Short Book Reviews: An Inspiring Tale of Courage, Queerness, and Punk Rock

Music from Another World, by Robin Talley (Inkyard)

In the late 1970s, the gay rights movement was getting underway, with cities like San Francisco leading the way. Harvey Milk’s election as city supervisor (1978) catalyzed a generation of LGBTQ youth and their allies, while in other parts of the country Anita Bryant was campaigning for anti-gay laws. The punk music movement was in full swing, giving voice to the chaos and rage many of these young people felt.

Into this world come two young women, high school students at extremely conservative schools. A summer program pairs Sharon, a Catholic from San Francisco, with Tammy, a Baptist from Orange County. Each harbors a secret she dare not let her homophobic parents know: Sharon’s twin brother is gay, as is Tammy herself. Gradually, through diaries and their correspondence, the girls discover the courage to fight free of the homophobia, repression, and secrecy of their lives. Matters come to a head when Tammy is outed and flees to San Francisco. Under a pretext, she and Sharon convinced Sharon’s mother to let her stay with them. Here she’s caught up in the Castro Street scene and a radically, woman-owned bookstore. Tammy and Sharon find that adjusting to in-person intimacy is very different from the openness they enjoyed in their letters.

So much of this book evoked memories for me. I wasn’t in San Francisco when the story takes place, but my sister was. We both frequented book stores like the one in the story; we both knew people struggling with their sexual orientation, with the condemnation of their families. We knew the fear of bigotry such as Bryant’s and the exhilaration of Milk’s election. That said, we were both older, and Tammy and Sharon are still teens. The teen years are agonizing enough without issues of identity and the terror of being sent to a conversion camp or being rejected by family and friends. It was no wonder gay teens had such a high risk of suicide. But this story is filled with hope, too. The love and support of some friends and some family, and the riotous energy of the music, and the deep friendship between the two girls is a message of hope.

Nowadays it’s all too easy to look back on “those terrible times,” as if they will never happen again. That’s a false confidence, as daily news stories remind us. The eternal vigilance that is the price of freedom means that books like this one have enduring value. Even in “enlightened” times, there are teens who struggle, who come to loathe and even destroy themselves, because of isolation and hatred. I would love to give each one of them this book, with the message, “It Gets Better.”

For today's post, I'm a guest of Open Alliance friend Kyell Gold, and talk about Lace and Blade, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and my newest anthology, The Feathered Edge: Tales of Magic, Love, and Daring.

On "Adventures in Queer-Friendly Editing:"

I’d worked with Marion Zimmer Bradley, as an author she edited as well as a personal friend, for long enough to know that the narrower the scope of an anthology and the more rigid the guidelines, the deeper into the slush pile you have to dig. The stories that can hit a tiny target and offer excellent quality are few and far between. Marion was a personal inspiration to me as well, in the fearlessness with which she tackled controversial topics (like sexual orientation) at a time before such things were acceptable in genre publishing. I remember reading her ground-breaking novel, The Heritage of Hastur (1972, in which she deliberately set out to portray a heroic, sympathetic gay character), and bursting into tears at the struggles of this character to accept himself — both as a gay man and as the heir to enormous, soul-crushing responsibility. (In the final year of her life, Marion began work on another story about Regis Hastur and his lover, Danilo Syrtis, and I had the privilege of finishing it and seeing it in print: Hastur Lord, DAW, 2010). She taught me that it was possible — and morally imperative — to tell compelling stories about human problems — power, sex, jealousy, self-sacrifice, and most of all, love — and that gay people must be included in those stories. I knew that this is what I wanted to do as an editor.

............

We’re all different in what delights and inspires us, not just as queer/straight and male/female, but as individuals. At the same time, it is also important that there be a “place for us,” whether it be a specifically gay-themed anthology or one in which love stories between men or between women are portrayed with the same respect and rapture as those of the straight couples.

I have long believed that what is wrong with this world is not too much love, but too little. I hope to play a small part in creating a world in which no one feels invisible or excluded, and all expressions of who we are are celebrated.

GUEST BLOG: Kyell Gold on Writing From The Heart

I had to become someone else to write the things that were important to me.

Let me back up a little. You’ll hear this phrase, “write from the heart,” a fair amount as you navigate the world of writing advice. When I suggested the topic to Deborah, she immediately pointed me to a podcast in which Betsy Wollheim of DAW spent fifteen minutes giving just that advice. So I want to talk a little about why it’s important, why many people don’t do it, and how you can.

Writing from the heart is scary. It means exposing yourself to the world. In a way, it’s like having an intimate conversation with hundreds or thousands or (if you’re lucky) millions of strangers. It’s talking about the pain of breaking up, the fear of not having enough to eat, the loneliness of losing a parent, the depressing reality of falling short. It’s talking about falling in love, about the joy of discovery, about those words your mother said when you were six that you carried with you all your life. It can mean describing your journey from realizing you’re different to realizing that that’s okay.

