OA member Keffy Kehrli was a guest on Writing Excuses during WorldCon, and the episode went live this week. It’s a short (about 20 minutes), but good discussion. All of the participants talk about different ways to think about (and write) gender, and Keffy patiently explains some of the unfortunate stereotypes that trans people face.

There are also some resources on the comments page (and some unfortunate comments, but surprisingly few of those, honestly).

Have you got any favorite examples of well-written trans characters to recommend? I’d love to hear about them!

In this episode, Natania Barron talks about her work and how she started the Outer Alliance, Lynn Flewelling talks about writing sex scenes and teaching a writing workshop on a cruise ship, and we have an excerpt of Georgina Bruce’s story from Aether Age: Helios.

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:

Gender Playful Marketplace is collecting startup funds over here.

Elisa Rolle hosted the 2010 Rainbow Awards, which recognized works by several Outer Alliance members. Congratulations, winners!

Hayden Thorne’s historical fantasy comedy (not a problem novel!) Desmond and Garrick Book One is available now at Prizm books.

Natania Barron’s website has all kinds of info about her fiction and non-fiction. Go there to find out all about stories available now and coming soon.

Lynn Flewelling has links to signups for the cruise workshop and place to buy her work (including the sexy Nightrunner short story collection that flustered prim and proper me in the interview) over on her website.

Aether Age: Helios is out now. You can find out more at Aether-Age.com. Author Georgina Bruce maintains a blog at thebeardedlady.wordpress.com, and you can learn more about narrator T.C. Parmalee at Aural Spice.

Thanks for listening, and please do feel free to leave feedback here, on the google group, or by e-mailing me at julia@juliarios.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Jedi Girls and Princess Boys

If your internet reading list is anything like mine, you’ve probably heard all about the first grader named Katie who got bullied for carrying a Star Wars water bottle to school (the other kids told her it was “for boys”).  In the few weeks since that essay was posted, people have poured virtual love all over that little girl, which is awesome. I fully support Katie’s choice to accessorize with whatever she likes, and not to conform to societally imposed gender norms. That she’s a fellow SF-lover is an added bonus.

Another kid whose fashion choices have garnered some attention lately is a little boy named Dyson, who likes to dress up as a princess. If you watch some of the videos linked from that page, you’ll see that Dyson’s family and school are supporting him on this, which is fantastic. One thing that caught my attention, though, was that although all the adults involved are trying to be openminded about things, at least at first they do seem to find it strange and to be a bit uncomfortable with it. It’s easier in mainstream USian culture to support a girl’s love of Star Wars than to support a boy’s love of tulle and satin because  to some extent we’ve all internalized some majorly prescriptive ideas about gender roles.

As a kid, I was a lot like Katie. I wore glasses and had a lazy eye, which sometimes required me to wear a patch, and like Katie, I was acutely aware of how those thing marked me as different. I also really wanted to do “boy” stuff. I asked for things like constructions sets for Christmas, and played a lot of things like war games and yes, Star Wars (we’d pretend flashlights were lightsabers). I think at one point I even had a Return of the Jedi lunchbox. But I wasn’t just a tomboy. I was also into “girly” stuff, only I felt it wasn’t worth it unless I went all out. I had two preferred modes of dress: corduroy pants and shapeless tops, and OMG Ruffles! Unfortunately, ruffly things with iridescent beads and a thousand petticoats weren’t to my mother’s taste. She wanted to put me in simple sweet dresses, which usually had itchy smocking all over the front. I hated them, and fought really hard not to have to dress up even while I looked for every opportunity to wear costumes incorporating fluffy tutus. No one thought twice about a little girl liking to dress like a ballerina, though–even if I was about as coordinated as a drunken lemming.

