Barton is bisexual and has been writing queer speculative fiction for 24 years. His latest novel, I Will is due out very soon from Virtual Tales. Two earlier novels, Ella the Vampire and Parole are available through Lyrical Press. Two more novels, Max and Me, and Year of the Human are slated for release later this year through Lyrical Press and Hearts on Fire Books.

As a physicist, Barton writes atmosphere models when he isn’t writing fiction, and spends a lot of time trying to raise awareness about global warming. He is a born-again Christian, a liberal Democrat, and a lover of science. He hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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OA:  You’ve written female/female, male/male and male/female relationships in your currently available works. What appealed to you about each of those? Do you anticipate writing more of any one type in the future?

BPL: I’m currently working on a novel which I think will involve two teen girls falling in love with each other.  But generally I don’t target the sexual relationships involved from the beginning; they just flow out of the characterization.

What is attractive about each?  Hard to say.  I think the hetero thing feels good because you’re exploring a cuddly, warm body different from your own and designed by evolution to mate with–also because men and women in most societies have slightly different subcultures and ways of looking at things, so it’s a chance to get close to someone with a (somewhat) different psychology.  The homo thing feels good, I think, because it’s reassuring to be with a body like your own, one you know, and it’s easier to know in advance what your partner will and won’t like.  And if you’re raised in a heterosupremacist culture, it can be awfully liberating to throw away the demanded gender roles and just do what feels good to you, and the hell with what society thinks.  That experience will fade with time as GLBT lifestyles become more accepted, God willing.

OA:  I Will was released a few days ago. If you could really visit the space adventure universe in the book, would you want to go? Why, or why not?

BPL: Heck, yeah!  It’s filled with all the cool SF stuff I craved as a kid–aliens, interstellar travel, strange planets, and a very comfortable, high-tech environment.  Plus Earth in this universe (it shows up in the sequel) has incorporated a lot of the policy changes I recommend.  When you’re creating the world, you can make it do anything you want!

OA:  Your bio on the Lyrical Press site describes you as a born-again Christian and a liberal Democrat, and says that this combination confuses people. Do you think this confusion is unwarranted, or are there times when you find your spirituality and your political beliefs in conflict?

BPL: It hasn’t been a problem so far, aside from occasional frustration with fellow Christians who embrace politics I don’t, and fellow left-liberals who reject my religion or all religions.  I can get along with anybody, but I have had a few occasions when I was told I couldn’t be a “real” Christian if I supported [pick an issue--free choice, gay rights, evolution...].  Also that I couldn’t “really” understand or believe science if I believed in God, and that as a Christian I undoubtedly embraced misogyny, homophobia, racism, creationism, and despoiling the environment.  Sometimes it was honest ignorance; sometimes it was just prejudice.

OA:  You have two more books coming out in the next year: Max and Me, and Year of the Human. Can you tell us anything about them? When can we expect to see them?

BPL: Max and Me is an SF action-adventure novel with a little speculative philosophy thrown in.  The protagonist is Gunnar “Gunner” Dahlquist, a bisexual veteran of Beast War III who now pilots a freelance spaceship out of 1 Ceres.  He lives with the bioengineered talking cat Max, who is even more cynical and foul-mouthed than he is.  Things get strange when, twelve years after Beast War III ended, people suddenly begin pursuing Max, one faction wanting to kidnap him, another to kill him.

Year of the Human is a young-adult SF novel.  Alien teen girl Throsu ka-Hohsh is a would-be astronaut and a nationalist; her planet fought a brief, inconclusive war with Earth years earlier.  She is thrown for a loop when her parents inform her they will host a human scientist and her daughter for a year–the daughter to live in Throsu’s room!  And soon that’s the least of her worries.

OA:  As a concerned physicist, what (if anything) do you think the global community can do to successfully end global warming? If it doesn’t work, what do you think the consequences will look like?

BPL: If we make a massive switch away from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and hydro in the next five to ten years, and stop cutting down forests, we may just make it.  Frankly, I don’t think we will.  The human pattern is never to prevent a crisis; it’s to wait until the crisis happens and then react.  This time that pattern is going to kill us.  Global warming causes more droughts in continental interiors and more violent weather along coastlines.  12% of the Earth’s land surface was “severely dry” by the Palmer Drought Severity Index in 1970; by 2002 that figure was 30% and still climbing (Dai et al. 2004).  I expect human agriculture to collapse completely some time in the next forty years, and when that goes our civilization will go with it.

