***

***

This has been a busy spring – with two books coming out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction  and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, I feel like I’ve been talking about them here (Tor.com),” there (Autostraddle), and everywhere (with Nicola Griffith). Something I haven’t done, however, is talk about the interrelation of the two projects.

For one thing, they both have colons in their titles.

But there’s something else going on between these two projects, too—a thematic resonance, a contiguous purpose, and that purpose is intimately bound up with issues of gender and sexuality. We Wuz Pushed, a work of scholarly nonfiction on Joanna Russ, opens:

“We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them.”

–Joanna Russ, The Female Man

To speak radical truths—unapologetically, ferociously, rudely when necessary—is the central purpose of Joanna Russ’s influential body of work in science fiction, feminist theory, and criticism. Radical truth-telling takes many forms and addresses many concerns in Russ’s writing, but at the core of her work, from feminist critical theory like How to Suppress Women’s Writing to a Robinsonade like We Who Are About To… to lesbian realist fiction like On Strike Against God, it remains: a burning intent to demystify and clarify, to destroy obfuscations, and to reveal real truths as she perceived them. Her willingness to revise those perceptions and incorporate fresh evidence that required her truths to evolve demonstrates her ultimate understanding of truth as potentially mutable and intimately personal but also supported by social or scientific evidence. In this way, the concept of “real truth” is problematized and individualized but not ultimately rejected. The centrality of this project of radical truth-telling is universal through all her works, the one guiding intention and unifying theme that reoccurs consistently despite all other variations throughout her career.

*

Truth-telling is a multi-faceted thing, but in the end it amounts to this: erasing silences, telling our stories, and filling the spaces where we were previously invisible. It is a process of making meaning whereby the effaced self, the Othered self, claims spaces and power. I’m arguing in We Wuz Pushed for Joanna Russ’s radical investment in truth-telling across her career, and for the stories she told, the truths she refused to keep silent about—queer, feminist, socialist truths about subjectivity, about life, about being. There’s a wealth of awesome material to sift through, from her fiction to her scholarship and then some. Further on in the text, I say,

Silence is the opposite of truth-telling; silence is defeat. Russ makes clear this danger in a set of quotations of other feminist theorists on the same subject, erasure and silence, when (in this case, specifically queer women’s) truths cannot be told and are not told:

The little woman (or man) who isn’t there is not merely invisible. She is also punished. One of the ways she is punished, of course, is having invisibility forced upon her. […] “Silence is like starvation,” says Cherrie Moraga, and Adrienne Rich calls invisibility “a dangerous and painful condition.” She describes the sensation of seeing the world described by those in authority—and not seeing oneself in it—as “psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” (What Are We Fighting For?114)

If silence is starvation, and silence is looking into a mirror and seeing nothing, the only way to fix this erasure is to speak radical truths.

*

I hadn’t seen, at first, the real connection between the two projects I was undertaking. In We Wuz Pushed, I wanted to write about the irreplaceable work of making truths visible that Russ had been engaged in; it’s really fascinating, moving, intense stuff. I loved reading all of her work, thinking about it, staying up nights inserting little sticky-note tabs at quotable lines until all of my copies of her books bristled like rainbow porcupines—it was one of the most invigorating, intellectually challenging things I’ve ever done. Getting to write about it was even better.

But at the same time, in putting together Beyond Binary, I also wanted to make visible a collection of genderqueer and sexually fluid stories, to foreground these often-silenced narratives and to put them out there for the folks who need them. Clearly, I was being a little clueless, or willfully blind: what else was I engaging in but truth-telling? If silence is starvation, and the only way to fix it is speaking out… That is what I hoped to accomplish with Beyond Binary. I wanted to make stories available, make space for queer, nonbinary identities in the discourse.

Looking back, I find the correlation between these two projects—one an anthology, one nonfiction—striking. In one I am discussing someone else’s project of radical truth-telling; in the other, I am trying to contribute something of my own.

***

Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. She is a fiction editor for Strange Horizons Magazine and has two books recently published, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling. Her work—fiction, nonfiction, poetry; she wears a lot of hats—has also been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and Ideomancer. She is a Louisville native and lives there with her partner in an apartment that doesn’t have room for all the books.

Tansy also writes books, and after lots of conversation about fandom, Australia, podcasts and feminism, we DO eventually talk about those books! The book chat starts around the 45 minute mark, but if you skip ahead to that section, you might not understand why we have this map of Australia as an illustration:

For the record, it’s 3,422 km or 2,126 miles from Perth to Melbourne. You can click on the map to see a larger size in my Flickr photostream.

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:

Tansy’s Stuff!
*Tansy’s website, where she blogs.
*Galactic Suburbia, the Hugo nominated Australian feminist science fiction podcast.
*Doctor Her, the Doctor Who blog Tansy recently joined.
*The website for the Creature Court trilogy (including pictures of the covers with the three different dresses).
*Love and Romanpunk at Twelfth Planet Press.
*Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, the anthology edited by Brit Mandelo with one of Tansy’s stories inside.
*Tansy on Twitter.

Other Stuff We Mentioned
*The Hugo nominees! So many OA members, so much awesomeness!
*The Ditmar nominees! Again with the OA members and awesomeness!
*The Writer and the Critic and Shooting the Poo are two more Australian podcasts, both of which feature Ian Mond (AKA Mondy). Incidentally, if you want a great QUILTBAG-centric discussion, check out episode #11 of Shooting the Poo, which is all about the Australian TV series Outland (about a group of QUILTBAG science fiction fans).
*Radio Free Skaro, one of Tansy’s favorite Doctor Who podcasts, and one of the inspirations for Galactic Suburbia.
*The Sofanauts was another of the inspirations for Galactic Suburbia.
*The ASIF podcast discussion of Justine Larbalestier’s work (a precursor to Galactic Suburbia).
*Sean the Blogonaut, one of Australia’s awesomely active fans, and someone whose reading habits have changed since he started listening to Galactic Suburbia.
*Swancon is Perth’s science fiction convention, and Natcon is the roving Australian national convention, which often teams up with other cons. This year it will be at Continuum 8 in Melbourne.
*Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is an Australian specfic magazine. Tansy and Alisa first met through working on it.
*ASIF (Australian Specfic In Focus) is the reviews site Alisa started, and Twelfth Planet Press is the press she started.
*James Tiptree Jr. had all kind of written correspondence and long distance friendships with other SF writers.
*Richard Harland is the writer Tansy’s still embarrassed about fanning over in 1999. He’s now part of her writing group.
*Sean Williams is one of Australia’s biggest SF writers, and also an SF fan who hangs out at cons and is “one of the people.”
*We talked about the post Jim Hines (up for best fan writer in the Hugos this year) did in which he tried to pose like women on Urban Fantasy book covers. Since we recorded this, he’s also posted a series of male Urban Fantasy book cover poses. Both are well worth a look!
*Tansy’s blog post with pictures of the unfortunate portrayal of Pratchett’s Herrena the Henna Haired Harridan.