But what does all that personal background have to do with LGBTQI speculative fiction? Well, it kind of doesn’t. Except it also kind of does. I’ve noticed speculative fiction is one of the genres where girls can dress like boys and boys can wear things like flowing robes with impunity, and that’s part of what drew me to it when I was young (of course the magic and super cool space travel and stuff also helped). Speculative fiction authors have been known to play with gender, alternative relationship formats, and even one of the things we often don’t talk a lot about, which is also part of the spectrum: asexuality. One of the things which first drew me to The Outer Alliance was the all inclusive attitude I encountered among the founding members. They wanted to support and celebrate the individual choices each person makes about sexuality and gender expression. I can really get behind that, because you know, I still like the iridescent ruffles, and I would like to live in a world where anyone could wear them without other people judging them for betraying their gender. I also sometimes like to shop in the men’s department (where denim isn’t stretchy and the sizes are measured in inches instead of obscure code), and I’d like that kind of behavior to be equally acceptable for everyone, too. Which is why this next thing is so exciting to me.

Genderplayful Marketplace

Sarah Dopp of Genderfork.com would like to start an ebay or etsy style marketplace specifically for clothing sold by and for people who want to play with gender norms. Here’s a video in which she explains the idea with visual aids. If you think this is an awesome thing, consider making a video or sharing a written testimonial to explain why. Sarah gives more info about where to post your feedback here.

For my part, I think it could be an excellent resource for everyday clothes, and for killer costume items for the times when I really want to be a dashing male character like Captain Jack Harkness. And I think if this exists and takes off and is successful, it’ll help kids like Katie and Dyson be more confident in expressing their genders as they see fit. What do you think? Tell me in the comments here, or make your own video, and definitely send me the link. I’d love to hear from you.

That’s all I’ve got for now, but join us next week for Outer Alliance Podcast episode #2!

Kal is a genderqueer, pansexual, kinky switch in a stable polyamorous triad, which makes him^[1] pretty familiar with non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities, even before you factor robots in. He made his first queer speculative fiction sale three years ago when “The Lift” appeared in Circlet Press’s Best Fantastic Erotica collection. Since then, his stories have also been included in Richard Labonte’s Best Gay Romance and Boys in Heat, Queerpunk, and Circlet’s upcoming Best Erotic Fantasy and Science Fiction. Robotica is his first solo story collection.

On the non-fiction side of things, Kal writes essays and articles related to alternate gender and sexual lifestyles and identities. His essay, “Gender Evolution” is included in Toward 2012: Perspectives on the next age, and he also writes for edenfantasys.com and Reality Sandwich. His hobbies include knitting, playing Wii, and attending industrial and electronica shows. In addition to his personal site, Kal maintains a Twitter feed, and shares a food blog with his best friend at foodn00bs.typepad.com/.

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OA: Robotica is your e-book collection focusing on the sex lives of robots. What range of robot and human sexuality can readers expect there, and what makes robot sex so appealing in the first place?

KC: There are so many ranges of sexualities to describe! In terms of orientation, some of the stories are gay male, some are bisexual, and some are what my editor, Cecilia Tan, calls “post-gay.” In terms of tone, there’s everything from innocent coming-of-age stories under the control of human scientists on through to painful, rough interactions with alien robot “species” where the humans are very much not in control. Mostly, you can expect humanoid robots, but there’s some sex involving a sentient spaceship as well. That in itself is one of the things that makes robot sex so appealing: the interesting and unexpected ways that sexuality can come to pass outside of human biology. For me, a big writing payoff comes from the double whammy of separating sexuality from biology and viewing human sexuality from the outside — that’s led to a lot of surprising personal revelations.

OA: How much of the robot sexuality in your stories is within the realm of possibility in our non-fictional future? How much human/robot sexual interaction already exists, and what are the ethical concerns around that both now and as technology advances?

KC: I could see a near-future situation where artificial intelligence assembles information regarding sexuality in a logical yet entirely different fashion than we’re accustomed to, which is part of what happens in “Charlie.” “Star Fucker” is about identity, idolization, and rock ‘n’ roll robotics, which I think is another very plausible near-future. Chances are, though, that “The Sex Drive” is closer to where we’re going — imbuing robots with the capacity for sexual activity without quite thinking through the consequences. “Agrathia’s Freedom,” about a sentient, sexual spaceship, and “Survival-Compatible,” about a very rough human introduction to an alien species, are such far-future tales that it’s hard to say whether our paths will lead us there or elsewhere.

