Keffy Kehrli Talks About Gender on Writing Excuses September 23, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : links , 4commentsI’m super busy this week, but I thought I’d take a minute to point out something good:
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!
Outer Alliance Spotlight #56: Make It Better November 19, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : events, links, news , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #56. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. This week brings us The International Transgender Day of Remembrance, and some more updates on the anti-bullying projects floating around the internet.
The 20th of November, 2010 is the twelfth annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. On this day, people all over the world come together to remember people who were killed because of anti-transgender bias. If you are interested in attending one of these vigils, transgenderdor.org has a list of events and locations.
This brings us to a sticky point that’s come up recently on the Outer Alliance Google group. We’ve talked about the It Gets Better Project and the We Got Your Back Project before (here and here, respectively), both of which are projects intended to give hope to teens in rough situations. The problem is, for some people, it doesn’t get better. For too many people, being part of the LGBTQI spectrum means facing violence, verbal abuse, and despair. There’s a list of people being memorialized this year–people who were killed in the last twelve months because other people didn’t like the idea of transgender people existing–and it’s horribly long. It would be too long if it were one person, but it’s much worse than that. Faced with cold hard truths like that, some Outer Alliance members wonder how we can say It Gets Better? They worry that urging kids to wait out the rough times isn’t enough. And they’ve got a point. That’s why our next two items for this week explore other messages.
*Hal Duncan made a spectacularly sincere (and sweary) It Gets Better video. On the Google group, a lot of the positive reactions to this video commend Hal for acknowledging that 1) things really suck and being told to hang in there doesn’t always help a whole lot when you’re in the middle of that suck, and 2) the reason it can get better is not just because the world will change while we sit in quiet misery, but because we can make it better. By waiting, maybe, but also by refusing to accept things as they are. Click here to watch, but be advised that we’re not kidding about the swear quotient. It’s massive.
*The Make It Better Project encourages people to work toward fostering acceptance. They have suggestions for ways that teens and adults can take action to protect LGBTQI kids in school and out, including a YouTube campaign, and a letters to school principals campaign.
Thanks for reading. Join us again next Friday for more queer speculative fiction related goodness. We’d love to see more ideas for how to make things better, and more videos from Outer Alliance members. If you’ve got any of those, please let us know!
Outer Alliance Spotlight #52: Coming Out 2010 October 15, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : links, news, publications, queer-friendly publishers, submissions , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #52. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. Coming out Day was Monday the 11th (Tuesday the 12th in the UK), so that’s our focus this week.
OA Members Talk About Coming Out:
Nicola Griffith shared an excerpt from her memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life. This is a sad, alarming, amusing, and sweet glimpse of Nicola’s teen years before she became a well-adjusted and happily out adult.
Cheryl Morgan reminded us that being out is not always simple, easy, or safe with a post examining some of the challenges trans people face.
Catherine Lundoff agrees that being out is a privilege, and asks that we consider supporting organizations which help queer youth like District 202.
New Releases:
Rigor Amortis, the anthology of zombie erotica edited by Jaym Gates and Erika Holt is available at amazon, and contains stories by OA members Kay Holt and Kaolin Fire.
The Little Death of Crossed Genres, edited by Chris Fletcher and Jaym Gates is available in both electronic and print formats through the Crossed Genres website.
The latest issue of Weird Tales contains Natania Barron’s three part poem about “made” women in mythology. “The Wakened Image” appears alongside pictures by Brigid Ashwood.
Calls for Submissions by Queer-friendly Publishers:
Rose Lemberg would love to see poems with LGBTQI voices for Stone Telling. The current submission window is open until the 21st of November, and at present, Rose says there hasn’t been nearly enough queer content in the submissions pile.
Port Iris Zine is accepting submissions for issue #4 until the 5th of November. See their guidelines for more details.
Karen Romanko is looking for Halloween themed stories for her next anthology, Jack-o’-Spec.
That’s all for this time. Join us again next week, and please share any news you might have here in the comments, on the Outer Alliance google group, or via Twitter (mention either @omgjulia, or @outeralliance)
Outer Alliance Spotlight #47: Congratulations! (and some changes) September 10, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : announcements, links, news, publications, queer-friendly publishers , add a commentWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #47. Traditionally, the Spotlight has featured an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. It’s been a year since the Spotlight started, though (I’ve missed a few weeks due to travel and so forth), and it’s time the Spotlight format changed a bit. We’ll still have interviews some weeks, but from now on the Spotlight will also be a news and notes column. There may be more exciting changes in the works, too, but I’m afraid I’m not going to say more about those just yet. For now, let’s get to the news!
