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I am obsessing about a potentially hurtful thing I said over a year ago. Which is a thing I often do. I worry about hurting people a lot, and when I'm feeling down I loop into tracks about Did I Hurt That Person? I Hope I Didn't Hurt That Person, I Don't Think I Can Make Up For It Now.

In mostly unrelated thoughts, I'm feeling intensely ambivalent about

lgbtfest. It's an odd thing. I like reading the fic that comes out of the fest, but I hate reading the prompt lists, because...

Okay, so this probably isn't entirely fair. But sometimes it starts to feel like a lot of the people prompting are basically prompting misery porn, and given that I have immense issues with the extent to which stories about LGBT people generally are. Not joyful. I mean, okay. As a queer teenager, I hated reading YA novels about queer people, because -

Well. Let me be honest here. I tended to get the feeling that those novels weren't for actual queer teens. That they were intended for straight teens, and that was why they were so horrible, and the people in them were rarely brought joy by their sexuality, and when they were it was frequently elided, while pain was examined and almost reveled in. It used to make me so mad.

It still makes me so mad. Because yes. Things are hard, and the closet sucks, and frequently so does being out, and people are always happy to tell you how you're not you enough, and sometimes it's hard not to believe them, and it's always dangerous, people might very well hurt you, and hurt you very badly, kill you even, and there is vulnerability and danger -

But damn it. Just. Just.

Fuck that, I'm going to be happy. Judging by the fic that gets actually written, a lot of people feel the same way.

(This might be somewhat ironic, coming from someone who writes incessantly about mental illness, which means I write a lot about fear and pain and sadness, but pfffffffft.)

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I'm so glad you made this post.

I agree, so much. When I was growing up as a queer teenager, I would have LOVED to see something about queer people being HAPPY and having FUN.

There's also the issue where people seem incapable of giving queer characters any conflict that doesn't revolve around other people's reactions to their sexuality. Which is, er, not good.

I know! It was all No One Can Change Who They Are, But YOU WILL FOREVER BE UNHAPPY. I still have unfulfilled longings for stories that have fun picnics with ice cream and general silliness. Or adventures! Adventures embarked upon just because, not because your homophobic parents kicked you out, Lackey, I am looking at you.

Yeeeeeah, that one's a big problem. I'm not good at coming up with conflict in prompts, myself, but there's always the old stand by of "why am I the only one in this organization doing any work?" which could totally be entirely queer people!

Adventures embarked upon just because, not because your homophobic parents kicked you out, Lackey, I am looking at you

I was totally thinking of The Last Herald Mage while writing this. I remember the part in the first book where Lackey decided that Vanyel's lover committing suicide over a revenge-murder (was that what it was?) wasn't enough angst -- no, no, he ALSO had to overhear what must have been the only homophobic Herald in existence making some cruel remarks about his relationship. And, of course, when he's captured by the villain, he has to be raped -- god forbid there be any trauma in the guy's life that isn't connected to sex.

Anyway.

The line for LGBTfest is an odd one -- some people want to write about queer ISSUES, which are unfortunately still very much concerned with intolerance, and some people want to celebrate queer CHARACTERS, in which case the focus really should be on their lives and experiences, not the hatred and misery inflicted by others. Ah well.

I knoooow. It makes me want to write totally non-sexual torture scenes. And I hate torture scenes! (I actually never read The Last Herald, mainly because I, uh, read her other stuff! And there were homophobic parents kicking their kids out of the house all over the place and I didn't really need that.)

It is kind of weird. I think the guidelines kind of encourage the confusion? There's a conflation of queer experience and queer issues. Which are kind of the same thing? But then you have the problem where queer experiences are defined by the world as large as consisting entirely of those issues - queer people existing only when straight people see them.

:/ It is so complicated and tangled.

mm, this.

I am so, so for more writing about canon queer characters, and characters who are actually written as queer people rather than just having 'slashy relationships', but I have the same reaction when I read over the prompts. I read fic primarily as an escapism thing, and I just...the last thing I want is to read about characters I love having to deal with homophobia/transphobia, because I get plenty enough exposure to that in real life. I wouldn't want to write most of the prompts because 1. it'd feel too personal and 2. I'd be paranoid about just projecting my own issues on to the characters.

Now the prompts about X's friends/family/random alien coworkers being wonderful and supportive, those I wanna read. And a lot of the X-working-out-their-identity prompts look interesting to me. It's just the ones that sound like looming homophobia trauma porn that turn me off.