Right now, I think we’re in a phase with robotics and sexuality much like we were a decade ago with PDAs and cellphones. We had two gadgets that had some overlap in functionality, but it took a while to finally merge the two so fully that having a smartphone — PDAs and cellphones gene-spliced together and then given steroids — is fairly ubiquitous. I see a similar thing happening with robotics and sex toys at this point. The 1970s blow-up “sex doll” has given way not just to better simulations of genitalia but better simulations of humans. RealDolls are absolutely incredible — if you saw a five-second clip of a guy having sex with a female RealDoll, you probably wouldn’t even know the difference. Because they’re meant to mimic human sexuality, the focus is very much on things like breasts with realistic sway and lips with realistic give. These are the things that the scientific robotics community is only slightly delving into, as their focus is more function than form. Some companies are already combining the two; there’s a Japanese company that makes what are essentially RealDolls with artificial heartbeats that speed up to signify excitement and have accurate body temperatures. In a hundred years’ time, I think it’s plausible that we’ll have fairly human-realistic, reasonably-intelligent robots, some of which will be “optimized” for sexual behaviors.

The ethical concerns are immense, but I’ve noticed a very specific gap in the cultural conversation about robot ethics. We are, by and large, quicker to assume sentience than we should be. This is how Furbys and Tamagotchis are so popular: they get “sick” and we feel guilty. We anthropomorphize very easily. I think the biggest, and nearest, ethical concern we’ll face is that of wanting to protect artificial beings which are not yet actually sentient but make us feel like they are. At some point, the question of what exactly constitutes sentience will come up in that debate, and suddenly we’ll have an issue that’s so far-reaching it impacts things like the rights of people in comatose states, how we treat people with low IQs, and even what we decide about abortion. There are a slew of ethical issues that will affect artificial intelligence, but I think we’ll be bowled over by the ethical issues that artificial intelligence raises about ourselves first.

OA: “Analog Christmas” presents a future in which electronic stimulation is par for the course, and reminds us that good old fashioned human contact is also worthwhile. In your opinion, is there an ideal balance between mechanical and analog sexual interaction?

KC: In my opinion, it’s an entirely subjective, personal thing. Is your idea of an ideal weekend holing up with The Sims or mall-crawling? Do you check Twitter a dozen times a day or do you not even own a smartphone? There’s no static right answer. It all has to do with the balance you strike in your life that’s ideal for you.

OA: You were recently on a panel about gender and sexuality in SF, and were dismayed at the narrow focus on feminism and homosexuality that people expected the panelists to have. What other avenues would you like to see the speculative fiction community exploring?

KC: Everything! While it’s true that SF has to, in some aspect, speak to present-day society in order to be relevant to present-day readers, it amazes me how many SF writers build mostly-monogamous, mostly-heterosexual, mostly-humanoid cultures a hundred or two hundred or a couple thousand years into our future. If you look back at our last fifty years, not even just on Earth but within the narrow confines of the United States, you can see enormous social changes in gender and sexuality norms. The idea that we’ll still be pretty much here in a future so advanced as to be science fiction seems ludicrous. Let’s talk about English evolving into a language with non-gendered pronouns and the good and bad that ensues. Let’s talk about starships filled with 200 crewmates all bonded to one another in a polyamorous commitment. Let’s talk about starships filled with 200 crewmates who bed-hop regardless of gender or species and none of them have even heard of this “commitment” thing. Let’s talk about what the heck we humans do when trying to interface with a species that has sex like slugs do (YouTube it^[2], it’s amazing and would cause some serious diplomatic issues). Or a human who falls for someone in a “black widow” species. The possibilities with sexuality and gender are just as endless as every other topic in SF, and it amazes me that we don’t do more with that.

OA: You’re a big J. G. Ballard fan in part because of his unflinching portrayals of non-mainstream sexuality. Have you got any other recommended reading for us?

