well, at least eye rolling is good exercise for my eyes!

[erastes]

The echoes from the OUT article rumble on. Lambda online weighs in with an interesting point of view, that of saying that perhaps we need to redefine GLBT fiction. Well, der. Dog bites Man.

Plus hasn’t Lambda just done exactly that?

What stunned me about that article (as I’ve commented about there) was the suggestion that we (females) seem to be heteronormalifying our gay men because we are pairing them up and putting them in committed relationships.

 

*blinks* Well, bust my breeches, were we REALLY the first writers to do that?  I don’t think so!

Teddypig weighs in better. I’ve decided needs to have a shrine in my house, so I’m surfing to find a hairy pig for the centre of my Lares Shrine. Hell, Lafayette’s got one, why shouldn’t I?  (I don’t think TP is on Lafayette’s shrine.)

Ta da! A pig that is also a bear!  Note to self: surfing “hairy pig” wasn’t the best search you ever did. Some of those images have scarred my already tender eyeballs.

Gehayi takes OUT and Gawker to task. Spot the Tropes!

 

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” was a rallying cry once upon a time.  Teddypig has suggested a new one for us writers of gay fiction.

FUCK YOU, I LIKE THIS

 

The Pig is dead right, though. We tried and tried to turn the interview towards our work, other writers’ work (we mentioned a huge list of names, but only Josh Lanyon got a mention) We suggested that they talk to Josh, or Donald Hardy, or other male authors. But it was all about The Porn, and Ms Wilson’s seeming bafflement about why we weren’t putting females into our gay books.

FUCK YOU, I LIKE THIS. I shall be iconing this later!

- - - -

Comments

[changeling72.livejournal.com]

I do think it a bit odd straight women writing gay fiction. However, I guess it's no different to if I was to write straight romance. I would have thought the market for the latter was bigger, though.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

yes, but NONE of the Running Press authors are straight - that's really my point. everyone is banging on about "straight women writing gay porn" and yes, there are those that do - but NOT the people they were interviewing, and Gawker was commenting about. Despite the fact we both clearly said we neither of us were straight, the magazine still went with that angle, because they'd obviously decided to use that angle before they'd sent a reporter to England.

And even if I was straight, why is it odd? I don't understand why anyone thinks its odd.

No-one expects me to be an alien, a bishop, an adulterous wife, a straight female, a horse, a russian, a rabbit, a person from another time, a serial murderer, a cop, a child - but I could write all of the above scenarios and no-one would bat an eyelid. If I wrote straight romance, no-one would say OMG - THAT BISEXUAL WOMAN IS WRITING ABOUT STRAIGHTS!!!!

As a woman, at least i know what it's like to make love to a man, what a man feels like, smells like, what he likes having done to him.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Here from gehayi's journal and this:

No-one expects me to be an alien, a bishop, an adulterous wife, a straight female, a horse, a russian, a rabbit, a person from another time, a serial murderer, a cop, a child - but I could write all of the above scenarios and no-one would bat an eyelid. If I wrote straight romance, no-one would say OMG - THAT BISEXUAL WOMAN IS WRITING ABOUT STRAIGHTS!!!! is exactly what I wish people would understand.

I write gay men. I can write them because they feel anger and pride and jealousy and love and hate and tenderness and friendship and stubborness and wrath and guilt and curiosity, just like I do. I write them because they do wonderful things and they do horrible things and they do stupid things and they do fun things, just like I do. They have sex, they have relationships, they have interests, they have jobs, they have families, they have arguments, they have accomplishments, they have friends, the have frustrations, they have passions, they have faith, they have confusion... just like I do.

There are certain things that are a constant across the human race, and I don't understand why it's so impossible to believe that someone would want to put themselves in someone else's shoes, and why it would be so hard. I also don't understand why people think I'm only going to write what I know. I love my life. I am extremely happy. But I am a stay at home mom in a happy marriage with two small children. Which sounds like a better story- me staying at home with my kids, or the crossover fanfic I'm writing where the technology to mindwipe people and make them into whatever you want them to be exists in a post-apocalyptic world where less than 50,000 humans survive after genocidal robots wreaked havoc on their homeworlds? Yeah, I thought so.

God forbid people write a story about characters and times and places because they're simply interesting. Because even just focusing on the sexual aspect of homosexuality... hate, oppression, hiding the best part of your life... those don't make a fascinating and compelling story at all. It's only about the sex.

Anyway, I'm glad you can at least look at the upside and will end up with extremely well-toned eyeballs. :)

[lamardeuse.livejournal.com]

FUCK YOU, I LIKE THIS

I may very well be making an icon with that on it too, with credit to you of course. :)

[semioticwarrior.livejournal.com]

I liked the Lambda article. A refreshing change from the now-tired battle cry. "Fuck you, I like this." Hee!

[teddypig.livejournal.com]

Teddypig weighs in "bigger"...

I need to go on a diet. I swear!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

But you are so cuddly and cute! :D

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Thank you for being a voice of reason. Huge props to you.

And fuck everybody who doesn't understand.

(well, not literally. that would be unsanitary.)

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

So should I only write about gender-neutral, polyamorous (possibly celibate) bisexuals (in space! no can't do space I haven't been there yet) who do stuff I've done? Well, they can drive racing cars, develop new drugs vaccines, groom horses, not quite cure MS, climb mountains, deliver lambs, work in customer services... but then someone will pipe up that not everyone's bisexual, and some people like having a gender.

Can't please all of the people all of the time...

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

Writers are about imagination X reality = fiction.

Yeah, fiction.

As in people don't really live on other planets (yet).

Jane Austen didn't really meet "Mr. Darcy" and live happily
ever after.

Men have been writing about female sexuality for centuries
(Hello, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Euripides).

Woman, gay and straight and bisexual, have been writing about
gay men for ages ("Front Runner," Mary Renault, Annie Proulx).

Gay/bisexual men have been writing about women/from a female
POV since writing began (Whitman, Shakespeare, Rechy, Arthur
Laurents, all those Hollywood musicals and melodramas, Albee,
Proust, every soap opera ever on the air, etc.).

So what's the deal?

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

What stunned me about that article (as I’ve commented about there) was the suggestion that we (females) seem to be heteronormalifying our gay men because we are pairing them up and putting them in committed relationships.

So Lambda Literary is saying that being in a committed relationship is something that only straight people do?

Well, I guess there's no need for gay marriage then!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what i found very odd.

Despite the traditional approach to romance, love, and sex, each of these novels manages to complicate notions of sexuality. Isn’t there something queer about two men choosing to live seemingly heteronormative lives? Isn’t there something queer about redefining the bodily boundaries of virginity? And even more than this, isn’t there something queer about the fact that supposedly straight men and women want to read and write fiction where this choice is possible?

However, I'm a bear of limited intellect, and I may be entirely missing the point. The author of the article may have been using "queer" in its original sense, or it may be sarcastic, or ironic. It's impossible to tell, for me.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I read it as "peculiar," because I couldn't see what being LGBT had to do with straight (or "supposedly" straight) people liking a particular kind of fiction.

I don't know what he's talking about with "redefining the bodily boundaries of virginity" since the boundaries are very simple. You are a virgin until you have some form of sex. Then you aren't a virgin anymore. Anything else (like, you're a virgin if you have every kind of sex except for penetrative, or if you say that a relationship un-happened, then you're a virgin again) is wishful thinking.

If there was any humor, irony or satire involved, I'm afraid it sailed right over my head.