Yeah, and even though these are real things that really happen, at low levels of intensity and high levels of intensity (and I am lucky, so far for me it has been low intensity levels), the Queer Lives Are Miserable is a homophobic and transphobic trope that has frequently been deployed in intensely hurtful ways throughout history. I just think of all the dead lesbians in film and literature and my teeth start to hurt. I am sure some of those prompts come from places of personal pain and wanting that pain to be acknowledged in fandom and fiction, but it's... really hard to deal with that without getting tangled up in that heteronormative, homophobic narrative. Especially in a space as small as a prompt, and when the community you're prompting consists in part of people who have been bombarded with the crueller forms all their lives.

Which is a problem for any minority group, of course. How do we tell our stories without those stories becoming the same stories that oppress us? I think it's a thing worth doing, but sometimes my visceral reaction is just angry, anyway.

And I know what you mean about the projecting. That's definitely something I worry about. (And for some reason I worry about it more with queer issues than with mental health issues. I do not know why.)

I love stories about unexpectedly supportive co-workers/family/friends! They always make me laugh, because they turn around expectations and sometimes you can do it in such a way that you can see the supportive character's straight privilege still being present, but not neccesarily stopping them from being an ally. Especially when those are written by queer people, I love them. (I have one I keep meaning to write for Fullmetal Alchemist, about Ross and Armstrong and Broche, and Broche's floundering straight boy attempts to be a good friend and ally to his lesbian work partner and his bisexual boss - he screws up, but he doesn't give up!)

Oh, man, this so much. And it made me SO ANGRY when I would say I wanted stuff like the Alanna books, but with a queer main character, and I got told I should be happy with angstfests in totally different genres.

...actually, it still makes me really angry, although it's starting to get better in YA fiction.

And fandom has always been an escape from the angstfests for me. I mean, even when there's angst in fandom, it's usually because The World Is Doomed or whatever, and not because the characters are queer. At least in the fandom I hang out in.

Yes! Alanna's such a great example, because it's not like those books are conflict free, and some of that conflict comes from Alanna's gender, but they're not angst fests and Alanna gets to succeed through positive action, not suffering (suffering that often has creepy undertones of atonement, due to the rhetorical strategies literature built up in the Middle Ages). So there's that and also the You Don't Deserve More Stories, You Already Have This Story aspect.

Rrrrr.

YA really is starting to get better. It's such an innovative and rich field these days! I think there's some really good stuff going on in YA with creating hybrids of the Celebration novel and the Problem novel that allows for a lot more complexity and positivity.

I definitely agree with you about fandom. It's really nice to have queer characters and not have to sit through at least fifty pages of self loathing first!

Oh, yes, suffering as atonement. It is so entrenched in western fiction.

On You Don't Deserve More Stories...one of the things I was thinking about in the queer appropriation discussion was that yes, as a queer person I want most fictional depictions of queer people to be BY queer people. But as a queer reader--well, I read somewhere between 70-150 books a year, I'd guess, and if I want a decent percentage of those to be about queer characters, and I have genre preferences (which I do), there just aren't enough queer writers to write enough books for queer readers, because writing is far slower than reading, and there are far more queer readers with diverse tastes than queer authors to provide books for those tastes.

So as a reader, I want straight writers to try, and to try harder to do well. So there will be MORE BOOKS. Because I am sick of "You already have a few books, why do you want as many choices as straight readers?" But I still want the queer authors' voices to be dominant, argh. I don't know how that works.

Queer YA fantasy, especially non-urban fantasy, basically didn't exist when I was a teenager. And now it does, and about characters who aren't all Suffering For Their Queerness. But there still isn't enough of it! And there's still a lot more about queer boys than queer girls (I suspect because of fannish connections on the part of some YA fantasy authors, but I dunno, really).

*nodnodnodnodnodnod!* Yes, yes, yes! Me too! I didn't say much during that particular debate because, well. Yeah, I have no idea how you balance straight authors writing queer characters and writing them well and queer authors writing queer characters and their voices still be the most important ones because privilege dynamics don't work that way, I know! But maybe we can change that! There are probably lessons to be learned here, but I don't think they've been fully implemented anywhere. (See: men writing girl children, and how this is frequently treated as more important and more worthy than women writing girl children. Argh.)