KC: How large a font can I use to say CHARLES STROSS?^[3] Sometimes it’s easy to read the queer SF “ghetto” and lose sight of what’s seeping into the mainstream. I was completely shocked the first time I picked up a Stross book because I had no idea we’d come to the point where his ideas could be handled by a mainstream publishing house and land on the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere. I highly recommend his Glasshouse for anyone interested in seeing some truly creative and plot-integral explorations of gender and sexuality. You also can’t go wrong picking up a James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner. The Award’s short-story anthologies are a particularly good way to get exposed to authors with non-mainstream ideals. Circlet Press, my publisher, focuses on really terrific erotic SF/F, and there’s a lot of free content on their website to get you started.

***

Thanks, Kal! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Robotica.

1. Kal identifies as pangendered, but tends to prefer male pronouns.
2. It really is amazing! Here’s a video link for you (warning: contains graphic depiction of slug sex).
3. Rather large, as it turns out.

Katharine is currently a graduate student specializing in 18th century British Literature at the University of Texas in Austin, but her first novel, Alcestis, reflects her B.A. in Classical Studies from Smith College. Alcestis is a retelling of a Greek myth from the point of view of a woman who usually doesn’t get a voice. It explores the gender roles and sexual politics in Greek mythology, and the inherent power imbalance in relationships between mortals and gods.

Katharine has a short short in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #19, and She is currently working on another novel, Killingly. She identifies as bisexual, and appreciates the Outer Alliance for its ability to bring queer-friendly speculative fiction fans and writers together. In addition to her personal webpage, Katharine maintains a Twitter feed as @katharine_b. She lives with her husband and two cats.

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OA: What made you decide to retell a Greek myth, and why this one in particular?

KB: I’ve always loved Greek mythology, but my desire to tell this story was a response to Euripides’ Alcestis, specifically. I knew the myth of Alcestis from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem, which I love — but it ends with Alcestis disappearing after she has chosen to go to the underworld in her husband Admetus’s place. I was outraged when I realized that, in most traditional versions of the myth, she’s then rescued by Heracles after three days in the underworld. I knew Alcestis was seen as a model wife because she’d sacrificed herself for her husband, but I hadn’t known that she’d been won back like a trophy so that the story would end happily. I wanted to retell the story in such a way that the basic facts would match the play’s narrative, but the tone of the story would be entirely different — to make it Alcestis’s story, to follow her into the underworld and see what happened to her there. Part of what happens to her, in this novel, is Persephone.

OA: Ancient Greek culture was full of male queerness, but we don’t usually hear all that much about the women. In Alcestis, it seems as though women may have the same kinds of homosexual attachments that men do, but that it is less socially acceptable. What’s your take on that?

KB: In my version of Mycenaean Greece, at least, women are simply considered less important, and in some ways less human than men (even classical Greek culture reflects this, I think). So I’m not sure that I’d say that female queerness in Alcestis’s society is less socially acceptable than male queerness — I think it’s more that any show of defiance or passion in a woman, any evidence that she considers her desires more important than the needs of men, is definitely frowned upon. I based this largely on the way women are treated in the Homeric epics; nobody cares what Penelope‘s feelings about waiting for Odysseus were, she’s simply expected to remain faithful or get slaughtered when he comes home.

OA: As a classics scholar, where would you advise a newcomer who enjoyed Alcestis to begin with Greek mythology?

KB: Well, this isn’t really very scholarly, but I began with the D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths when I was a kid, and I still think it’s stunning — it’s full of illustrations that will make you think of William Blake, just gorgeous bright colors. Beyond that, each of the big three Greek dramatists has his own specialty. If you like soap opera, read Aeschylus; if you like procedurals and believe in dramatic unity, Sophocles; if psychological realism in crazy circumstances is your thing, Euripides. (I’m a Euripides girl, myself, despite my irritation about his version of Alcestis’s story, but I see the appeal in the others, too.)

OA: You’re currently working on another novel, Killingly. Can you tell us anything more about that?

