GUEST BLOG: Catherine Lundoff on Organizations Building Diversity in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Science fiction and fantasy as a genre gives us the opportunity as readers and writers to explore new worlds, new futures and new concepts. As a reflection of the genre, science fiction fandom often prides itself on being very welcoming and inclusive. That said, sometimes both genre and fandom need some help achieving those goals. The organizations mentioned in this post are part of that help: sponsoring awards, increasing visibility of unrepresented writers and their books and providing support (emotional and/or financial).

I recently joined the Mother Board for Broad Universe . Broad Universe is a volunteer-run organization that promotes women writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror through podcasts, convention readings, book tables, panels, a listserv and various forms of social media. We run an ad in Locus every year celebrating our award winners (it gets bigger each time!) and do other forms of outreach and promotion. "Women" are defined as anyone identifying and presenting as female, as I found out when I asked.  I'm really enjoying being on the board and I'm hoping to see the organization grow and expand during my tenure.

One of the things I'm working on as part of my board duties is building bridges with other organizations in the genre. We're hoping to start doing some joint readings and events such as panels at different cons in the near future so that more readers and fans find out about us and the issues that we're working on.

GUEST BLOG: Warren Rochelle on "What's Next?"

 Warren Rochelle worked as a librarian for eleven years, alternating between North Carolina and Cartagena, Colombia. In 1989, he decided to follow his heart and left school libraries and started graduate school again, this time in creative writing, at UNC Greensboro. His first book was a critical work on Le Guin’s fiction, Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, Liverpool University Press,2001. He  is now a Professor of English at University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He's the author of The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007) and The Called (2010).

 What is the working title of your next book?
*Hmm. I have a completed novel, The Golden Boy, which is currently being edited by Nancy Berman, a free-lance editor friend of mine.  I am working on a story collection, with the working title, Happily Ever After and Other Stories. I have a novel-in-progress, The Werewolf and His Boy, almost finished but I have put it on hold to finish the story collection.

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
*I don’t have an agent, alas. Self-publishing is an option, but before I try that, I am planning on sending the manuscripts to various small presses that have published similar books.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
*The Golden Boy:
The original idea came from the notion that all fairy tales are true, and that the magical and mundane coexist, although the latter is not always aware of the former, or rather doesn’t believe in the former—at first.
Happily Ever After:
Homophobia persists, lingers, and is girding its loins to fight to the death. And as a result, stories are still being published and films are still being made in which the gay characters do not have happy endings, usually with one dying, leaving the survivor to mourn.  I was determined to write a collection of stories in which my gay protagonists have happily ever afters—more or less.
The Werewolf and His Boy:
*The story that inspired this novel, “Lowe’s Wolf” (published in the Spring 2010 issue of Icarus) was inspired from a dream my partner had about a wolf hiding in Lowe’s.

Suicide Attempt Predictors Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth (Article Review)

From Open Minded Health, reposted with permission:

LGBT youth are at elevated risk for suicide. Researchers have been looking into the risk factors for suicide in LGBT youth. Most of the studies so far have been cross-sectional; that means they only studied how things are once, at one point in time. Longitudinal studies, in contrast, measure at multiple points in time. Longitudinal studies are expensive, and risk losing track of participants, but they provide more information.

This year, the first longitudinal study of LGBT youth suicide risk factors was published. The participants were interviewed twice, a year apart. Both times, they were psychiatrically evaluated and asked about suicide attempts. They filled out questionnaires evaluating hopelessness, impulsivity, social support, gender non-conformity, age of same-sex attraction, and LGBT-related victimization.

In this sample, roughly 31.6% of the participants had attempted suicide. This is far higher than the 8% rate reported by the CDC. Seven variables were associated with previous suicide attempts: hopelessness, impulsivity, LGBT-related victimization, low family support, being younger when first feeling same-sex attraction (for LGB youth), and symptoms of either depression or conduct disorder. That is, the more hopeless or impulsive the youth, the more likely it is that they have previously made a suicide attempt. Gender non-conforming behavior and peer support did not seem to affect suicide risk. When it came to predicting future suicide attempts, the best predictor was previous suicide attempts. Youth who had previously attempted suicide had a 10 times greater risk of another attempt compared to those who hadn’t attempted suicide.

As always, these results should be accepted with caution

From: LGBT Issues in Fantasy Round Table

The Great Traveling Round Table is over at Warren Rochelle's place this month, tackling the question of gay characters and issues in fantasy. There's quite a range of perspective, from historical attitudes to personal biases and coming-out stories. Here's what I had to say:


Gay Characters in Fantasy: A Personal Journey

In my experience, the community of science fiction and fantasy readers and writers has been one of the most tolerant of, and welcoming to, those who don't fit into the mainstream. This includes queer (non-strictly-heterosexual) and gender-queer (non-strictly-male-or-female-assigned-gender) folks as well. My own introduction included stimulating discussions of sexuality, gender identification, and sexual orientation. I remember reading Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960, one of the earliest science fiction stories to challenge gender-role stereotypes), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The World Wreckers (1971). Four years later, Marion published The Heritage of Hastur, in which she created a sympathetic and heroic gay protagonist. The World Wreckers impressed me because one of the characters falls in love with a member of a hermaphroditic race and must confront his own feelings about homosexuality and his identity as a man. I had never read anything like it, and it opened my eyes to the question of who we are, apart from our plumbing and hormones. This led the way to the understanding that sexual orientation is not just about which body part fits where, but about the people who are the focus of our hearts: romance as well as hormones.

In general, the works I read during the 60s and 70s were serious and courageous treatments of gender, gender roles, and sexual orientation, well ahead of popular media. But popular media caught up, although perhaps not in the formats its creators intended.

Gender, Sex, Identity and A Bunch of Other Fascinating Issues

Last year, I attended a workshop at the Ben Lomond Quaker Center on "Gender, the Search for Self and the Search for Acceptance," facilitated by Chloe Schwenke, an ethicist who is herself a transgendered woman. (There's an interview with her here.) Although much of the workshop centered on personal issues of gender and identity, it struck me that as writers, we can discover much depth and richness by asking the same questions.

For the workshop, we defined sex as the classification of people as male or female. Intersex individuals, that is, people possessing the external characteristics of both, are usually "assigned" to one sex or the other. Gender, on the other hand, is a personal sense of being a man or a woman (or both, or neither). Each of these is distinct from sexual orientation, which has to do with an enduring physical, romantic, and emotional attraction to another person. Gender has been described as "who you want to go to bed as, not who you want to go to bed with."

In science fiction and fantasy, we have been playing around with such notions as more than two sexes/genders, none, fluid sexes/genders, and a diversity of gender role expressions. Every so often, a story that takes a new or not-new-but-splashy look at the field garners a lot of buzz, particularly in the queer and queer-friendly community. Yet much genre writing continues to perpetuate the world view of two oppositional and fixed genders, each with equally unyielding behavioral expectations. For many writers and readers, a character or society that goes too far outside the familiar becomes so uncomfortable as to fracture sympathetic identification. It strikes me, however, that even within the limitations of conventional portrayals of sex and gender, we can reach for greater depth. We can go beyond the Caveman Model of Gender Roles, the Separatist All-Men or All-Women Worlds, the Rambo-in-Drag/Supersensitive Male dichotomies and other variations already done to death.