Awards:

Over the weekend, several conventions around the world announced this year’s Hugo nominees. Voting is open until the 31st of July for anyone who is an attending or supporting member of this year’s WorldCon, Chicon 7. So many awesome people on that list, from Jim Hines to Rachel Swirsky and beyond. The Fancast section is especially strong, which is exciting, as this is the first year for that category. Congratulations to all the nominees, and special awesome congratulations to the OA members on the ballot this year!

This weekend also brought the Tin Duck Awards (for Western Australian spec fic). Big congratulations to all the winners, and especially to Sue Isle for writing Nightsiders, to Alisa Krasnostein for publishing it, and to Stephanie Gunn for her reviews on ASIF!

The Golden Crown Literary Awards finalists are also out! These awards are for lesbian writing, and it looks like a great year for lesbian spec fic. Congratulations to all the spec fic finalists, including JoSelle Vanderhooft, Catherine Lundoff, Steve Berman, and Dayna Ingram! And congratulations also to Sacchi Green, who’s a finalist in the erotica category!

YA Dystopian Stories:

Paolo Bacigalupi’s second Kirkus post is live. Following on our previous conversation, this post calls for inclusivity. Read Straight-laced Dystopias here.

Nora Olsen’s QUILTBAG dystopian YA novel, Swans & Klons will be published by Bold Strokes Books. More about that at Nora’s website. Hurray!

New Books and Fundraisers:

Chicks Dig Comics is officially out in all formats as of yesterday! If you haven’t already read Sigrid Ellis’s essay, now’s a great time to do that. Fair warning: it did make me cry, so you might want to have a tissue handy. Sigrid’s co-editor (and double Hugo nominee for 2012!), Lynne M. Thomas posted a Big Idea essay about the book on John Scalzi’s blog today, too. No crying over that one, just bouncy squeefulness.

The Future Fire is fundraising for a new anthology. Co-edited by Fabio Fernandes, this anthology will be all about colonialism-themed speculative fiction from outside the first-world viewpoint, and they aim to pay pro rates! If this sounds like a worthy venture to you, you can back it here.

Scheherazade’s Facade is fully funded! There are still 4 days to go on this kickstarter project, and the editors are thinking about doing a second volume. If you want to support that, or just lock in your copy of the first one, now is a great time to back this project. For a taste of what you will find inside, see David Sklar’s story excerpt here.

GoodReads Giveaway for Catherine Lundoff’s Silver Moon! This lesbian werewolf tale won’t be out until the end of May, but two copies are up for grabs early. Enter to win anytime before the 30th.

That’s it for now. If you have news to share, please let us know. We’d love to hear it!

Chicks Dig Comics follows the same format of the Hugo winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, co-edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea, but (as the astute reader may have guessed) the topic of this volume is comics. SF authors, comics creators, and artists share their experiences, analyze characters, and generally celebrate the awesomeness of comics. To whet your appetite, Sigrid Ellis offers her contribution to the collection.

***

Kitty Queer
by Sigrid Ellis

I was sitting on the top bunk when I told Rogue I was gay. This was in the spring of my sophomore year of college, so that meant the bunk bed was in Bigelow Hall on the Macalester College campus. I was in the dorm room by myself, it was nighttime, and the fluorescent gleam of the overhead light reflected off of the Jim Lee X-Men triptych poster stuck to the opposite wall with duct tape. I was crying in horrified humiliation, but the look in Rogue’s eye told me I was going to be okay.

To say I probably ought to have figured out my complete lack of heterosexuality a little bit sooner in life is… a vast understatement. I blame Chris Claremont. Chris Claremont – writer of the various X-Men comic book titles during my impressionable adolescence – and the editorial policies of Marvel Comics at the time. You see, I was raised by liberal parents in a middle-class household, and in my household we did not subscribe to stereotypes. One could not judge a character by their looks or mannerisms or skin color or speech. This meant that I got into a fight with a classmate in sixth grade over the sexuality of pop star Boy George. Just because he looked gay and sounded gay and dressed gay didn’t mean he was gay, I said. When presented with the cases that justified and reinforced cultural stereotypes, I insisted that the presumption could not be true.

I had the Boy George conversation in 1985. By 1992, I went to a college where people wore Act-Up T-shirts, sported Queer Nation pins and buttons, and the GLBU quarterly dances were the best party around. In Marvel Comics, Northstar had just come out as gay. Being queer, in real life and comics, was an act imbued with anger and frustration. Even Northstar was angry. But whatever concern I had for social justice issues was abstract and impersonal. I still didn’t connect gayness, or queerness, with my life.

I didn’t want to protest the President or march for reproductive rights; I wanted to spend all of my time in moon-eyed devotion to my best friends and/or dorm-mates. In the same way that Kitty Pryde was devoted to Rachel Summers and Illyana Rasputin.

Some of you reading this essay might not be as all-consumingly familiar with Kitty Pryde’s life in the 80s as I am. She was a teenager, a member of the X-Men, living in the mansion-school-headquarters of the team. She had two best friends during this time frame: Illyana from the New Mutants team, and Rachel. Both were teenage girls, for a value of “teenage” that includes time travel, dimension-hopping, demonic aging and alternate universes. This is, after all, superhero comics. Kitty was passionately devoted to each of them.