KB: Sure — it’s also a historical novel, but it’s set in 1890s New England, and concerns the disappearance of a student from Mt. Holyoke College just after it became a college rather than a seminary. I went to Smith, and I loved women’s college culture, so I’m looking forward to trying recreate the world of a late nineteenth century women’s college. I managed to get to Mt. Holyoke last June to do some archival research and found some amazing things; I’ve also been reading “college novels” from the turn of the century. My favorite so far is called A Sweet Girl Graduate. Seriously.

OA: You’ve got a pretty full plate. How do you balance your fiction writing time with your PhD work time and other life commitments? Do you have any tips for busy writers?

KB: I wish I were better at time management or had easily-applied tips to share! I think understanding your own working style is important — some people enjoy working on two or more projects at once, while others (like me) really need to focus on one thing at a time. I find that I tend to need to divide my time into chunks rather than managing multiple threads of work simultaneously; right now, I’m working on my dissertation, but once I have a draft of it finished, I’ll go back to working on Killingly. Of course, other administrative stuff always pops up, but I try to limit myself to one major project at a time.

***

Thanks, Katharine! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Alcestis.

Djibril has always assumed that explorations of sexual difference were key to science fiction, so The Future Fire has welcomed queer fiction since it began in 2004. The most recent issue has a feminist theme, and Djibril is currently reading for a queer themed issue, which should be out soon. In addition to the magazine, The Future Fire also has a reviews blog, which focuses on reviews for small press publications.

Djibril has lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic, and is currently based in London, UK. He is a formally trained historian with a collection of animal skulls. He maintains a Twitter feed as @thefuturefire.

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OA: The Future Fire is putting together a queer themed issue right now. Can you tell us more about that? Is it already full, or are you still looking for new pieces? Any stories you’ve accepted that you’re particularly excited about?

DA: The “Queer-themed” issue of TFF is basically a spin-off from the Feminist Science Fiction themed issue that we advertised about a year ago and published in January, which was also our 5th anniversary issue (though I forgot to make a fuss about that). We buy stories depending on how excellent each story is individually, and we don’t have any quotas or maximums, so we ended up buying too many stories that fit the “sex, gender, sexuality and gender identity” theme that we’d specified–more than we would normally include in a single issue, anyway. So we decided to divide them into two categories: the first, sex and gender and women’s issues generally; and the second, focussing on sexuality and gender identity, will be the “queer issue”. We’re still very much open to submissions on this theme, up to about the end of the month to get into this issue; but as we say, there will never come a time when queer stories are unwelcome in TFF.

Beyond that I can’t say very much more about what we’re looking for. TFF publishes speculative fiction with a focus on social and political themes (think 1984, Island, Fahrenheit 451, anything by Le Guin, Dick…), and would like to see more cyberpunk than we do. We have always valued the cosmopolitan, stories that address diversity and tolerance, stories by underrepresented groups (including non-Anglo scifi). This issue will be no different, except that it will further narrow that focus to stories that address issues of sexuality and gender identity, which have always been a key part of science fiction, I think.

In the stories we’ve taken on already, there are two main approaches: either there is a queer protagonist whose difference and difficulties reflect other differences or forms of alienness/alienation in the same or other characters; or queer protagonists only represent the queer struggle against very real repression in a dystopian, slightly exaggerated world. These approaches are both fine, of course; maybe there are others.

OA: What made you decide to start The Future Fire, and what are some of the upsides and downsides to running an online magazine?

DA: The Future Fire was set up kind of naively by a small group of SF fans some years ago–of the five of us there were two left within a year, and we’re still the core of the team. I’m not sure we really had any idea why we were doing this, or what we were letting ourselves in for; between us we had no experience of publishing either traditional or digital. I’d often imagined publishing a small print ‘zine, but I guess it was only ever going to happen when we had the possibility of doing it online. We were most inspired by the trippy paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges–imagined writing fake book reviews and event reports and all that sort of thing. It was only after a couple of years that we realized that what we really wanted was to focus on the social and political aspects of speculative fiction, things that we care about, things that can (or should) change the world.