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Thanks, Barton! Join us again on Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out I Will at Virtual Tales, or other books by Barton Paul Levenson at Lyrical Press.

[1] (Back to post): My apologies for the tardiness of this week’s Spotlight. A series of international travel (mis)adventures left me without internet access on Friday and Saturday.

Since 2004, Angelia since written seven novels, ten novellas, and many more short stories both on her own and together with her writing partner, Naomi Brooks. Their latest novel, Alive on the Inside, came out in December. An erotic horror novel about a traveling circus, Alive on the Inside has been nominated as a candidate for Best Horror Novel in the Preditors and Editors Readers’ Poll for works published in 2009.

Angelia and Naomi are planning to release a Western in 2010. Showdown at Yellowstone River will feature a drag king gunslinger and a bisexual sheriff. In addition to that novel, a couple of collections of previously published short stories are on the horizon. Angelia will be making appearances at several cons and events including MidSouthCon in March, Southern Delta Church of Wicca‘s Beltane, Hypericon in June, Either Memphit FurMeet or Dragon*Con in September, MidSouth Pride,  Summerland Grove‘s Festival of Souls in October, and  ConTraception in November.

Angelia is a truck driver and mother of four, who identifies as a bisexual, Butch Earth Mother. She grew up in Peculiar, Missouri, but has lived in the greater Memphis area for the past twelve years. She blogs about her writing at http://angelsparrow.blogspot.com/ (syndicated on LiveJournal here), and maintains a personal blog at http://valarltd.livejournal.com/. Angelia enjoys crochet and old movies, and donates both time and money to Memphis Area Gay Youth.

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OA: Alive on the Inside came out in December, and is up for Best Horror Novel in the Preditors and Editors Readers’ Poll. Can you tell us a bit about it?

AS: Nick Harper, small-town car salesman, gets swept away from his closeted little life by a dark carnival. He falls and falls hard for Jacob Plum, aka Torturo the Pain King. But as he is with the show, his toxic religion, Jacob’s abusiveness and the general weirdness come into harsher and harsher conflict.

Everyone reading it keeps saying “Not for the faint of heart,” and my publisher felt a warning was in order. There is also a fair bit of heterosexuality, since the acts in the Adult Show are all het, including Torturo and the conjoined twins. Torturo doesn’t just bear a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn, he is omnivorously sexual and lives by Flynn’s preferred epitaph: “If it moved, [he] fucked it.” And I know a lot of m/m only readers don’t like bisexuality (or omnisexuality) in their stories.

OA: Where did the idea for a twisted circus come from?

AS: Oh so MANY sources, fictional and real-life. Is there really anything creepier than a closed or deserted amusement park? I lived in Peculiar during the era described and visited the dying park, Fairyland, in its last season. I was 9 and it has stuck with me. And clowns? Who isn’t scared of clowns and mirror mazes, honestly?

The most immediate answer on the literary front is Bryan Smith’s The Freakshow, a horror novel I picked up the summer before I wrote Alive on the Inside. Bryan’s a lovely guy and gave us a nice blurb for Alive, by the way.  But I’d been kicking around the idea of full-length horror instead of just paranormal romance shorts as we’d been doing.  So, with some rereadings of Ray Bradbury and Tom Reamy (I always loved Bradbury’s dark carnival short stories), a few viewings of the movie Freaks, and a lot of web exploration on carnival illusions, deserted theme parks and the like, Naomi and I managed to get it together.

OA: You’ve written a lot of different kinds of queer characters from lesbian and gay to bi and trans, and currently Shell Shocked is in the number one spot for Best Gay Romance with a Disabled Lead at Good Reads. What were some of your most fun and/or most challenging characters to write?

The most fun were definitely Robin and Marion, along with Bess and Little John. How can you NOT have fun writing Robin Hood in love with King Richard’s bastard son, who has been raised as a princess? The fun we had really shows through Heart of a Forest. Edward Kilsby and Charlie Doyle from Curse of the Pharoah’s Manicurists were great guys. We’re glad they took us along on that trip and they’ve invited us along on a polar expedition very soon.

