Spectrum finalists
The finalists for this year's Spectrum Awards (honoring "works in science fiction, fantasy and horror which include positive explorations of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters, themes, or issues") have been posted; I'm delighted to see that M. C. A. Hogarth's story "Unspeakable" (published at Strange Horizons) is among the finalists.
The award jury will select a winner from among the finalists; the award will be presented at TorCon.
I think it's interesting that four of the short-fiction finalists are from Queer Fear II, a queer horror anthology from Arsenal Pulp Press; interesting because last year four of the short-fiction finalists came from Bending the Landscape: Horror, and the first Queer Fear was a finalist in 2001. Which makes me wonder if horror is a genre particularly suited to queer-friendly stories, or if it just happens that there've been three particularly good queer-themed horror anthos in the past few years and not many other queer-themed speculative fiction anthos. (But Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction was a finalist in 1999, and three Circlet Press anthos have made an appearance on finalist lists in the past couple years, so the latter hypothesis does seem more likely than the former.)