A few Friday tidbits June 24, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, events, links, news, publications , 1 comment so farFollowing up on the internet hoaxes discussion, here are two links sent in by JoSelle Vanderhooft:
A Gay (Straight) Girl (Man) in Damascus (Edinburgh) by Ali Abbas and Assia Boundaoui is an explanation of the damage the Amina hoax did from two “New York based writers and freelance-journalists that submitted a blood test and birth certificate to affirm that the above thoughts are their own analysis based on a lifetime of Arab and or queer and or American and or woman identification.”
White Privilege and the ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ is an NPR segment in which Brian Spears (a white man) talks about white male privilege and why it’s not okay to co-opt the voices of marginalized people.
Sara Amis will be moderating a Feminist SF Twitter chat on Sunday at 2pm EST. The theme of this discussion is worldbuilding. If you want to participate, just follow the FeministSF hashtag.
And while we’re talking about #FeministSF, NPR is asking people to share their favorite SF/F books with the goal of ultimately making a top 100 books list. Nicola Griffith reminds everyone to consider including books by women on the list. I’ll add a bid for considering including books by queer people and people of color.
Finally, Ladies of Trade Town is available now at HarpHaven Publishing. I talked to Lee Martindale about this in the big Gaylaxicon podcast episode–it’s an anthology of stories about the oldest profession, with stories by Catherine Lundoff and Cecilia Tan.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #81: OA Podcast #8 June 22, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, interviews, links, news, Outer Alliance Podcast , 1 comment so farWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #81. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week we’ve got the eighth Outer Alliance Podcast episode for you!
This month we have tons of news and two interview guests. David Levine talks about a few of his many short stories, and Dennis Upkins talks about his debut YA novel, Hollowstone.
You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.
Notes
On the Amina Arraf and Paula Brooks Hoaxes:
*The OA post I made about this last week: Are All Gay Girls Secretly Men?
*Liz Henry at BlogHer: Warnings and Question about Paula Brooks.
*Ben Rosenbaumguest posting on Liz Henry’s personal blog about when it’s okay to pretend to be someone else, and why it’s not when it’s not.
*Liz Henry on her own blog: Notes on Sockpuppetry and Astroturfing (explaining some internet jargon related to hoaxes, and the mechanics of how people perpetrate hoaxes.
*Daniel Nassar at Gay Middle East: The Impact of Audacity: The Amina Story and its Effect on the LGBT People of Syria and (with Sami Hamwi) From Damascus With Love: Blogging in a Totalitarian State.
*Britta Froelicher at The Washington Post: Britta Froelicher, wife of ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus,’ caught in her husband’s ‘hurricane’.
And because it bears repeating in writing: Trans women are not pretending to be women. Trans and genderqueer/questioning people who do not feel safe revealing their identities and need a pseudonymous online identity in which to explore that are not the people who are doing damage here. There’s a giant difference between that sort of thing and the Amina and Paula hoaxes. I think Ben Rosenbaum’s post above does a good job of exploring when and why pretending to be someone you’re not is harmful, so that’s a great place to start if you aren’t sure.
On Feminism and Gender Bias in SF:
*The OA post from a couple of weeks ago: Outer Alliance Spotlight #80: Feminism.
*The SF Signal interview (and large comments thread): MIND MELD: What’s The Importance of ‘The Russ Pledge’ For Science Fiction Today?
*Athena Andreadis voices her frustration: Why I Won’t Be Taking the Joanna Russ Pledge. (Note the comments. I was glad to see Nicola stopping in, and I particularly liked what JGStewart had to say–I feel that’s one of the great reasons for promoting things like the Joanna Russ pledge. You just never know when a basic step like that will reach a particular person and lead to more openness and consideration.)
*Ann Leckie on editorial bias in seven parts! This is a really great in depth look at bias, building on the things she said at WisCon on the editorial bias panel: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Congratulations to Sacchi Green for winning a Goldie!
On The Writer & the Critic/OA Crossover Episode:
*The Writer & the Critic (in case you want to start listening to one of my favorite podcasts right away).
*I recommended Hal Duncan‘s Spectrum winning story, “The Behold of the Eye”. Read it for free online, buy it in Wilde Stories 2009, or listen to it for free at Podcastle.
*Kirstyn recommended Kim Westwood‘s story, “Nightship”. Buy it in Dreaming Again, or listen to it free at Terra Incognita.