I don't know if it's fandom connections that have fewer queer girls than queer boys in YA fantasy? Because I read a fair amount of non-fantasy YA and I see the same pattern there. I think it's probably a broader cultural thing that fandom reproduces? Oh man, it must be, because there was this one book, right? And it promised me that it was about a young woman who was a lesbian! And she was deciding whether to come out or not and her BFF was a gay guy her own age. And. Guess which one of them had an S.O. by the end of the book and which one of them got turned down in a "can't we still be friends" scene that made me cringe for both her and the totally awesome fellow aspiring journalist girl involved? (Yes, let's get the bland jockish boys together and spend ink on their relational bliss, but God forbid we have FOUR queer people at a school of several hundred! I mean, it's valid to write about crushes not working out but -

Wow, this was some time ago and I'm still bitter.)

I don't know! In one sense, it makes sense because gay men ARE more widely represented in the media, and men's stories ARE considered more important, even when they're gay. But I don't know. In YA fantasy, I'm getting a specific vibe that feels kind of fannish to me, but I dunno. I may well be making incorrect assumptions about authorial background. Regardless of why, it's really annoying me.

I've noticed doing queerlit50 that I have very little interest in pro fiction about queer men, maybe because I spent so long in fandom reading about dudes, maybe because profictionwise I have always read primarily about women. I want lesbian and bisexual women Doing Stuff in my pro fiction!

Oh, drat. Rereading what I wrote it sounds like I doubt your perceptions of fannishness, and I didn't mean to do that at all. I'm sorry! You know, I wonder if being in media fandom, especially the slash side of it, intensifies that narrative tendency. Sometimes it really seems like it does, or maybe it just makes it more obvious.

That totally makes sense! I really do much the same thing (although I'm not doing queerlit50, mainly because this would require remembering to write the books up, and that's too much like actual work).

Oh, not at all! I'm not really sure about them myself as far as pro-fiction goes.

I realized recently that I am less picky when it comes to f/f stories than m/m or m/f, simply because there's so much less to choose from. And that makes me really sad.

(I am two months behind on reviews! But it's been more of a mentality adjustment, "I will make more of an effort to pick up books by authors of color and/or queer authors" than actually deciding to read and review X books. It's changed my habits, even if I'm not doing so well on reviewing this year.)

Oh totally, totally. I'm less picky on the f/f too for that same reason and it is sad.

(Hmmmm. I might try. I suspect most of why I've been skewing off is actually left over stuff from grade school that I really need to ditch.)

I spent a year just reading 50books_poc reviews and noting down interesting titles and not changing my reading habits at all. But I still have a thing of not beating myself up if I find I'm reading a bunch of white guys one month or something. I don't think these challenges are good if viewed as a guilt-inducing Assignment, you know?

*nodnodnod* In my personal case it's this. Leftover thing about not really wanting to let people know how much I read. Because then I get looked at like. A cassowary in a zoo or something. Wonder and amazement and a little fear!

But this isn't really something I need to worry about on my little geeky corner of the internet, so.

Haha, that is totally how I look at cassowaries (I love them!) and also exactly what people do when I tell them how much I read (and I read WAY less than I used to).

I don't actually have any idea how much anyone on either of those communities reads. If you don't number or list your reviews, no one else is going to keep track.

That is to say, about the suffering narratives, I don't think that the writers are consciously deploying the ickier Redemption of The Inferior/Lesser Person By Patiently Enduring Suffering narratives that are so persistent, I think they're mostly trying to invoke other narratives, it's just that the Patient Griselda trap is hard to escape.

...Now I am blathering. And I will stop.

Did you ever see the film version of Maurice by E.M. Forster? Here was an English gay male writer who asked that the book not be published until after his death because he knew that it was impossible that anyone living in the Edwardian era would publish it, he lived rather a long time..at any rate! In the 90s... Recently in other words, a film is made from it as there is so much wonderful British fiction and so many wonderful British actors in need of period piece acting....more digressions.
Well aside from having a gay male protagonist, his book had an ending that wasn't awful, another reason why it couldn't be published in its day. So what do the filmmakers do? They rewrite the ending and make it awful. WTH? I hope that E.M. Forster rose from the grave to smite them in their sleep because even living in his day he hoped for better times, and probably thought that once he had passed on it would be much more possible.

I agree with your post!

I had no idea! I've never seen it, no. Oh my GOSH that is HORRIBLE. Of all the novels! Ugh, especially when not everyone in the novel winds up happy anyway! You can't let the protagonist set up a quiet, loving existence with his heart's friend? What kind of awful people -

*fumes*

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