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!

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!

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)

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!

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.

***

OA: Your first collection of stories, Mate, was first published nearly 20 years ago, and has a cyberpunk feel to it. How has your vision of the future changed since then? How has it remained constant?

LB: For me, science fiction is less about the future than the present. Cyberpunk was 1990 remixed, shinier, with room more room to play and new ways of looking at the world.

Then we met the future of 1990, and it’s not as fun to live in as we imagined.  It’s made of ComCast and Facebook and Windows.

Now all the cool kids have gone steampunk–H.G. Well’s future, where science could solve all of our problems and men still knew how to dress.  I’d like to build worlds that the reader has never seen before, and I hope they’ll stay for a while.  “When” the world is may not matter to the reader as much as how well it is constructed and who lives in it.  In that way my current writing most resembles the middle story in Mate.  That story was told from the point of view of a straight young man in a world ruled by lesbian warriors.

OA: Circlet Press exists to fill a niche for erotic speculative fiction because the other speculative fiction publishers seem unwilling to take erotica. What draws you to the genre, and why do you think it’s a difficult sell for most houses?

LB: I’ve never understood why we don’t see more books that explore sexuality. Faster-than-light travel gets all the attention. I’m not sure why; when we get it, it will be just as buggy and overpriced as the internet.  Sexuality, on the other hand, is something we think about all day, every day. I want to explore sex because FTL has been done to death.

On the other hand, what are my chances of being a break-out author in science fiction? Science fiction publishers are drowning in slush, and their sales are shrinking.

We joke that science fiction editors think that all their readers are fourteen year old boys, and that any sex will upset their mothers. It’s not a joke. Sure, we get some awesome exceptions, like Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest. But they are exceptions, not the rule.

Meanwhile, the 14 year old boys are playing video games and watching DVDs, and women purchase more than half the books sold every year. But they’re not buying from science fiction houses. They’re buying romances, because they like fiction about relationships. If you look at a romance publisher’s catalog, you’ll see urban fantasy romances, science fiction romances, heroic fantasy romances, vampire and werewolf romances. You could certainly argue that romances are poorly-written and repetitive, but they’re what readers want. Or so says my last royalty statement.

OA: You’ve edited several anthologies for Circlet. What is the most rewarding aspect of the editing process for you? How does it compare to the rewards of writing?

LB: You know how excited you get when you sell something? When I edit an anthology, I get to make a bunch of people that happy. It’s just as much fun as you might expect.

Of course, the rejections outnumber the acceptances. Sending rejections is sad, because I know most authors sweat over their story every bit as much as I sweat over mine. The saddest part is that if everyone sent me a winner, I wouldn’t necessarily have to reject some of them. I could put out a second or third volume of stories, because e-publishing is flexible. That’s why it depresses me to get trunk stories from someone who woke up that morning and decided to submit to every publisher that starts with “C.”

Editing also requires a whole new set of skills. You’re still writing, but now it’s introductions and press releases. Some stories are good, but need re-writes to be better. I find it tricky to improve an author’s voice without imposing my own, but it’s worth the work. I think that being the editor who bought the first story from an author who subsequently takes off is as exciting as selling a novel. That makes up for all the rejection letters I have to write.

OA: You’re working on a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. As someone with Asperger’s, you are coming at this from a place of personal experience. What sets this apart from other cookbooks?

LB: Recently I was making chicken stock. Stock takes all day. My last step is to reduce the strained stock by boiling it so it will take less room in the freezer. Then in the middle of the night one of our cats woke us up with that plaintive cry that says something is wrong with the world. I took one sniff and knew that I had left the stock cooking. It had cooked down and just started to burn. I spent a couple of hours the next day cleaning the pot.

Well, that showed me. I’d be more careful the next time. Except I did it again. The cat was too disgusted with me to bother, and I spent the next day cleaning the pot again.

And then I did it a third time.

After that, I set an alarm to go off every hour while I was making stock, so I would have stock at the end, not a dirty pot.

In my cookbook, recipes will include instructions for setting alarms, because I know I’m not the only Aspie who does silly things like that.

OA: In January, Torquere published your m/m romance, Wishbone. Can you tell us more about that? Do you anticipate writing more m/m romance books in the future? Are there any other genres you’d like to explore?

