{"id":845,"date":"2003-01-22T00:00:40","date_gmt":"2003-01-22T08:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/01\/22\/845.html"},"modified":"2003-01-22T00:00:40","modified_gmt":"2003-01-22T08:00:40","slug":"queer-sf-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/01\/22\/queer-sf-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer sf"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I recently read Gordon van Gelder's latest\n\teditorial<\/a> in F&SF.<\/cite> It says various interesting things;\n\tfor example, he notes that the percentage of female readers is down to 33%,\n\tfrom 39% in 1994. And he says \"Maybe . . . readers no longer differentiate\n\tas much between fantasy and sf,\" which doesn't match my observations; I see\n\ta surprising (and, to my mind, unfortunate) number of people making a very\n\tstrong and vocal distinction between the two.<\/p>\n

But here's the part I found most interesting:<\/p>\n

\n\t

There were more complaints than I expected from readers who object to homosexual\n\tsubject matter in the fiction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I keep going back and re-reading that sentence and being surprised by it all\n\tover again. Which no doubt just makes even clearer than was already obvious\n\tthat I'm kinda naive and sheltered in some ways. I like to think of sf readers\n\tas a bit more accepting than the general public, but of course not all sf readers\n\tthink alike.<\/p>\n

When I think of sf stories featuring queer characters, the first one I remember\n\treading is a bittersweet piece by Bridget McKenna called \"Evenings, Mornings,\n\tAfternoons,\" which appeared in the 12\/90 issue of Asimov's.<\/cite> Somehow\n\tit stuck in my head, though I didn't remember anything more about it than the\n\tfact that it featured a gay male protagonist; the fact that his orientation\n\twasn't a big deal, just part of who he was; and the closing image. My memory\n\tof it was so weak that I even misremembered the author as Maureen McHugh and\n\tthe date as two or three years earlier. But I just dug through my old copies\n\tof Asimov's and found it and re-skimmed it. It's still a nice story, but it's\n\tnot as groundbreaking as I remembered; for example, the protagonist is elderly,\n\tand doesn't appear to have much in the way of sexual interests at all, and is\n\tdying of what might or might not be AIDS. (Of course, the lack-of-interest-in-sex\n\tthing is a tough line to walk; if you go too far in one direction, you're adhering\n\tto the stereotype that all gay men are interested in is sex, while if you go\n\ttoo far in the other direction, you're adhering to the safe asexual portrayal\n\ttoo common in fiction.)<\/p>\n

And as it turns out, that wasn't even the first sf story I read featuring\n\tqueer characters; two of McHugh's Zhang stories had appeared in Asimov's<\/cite> over\n\tthe previous few years, and though I'm not certain at this point, I assume that\n\tZhang's orientation was made clear in those.<\/p>\n

But for whatever reason, the McKenna story stuck in my head (come to think\n\tof it, December '90 was not long before I began questioning my own orientation,\n\tso perhaps that had something to do with the story being memorable for me),\n\tand left me with the impression that the sf world in general and Asimov's<\/cite> in\n\tparticular were nicely accepting of gays.<\/p>\n

Just this past weekend, I read what I believe to be the first sf story ever\n\tto sympathetically portray a gay character: Sturgeon's \"The World Well\n\tLost.\" I'd certainly read the story before, most likely when I was a kid\n\tand first encountered Sturgeon on my father's cornucopia of bookshelves. But\n\tsomehow I hadn't remembered much about it, and certainly hadn't remembered that\n\tit's all about homosexuality. It's even possible that I missed that aspect entirely,\n\treading the story at age 10, though if so then I can't imagine what I thought\n\twas going on in it. It's a very good story, well worth reading, even though\n\t(unsurprisingly) a bit dated in some ways.<\/p>\n

\"The World Well Lost\" was published in the June, 1953 issue of a short-lived\n\tmagazine called Universe Science Fiction<\/a>.<\/cite> It's been almost fifty\n\tyears. Portrayals of sexuality in sf have come a long way since then.<\/p>\n

And yet we're still getting things like these survey responses that Gordon\n\tmentioned. And we're still at a point where even an actively queer-friendly\n\tmagazine like SH<\/cite> just doesn't see all that many stories featuring\n\tgay characters. We've published only about ten\n\tstories<\/a> that could be seen as featuring more-or-less queer characters, out\n\tof the 125 or so stories we've published total, and one of those is a reprint,\n\tand several of them are pretty subtle about the queer parts, and in several\n\tof them one of the main queer characters is dead by the time the story begins,\n\tand a couple of them feature characters who aren't entirely human. We don't\n\thave much in the way of queer-related fiction coming up in the next few months,\n\teither.<\/p>\n

So what's up with that? It's not that we're getting a lot of queer stories\n\tthat we're not publishing; a few, certainly, but not all that many. (Some have\n\tbeen quite good but didn't quite make the cut for one reason or another.) Are\n\tpeople not writing them? Are people writing them but not sending them to us?<\/p>\n

I suspect most people reading this know me well enough by know that I don't\n\tneed to issue the disclaimer, but in case of people arriving via search engine\n\tor something: of course there's no quota, of course I'm not saying all stories\n\tshould have gay or bi characters in them, of course I'm not saying \n\tthat we'll automatically publish any gay-protagonist story we get. After all,\n\tif only 8% of our stories so far have focused on queer characters, then at least\n\t90% focus on straight ones. (Hard to say exactly, though, since some stories\n\thave multiple main characters, or don't have any characters at all, or have\n\tonly alien characters whose orientation is difficult to categorize on a straight\/gay\n\taxis.)<\/p>\n

But I will say that I would be very happy to see more stories that contain\n\tgay, lesbian, and\/or bi characters in prominent roles, especially if at least\n\tsome of those characters are portrayed sympathetically and remain alive throughout\n\tthe story.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read Gordon van Gelder’s latest editorial in F&SF. It says various interesting things; for example, he notes that…<\/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":[117],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sturgeon"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","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=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}