If this scares you or disturbs you (in an emotional sense rather than a horror sense), that’s good. Tap into a place where you’re not comfortable: those are the raw places from which powerful writing comes. You guard them because they are important to you. And when they are important to you, that passion comes across in your writing. When you put yourself on the page, the reader can feel that, because your characters reactions feel authentic.

GUEST BLOG: Catherine Lundoff on “Adventures in Marketing: Promoting My First Novel”

Book promotion: the thing most of us love to hate but have to do. What follows is an overview of what I did before and after my first novel was published in May, 2012.

Back in the misty regions of 2011, my publisher (Lethe Press) and I agreed that my first novel, Silver Moon, would be published in 2012. Armed with a copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s BookLife, I started planning. I knew I was going to need all the marketing help I could get and practice makes perfect and all that.

I started out by trying to define my book. I had to understand what I was selling, apart from “my first novel.” Silver Moon is a novel about a menopausal woman who turns into a werewolf. It is also about developing a community and starting a new life. And my protagonist begins to come out as a bi woman over the course of the novel. It is not, however, primarily a romance nor is it erotica. This description helped me identify possible target audiences for the book: older women, werewolf fans, fans of LGBTQ fantasy, general fantasy readers, etc.

Then I moved on to what I had to work with.

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.

Post on Queer-Welcoming Anthologies Reposted

If you were looking for "Queer-Welcoming Anthology Adventures", and found yourself redirected to the Book View Cafe blog site (and hence, could not find it, because it came out April 2011), don't give up. I've put up the entire text below (and also edited the April 12, 2011 blog post to include it).

The recent brouhaha about an anthology (in which a number of authors withdrew their stories after one author was told to change her M/M to heterosexual) highlights for me how much power an editor has in establishing the tone of the anthology. This happens not only through the selection and editing of the stories, but on a much more fundamental level of concept and outreach. The editor’s vision for the book and the care and inclusiveness with which the authors are invited have a profound effect on what gets submitted and by whom.

In 2007, I was asked by Vera Nazarian of Norilana Books if I’d like to edit an anthology. This was something I’d thought about for a long time. I’d had both wonderful and awful experiences from the writerly standpoint, and I had formed opinions about how I wanted to treat my authors. I also thought it would be a great thing to work with my favorite writers and to meet new ones. After some discussion, we arrived at a topic: romantic, swashbuckling “sword & sorcery” fantasy with wit and intelligence. The title, Lace and Blade, was one Vera came up with to describe this particular flavor of fantasy.

Because we wanted to bring the first volume out the following Valentine’s Day and time was short, I decided to make the first volume by invitation. Tanith Lee had already agreed to send a story, and I contacted a number of authors that I knew either personally or professionally, authors I could count on to understand the concept and deliver fine stories. I specifically stated in the guidelines:
This is not “Romance” but “romance,” a play of sensibilities, a vision of something wondrous but not sentimentalized, from bittersweet to transcendent, stirring the heart, but not stereotyped “love stories.” I have no objection to happy endings (or heterosexuality, or monogamy), but I do not require them. … Alternate sexuality is welcome, although this is not specifically gay-themed — these are stories of the heart, not the plumbing.

In other words, I wanted to see stories of love and adventure for all of us, queer and straight. I believe that we all benefit by celebrating love (and courage and compassion) in its wondrous and diverse forms.
One of the authors I contacted was Chaz Brenchley. I’d read a little of his work and loved it. He sent me “In the Night Street Baths,” which featured an intimate relationship between two eunuchs, complete with a steamy sex scene (steamy in more than one sense, since it takes place in the baths). I say intimate rather than romantic because of the subtlety and complexity with which Chaz portrayed an unusual relationship. One doesn’t typically think of eunuchs of having love lives, let alone sexuality, so the story is startling and disquieting as well as deeply moving.

Many of the other stories fell comfortably within the parameters of traditional heterosexual fiction, beautifully rendered but not likely to discomfit the conservative reader. (Or so I thought. It turns out that the only reader reviews on amazon.com that objected to sexual content found it all to be distasteful.) I was pleased that my anthological “tent” was big enough to include them all. It offered “something for everyone,” and “something to enlarge most people’s reading experience.”

I’d worked with Marion Zimmer Bradley for long enough, as an author she edited as well as a personal friend, to know that the narrower the scope of an anthology and the more rigid the guidelines, the deeper into the slush pile you have to dig. The stories that can hit a tiny target and offer excellent quality are few and far between.

I wanted excellence and I also wanted stories that pushed me–and my readers–just a little over the edge, that made my world larger and richer and more filled with possibilities. Chaz and BVC members Sherwood Smith and Madeleine E. Robins, Tanith Lee, Mary Rosenblum, Robin Wayne Bailey, Diana L. Paxson, Dave Smeds and Catherine Asaro sent me stories that answered the spirit of the premise in rainbow profusion. Reader response suggested that although not every story was to every reader’s taste, every reader found something to love, and every story reached the hearts of some readers.