First, congratulations to all the Hugo winners! Lots of awesome stuff up there, including plenty of things by LGBTQI friendly people. Congratulations, too, to all the nominees who didn’t end up taking home a rocket ship of their very own. It was a great crowd this year. Special thanks and congratulations to Cheryl Morgan, who provided live coverage of the awards (alongside podcast superstar, Mur Lafferty), and shared the Best Semiprozine win with Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace of Clarkesworld.
Second, Congratulations to Outer Alliance founder, Natania Barron, for a few things! Aside from being in on the groud floor of the new Geek Mom blog, our fearless leader has a story in the new Dark Futures anthology. She’s in great company as the anthology is full of stories by excellent writers, including two who’ve been interviewed here before: Sara Harvey and Michele Lee.
But that’s not all Natania’s been up to! She’s also agreed to take on editorial responsibilities (along with OA member, Jaym Gates) at Crossed Genres starting next year. Bart Leib and K.T. Holt will still be the publishers, but they’re handing over the editorial reins so that they can focus on putting together anthologies, and managing the Science In My Fiction site, which they started last March. The best part? Science In My Fiction will be publishing short stories each month, which means there’s yet another LGBTQI friendly SF market in the world (here are the submissions guidelines). Hurray!
Next is something not speculative fiction related, but noteworthy all the same: the fine folks at Lambda Literary have posted a call for submissions to a Mothers of Trans Children Project. This will be published by Cleis Press and edited by Rachel Pepper, co-author of The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.
And finally, here’s a thoughtful guest post about bisexuality and gender-bending in paranormal romance by Cecilia Tan on the GLBT Reading blog.
That’s it for this week. If you have any Spotlight-worthy notes, news, links, etc., please let us know in the comments, on the OA google group, or by telling me on Twitter. You can address me directly, or use the Twitter tag #oaspotlight to let me know what’s new. I look forward to hearing from you!
Outer Alliance Spotlight #37: Lauren P. Burka June 4, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #37. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Lauren P. Burka, writer and assistant editor at Circlet Press.
Lauren’s fiction debuted in 1992 with the collection, Mate: And More Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy. Since then she’s written several more pieces, both long and short. Most recently Torquere Books released her m/m romance, Wishbone, and her short story, “Double Edged Bomb” appeared in the collection of erotic superhero stories, Like a Mask Removed. As an editor, she works on single author projects and anthologies such as the transgendered themed Up For Grabs, the BDSM themed Kneel to Me, and the M/M SFF erotica collection, Wired Hard 4. She is currently editing the sequel to Up For Grabs, and writing a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.
Lauren lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Circlet Press headquarters. If you’d like to catch up with her in person, she’ll be attending Readercon in July.
Outer Alliance Spotlight #27: Sumana Harihareswara March 26, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , 2commentsWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #27. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Sumana Harihareswara, co-editor of Thoughtcrime Experiments.
Sumana is a straight ally, who is committed to promoting diversity and acceptance in everything she does. She has written for Salon and Bookslut in the past, and currently writes for the Geek Feminism blog. Together with her husband, Leonard Richardson, she edited the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments in 2009. Thoughtcrime experiments has been longlisted for the British Fantasy Award, and one of the illustrations in it (“Gaia’s Strange Seedlike Brood (homage to Lynn Marguils)” by Patrick Farley) is on the shortlist for the Ursa Major Awards.
In her non-writing and editing life, Sumana dabbles in all sorts of pursuits from standup comedy to technical project management. She has managed projects for Fog Creek Software, Behavior Design, and Collabora, and one of her former colleagues recognized her as an exemplary woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day this year. Sumana keeps a personal journal on her website, a fanfiction profile at Archive of Our Own, and a micro journal on identi.ca (also available on Twitter).
Linkdump #9 – libraries and politics March 23, 2010
Posted by zeborah in : links , add a commentFiction and libraries
GLBT Reading (The Blog That Dare Not Speak Its Name) has focused this March on graphic novels and manga.
Shelf Check is a webcomic set in a public library that frequently touches on GLBTQ issues – see for example the strip on ‘transgender’ in the Library of Congress subject headings and a recent blog post asking “As a GLBTQ library patron, I feel welcomed when…” [complete the sentence].
Politics
Got an iPhone? You can now use it to sign a petition to repeal Proposition 8 in California. Sign the petition at http://restoreequality2010.com/ipod.htm or signal boost this article about it.
Benjamin Solah writes about a protest for same-sex marriage in Melbourne.
Kei Kei has created a sourced timeline of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
And of course, remember to Queer the Census!
For more regular linkdumps, please let me know of any interesting links in comments, by email, on the Outer Alliance forum or bookmark them on delicious or diigo with tag “outeralliancelinks“.
Linkdump – the inaugural edition September 27, 2009
Posted by zeborah in : links , 1 comment so farGreetings all! Each week I’ll be compiling whatever links people bring to my attention as likely being of general interest to those following the Outer Alliance Blog. The links for the first linkdump are…
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”.