As for the advantages of running an online magazine, the most obvious is just that it’s much less trouble–marketing and distributing a print magazine would be a *lot* of work (less so now I suppose that we could use POD to actually print and distribute, but still having to worry about marketing to make the magazine profitable would still be prohibitive for a volunteer-run venture). The down-side is the flip-side of that coin: because TFF is free, and we’re not interested in running crappy ads, it makes no money. The donations we receive cover less than 10% of our costs, and the rest comes out of our pockets. For a small ‘zine like this that’s fine, I think it’s worth it. The time is actually a much bigger cost than the money.

The correct answer to “what are the upsides of running an online magazine” ought to be that it removes certain restrictions of space and medium, and potentially attracts a much wider audience. If we buy a story that is 20k words long rather than the 4-6k average, we don’t have to worry about how that’s going to affect the page count of the next issue. (We do worry about how long a reader is willing to stare at a screen hitting page-down over and over, so we serialize longer pieces.) We ought to be able to say that we can publish stories with a visual element, animation, audio, interactive features, hypertext fiction, stuff that’s impossible on paper. That is true, but we’ve yet to be offered anything like that. I’d love to see it, but I don’t know what it would look like.

OA: The Future Fire holds mini-cons in the summer in London. What are they like,  and who may attend?

DA: We started out holding joint mini-conventions with Whispers of Wickedness, a British small press magazine of dark and atmospheric fiction, to which typically a dozen people would come, read or perform some of their work, and generally chat about speculative fiction on a Saturday afternoon in a pub in London or Swindon. It’s a lot of fun. Since WoW stopped publishing a year or so ago, we’ve carried on with the TFFcon. Anyone and everyone is welcome. We often see a sample of TFF authors, artists, reviewers and editors, along with friends, fans and assorted randomers. Other magazines or small presses are sometimes represented, or sometimes just send promotional materials or freebies (especially if they’re not based in the UK). For the last couple of years we’ve tried to have a story competition, with entries voted for on the day, and prizes donated by various publishers present.

We don’t have a date for the 2010 TFFcon yet, but it will be announced on our website and in all the usual places. Would love to see some Outer Alliance representation there this year.

OA: How did you come to have a collection of animal skulls, and do you have any favorite, or unusual ones?

DA: I’m not sure any of them are particularly unusual, but perhaps the most random is a stag skull set on a shield, which used to adorn the wall of a zoologist at a Scottish university, and which mysteriously turned up at my door encased in cardboard and polystyrene. I’d like to be able to say that having samples of animals skulls are essential to my archaeological research, but I’m very much an armchair historian, not a fieldworker. I can’t remember the first skull I acquired, but the barn rat is one of my favourites. The jawbone of a shark is also pretty impressive–it’s the only part of the head that isn’t cartilage, so technically I guess it is a skull. For the record, the human skull is a replica, and the goat was not sacrificed.

OA: You say that explorations of sexual difference are the key to science  fiction. Do you have any recommendations on this theme?

DA: I cut my teeth on writers like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Michael Moorcock, so I guess I’ve always assumed that a genre like science fiction that explores difference, alienness, xenophobia and other prejudices, and social norms different from ours would be full of sexualities and gender identities that push the boundaries as well. Now that I think about it, I’ve been surprised by how much speculative fiction adheres to modern, western notions of heteronormativity and cisgender. Are we really that conservative a genre?

Beyond the above, and equally obvious authors like Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree Jr., Poppy Z. Brite, Joanna Russ, I suspect that your readers can suggest me more good queer science fiction than I can them.

***

Thanks, Djibril! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out The Future Fire.

Her Tangh-i-ness is a Clarion West 2001 Graduate. She owes her pseudonym to a vocalist friend who gave her the first name, a faery godmother of an editor, who told her using just one name is pretentious, and the surname from the Turkey City Lexicon. She considers herself African Descended rather than African American, but will still answer to Black and Colored.