LB: I’m currently writing the sequel to Wishbone. However, I tend to get bored if I do the same thing over and over. My next work after that may be a traditional heterosexual romance, just to prove I can do it. After that I may go back to Wishbone’s world. It’s got a lot of room for stories.

***

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

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).

***

OA: How did you try to encourage diversity in the stories you received for Thoughtcrime Experiments? Are you happy with the end result, or are there things you wish you’d seen more of? Would you do anything differently if you put together another anthology?

SH: We published nine stories and five illustrations. I believe four were by women and five by men, and at least two of the nine authors were people of color.  Two of the five artists were women, and I don’t know whether any of the artists are nonwhite.  At least one of the authors and one of the artists identify as queer, but I don’t know the sexualities of most of our creators.

We wanted a lot of kinds of diversity in the submissions.  We wanted diversity specifically in topic, theme, and approach in the stories, and diversity in the authors’ genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and other identifying characteristics.  We mentioned several of these in the call for submissions.  I wish I’d tried harder to recruit nonwhite and queer authors; I wrote to a few relevant blogs, mailing lists, workshops, and interest groups, but not as many as I could have, and I got several bounce messages I should have followed up on.

Our submissions statistics were okay in terms of gender, compared to some other publications; it looks like about a third of the submitting authors were women.  But out of 200 distinct authors who submitted pieces, a naive look at author names makes it look like we got only 14 submissions by people of color.  I should have tried harder there.

Of course, that’s going by the names authors gave us, which might have been pseudonyms, and I can’t tell anything about whether authors are transgendered or cisgendered from their names, and many people of color have names that I read as white.  Still, if I edit again, I’ll do more recruiting and outreach via affinity groups and publications.

I am happy with the diversity of themes, approaches, and topics in the stories.  We have futuristic noir, a fable, a Manhattan cat story, a poly queer chromatic academic/merchant family IN SPACE, magic, slapstick political satire, hard physics entrepreneurialism, theology, and a military Mrs. Claus.  I figure that’s something for everyone.

OA: You’ve gotten more interested in trans issues over the past year. Why and how did that happen? Can you recommend any resources for other people who are interested in learning more about that subject?

SH: I am dismayed that I’d been so unaware of issues specific to the T in LGBTIQQ until 2009.  Two friends of mine came out to me as trans last year, and through them I started hearing about their legal, medical, social, familial, and other challenges.  Here I was thinking I’d been all hip and allied on gender issues — didn’t I go to UC Berkeley?  didn’t I teach Left Hand of Darkness and love Varley‘s “The Phantom of Kansas”? And yet I hadn’t been grokking how harrowing it could be simply to need to use a public restroom, or how many hoops medical establishments put in the way of transitioning.  I didn’t even know the word “cisgender,” much less realize that it describes me.  I’d sort of understood how homophobia plays a role in policing sexual identity and expression; now I understand better how transphobia polices gender identity and expression.

Some resources:

Questioning Transphobia: http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/about/
This blogroll: http://nixwilliams.blogspot.com/

OA: Last year was your first WisCon, and you liked it enough that you’ll be there again this year. What was your previous experience like, and what are you looking forward to this time around?

SH: Not only was it my first WisCon, it was my first con, period.  Basically, I thought that promoting the anthology gave me a reason (an excuse!) to go.

WisCon changed my life; it was a singularity and every day since has been different than the years before.  I felt at home, challenged intellectually and emotionally, and exhilarated.  I compare WisCon to going to a vegetarian restaurant; I’m paralyzed with choice because I want to do everything!  I met several new friends there, including some very close ones, and got into some authors and media (N.K. Jemisin, Dreamwidth, and fanvids, for examples) I thoroughly enjoy.  WisCon was the first time I’d ever met so many fans of color.  And there was the lunch with four acquaintances, where I was the only one who’s not queer!

I found strangers via the Internet who would let me sleep on the floor of their hotel room.  I signed up to speak on panels and ended up on three; perhaps I was useful in two of them, but they were all interesting.