This devotion took a variety of forms. In New Mutants #35, the New Mutants are all killed by The Beyonder. Kitty is not merely the only person who remembers the team ever existed, we find out in Uncanny X-Men #202 she is also the inheritor of Illyana’s soul-sword and armor. This is due to the special bond the two girls share. The nature of said bond is never explained. One might think that Peter, Illyana’s fanatically protective older brother, might be the person who gets the sword and the memory. Nope. Those go to Kitty, the roommate.

In New Mutants #36, Kitty gets injured, kidnapped and strung up by a demon. To save her friend, Illyana reclaims her demon heritage and the soul-sword. Much teary cradling of each other while declaiming affection ensues.

In all scenes of Rachel and Kitty – X-Men/Alpha Flight #1-2, Uncanny X-Men #188-207, most issues of Excalibur – the two young women touch each other. A lot. They stand closely, they link arms, they hold hands. When Kitty’s life is threatened in Uncanny X-Men #196, Rachel knows it through a hitherto-unmentioned psychic bond she has with Kitty. Rachel goes berserk and nearly murders a man for Kitty’s sake. The running gag in early issues of Excalibur is that any time Kitty gets injured in a fight, Rachel goes nuts, sacrificing everything to save her friend.

These scenes were written under the Comics Code Authority. Structured to be much like the Hays and Breen codes governing movies, the CCA prohibited depictions of sexuality in comics:

“2. Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at or portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.

[…]

5. Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.

6. Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.

7. Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.” [1]

At the same time that Kitty and her roommates were declaring their soulbonds with each other, Scott Summers of the X-Men was married to Madeline Pryor. They were married, and their relationship was shown through hugging and the occasional kiss. Their most risqué moment, before it was revealed that Madeline was an evil clone programmed to steal Scott’s sperm to make a superchild, was on their honeymoon, where they cuddled while she was wearing a nightie and he was wearing shorts. Let it be made clear: Marvel treated all sexuality as something to be hidden away.

As is so common in queer history, though, an ostensibly fair and even-handed treatment of sexuality in comics makes gay and lesbian relations invisible. The heterosexual pairings among the X-Men could kiss or hug, could call their time together a date. The queers could not. Moreover, there’s that “perversion” clause. Ego-dystonic homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1986. [2] New Mutants #36 was published in February 1986. When it was written, lesbianism was legally and medically a perversion. Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, the writer and artist of New Mutants at the time, could not say that Illyana came to the rescue of her some-time girlfriend Kitty who had been defeated by a demon with a penchant for classic bondage porn. But they could write it, and draw it, without ever acknowledging that is what they were doing. The relationship, the subtext, the highly sexualized imagery, all these things were presented not as queer kink but as friendship and heroism. The kind of relationship any high school girl might have with her best friends.

I cannot in any way speak towards the intentions of Chris Claremont, the artists, editors or anyone involved in the making of X-Men comics during the late 1980s. I don’t know what they meant to tell me. But I know what I saw. I saw romantic love presented as simple friendship. I saw heroism, a kind of knighthood and self-sacrifice, to be what any friendship should expect.

In early 1992, I was re-reading my Excalibur comics, specifically Excalibur #24. Reading these pages again, in the new climate of the GLB-Union, my almost entirely not-heterosexual friends, and constant political awareness, something went “click” in my head. In this issue, Kitty has been separated from her Excalibur teammates. She is staying with a woman named Courtney Ross, an old friend of Captain Britain’s. (This is not actually Courtney, it is a villain, Sat-Yr-9, but Kitty doesn’t know that.)

Courtney wakes Kitty with an offer to take Kitty out for her birthday, to cheer her up since all of her friends might be dead. Kitty initially declines, sulkily, until Courtney… well, until she seduces Kitty into saying yes.

Panel 1: Kitty is facing Courtney over the cake as they both sit on the bed. Kitty is wearing pajamas, Courtney is wearing a white dress with a high flared collar and puffy sleeves. Courtney has some pink frosting on her finger. Her finger is in her mouth and she is sucking the frosting off.

COURTNEY: So, there’s no need for lies between us, okay?

KITTY: Okay.

KITTY: But I’m afraid I haven’t a clue about what to do with today.

Panel 2: Two-shot of Kitty and Courtney. On the left of the panel Kitty is sitting cross-legged in her pajamas, looking at Courtney. On the right, Courtney is leaning forward, her hand extended towards Kitty. She has frosting on her finger, still, the same finger she was just sucking. The frosting-laden finger is nearly touching Kitty’s mouth.

COURTNEY: Actually, I have a few ideas.

COURTNEY: If you’re willing.

Panel 3: Kitty holds Courtney’s hand gently by the wrist. She is sucking on Courtney’s finger, her chin titled slightly down, eyes looking up and over their hands at Courtney’s face.

KITTY: Lead on, Courtney, I’m all yours.

Panel 4: Both women lean towards each other, their foreheads nearly touching, identical smiles on their faces. In this panel, we cannot see their eyes, just the smiles.

COURTNEY: I’m so glad.

The two proceed to then spend the day together, with Courtney buying Kitty a sports car, exotic dinners in foreign locales, and expensive sexy clothes. Every scene they share speaks of excess, seduction, hinted debauchery, and the possibility of corruption. [3]

I re-read this scene over and over again. I knew, now, in 1992, what this looked like. This looked like Spin-the-Bottle or Truth-or-Dare, it looked like the drunk and stoned random kissing games people played in the dorms on a weekend night. It looked like a challenge thrown down and accepted. I stared at the art. Courtney or Sat-Yr-9 or whoever was seducing Kitty Pryde. And Kitty was saying yes.

I went through my back issues, flushed and slightly sick, my heart racing. There in the pages of the comics I loved, the characters I loved were… were very possibly loving each other. Every year, Macalester held GLB visibility week, when students chalked the sidewalks with the names of famous queers. My first year I had blinked at some of the names in astonishment, confused. Eleanor Roosevelt? Seriously? And I’d gone to look up some of the evidence. I’d learned, as a consequence, about GLBT invisibility, how queer relationships are unacknowledged in history. I read up on Hollywood’s part in the conspiracy, about the Celluloid Closet. I’d done, in short, what the GLBUnion wanted people to do during queer visibility week – I learned about gay history.