Her Tangh-i-ness is a writer of homoerotic, multicultural, and kinky romance, science fiction, fantasy, and horror featuring people of color as the protagonists.  Her work has appeared in Afro-Future Females (edited by Marlene S. Barr) and Mojo Conjure Stories (edited by Nalo Hopkinson). As a straight, cisgender ally, she joined the Outer Alliance because she wants to make sure there are always books with delicious LGBT characters to fall in love with on shelves, eBooks, online, on Kindle, etc.

Her Tangh-i-ness lives in Boston, and maintains a Facebook page and a Yahoo group.

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As one of the contributors to the Afro-Future Females collection, I suspect you’re in a great position to recommend some queer speculative fiction by or about people of color. Do you have any particular favorites?

I’m familiar with Jewelle Gomez; The Gilda Stories are on my to-read list. I’ve lucked out in knowing Nisi Shawl personally. “The Tawny Bitch”, her Gaylactic Spectrum Award nominated short story, is in the same anthology: Mojo Conjure Stories as my sadly unqueer offering.

But I cut my teeth on Samuel Delany‘s Nevèrÿon series and Heartspace by Steven Barnes shares the same magical volume as Nisi Shawl and I. Of course, read Cecilia Tan‘s  short fiction. These are all people of color whose works touch upon queer lives and whom I heartily recommend.

What was your Clarion West experience like? Would you recommend the workshop to other aspiring writers?

Write a lot. Submit often. And go once accepted. I almost didn’t make it in my 2001 class. First, I was candidate number 19 out of 17 slots, but I asked to be put on standby and about a day later Leslie Howle called me to ask what kind of mojo I had because I was now going to Clarion! That year Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Brad Denton, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack were the instructors.

Our class brought us six weeks of intense camaraderie, weekly short story writing, and into close contact with more speculative professionals than you could ever get at any convention.

My Clarion West class is a 100% published class and I still keep in touch with them via email, Facebook, personal websites, and whenever they make it into my neck of the woods. We’ve critted each other’s works, congratulated each other on publications, babies, marriages, and other noteworthy accomplishments. I’ve standing invitations to crash with CW2K1 folks in Vancouver, Seattle, and in NYC.

I got a faery Godmother and a Literary Godfather out of it. That sense of community can last outside the actual experience.

Mainstream acceptance of kink has grown in the past couple of decades, but still has a long way to go. Why do you think some  people are so scared of it, and are there any resources you’d recommend for promoting more kink acceptance?

The Puritanical element to American culture has its foot firmly on many people’s libidos. I think that’s the number one stigma that accompanies Kink. There’s nothing in the holybooks to say Kink is Good. Lots of people absorb messages all their lives about the sanctity and secrecy of sex. So it doesn’t occur to them that healthy sex includes Masturbation, Sex Toys, Leather, Latex, Rubber, Wet and Messy (thank you for introducing me to this term, Chewtoy!), Cross-dressing, or BDSM elements.

Gloria Brame‘s manual springs to mind as a resource along with the transman’s Pat Califia‘s. Check out Caryl’s BDSM & Fetish page and Tammad Rimilia has a BDSM Questionnaire that’s useful to both Dominants and Submissives. There’s the Deviant’s Dictionary and read Circlet Press’s pro-Kink collections on a regular basis.

How did you get the idea to start a Yahoo group for all things Tangh-y, and what is your vision for that?

I believe we have the ability to manifest things for ourselves. Say I’m currently living in a literary desert. I’ve dug a ditch and I’m waiting for it to fill with rain, so to speak. I figured once I have an audience, where in the heck do they go to find out what’s up with me and my work? If I could grow up to be the literary version of Margaret Cho, I think I’d used my time wisely upon the planet.

Can you tell us anything about your work in progress? What can we hope to see in the future?

Current Projects:

I’m looking for homes for several queer or kinky short stories that run the gamut from mildly perverse to extremely Not Safe For Work in various milieux. I’ve been collecting non-form rejections, which my writer friends remind me is good.

These are the novel projects that I’ve been juggling since I returned from Clarion West in 2001.