The challenging characters would be Chuck Hummingbird from Glad Hands and Adlai Goodman from Kestrel on the Horizon. They required a great deal or research on religion (Chuck’s), attitudes and mindsets. Chuck, I could do more with because he is a futuristic. He has some issues, but for the most part, he’s very comfortable with himself. But Adlai, being a character of color in the early 1800s, has ideas that are very different than our own 21st century ones. There’s always some doubt in a white writer’s mind when she sets down to write characters of color as to whether she is walking the fine line between stereotype and what Harlan Ellison calls “Julie Andrews in Man-Tan.”

OA: Do you have plans for further diversity in future books?

AS: Oh yes. We write as the muses move us. Most of our books have some sort of diversity, racial, ethnic, religious or class.

At the moment, we have a cross-dressing space chanteuse, Commander Cliff Cody and his two husbands facing down space-faring brain-eating dark elves, a useless young man being taken in by a wealthy benefactor, flower fairies and a vampire apocalypse, which includes immortals of every race and era, especially Samil, a soldier in the armies of King David who died under a Hittite sword, and Ursula, who was tortured to death for witchcraft in colonial New England. My dark future universe, with a Balkanized US, is moving into the third novel, Nick & Corban, and James Ligatos’ Jewish faith will be more prominent, as will the whole dominionist theocracy that runs the Confederated States of America.

OA: How did you and Naomi Brooks become writing partners, and how do you decide who writes what? Is there a methodical process there, or is it more random?

AS: Once upon a business class, Han Solo and Bagoas fell in love. We met in an online role-playing game called Fandom High. Although we both had to leave the game for work-related reasons, we continued writing together.

We each have stock characters, muses we call them. One of us will hit on a story idea and we’ll poke around to see who wants to play, to see who will fit the story line.

[The process] starts random. Then it grows out of AIM role-play and we find our plot. I usually do the outlining, with Naomi suggesting plot-twists. Sometimes I write, show her what there is and the muses pipe up with dialogue or actions.

She does a read of the rough draft before I ever touch it. Then we both work on re-writes.

OA: For writers everything is story fodder. How has your job as a truck driver influenced your writing?

AS: It has gotten me out, let me see more places, including a very creepy motel that is going to show up soon. It has given me a different skill set, which allows me to write more realistic trucker characters. You’ll never see mine lounging in the driver’s seat in his undershorts with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (the booze can cost him his license, even if he’s not driving impaired) Truckers are very popular in m/m, being all butch and macho.

Also, the sheer length of time behind the wheel lets me work out plot points, meditate on characters and even do dialogue. I’m not a long haul driver. I have a dedicated run and spend about 6 hours a day driving.

OA: As the mother of a queer teen, do you have any advice for other parents with queer kids?

AS: First and foremost: get support. Get it for yourself, get it for your child. The earlier a child comes out, the more peer group problems there can be. My daughter had other children (yes, age 13-15 is children) trying to kill her. Our local gay and lesbian youth group was a great help to her during the rougher patches.

Second, don’t be a hypocrite. If your straight child can date, let the queer one date, too. Don’t freak out over the same-sex kissing anymore than you freak out over the opposite sex kissing. Sleepovers are problematic, but know your child and who ze is romantically involved with and who ze considers a friend.

Third: safe sex. Talk about it. Provide for it. You cannot tell a queer teen “wait until you’re married” when they can’t marry in 45 states. Condoms and dental dams, learn them and be prepared to talk about them.

OA: Are there any resources you’d particularly recommend?

AS: PFLAG is an excellent one, especially if one parent is having problems with the notion.

Your local GLBT community center may have programs for youth or be able to direct you that way.

The Trevor Project is the only nationwide 24 hour help and suicide prevention hotline specifically for queer youth. Our kids commit suicide at a rate three times that of their straight peers. Consider supporting this.

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Thank you, Angelia! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Alive on the Inside.

The American Library Association (ALA) celebrated Banned Books Week from 26 September – 3 October this year. Their 2009 list of challenged/banned books (PDF, 8.4MB) includes “And Tango Makes Three”, “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, “King & King”, “Girl, Interrupted”, “The Joy of Gay Sex” and “The Lesbian Kama Sutra”, among others. (Speculative fiction books included “The Golden Compass” “The Great Tree of Avalon”, “Brave New World”, and more.) For the curious, past lists of challenged/banned books are also available.

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”.