My comics had invisible queers.

What did this mean for me?

I went on a walk around the campus, chain smoking cigarettes in the light spring rain. I could feel something happening inside my head, and I didn’t like it one little bit. I got back to my dorm room and sat on my bunk and stared at the posters lining my walls. The thing unfolding in my mind was taking shape. Kitty and Rachel, Kitty and ‘Yana, they were best friends. I tried to mold my best friendships on their model. The love they felt for each other, the passion, this was how I felt towards my closest female friends. If Kitty Pryde wasn’t straight, if her love for her friends was instead sexual, then… then what did that make me?

A dozen half-remembered conversations floated through my thoughts, mixed with images of comics, images of my life, whirling around. Tears started to form in my eyes, and I flushed bright red in the privacy of my dorm room. Kitty Pryde wasn’t straight. She likely never had been. I… was not straight. I likely never had been. Moreover, it was probably perfectly obvious to dozens of people in my life that I was a complete idiot. A complete, closeted, idiot.

I looked across the room at Rogue, smiling at me from the Jim Lee poster. She looked so cocky, so confident. She also looked really hot, goofy hair notwithstanding. I wiped my eyes and said it. I looked Rogue in the eye and managed a whisper. “I think I’m gay.” She kept smiling.

How was it I had missed this? I looked at the X-Men poster again and tried to examine the admiration I held for the figures on it. When I looked at Rogue, what did I imagine? What thoughts crossed my mind? What did I want to say or do? Do with, or for, or to… Oh. Okay, yes, Sigrid, you really, really ought to have realized your sexual orientation before this point. Why didn’t I? What had stopped me?

The artist for Excalibur #24, Alan Davis, said in his online forum that, “although I knew Chris had some plan for Sat-Yr-9 to corrupt Kitty and that the various Cross-time versions of Saturnyne were attracted to Kitty, I had no idea what, if any, the goal of this relationship was to be. I just played it as a lesbian affair.” [4] Davis knew something about Claremont’s intentions that I did not know, and drew what he thought a lesbian relationship, with willing participation from both parties, would look like.

Kudos to him, it looked rather a lot like the same-sex flirting I saw monthly at the GLBUnion dances – licking of the fingers, et cetera. What I did not know is that Claremont included this sort of girl-on-girl sensuality in all of his comics, hiding it from the CCA as heterosexual female friendship. It wasn’t until 1992 and Davis’s fairly blatant art that I got the hint; actual straight women maybe don’t feel this way about their friends. It was entirely possible, I realized slowly, that finger sucking and licking was not a strictly heterosexual activity among friends.

Rogue didn’t judge me. Neither did my friend Scott, who I called in a not entirely coherent manner to come get me. Scott drove around for hours while we talked about comic books, and Northstar, and whether Nightcrawler (an X-Man who was also a devout Catholic) was also gay, and the gay Catholic monks that Scott had slept with. When I finally managed to squeak out that I might not be straight, Scott lit a cigarette and suggested we go get coffee at a local family restaurant. He politely ignored me, singing along with the radio, while I lit my own cigarette and finished crying.

From December 2002 to May 2003, Marvel published a miniseries called Mekanix. In this series, Kitty Pryde comes out. Claremont finally has her almost kissing Xi’an Coy Manh, a fellow former X-Man who is an out lesbian. Kitty’s bisexuality seems to only exist in Claremont’s mind – no other writer of her since has done anything with this. But I’m okay with that.

I could wish that Kitty talked about it more, or occasionally ogled a woman. But it’s fine with me that she dated Piotr Rasputin. It’s fine with me that she put all romance on the back burner to focus on saving planets, riding through space in bullets, snarking with Emma Frost and trying to not die. I have my Mekanix and my Excalibur. I know that Kitty was struggling with her identity and her sexual orientation all through her high school years as she and her roommates fell in and out of love with each other. I know she came out in college, and that the coming out was a surprise to her. I know in my heart that she told Rogue, and that Rogue shrugged and didn’t care.

I can blame Claremont – and I do – for my not coming out earlier than I did. But I also have to credit him for slipping queers into my comics when the CCA forbade it. When I did finally come out to myself, the X-Men didn’t judge me. They accepted this new form of oddball difference the same way they’d always accepted me; with open hands and an invitation to be a hero once more.

[1] Comics Code Authority 1954 – http://www.comicartville.com/comicscode.htm
[2] psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_mental_health.html 
[3] http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/411719.html
[4] http://www.alandavis-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=59#wrap

***

Sigrid Ellis is a writer of fiction, nonfiction and comics; an editor; a parent of two homeschooled children; and an air traffic controller. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with her partner, their kids, her partner’s other partner, and a host of pets both vertebrate and invertebrate. Her work can be found in the online speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons and in Mad Norwegian’s Whedonistas.

In case you’re curious about what sorts of things you can expect in the anthology, contributing author, David Sklar offers an excerpt of his story, “Lady Marmalade’s Special Place in Hell”. This is actually the second excerpt he’s offering. You can read the first excerpt on his LiveJournal, where he has also posted several entries about the story’s creation and long road to publication. And now for the OA exclusive second excerpt!

***

Lady Marmalade’s Special Place in Hell (excerpt)
by David Sklar

I had pictures of Princess Buttercup, as a girl and as a boy, that I developed from my memories. When there were no other tormentors around, I showed these pictures to the people I met in Hell, but mostly I had to rely on my own eyes. I visited bearers of false witness and bearers of false coin; dealers of drugs, dealers of blackjack, and people who could not deal with themselves. And at last I came to the place in Hell for those who cast out their own children, where a middle-aged man with an angry face looked at Buttercup’s picture and said, “That freak? You won’t find him here.”

“So you know her?”

“Not as well as I thought.” I swear, I was afraid that scowl would cut the laces on my corset.

“No,” I answered wistfully—and more honestly than I should have—”Me neither, now that I think of it.”

“Were you one of Jonah’s fruity friends?” There was a scathing accusation in his voice, and I realized suddenly who I was talking to.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m a regular piña colada. But it seems to me, if you’re in Hell and she isn’t, you might want to rethink your attitude.”

