Good Shit vs. Shit to Avoid, lgbtq characters edition

[elspethdixon]

Because I've been considering doing this, and talking about it, and I need to just stop being afraid and post it. I'll just pre-emptively tag this with "they should have left me in the ice," shall I?

If the mods at linkspam get ahold of this and feel that it's derailing, I ask that it NOT BE LINKED IN THAT CASE because that would only enhance any derailing effect.

Currently, everyone's discussing the ever-widening definition-creep of derailing, and before that, they/we were all talking about misogyny in slash. Unless we consider "slashers: there's something wrong with them" to be the general point of the discussion, with detours into "bisexual slashers: they're all liars, and even if they aren't their sexuality doesn't matter, and if they try to say it does, that's derailing," we've drifted away from the original topic of "slash and m/m romance: some of it has harmful stereotypes in it."

Since I don't think I can contribute in any meaningful way to the derailing debate, and since I've read at least three rounds of "slasher misogyny" debates over the past nine years, I'd like to get back to the original topic for a while.

Some fiction has homophobic or heterosexist stereotypes in it.



Fandom is generally very good at pointing out sexism and misogyny in texts. We're less good at pointing out more subtle forms of homophobia/heterosexism in texts, possible because as of right now, any movie where there's a gay character and they're not either explicitly condemned as an evil pervert by the text and/or dead at the end pretty much counts as a win.

So, while people are arguing elsewhere about what is and isn't derailing and so forth, I think it would be useful for LGBTQ slashers to analyze, not our "internalized homophobia," which implies that the problem is *us* being "bad queer people," but published m/m fiction and female-authored or straight person-authored fiction with male/male and/or female/female relationships in it, and figure out what we shouldn't be doing. Straight slashers can do this too, obviously, but I'd ask that y'all limit yourselves to analyzing other straight writers in the comments on this particular post.

Because I've realized over the course of this debate that I'm better at spotting racist and sexist tropes in fiction than I am homophobic ones, despite being bisexual. Because I've seen people in fandom discuss sexism and racism in source texts in excruciating detail, but not so much with heterosexism/homophobia, beyond the obvious Dead Lesbian/Dead Gay Guy thing (hi, BSG 2.0).

The Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books romance blog has a regular feature they call "good shit vs. shit to avoid." Consider this an LGBTQA-themed version of that.

So, Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel trilogy, Lynn Flewelling, Mary Renault, Libba Bray, erotic romance with f/m/f or m/m/f relationships, the published* m/m novel of your choice (that's not by someone who has publically IDed as male): anyone have any thoughts about what those writers and books do well/do badly in terms of the depiction of same-sex relationships and queer people? (obviously, some of them might contain other kinds of fail, but we're specifically diccussing queerness here).

I'll start:

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series contains several background f/f relationships between very minor characters. On the one hand, I found this awesome, because any queerness in epic fantasy is awesome (I also appreciate the fact that Jordan's books have multiple prominent female characters and consistantly pass the Bechdel test, even if he did have some, ah, interesting ideas about women, such as apparently believing they were a seperate species that men are fundamentally incapable of understanding, and vice versa) but on the other hand, I can't help but notice that the "pillow friends" among the Red Ajah/Sea Folk/Seanchan damane have no male equivalent. The f/f pairings don't feel to me as if they exist to titiliate male readers -- there's no onscreen girl-on-girl action, for one -- but still... why no male pillow friends, Jordan? The end result is a fantasy world that explicitly has queer women in it, but where queer men are invisible.

And another:
I sadly don't have a book citation on hand, but in one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books, in return to a sneering comment about her husband Aral's (canonical) bisexuality from someone who intended her to be shocked and horrified, Cordelis Vorkosigan says, "He was bisexual. Now he's monogamous."
Let's all wince together now. I love you, LMB, and your Miles books, but gah, that one sentence has bugged me for years.

edited to add: Logophilos brings up below that I don't actually mention any m/m romance stuff from the m/mromance genre per se here, which is true. I've actually read relatively little published m/m fiction in comparison with SF stuff with LGBTQ themes like Lackey's Vanyel books, and a lot of what I have read is available online for free, which makes me :\ about discussing it critically, for the same reasons that I don't feel comfortable critically discussing fanfiction in a formal atmosphere.

A lot of the unpublished, free stuff I've read has been heavily influenced by yaoi, which has a very strong top/bottom dynamic with the sexual roles carrying over into the characters' day-to-day personalities and interactions, usually with at least one man being both young and androgynously beautiful. This has some of the same issues as both Pern (fixed sex roles that double as a sort of heteronormativity-imposing gender role, though without the Dragon-ex-machina doing the fixing) and the Vanyel books (Vanyel basically = every tragic yaoi/shonen ai uke ever), and is often not making any effort to actually realistically depict what actual gay or bi men are like. I suspect some of this is what people may be talking about when they talk about m/m sometime being just so much wank fodder for straight women. Some of the sites I've been to say "this is a heavily stylized yaoi fantasy." Most don't, and you have to be at least a little familiar with yaoi to know going in that that's what you're getting and reality is back that --> way.

edit the second: Um, not that I don't still love a lot of yaoi manga and have about a gigabyte of old Gundam Wing fanfic lurking around my hardrive, and haven't spent the past week mainlining Metal Gear Solid fanfic. I got into fandom at least partially via anime fandom as a college student.



