{"id":491,"date":"2002-06-22T13:20:42","date_gmt":"2002-06-22T20:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/06\/22\/491.html"},"modified":"2002-06-22T13:20:42","modified_gmt":"2002-06-22T20:20:42","slug":"but-not-you-know-in-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/06\/22\/but-not-you-know-in-that-way\/","title":{"rendered":"But not, you know, in *that way*"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've read two stories in SF magazines recently—one in Interzone,<\/cite> one in Asimov's<\/cite>—in which the male protagonist is entirely devoted, in an adoring puppy-dog sort of way, to another male character. Both stories are written by male authors, and in both stories, the protagonist hastens to assure us that, however much he may love this other guy, it's not, you know, sexual<\/em> or anything like that. It's not like I'm one of those damn queers, I just love him! (That last is not a quote; it's an exaggeration.)<\/p>\n

Okay: I'm definitely in favor of portrayals of affectionate interactions between men. And I'm definitely in favor of portrayals of love that isn't sexual in nature as well as of love that is. And the attitude portrayed is probably a realistic one: I'm sure many real-life men have said things much like that. (For that matter, from Delany's nonfiction I get the impression that there are a lot of men who consider themselves completely straight but who have sex with other men on a regular basis.) And in at least one of the stories, the protagonist doth protest a bit too much; I rather get the impression that he's just a wee bit closeted (perhaps even to himself) about his true feelings, and I suspect that was the impression the author intended to convey.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, I can't help feeling that in a genre where we rarely see gay male protagonists, and most of those we do see are written by women, it would be nice to once in a while see a story where the male protagonist does<\/em> have acknowledged sexual interest in an another male character.<\/p>\n

After all, you can pretty much guarantee that if the protagonists of the abovementioned stories were female, they wouldn't be saying \"Yeah, I loved him—oh, but don't get the wrong idea, I didn't love him in that way.<\/em>\"<\/p>\n

Or maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon again.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve read two stories in SF magazines recently\u2014one in Interzone, one in Asimov’s\u2014in which the male protagonist is entirely devoted,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}