“I don’t know how that faggot cheated the Devil,” he snapped.

Then I snapped too.

Now understand: when I made my way across Hell, I had to whip some people who didn’t really want it. I was where I was and I did what I had to do. But Princess Buttercup’s father was the first person I truly delighted in torturing.

***

To read the rest of this story, plus stories by Sunny Moraine, Tanith Lee, Aliette de Bodard and others, make a Kickstarter pledge!

Last week, Paolo Bacigalupi wrote a post about the lack of QUILTBAG characters in dystopian YA stories. Paolo is a bestselling, multi-award-winning writer, and an ally, so this should have been awesome. Imagine, then, how my heart sank when I saw that what he’d said was… not going over well. If there’s one thing I really hate to see, it’s a misunderstanding or mistake turning into a giant internet storm of hate. Sometimes good things come out of those storms, but a lot of the time they just leave me feeling distressed, especially when people who have their hearts in the right place draw so much negative fire that they end up closing off and thinking there’s no point in trying to be an ally anymore.

But that didn’t happen this time! Instead of shutting down, Paolo listened to what people had to say, apologized and talked it over with some of them on Twitter, and worked with us to figure out how to respond in his follow up post (which should be up soon). And instead of personally attacking Paolo, lots of OA members took this opportunity to explain why they were disappointed in the first post, talk about what sorts of things are important to them in dystopian YA stories, and recommend lots of good ones with QUILTBAG content.

Today, it’s my pleasure to present you with a links and quotes roundup, and a GREAT recommendation list. This is the best thing, the one where we all work together to help each other through tricky spots and make the world a little better. So before I get into the links and recs, I want to thank all the people who were a part of this conversation. Thank you to everyone who recommended a book, and to everyone who spoke about what was wrong, or what they’d like to see without turning it into a personal attack. Thank you to Paolo for being open to discussion, and to Kirkus for allowing a follow up post. Every little piece of this makes a difference. All of it helps make the whole conversation more visible, and the more we all come together to support each other, the better chance we have of reaching people we might not have reached before. You’re all wonderful, and today I’m especially glad to be part of this community of SF fans and writers and QUILTBAG advocates.

Okay, right, enough with the soppy group hug talk already. Onto the thinky thoughts and awesome books!

The first post I saw about this was “When an Ally Doesn’t Get it Right” by Catherine Lundoff. She laid out everything that bothered her about the original Kirkus post, and though she was definitely upset, she kept the focus on the text, and not on the person who wrote it.

The last time I checked in, readers read dystopias in part because many of them show humans building new societies. The dystopian event is what clears the way for a new beginning. Telling LGBTQ kids or adults, for that matter, that they have no place in that is like telling them they have no hope.

 Sam Fleming e-mailed to say:

I’m not a YA author (although I might be one day, who knows), but I do write dystopian fiction and inclusivity is very important to me. It’s a big deal for me to make sure my writing reflects humanity in all its forms and variations. If people are out there in the real world then any world I write has to include them or otherwise it’s not a realistic representation. If I write a book in which people have to accept there are girls with superpowers, or deities who like to go to Japanese pop music gigs, or beings from another world who like meddling for the lulz, then I don’t want to make my world even less like reality by excluding people who actually exist.

Nora Olsen wrote a detailed post about why the first Kirkus post rubbed her the wrong way, her experiences growing up and wanting to read dystopian stories, and her approach toward reading and writing YA as an adult.

What I took away from the article was, “Don’t bother to write LGBTQ characters; people can only identify with straight ones.” I’m 100% sure that is not what Mr. Bacigalupi intended. I also didn’t like the implication that the only reason to have LGBTQ characters is to teach a lesson to straight people. LGBTQ characters do not have to act as symbols of oppression, or be there to educate. They can be regular characters who are queer, just like how in real life there are a lot of teenagers who are queer. It can also be very affirming for LGBTQ teens to see themselves in fiction, not as a “problem storyline” or example of victimization in society but as a cool character in a dystopia. You’re not really normalized until you’re the star of the show, not just the “very special episode.”

Lauren Becker wrote to say:

I believe that including QUILTBAG characters in any genre is important. It shows a demographic that many people don’t feel the need, for whatever reason, to represent. People look to books for escape, but we often go to them to find solace and characters/situations that make us feel less abnormal about our life situations. This is true of those who identify as LGBTQ, as well as everyone else. Books should be diverse, full of rich characters and situations that can mirror our lives as well as hold one up to lives we may not quite understand. I think it’s particularly important to include LGBTQ in Dystopian YA because it seems that most of the time they are only included in contemporary stories. We should show others that not being straight does not make you an anomaly. You can identify as LGBTQ and still have lives that are not defined by that. Give us a world where things seem hopeless. Give us characters that are fighting to change that. Give us these characters, in these settings, that have a sexuality that is not the majority, and yet, they survive.

John of Dreaming In Books also sent his thoughts via e-mail:

Growing up as a gay teenager has made life stressful at times.  I started realizing my sexuality on the brink of other personal issues and became depressed for a time period, although I didn’t identify those feelings as depression at the time.  However, this wasn’t the result of a modern dystopian government regime.  This was something that came from social issues.  It wasn’t just because I lacked marriage rights, but because a fair portion of the population felt I shouldn’t have them.  It wasn’t a nameless government that did this to me, but people.

So I turned to books.  As a reviewer who is no longer depressed (but still suffering from teenage angst on occasion), I look for QUILTBAG content in everything I see to combat the social issues I see around me.  It’s about changing the people and writing stories where QUILTBAG characters are just like everyone else – their sexuality/gender identify is just different.  I look and look for that in all genres – especially YA – and have rarely come across dystopians that have used those characters at all.  Nora Olsen’s The End is the only one I can think off of the top of my head.  But it’s books like The End that make the most impact on this social disruption.  As a teen reader, I don’t want to read about why my situation is extremely depressing – because it’s not.  It can suck and needs an overhaul, but it’s not a dystopian nightmare.  It’s a situation that requires the subtle realization that QUILTBAG people are completely normal in society.  What fixes that?

