink the way we teach gender and sexuality. They’ve made a documentary exploring this topic with 26 teens in Seattle, Washington, and they’re launching a national tour to get their message out and open dialogue in different communities.

This is a good thing to think about, both generally, and in the context of our reading choices. How do our favorite books inform our ideas of gender and sexuality? Speculative fiction is a good avenue for alternative views of gender and sexuality, from Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness to Lauren McLaughlin’s Cycler and beyond. What are some of your favorites, and why? What would you like to see more of, or less of? In light of all these projects, I can’t help wondering how can we, as an alliance of LGBTQI-friendly fans, writers, artists, reviewers, editors, and activists, make things better?

That’s it for this week. A short post, but one which will hopefully make us all think. Please share your thoughts! We’d love to hear them.

Here’s a link to a very fine post from several months ago by Dayton Ward, the well-known Star Trek novelist and one of my Twitter buddies. He’s a straight married ally and a military veteran and would be ready and willing, if necessary, to kick the ass of anyone who thinks that they have the right to deny other people their civil rights. In fact, I bet he would agree with me that anyone who thinks that they have the right to oppress other people can get the fuck out of our country.

President Obama has added gay, lesbian, transgender and disabled people to those protected by US hate crimes law; other promises about gay rights remain in progress or outstanding.

Religious settler comes to aid of gay Palestinian: a young Palestinian man who lives with his partner in Israel visited his parents in West Bank and was subsequently not allowed back into Israel. For fear of his life he couldn’t return to his own village, but a religious Jewish settler agreed to shelter him in his settlement.

Crash director Paul Haggis quits Church of Scientology after 35 years as a member, in protest against its opposition to gay marriage.

Crossed Genres has released their LGBTQ issue (Issue #12)

If you come across any links to share for next week’s linkdump, please post them to the Outer Alliance forum or bookmark them on delicious or diigo with tag “outeralliancelinks“.