*I'd like to limit this to published books, because the conversation began with criticisms specific to the m/m publishing industry and their depiction of gay and bisexual men. I think that fanfiction and slash are a different conversation that it would also be useful to have, but I'd prefer to let someone else host that.

This post is mirrored on LJ

Comments

[logophilos]

So far none of the comments or your own examples are from the "m/m publishing industry". They're mainstream works from other genres which happen to feature gay/bi characters.

M/m is 'gay romance by [inaccurately-labelled] straight women' as sold by Romance publishers and there's only one NY company who has picked any of that up - Running Press. (http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/runningpress/home.jsp)

If you want to look at slash gone pro, then you need to look at stuff published by
Torquere - http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=index
Loose ID - http://www.loose-id.com
Samhain - http://samhainpublishing.com/category/gay-lesbian-romance
MLR - http://www.mlrbooks.com
DreamSpinner - http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/

etc

Or as featured in reviews here:
http://unique.logophilos.net/
http://bookutopia.blogspot.com/search/label/genre%3A%20gay

Some gay presses also publish "m/m" (if you define it as a gay romances by straight people.)

I like a number of authors also self-publish (and that doesn't necessarily mean at a lower quality, since too many of the pro epresses don't exercise high standards at all).

SF has always had a stronger representation of queer characters than most genres. But it's not 'm/m' just because you have a gay character or even two of them. At least, it's not how the industry defines it. After our discussions elsewhere, I assumed it was the potentially exploitative stuff you focused on here? If not, I apologise for butting in.

[logophilos]

Um, unless you mean "print published" by 'published' which will narrow this down to a meaningless level, given how much of the genre is epublished (even when like Samhain, some books make it to POD format later.)

[elspethdixon]

I'd been sort of mentally defining published as "fiction where I have to pay money in order to read it," which includes stuff like Loose ID and Torquere's ebooks, but not stuff like The Administration or the orignal yaoi fiction you can find on various LJ comms and webpages (palace of the keys, etc), which is available for free.

[logophilos]

"The Administration" is now pro published - and free to read :)

There's some awesomely good free to read stuff out there (at least as good as the so-called pro stuff) - by authors who are also 'pros'.

I've always been cranky about this division into pro /free stuff in m/m because:

1. A lot of us put our writing up to read for free because of a background in fanfiction where 'free' was 'good'

2. It's a female authored genre which has only very recently been remotely lucrative - so like a lot of female activities, it's severely undervalued. Something is not worth more because it costs more.

3. A lot of the small publishers are nothing but glorified self-publishers so the fact they charge doesn't mean there's any great quality control or vetting over their work (so sneering at those of us who put stuff out POD ourselves is a bit rich.)

4. The audience for free material is much bigger than it is for pro stuff.

It's unusual that the free material is very often as good or better than the pro stuff. Also sad because it means the pro stuff hasn't lifted its game enough for the distinction to mean anything.

[elspethdixon]

A lot of the small publishers are nothing but glorified self-publishers so the fact they charge doesn't mean there's any great quality control or vetting over their work (so sneering at those of us who put stuff out POD ourselves is a bit rich.)

I get the impression that a lot of sneering at the entire web-based portion of publishing industry in general goes on in the publishing world, depsite the growing popularity of ebooks.

Mostly, I just feel uneasy going after something that's written as a hobby with the same degree of rigor I'd use going after something that at least aspires to professionalism, and if there's money exchanged, I know the author intends their fiction to be a professional endeavor in a way that people posting on orig_slavefics might not (some people there are very clearly serious authors producing professional quality work -- Dusk Peterson comes to mind, while others are just in it for the fun).

[logophilos]

Fair enough. Speaking for myself, I write to the same standard regardless what happens to the writing when I'm done. Manna Francis does too.

Still there's plenty of 'pro' stuff to 'go after' if that's what you want to do. Anything that points out specific examples of 'doing it wrong' can only be a good thing even if the authors won't agree with you.

[elspethdixon]

I haven't read any professional m/m stuff other than False Colour that was memorable enough to stick in my mind, really (and that one left we with a very positive impression), but I came away from Dreamspinner Press in particular with a strong sense that a lot of their authors are strongly influenced by yaoi, with all the seme/uke dynamics that can imply.

But I can't remember any book titles or authors' names, so I don't have any specific examples to give.

[melannen]

Actually, at least three of the authors mentioned elsewhere in this discussion are fanfic writers gone pro (If you count Lackey, four. And one of the people I was thinking of in my count of trans characters is, too. That's just the ones where I happen to know for sure - I wouldn't be surprised at all if a few of the others were.)

I certainly agree with you that the m/m publishing genre is not the same as books from any genre that feature gay characters, but there are a fair number of "slash writers gone pro" who wind up in SF, too.

[logophilos]

Yes, but just because they're ex-fanficcers doesn't mean they're writing m/m! Or that all gay character books are m/m.

M/m is a specific label, as I use it and as it's used in the industry. I'd avoid labelling other books with it because, frankly, it's virtually synonymous with 'badly edited/written crap' in some quarters and with justification.