QUILTBAG people participating in storylines without focusing on their suffering/hardships/issues all of the time.  Sometimes the most powerful message is one of blissful acceptance.

Lots of good thoughts there, and while we should definitely keep those in mind for future writing endeavors, it’s also important to remember that we do have some excellent QUILTBAG dystopian YA available to us right now.

OA members’ Recommendations of QUILTBAG dystopian YA:

The End by Nora Olsen: Catherine Lundoff and John of Dreaming in Books both recommend this apocalyptic YA novel with lesbian, bisexual, and genderqueer main characters. Nora mentions in her post that she should also have some good news soon about her next novel,  “…a lesbian dystopian YA novel, about two girls who fall in love as they learn the truth about enslaved clones and join the fight for their freedom.”

Brave New Love, edited by Paula Guran: This is an anthology of dystopian YA romance with lots of QUILTBAG content, including stories by OA favorites, Elizabeth Bear and Steve Berman. This anthology is out through Running Press,  proving that they do indeed welcome QUILTBAG content, as they stated after last year’s outcry over Trisha Telep asking Jessica Verday to change a gay relationship to a straight relationship in a different anthology.

Nightsiders by Sue Isle: Nora Olsen describes this as, “A really terrific collection of linked short stories set in a climate-changed Australia. My favorite story is about a trans boy who must make a dangerous journey to Melbourne, a city that still has infrastructure, for surgery.” This one is also recommended by the entire Galactic Suburbia team. Tansy and Alex reviewed it for Last Short Story here and here, and Alisa published it!

Water Seekers by Michelle Rode:  Nora Olsen also recommends this one. The main character is a straight boy, but a lesbian-positive storyline is woven into this book about people wandering the desert a generation after a nuclear disaster.

The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood: This Australian dystopia novel is not YA, but does feature a fairly young (20-something) genderqueer protagonist, as well as lots of other QUILTBAG content. It’s been so widely recommended (From Cheryl Morgan to the Triptree jury to all my favorite Australian podcasts…) that I ordered it from Australia. A US edition should be available within the next 18 months, but if you can’t wait, Fishpond (linked above) will ship anywhere in the world.

After (Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling: This is scheduled to come out in October, but is available for pre-order now. I’m not sure how much QUILTBAG content it’s going to have, but OA member Rick Bowes says he did contribute a lesbian story, so there will definitely be at least the one! See Ellen Datlow’s blog for the full table of contents.

Zombies Vs. Unicorns, edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier: This one comes recommended by Michael M. Jones, who says, “Several of the zombie stories have gay or lesbian characters. (Gay teen love in a post-zombie world, anyone?)” I’ll add that Alaya Dawn Johnson‘s awesome gay zombie romance was reprinted in the excellent Wilde Stories 2011, edited by Steve Berman.

Eat Your Heart Out by Dayna Ingram: This is another zombie book out through Lethe Press’s novella publishing imprint, Brazenhead. I’m not sure if it’s intended as YA, but it’s got a late teens/early twenties lesbian protagonist, and it comes highly recommended by Catherine Lundoff and Melissa Scott.

The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson: This one comes recommended by Rose Fox and Michael M. Jones.

Rose says, “… while perhaps not strictly dystopian, [The Chaos] is chock-full of queer characters, running the gamut from the standard Gay Best Friend to an amazing wheelchair-wielding Sri Lankan angry punk dyke musician who is worth the price of admission all by herself.”

Michael adds, “The Chaos is so many kinds of weirdly awesome it’s impossible to sum it up.  But the angry lesbian musician POC in a wheelchair?  I was so darned happy to see someone so interesting and complex and unapologetically in your face.”

Above by Leah Bobet: The main character in this one is a straight boy, but Rose Fox says it, “… has a fabulous lesbian couple (though they are adults, not teens) and an intersex character (though to my great sorrow that character is the villain, albeit one who is misunderstood and mentally ill rather than deliberately evil).” Michael M. Jones agrees with Rose, and says Above is a great book with fascinating characters.

Leah herself says:

The question of why I chose to include QUILTBAG characters and content in Above is simultaneously a very difficult and very simple one to answer.  In one sense, part of the point of Above is to portray a world wherein every single character is marginalized, and every single character is marginalizing someone else.  There’s an aspect of the novel that’s an exploration of, I suppose, the ethical responsibilities involved in intersectionality; the differences between drawing a boundary and hurting someone else.  And that meant portraying different bodies, different orientations, different ethnicities, different class and language and family backgrounds. It meant portraying racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, prejudice, fear and hope.

But in another sense, it wasn’t a choice with much behind it: there are queer, intersex, lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters in Above because there are queer, intersex, lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters in the world.  It makes no sense to spend months figuring out how you’d realistically get electricity and plumbing in your secret underground society just to unrealistically leave the actual people who live in the actual world out of your book.  On a very practical, emotionless level?  That’s sloppy craft and sloppy work.  It’s sloppy seeing.

And that’d be, I suppose, why including QUILTBAG content in YA fiction is important to me: Because one of the functions of stories, in my mind, is to help us all see a little clearer, and you don’t see the world clearer by turning your head away.

And to close, here’s a thought from Julie Andrews:

Look, we need more QUILTBAG characters in YA science fiction and fantasy PERIOD. Full stop.

So go forth and write a dystopia where heterosexuality is forbidden. But, also, or instead of, write a dystopia where the main character isn’t straight. Write a dystopia where one of the love interests is bi. Write a dystopia where they mess with your gender. Write a dystopia where orientation doesn’t matter and it’s a dystopia for other reasons. And write a story with rocket ships piloted by lesbians. Write a fantasy full of boy dragons raising eggs together. Write all the things!!

We need it all.

I fully agree! Read widely, write widely, and please share your thoughts and further recommendations with us! We’d love to see them.

***

When it comes to our idea behind the anthology, UnCONventional, Kate and I like to blame the Green Fairy at Arisia 2011. No, we didn’t attend the absinthe tasting, but this one woman’s beautiful costume got us thinking about worlds where conventions were just a cover for something more… supernatural. Something weird… okay, weirder than your usual SF/F/H… or even mundane convention or conference.