Outer Alliance Pride Day has officially begun around the world! We’ll be updating the post here as more appear. Thanks to everyone for contributing, and for those who’d like to join along, it’s never too late. Just link to this post, and your pingback will appear in our comments. Keep in mind that many of these links will go live during the day (as noted).

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity.  I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Posts:

• Jordan Humphreys - Just another suicide on Bohemia Avenue was playing in the background…
• Mari Kurisato – Flight was originally published on Claire M Jacksons blog…
• Cesar Torres - SMS transcript, May 2005. Ned: My mom says I can go to prom with you. I gots permission!
• Chris Fletcher - “I hate that term… ‘meat raider.’” and Though it had already been two years since he and Jayson had gotten the robbie…
• Anna Caro – She had been waiting for this moment her whole life.
• Sam Fleming – I met him/her on the stairs. It wasn’t the first time.
• Lynne Jamneck – She found the house on Custard Street without incident.
• Caren Gussoff – Live @ 7pm EST – Spitkitten
• Benjamin Solah – I think this is a really good thing in speculative fiction and I think writers, whatever their sexual orientation…
• Paul Evanby – He had it shaved into his crew-cut sometimes, and he had a thing about black t-shirts with i printed on them in large type…
• Corinne Duyvis - In my own writing, that translates to don’t be a jerk, which is always solid advice.
• Roz Kaveney – She wore a silk scarf round her throat and took the trouble to eat three cloves of garlic just before arriving at the concert. and And since I am, suddenly, a queer poet as well as a queer novelist…
• Brandon Bell – Here is a sample from ‘things we are not…’
• Cecilia Tan – At her own blog and at Circlet Press . Live @ 11:59 EST
• Deena Fisher – Live on the 1st here.
• Mel Green – Outer Alliance Pride Day 2009: An excerpt from MoW – Live at 12:01am AKST
• Kelley Eskridge – Live on the 1st @ 12am PST, right here!
• Pia Veleno – I write gay fiction.  Yes, sometimes it’s graphic.
• Hal Duncan - Dear Elders of Sodom, Many thanks for the link you sent us to this John C. Wrong chap’s Apologia.
• N. K. Jemisin - Now, to explain: I’m straight.
• Aishwarya Subramanian – Since I haven’t written any fiction (queer or otherwise) in a while…
• Natania Barron – Peter was wrested out of contemplation by the jostling of the door above…
• Catherine Lundoff  – Becca Thornton’s first hot flash came on suddenly and unexpectedly…
• John Coulthart – For my part I decided today to do a sketch based on my favourite chapter of The Ticket that Exploded by William Burroughs…
• Alex Jeffers – “Happy equinox!” Oisín yelled when he heard his little brother clattering up the stairs.
• Alan Yee – When I was sixteen years old, my mother died.
• Sherwood Smith – Many members are posting from their work, but I couldn’t find anything suitable…
• Bart Leib - at Crossed Genres: For our twelfth issue, the final issue of our first year, Crossed Genres has chosen LGBTQ for the issue’s theme. and Andi opened her mouth to speak, but stopped.
• Adam Israel – Real life, as represented by fiction, should be diverse.
• Hayden Thorne – Frowning more deeply, he leaned forward some more until his forehead pressed against the glass.
• Kit Zheng – In honor of Outer Alliance Pride Day, I have released my 2006 sci-fi short story Hide as a freebie on my website.
• Jennifer Pelland – The online works of mine that best show this reflection are: Captive Girl and Mercytanks.
• Craig Gidney – The music stopped, Courtney wasn’t sure when.
• Nick Poniatowski – I was assigned to the Scrap Factory after three years of killing.
• Jay Lake - Boys love other boys. It’s the way of things.
• Thomas Scofield - “Saragoth’s gold spends so easily!”  Vi practically purred, changing two gold pieces for three silk scarves.
• Fábio Fernandes – As many of our associates are doing all over the world right now…
• K. L. Richardsson – The kisses — he wasn’t sure what to do about the kisses.
• Lou Hoffman - For those unfamiliar with my work, “The 8th Year” is Harry Potter fanfic.
• Julia Rios – “A young adventurer, just starting out?”
• Alena McNamara – I’ve posted this next bit before, when I was making an initial list of books to bring to college
• Cheryl Morgan – Today is the first ever Outer Alliance Pride Day.
• Mary Layton – This is an artwork in progress in support of The Outer Alliance on its inaugural Pride Day