*Ian Recommended Peter M. Ball‘s novellas, Horn and Bleed. Buy them in print or e-book format from Twlefth Planet Press, or get the instant dowload e-book versions from Smashwords.
Warning for anyone who has trigger issues with sexual violence: Horn does contain some graphic rape, which triggered me. I did like the story and find it worth reading, but I would have probably done a bit better if I had known going in that I was going to be reading about graphic rape. It’s not victim-blamey, and it is very much intrinsic to the plot, but you know, it’s still violent and awful because rape is violent and awful. “Nightship” also deals with sexual violence, but it maintains a distance that left me feeling okay. You may have different safe zones and boundaries than I do, though, so I thought I’d mention both. I still recommend these stories to anyone who feels up to reading them before our August episode. I just wanted to give any unsuspecting survivors a heads up about the potential triggers.
On David Levine:
*“At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club” — Subverting the sexy blonde stereotype character. Free online!
*”Second Chance” and many other free online stories are linked from David’s bibliography page.
*The 100th issue of Realms of Fantasy contains David’s lesbian plumber story, “Tides of the Heart”. Buy it in print or in digital format.
*David’s short story collection, Space Magic, is available through Wheatland Press.
*David’s Mars Journal chronicling his experience at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. Available together with the journals of David’s other Mars research team members as a book, The Mars Diaries.
On Dennis Upkins:
*Denny’s website, where he blogs all about Hollowstone.
*Hollowstone as an e-book at Parker Publishing.
*Hollowstone in print at Amazon.
*Lee Thompson Young is Denny’s top pick for actors who might play Hollowstone’s main character, Noah, on the big screen.
*Denny is also on LiveJournal as Neo_Prodigy.
Okay, that wraps this monster episode up! If you have feedback, please leave a comment, or e-mail me at julia@juliarios.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Guest Post: Nora Olsen on the Golden Crown Literary Society Conference June 17, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : events, news , add a commentI just got back from the Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS) annual conference. GCLS is a volunteer-run literary society devoted to lesbian fiction. Although the focus is on “lesbian,” from what I observed GCLS is very welcoming to bisexual women and transgender folk, which makes me happy. It’s a long con; it ran from Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon. GCLS has pretty much everything you expect in a con: panels, a dealer room, readings, a dance, karaoke, and book signing. No cos play though! It’s not a sf con, and the favored genre is romance. The focus of the panels is writer education and the chance to see your favorite writers, and the quality of the panels is what you’d get at Philcon or Lunacon. Just like every con, it’s more about hanging out with your friends than it is about the panels.
My girlfriend and I technically attended GCLS last year. But it was held in Orlando, Florida, and neither of us had been to Disney before. Basically we ended up seeing a lot more of Mickey Mouse than Karin Kallmaker. So this was the first year that we were really present at GCLS. (Next year GCLS will be in Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon the year after.)
One of the most fun parts of GCLS was their awards ceremony. It’s like the Oscars if everyone was a lesbian. GCLS runs their awards the same way Lambda and Publishing Triangle do: publishers (or authors) nominate books by paying a fee and providing copies, and then judges winnow the nominations down to a list of finalists. The awards are known as the Goldies. What’s amazing is that there can have more than one winner per category, depending on how many finalists there are.
The Outer Alliance’s own Sacchi Green won a Goldie in the category of lesbian erotica, for Lesbian Lust, although she wasn’t present at the ceremony. Winners in the speculative fiction category were Bourn’s Edge by Barbara Davies, More Than An Echo by Linda Kay Silva, and Nigredo by Alex Mykals. I read one of the finalists, Lesser Prophets by Kelly Sinclair, which follows a group of women through a flu epidemic that decimates the earth’s population but mysteriously spares gays and lesbians, and I thought it was excellent. Outer Alliance member Andi Marquette had a finalist as well, A Matter of Blood. Although I haven’t read that one, I did read the first book in the same series, Friends In High Places, and it had great world-building, intrigue, and romance. OA peeps would also enjoy Shadow Point by Amy Briant, a winner in the debut novel category, which is about a woman who goes to a haunted naval base when her brother dies there and must fight a malevolent ghost. The winners of the paranormal category also sounded intriguing: Rip Van Dyke by Kate McLachlan, a time travel story, and Riverwalker by Cate Culpepper, about a vengeful spirit. I loved learning about the pioneers of lesbian fiction, like Katherine V. Forrest and Ann Bannon. Apparently in the 1950s and early 1960s under the Comstock laws postal inspectors censored pulp fiction for vocabulary and plot, so that all gay books had to end in suicide or a straight marriage to be acceptable. Those early writers had a tough battle. They paved the way for all of us today, and we are truly standing on their shoulders.