As I was trying to figure out what to write for our Coming Out blog, it struck me that there was this sense of an incidental sense of being “different” through all the stories, whether or not a QUILTBAG character was in them. For someone in each story, their idea of “normal” did not match with their surrounding culture’s idea of “normal,” nor even the definition of “normal” at each story’s event.

The many facets of difference and self-identity all made some amazing characters that caught the hearts of Kate and me, yet no matter how unusual certain traits of characters were to the reading audience, these were inherent to the character–and they didn’t necessarily even drive the plot of the story.

With the three short stories that did feature QUILTBAG characters, all three feature “incidental gayness.” None of us made our non-heteronormative traits an issue of the plot. They just were.

When I wrote “Photo of a Mermaid,” I already knew Rose and Hunter, my lesbian couple. They showed up as side characters in my novel-in-progress, Kelpie, and despite their brief on-page time, my writing group wanted to know more about them. So, when Kate invited me to work on UnCONventional with her, I had an idea in my head that I would tell one of their adventures.

Hunter is a photographer, a recovering alcoholic, and a witch. Rose is an award-winning actress that just happens to be part of a family with a lot of unexpected run-ins with the Faerie realm. Those particular character traits are what affect the unfolding plot at a photojournalism conference cruise in the Bahamas… that has a problematic incident with mermaids.

While Hunter and Rose’s love for each other is a prominent part of their characters – as is the love between their newfound friends Gary and Colin, their love and desire to keep each other safe is no different than any other spouse’s. And it’s that love that motivates the characters’ actions and how they deal with the sea fey.

Kimberly Long-Ewing’s short story, “M.U.S.E.,” has two QUILTBAG characters. One is Ben, a gay writer with a ” a fair balance of masculine and feminine traits.” The other character is Sappho, a freelance muse. Kim explains, “The Greeks portrayed the muses as all women. In my updated take on them, I decided that they would take on whatever appearance happened to inspire their writers and artists. So, Sappho flows from one gender presentation to another. She is a shape shifter. Sappho also blends masculine and feminine traits as needed. When she is ‘herself’, she is androgynous.”

Kim’s Sappho is gender fluid because she believes people are very much like that; the muse is just more extreme. “While I think that our gender identity is fairly stable over time in that we will consistently say, ‘I am this or that’, there are fluctuations in our expression of that identity, the specific masculine and feminine traits we express across situations, days, and years. Studies have shown that we become more androgynous with age; that is, the traits we select as describing ourselves become more of a mixture of masculine and feminine over time. I wanted to explore this idea with Sappho.”

The fact that Ben is gay is not central to the plot, which is something that Kim also likes because she has problems with heteronormative assumptions. “Why does he have to be heterosexual if I’m not making the story about homosexuality? I think it is important to represent minorities in stories without making that difference the central theme. We are a very diverse society and readers of speculative fiction are also a very diverse group.”

Danielle LeFevre’s “The Sirens,” features Olive, a lesbian who seems to be a side character but is critical to the story not just as motivation to the main character Saorise, but because she is “the first character who already knows who she is.” Kelly, the other secondary character, knows himself, but his purpose is to help Saorise figure out how to defeat the sirens who have arrived to bring chaos and death to a music festival in the desert. “Olive, despite her antics, is really in control of her own life, and thus can be a good friend to Saorise while she goes through this journey of self discovery.”

Olive’s sexuality is only mentioned briefly in the story, but it’s clearly a part of her character. Danielle is “one of those ‘voodoo’ character builders (as Nancy Kress calls us). When I’m ready to start a story, I have to really work at the plot and description, but characters come to me, already formed. Olive is no exception. I knew her past, her future, forwards and backwards as soon as I put the first words on the page. She’s spoiled, very used to getting her way, but also dependent on Saorise. […] Olive has pretty much known her whole life that she was different, and that was a good thing. She always wore crazy outfits that, later on, became fashion forward. And she always knew she didn’t like boys the way they liked her.”

Kate and I were thrilled with how many of our UnCONventional stories dealt with questioning people’s assumptions of “reality” and “normal.” We decided to turn the idea of the inherent weirdness of conferences/conventions on its head and found ourselves exploring as many facets of our own world as supernatural or alien ones.

____________________

UnCONventional, edited by Kate Kaynak and Trisha Wooldridge, is published by Spencer Hill Press and available in trade paperback and ebook form. Find out more about the anthology and press, which welcomes QUILTBAG characters and submissions, at www.spencerhillpress.com.

Find out more about the specific authors here:

Trisha Wooldridge — www.anovelfriend.com
Kimberly Long-Ewing — www.mysticsheepstudios.com
Danielle LeFevre — www.writerling.com

Demeter’s Spicebox is a fairy tale retelling project in which the stories build on each other, and Nin says, “DS is definitely QUILTBAG (I love this term!)-friendly, and everything intersectional-friendly.”

Here is her official call for submissions:

Submissions Guidelines for Issue Three of Cabinet des Fees’s Demeter’s Spicebox are now up!

We have chosen the Aarne-​​Thompson type 2031C, “The Mouse Who Was To Marry The Sun” (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type2031c.html) for Issue Three, do refer to the guidelines for the additional prompts!

http://www.cabinetdesfees.com/demeters-spicebox/ds-submission-guidelines/

Reading Period: 5 APRIL 2012 onwards (until we get the perfect two stories for the next issue).

Do bear in mind that you will need to read the stories from Issue One and Issue Two, as this is a storytelling project and the prompts reflect this. DS runs in Volumes of four issues each, and each Volume will start with a fresh set of prompts.

If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to email us at demeterspice (gmail) in April!

This podcast does have an explicit rating! There are a couple of curse words, and lots of mentions of kinky sex, etc. This conversation was super fun, and we covered a lot of ground, from what makes horror worthwhile to us, to how to get people to place money in your belly dance costume without inviting them to grope you, and beyond!

It’s got plenty of dark humor, too, as one might expect from a woman who’d flip off a severed unicorn head…

This photo was taken at Boskone in February of 2012 by Readercon 23 chairwoman, Crystal Huff. You can reach her at crystal@readercon.org.