• Lee Wind - Okay, “beam me up!” is admittedly kinda dorky…
• Sarah Gostee - I signed up because I support this mission statement, and because I wanted to sit quietly in the virtual corner and listen.
• Nicola Griffith – It began, as these things often do, at a bar–a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle’s Queen City Grill…
• Wendy Kovitz – I became a straight ally of the community not long after the realization hit me…
• Elizabeth Schechter - The goblin led me to a mossy bank, guided me gently down onto my back and then stretched out next to me.
• JoSelle Vanderhooft - Once when rooks wrote treatises on sorrow and cities named themselves, a girl named Puzzle made her home in a house made all of boxes.
• Phoebe Harris - But what exactly is queer speculative fiction, besides an inspired melding of contentious umbrella terms?
• Harry Markov – September first is a special day for me for several reasons.
• Michael M. Jones – I wasn’t sure what else to say on the subject.
• Kip Manley - There’s a new outfit in town—
• C. D. Covington - The bunks on the Donau had not been designed with trysts in mind.
• Derek J. Goodman – It was ironic that, since he’d been listening to the sky for a month for the tell-tale signs of an approaching giant…
• A. H. Greenwood – Did the voices of the First Years always sound so heart-achingly young?
• Kate Elliott – Why does this matter to me? Because it’s the right thing to do.
• Inanna Arthen – So, I just joined today…
• Tom Smith – As far as “work”, I’ve got a few songs along the way that count, but the most prominent, I think, is “Two Guys Kissin’ (Ruined My Life)”.
• David J. Schwartz - It was suggested that we post an excerpt of our own queer speculative fiction today…
• Elissa Malcohn – As part of Outer Alliance Pride Day, members around the world are posting fiction or blog posts…
• E. London Setterby – As for my own writing, well,  I haven’t written very much yet…
• Willow Fagan – “Ah, an emissary from my sister,” the prince said.
• Katharine Beutner – She was almost a copy of Hero.
• Elizabeth Coleman – Juri locked the door to his inner bedchamber, but not before using a blob of wax to stick a sign to his door…
• Elizabeth Bear – In related news, September 1 is Outer Alliance Pride Day.
• J. M. McDermott – I’ve noticed it’s harder to sell short stories with gay leads than with straight leads…
• Marie Brennan – The Outer Alliance is a recently-launched LGBT organization for speculative fiction.
• K. V. Taylor – But I am ever ready with good laugh, since I find nothing bares the ridiculousness of society like a good solid flogging…
• Deborah J. Brannon – Although it is not speculative, I’d like to share with you my one published lesbian poem: “Ireland, A Sapphic Poem.”
• M. A. Temple – For the sake of today, I have decided to repost an older story of which I am quite fond.
• Samantha Holloway – Now, since I didn’t hear of this with any warning, I don’t have anything to add, fic-wise…
• Genreville – Genre fiction frequently takes a distorting lens to certain aspects of culture.
• Rose Fox - This week, that’s taken the form of chatting with the folks at Cleis Press…
• Erica Hildebrand - When people started talking about a blogosphere “pride day”…
• Shanna Germain – Skye is hunting off the prow of the boat.
• KD – I kept one eye on the trainees, watching as it slowly dawned, one by one, that they were probably sitting within a meter of the murderer.
• Angela Korra’ti – The Disenchanting of Princess Ceridwen and post.
• David Moles - I return to the Jing Shi at evening, boarding in the bustle of new passengers coming aboard.
• Marie Carlson – The air was hot and so wet it was practically a solid mass in my lungs.
• Ann Sommerville – I’m there. Where the bloody hell are you?
• Faustina - I am not yet a member of The Outer Alliance, but I wanted to participate and show my support.
• J. C. Hay - “I want to see you again.”
• Julie Andrews – Here’s three reviews I wrote about David Gerrold’s series the Dingilliad.
• Elle – He woke to the feeling of floating, hazy, like his limbs were distant from the drunk of his body and he was an inch off the wood operating table.
• Therese Arkenberg – “I’m so glad to have you,” Ashariel had told him once.
• Kay Holt – If you think you can rock that Mission Statement, I suggest you join me there.
• Jeff VanderMeer - By the time he reached the Cafe of the Ruby-Throated Calf, Lake found that his fellow artists had, aided by large quantities of alcohol…