After the anthology came out, Steve Berman of Lethe Press contacted me to reprint Chaz’s story in Wilde Stories 2009: The Year’s Best Gay SF. Other stories in the first volume appeared on LOCUS Recommended Reading, and Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind” was a Nebula Finalist.

We’re all different in what delights and inspires us, not just queer/straight and male/female, but as individuals. I suspect that the differences between one person and another are far greater than between sexually/gender-identified groups. And I hope to play a small part in creating a world in which no one feels invisible or excluded.

Queer-Welcoming Anthology Adventures

Today's my day to blog over at Book View Cafe, so do the clickie thing and check out Deborah recounting editing Lace and Blade.

Edited 9/11/11. Since this post went up a while ago, it's been hard for readers to find it in the general BVC blog, so here it is in its entirety:

The recent brouhaha about an anthology (in which a number of authors withdrew their stories after one author was told to change her M/M to heterosexual) highlights for me how much power an editor has in establishing the tone of the anthology. This happens not only through the selection and editing of the stories, but on a much more fundamental level of concept and outreach. The editor’s vision for the book and the care and inclusiveness with which the authors are invited have a profound effect on what gets submitted and by whom.
In 2007, I was asked by Vera Nazarian of Norilana Books if I’d like to edit an anthology. This was something I’d thought about for a long time. I’d had both wonderful and awful experiences from the writerly standpoint, and I had formed opinions about how I wanted to treat my authors. I also thought it would be a great thing to work with my favorite writers and to meet new ones. After some discussion, we arrived at a topic: romantic, swashbuckling “sword & sorcery” fantasy with wit and intelligence. The title, Lace and Blade, was one Vera came up with to describe this particular flavor of fantasy.
Because we wanted to bring the first volume out the following Valentine’s Day and time was short, I decided to make the first volume by invitation. Tanith Lee had already agreed to send a story, and I contacted a number of authors that I knew either personally or professionally, authors I could count on to understand the concept and deliver fine stories. I specifically stated in the guidelines:
This is not “Romance” but “romance,” a play of sensibilities, a vision of something wondrous but not sentimentalized, from bittersweet to transcendent, stirring the heart, but not stereotyped “love stories.” I have no objection to happy endings (or heterosexuality, or monogamy), but I do not require them. … Alternate sexuality is welcome, although this is not specifically gay-themed — these are stories of the heart, not the plumbing.

In other words, I wanted to see stories of love and adventure for all of us, queer and straight. I believe that we all benefit by celebrating love (and courage and compassion) in its wondrous and diverse forms.
One of the authors I contacted was BVC’s Chaz Brenchley. I’d read a little of his work and loved it. He sent me “In the Night Street Baths,” which featured an intimate relationship between two eunuchs, complete with a steamy sex scene (steamy in more than one sense, since it takes place in the baths). I say intimate rather than romantic because of the subtlety and complexity with which Chaz portrayed an unusual relationship. One doesn’t typically think of eunuchs of having love lives, let alone sexuality, so the story is startling and disquieting as well as deeply moving.

Many of the other stories fell comfortably within the parameters of traditional heterosexual fiction, beautifully rendered but not likely to discomfit the conservative reader. (Or so I thought. It turns out that the only reader reviews on amazon.com that objected to sexual content found it all to be distasteful.) I was pleased that my anthological “tent” was big enough to include them all. It offered “something for everyone,” and “something to enlarge most people’s reading experience.”

I’d worked with Marion Zimmer Bradley for long enough, as an author she edited as well as a personal friend, to know that the narrower the scope of an anthology and the more rigid the guidelines, the deeper into the slush pile you have to dig. The stories that can hit a tiny target and offer excellent quality are few and far between.

I wanted excellence and I also wanted stories that pushed me–and my readers–just a little over the edge, that made my world larger and richer and more filled with possibilities. Chaz and BVC members Sherwood Smith and Madeleine E. Robins, Tanith Lee, Mary Rosenblum, Robin Wayne Bailey, Diana L. Paxson, Dave Smeds and Catherine Asaro sent me stories that answered the spirit of the premise in rainbow profusion. Reader response suggested that although not every story was to every reader’s taste, every reader found something to love, and every story reached the hearts of some readers.

After the anthology came out, Steve Berman of Lethe Press contacted me to reprint Chaz’s story in Wilde Stories 2009: The Year’s Best Gay SF. Other stories in the first volume appeared on LOCUS Recommended Reading, and Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind” was a Nebula Finalist.

We’re all different in what delights and inspires us, not just queer/straight and male/female, but as individuals. I suspect that the differences between one person and another are far greater than between sexually/gender-identified groups. And I hope to play a small part in creating a world in which no one feels invisible or excluded.