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:

News
*The Tiptree Awards have just been announced, and feature some awesome work.
*The Solstice Awards have also just been announced, and include Octavia Butler, someone Jen cites as a major influence.
*The Ursa Major Awards are now open for voting, and Kyell Gold is up in three categories!
*The Nebula Awards shortlist went up last month, and includes lots of amazing work by OA members. Congratulations to all the nominees!
*Plunge Magazine recently met its Kickstarter goal, and is a going concern–yay!
*The 4th Annual New York Rainbow Book Fair is happening next weekend, and Steve Berman will be there with books from his press! If you are near New York, this is definitely worth checking out, as it’s free and open to the public, and full of QUILTBAG booksellers and authors.

Jennifer Pelland’s Work
*Jen’s website.
*Machine, Jen’s new novel about androids, identity, and kink.
*Unwelcome Bodies, Jen’s short story collection, which contains her nebula nominated story, “Captive Girl”.
*Dark Faith, the anthology which has Jen’s second Nebula nominated story, “Ghosts of New York” in it–one of my personal very favorite stories.

Other Stuff Jen Mentioned
*Octavia Butler was a giant influence.
*James Patrick Kelly was the Viable Paradise instructor who told her to keep the vomit in her story, and not to listen to people who said it was too gross.
*Myke Cole was the Viable Paradise classmate who said the vomit was too gross.
*Adam Troy Castro is the person whose short stories inspire Jen to try harder.
*Arsenic and Old Lace is now online-only, but used to be a storefront in Cambridge, MA. It’s where Jen first learned to belly dance.
*Noranti is the old woman from Farscape, who looks like one of the characters in Machine.

Comments are always welcome, and if you’d like to say anything to me directly, my e-mail address is julia@juliarios.com.

This podcast doesn’t have an explicit rating, but the panelists do spend a lot of time discussing erotica. Just so you know.

Thanks to everyone who came to the panel! I hear the room was full. Below are links to everything I could find that people mentioned during the session. Comments and further recommendations are always welcome, and if you’d like to say anything to me directly, my e-mail address is julia@juliarios.com.

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:

Jennifer Pelland’s Work
*Jen’s website.
*Machine, Jen’s new novel about androids, identity, and kink.
*Unwelcome Bodies, Jen’s short story collection, which contains her nebula nominated story, “Captive Girl”.

Shira Lipkin’s Work
*Shira’s website.
*“The Changeling’s Lament” in Stone Telling (Shira’s Rhysling nominated genderqueer poem).
*SteamPowered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, which contains Shira’s story, “Between Truth and Life”.

Gillian Daniels’s Work
*Gillian’s website.
*Gillian’s posts on New England Theatre Geek.
*Stuff Gillian wrote on The Analytical Couch Potato.

Lawrence Schimel’s Work
*Lawrence on Google+ and Twitter.
*A Midsummer Night’s Press, Lawrence’s poetry press.
*First Person Queer and The Future is Queer are Lawrence’s Lambda and Spectrum award winning collections.
*Tarot Fantastic is the book with a few queer stories Lawrence mentioned editing for a mainstream publisher in the 90s.
*The Drag Queen of Elfland is Lawrence’s queer fantasy short story collection.
*His Tongue, an erotica collection.

Other Things People Mentioned
*The Lambda Awards.
*The Spectrum Awards.
*The Tiptree Awards, which Lawrence noted tends to have stories with good femme male protagonists like Kari Sparring‘s Living with Ghosts, and Beth Bernobich‘s Passion Play.
*Gaylaxicon.
*Rachel Pollack has a book of tarot poetry from Lawrence’s poetry press
*Roz Kaveney has two forthcoming collections from Lawrence’s poetry press.
*Stone Telling (soon to have a queer theme issue, but always open to poetry with queer content)
*Strange Horizons, Apex, and Clarkesworld all got shoutouts as markets open to QUILTBAG content)
*Apex’s Arab/Muslim Issue.
*Beauty Queens by Libba Bray (about a plane full of teen pageant contestants, which crashes on a deserted island–full of QUILTBAG content, and heartily recommended by many panelists and audience members).
*Here’s an example of the Power Pyramid Lawrence mentioned, with straight white cisgendered males at the top.
*Poppy Z. Brite (Shira mentions that Poppy now identifies as male, but did not at the time when the books first came out), Anne Rice, Ellen Kushner, Octavia Butler, and Annie Proulx are some of the examples panelists gave of women writing gay fiction, because they can write up the power pyramid.
*Lawrence used to work at Books of Wonder, an excellent independent children’s bookstore in New York.
*Hanne Blank is an all around awesome person whose history of heterosexuality, Straight, just came out recently.
*Lawrence mentioned Jenna Black as having a paranormal detective series with a well-written gay BDSM relationship.
*Cherie priest’s Bloodshot and Hellbent also have a gay sidekick character.
*Gillian recommended SteamPowered II (and then a general recommendation for both anthologies followed). Gillian called out Zen Cho’s story, “The Terracotta Bride” in particular. Zen talked about that on OA Podcast #14 in December of 2011.
*An Arrow’s Flight, a retelling of The Iliad with a gay male stripper.
*Geoff Ryman’s Was is a Wizard of Oz novel with lots of QUILTBAG content.
*Marion Zimmer Bradley published Lawrence’s first story, and wrote tons of QUILTBAG stuff.
*Patricia Highsmith’s Carol is a lesbian pulp novel with a happy ending.
*Michael Cunningham is a writer the panelists find frustrating because he has beautiful prose, but tends to kill off gay characters, and write queer content for a straight audience.
*Stonewall, a turning point for gay civil rights in the United States.
*Stephen McCauley is someone Lawrence recommends, but notes that all the sex happens offstage because that is safer  and more comfortable for straight audiences.
*The Swimming Pool Library, recommended as a good mainstream literary book with a well-written, unlikable gay character and lots of sex.
*Tamora Pierce writes a lot of QUILTBAG characters.
*War Against the Animals by Paul Russell.

Okay, that’s what I scribbled down in a furious frenzy while listening. If you have additions or corrections, please let me know! And of course, if you have comments, we’re always open to discussion here.