This year, I’m of course interested in several panels, like “Facebook and Its Discontents,” “Fighting Imposter Syndrome,” the “Once Upon A Time” game-playing panel, and panels on small presses, worldbuilding, supportive artists’ SOs, forgotten women writers, and fanfic.  I hope I get to participate on a panel or two.  I look forward to seeing friends I saw last year.  I’ll be seeing college pal Shweta Narayan again for the first time in years, and I’ll get to meet Alexandra Erin, whose Tales of MU I’ve been reading for years.  And Mary Anne Mohanraj, whose “Jump Space” appears in Thoughtcrime Experiments, is a WisCon Guest Of Honor, so I shall puff out my chest and bask in reflected glory.

OA: How did your decision to publish Thoughtcrime Experiments under a Creative Commons license affect its production and distribution? Is this a publishing model you’d recommend to others? Do you have any advice for people who want to make their own anthologies?

SH: I can’t conceive of us trying to make this one-shot anthology make money. It was barely a decision; we both knew from the start that it’d be CC.  We are two amateurs, not marketing geniuses, and we weren’t mining a profitable niche in porn or a top-shelf brand, so it would be pretty difficult to make any money off yet another obscure anthology.  We wanted to get it out to the world, and we could afford the expenses, so any attempt to charge money would just get in the way of readers getting it. Creative Commons licensing is a great way to signal “I’m doing this to give back to the community.”  (Leonard goes into this more in his blog entries about Thoughtcrime Experiments.  The summary: you should donate time or money to get your tastes represented in the short speculative fiction market, but don’t ever think you’re going to get financial ROI or tons of readers.

I think CC made the production easier (fewer worries) and distribution easier in most ways.  People felt free to make audio adaptations, ebook files, etc.  Our use of the noncommercial CC clause does make some meatspace selling issues a little tighter (the paperback has to be sold at cost), but on the other hand, the creators know no one’s making a quick buck off their work.

An anthology’s a great medium for collecting interesting essays, stories, and art.  As with graduate school, you need a *reason* you’re doing it, some particular and fresh question or purpose you’re pursuing.  If you’re thinking of making an anthology, read our appendix and use our OpenOffice templates!

OA: You’re a champion at social interaction and helping people relate to each other (you’ve been described as a geek whisperer because of your ability to translate between tech savvy people and luddites). Have you got any party, conference, or workplace survival tips for those of us who are a bit less socially confident?

SH: To any happy introverts reading this: I do not mean to tell you what to do! And let me link to some tips for allies to ensure that shy folk have better times at parties.  Also, I was massively antisocial until I was in an environment where I blossomed, so all mileages may vary.  With that out of the way, people who want tips for themselves:

For social and work settings, it’s useful to have a business or personal card, and a set of boilerplate questions you can ask, like “Do you live around here” or “What have you been reading” or “How do you know the host/speaker”.   These just lube a lot of interactions.  Or perhaps you can think of them as handles, affordances, like names, that everyone can use to grasp and make their way.

Kirrily Robert has tips on getting good interaction and quality downtime at conferences.

In conversations, I endeavor to enthusiastically listen and ask follow-up questions and bring up related topics and trivia.  This is a learned skill, and sometimes I don’t have the energy to do it.  Some people respond in kind and get the momentum of the conversation going, start new threads and return to old ones. Some don’t. If after five minutes of that treatment (plus pump-priming with my boilerplate questions) the person isn’t saying anything particularly interesting, I say, “will you excuse me” (they basically have to! NEAT TRICK) and say something about food or drink or work or something, go away, and return to my work or find some other person to talk to.  If it’s a conference or party, I almost always find someone who can do twenty interesting minutes with me. And now I’ve made a new acquaintance, probably a friend. If I now need to mingle more to get good ROI out of the event, I frankly say, “I need to go mingle and meet more people,” take her card or give him mine, and move on.

Generally, if you think someone is interesting, you can ask them about the things they’ve done that you find interesting, and if you listen well, they’ll think you’re interesting.  That’s nicked wholesale from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I think.

Possibly the most useful social confidence tool I discovered in 2008 was a page about status-raising and status-lowering behaviors that improv performers put together.  I suddenly understood when I was seeing a dominance display or ritual submission.  You can make those scripts work for you.

***

Thanks, Sumana! Join us next Friday for another Outer Alliance Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Thoughtcrime Experiments.

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“.

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”.