The GCLS attendees were hardcore fans. It was bittersweet to hear so many women in the vendor room saying things like, “I lost my job and don’t have much money but I have to buy these books.” They knew classic lesbian books like Curious Wine by Katherine V. Forrest backwards and forwards. I’m afraid I have never read a single word by her or any of those trailblazing writers, although now I feel like I should. Attending GCLS showed me that there is a huge generation gap in lesbian fandom. I have to say that I was outside of my comfort zone at this con. Of course there were a variety of different kinds of people there, but the majority were white lesbians age 45 and up, many of whom live in isolated communities where they don’t meet a lot of other LGBTQ people. It seemed that a lot of women had come to GCLS by way of Xena, and I’m sorry to say I’ve never watched Xena either. What we did have in common was that we were all bookworms who admire lesfic writers at the top of their game like Karin Kallmaker, KG MacGregor, Georgia Beers, and Lee Lynch.
__________________________________
Nora Olsen, a proud member of the Outer Alliance, writes LGBTQ-themed science fiction. The End: Five Queer Kids Save The World is her debut novel, and her short fiction has appeared in Collective Fallout. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her girlfriend, writer Aine Ni Cheallaigh, and two cats.
Are All Gay Girls Secretly Men? June 15, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : Uncategorized , 2commentsOne of the big dust-ups this week is the double revelation that both Amina Arraf (author of the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus”) and Paula Brooks (a deaf lesbian and editor of LezGetReal.com) never actually existed. Both of them were fictional characters made up by straight white men.
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.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #80: Feminism June 10, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : links, news , 3commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #80. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week we’re exploring Feminism.
Cheryl Morgan asks what feminism is, and explores some of the various answers in a thoughtful post on her blog. The comments there are also full of interesting points (like that the wave model is not really ideal, for instance). One of the things that Cheryl brings up is the idea of intersectionality–that feminism shouldn’t be in opposition with anti-racist movements or LGBTQI rights movements. That’s definitely something that most of the OA membership seems to agree with, based on the way people interact on the mailing list. It’s one of the reasons why we try to point out works by and about people of all sorts of genders and racial identities, and not just works by and about gay white men. Not that there’s anything wrong with gay white men, mind you. As a group, we love work by and about them (have I mentioned lately that Hal Duncan writes awesome stories, one of which just won the Spectrum Award for short fiction? I have? Oh, right then). Just, personally, I want to see everyone represented, and I think other OA members do, too.
There’s a long road ahead of us, I’m afraid. Even though there are awesome things like the Tiptree Award (and The Carl Brandon Awards, and the Lammies, and the Spectrum, and…), there are still a lot of people who don’t recognize works that don’t fit into their idea of normality. Which sucks. A lot.
Nicola Griffith points this out over on her blog with a post about The Guardian’s Favourite SF Books list (of which, out of over 500 listed books, 18 are by women–slightly imbalanced?). On the heels of that post, Nicola calls for us to take the Joanna Russ Pledge.
“The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so.”
I’m going to go a step beyond, and say that we should be doing this for people of color and LGBTQI people as well. The way to become visible is to refuse invisibility.
Finally, talking of Joanna Russ, the awesome women of Galactic Suburbia (an Australian feminist SF podcast) are planning to have a big discussion of The Female Man and “When it Changed” in an upcoming episode. I mention this because it’s a great chance to read and listen and contribute to the conversation about feminism and queerness in SF. I’d like to see more open conversation about this spread all over the internet.
That’s it for this week. Next week will bring the June episode of the OA Podcast. In the meantime, please feel free to share your thoughts on feminism, SF, Joanna Russ, intersectionality, and other related topics in the comments here, on the google group, or by e-mailing me at julia@juliarios.com.
WisCon 2012 OA Party? June 3, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : Uncategorized , add a commentAs someone who just spent six weeks traveling non-stop, I have to admit I’m exhausted. This means I have to take this week off of major OA blogging, alas. But! At WisCon last weekend (which was awesome, and full of LGBTQI goodness), a few of us started thinking that you know, maybe next year we should have an OA party there. What do you think? Would you attend? What would you like to do at an OA party? Dress up, dance, see vids, just hang out? Another completely different option? Some other possibilities include an OA panel, a writing workshop, or a group reading.
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.