The Nether Concern- a dark urban fantasy series set in 1915 Boston with a Gay, Black hero. Book One I’m closest to soon being at the shop around to an agent stage. I recently became acquainted with Boston author, Lewis Gannett, whose own Gay Gothic inspired it.

World Jumping- a multi-world urban fantasy series set in Boston with a Straight Black heroine. I’m deep in revision on this one. It features talking animals and vanished ancient cultures.

The Society for the Protection of Engineered Creatures- an alternate-world, sci-fi series with an African descended, intersexed, albino hero who is a poly. The protagonist enjoys lovers of both sexes. Mind you, I wrote this before Caster Semenya’s unfortunate ordeal came to light. I have two finished novels from SPEC series in revision and two others with a quarter written only.

The Caldlond Demon series- a multi-generational fantasy set in an alternate Ancient Britain. I wrote three first drafts in the series and am tinkering with these as well.

I’m an organic writer. My process is slower because I don’t plan everything out beforehand. I leave myself plenty of space to connect things in the right way. I’m fortunate in that I have a writing group and family who happily give me regular feedback.

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Thank you, Jarla! Join us for another Spotlight next Friday, and in the meantime, check out Mojo Conjure Stories and Afro-Future Females!

Benjamin Solah reviews Tom Cho’s short story collection Look Who’s Morphing.

As part of a series on American women athletes, the Angry Black Woman writes about transgender athletes.

• Benjamin Solah also blogs about the recent media circus surrounding Caster Semenya.
• On the same topic, Chris / M-Brane SF says Do we ask if Michael Phelps is really a human male and not half fish?

Anna Caro writes City of Possibilities as part of New Zealand Speculative Fiction Blogging Week.

The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced changes in its board of trustees and its executive director position. These have coincided with a clarification of the Lambda Literary Award guidelines (see the guidelines at the LLF website).

Coming Out in Middle School in the New York Times explores the trend of gay and bisexual middle-schoolers increasingly being able to come out to friends, family, and adults at school. Benoit Denizet-Lewis talks to students, parents, and educators:

Though many of the parents I spoke to needed a period of adjustment before accepting their children’s announcement that they were gay or bisexual, others offered immediate and unequivocal support. “The biggest difference I’ve seen in the last 10 years isn’t with gay kids — it’s with their families,” says Dan Woog, an openly gay varsity boys’ soccer coach at Staples High School in Westport, Conn., who helped found a gay-straight alliance at his school in 1993. “Many parents just don’t assume anymore that their kids will have a sad, difficult life just because they’re gay.”

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”.

McHugh continued:

There are no excuses for this omission. That it happens, and it was allowed to happen, speaks to the deeply cultured disregard for women’s opinion in the world. I see it every day. We are marginalised, silenced, side-lined, forgotten, conveniently dropped, patronised, under-represented, dismissed, subtly intimidated and ignored.

Indeed, sexism within horror and speculative fiction as a whole is an issue that is often overlooked. And if you look at the norms of the genre, it’s easy to see how gender roles with society are reflected in the genre.

One of the most obvious examples that come to mind are those of passive female victims in slasher films from the 90s such as Scream and Friday the 13th. In addition, I recently had a conversation with another writer about how horror has often fostered a sexist revulsion to women’s bodies, such as with the symbolism of menstrual blood in many books and movies.

The contradiction, of course, is that from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein onward, women have made significant contributions to the horror genre. There are numerous female horror writers that easily match their male counterparts in their ability to scare and disturb their audiences. As David Barnett’s article in the Guardian points out, a quick visit to the book store easily demonstrate just how many women are writing horror.

While it’s still shocking that such an oversight happened, it is a sobering reminder for speculative fiction writers, as well. Sexism and homophobia are deep-seeded in our culture, and there is much work to be done to challenge these norms within the genre.

Benjamin Solah is a Marxist horror writer from Melbourne, Australia. He blogs his thoughts on writing and politics, including on gender and sexuality, and you can find these and other articles at Benjamin Solah, Marxist Horror Writer.