Crossed Genres Issue 12, the LGBTQ issue, goes live on November 1.

And I’m in it. Woohoo!  My short story “Cold,” about two young women on a planet in the late stages of terraforming, will appear on page… — well, I don’t know what page it’ll be on.  But it’ll be in the printed issue, & on the Crossed Genres website too.  Along with some other really good stories & artwork, like the artwork above which comes from the issue’s cover.

But while I’m really happy about being published in it, & will keep bragging it up in other posts, that’s not my primary purpose with this post.

The opposite of homophobia is…

On September 1, in one of two posts I wrote in celebration of Outer Alliance Pride Day, I wrote a post called “Queer eye for the sci-fi (& fantasy): LGBTA writers & homophobia” about antigay prejudice in the world of science fiction & fantasy. It was a homophobic rant by Nebula-award nominated John C. Wright that prompted the founding of the Outer Alliance in the first place.  (I also talked about Orson Scott Card.) [Ref #1]

Less than two weeks later, in a post called “Cold, Crossed Genres, & Flash homophobia”, I wrote about another instance of homophobia in the SF/F world: the refusal by Jake Freivald, editor of Flash Fiction Online, to accept Crossed Genres‘ ad calling for submissions to the LGBTQ issue (yes, this same issue that’s about to be published, with me in it) because that editor doesn’t accept “sexually themed ads” — & to him, anything with LGBTQ content was “sexually themed.”  Which is not the last thing Jake Freivald said that made a lot of people including me to rate him as homophobic, even if Frievald himself still claimes to “like” the gay people he knows. [Ref #2]

… welcoming.

There was a lot of reaction to the FFO editor’s action once it became known.  I write some about that in that post too.

But here’s something I didn’t mention:

Shortly after Bart Leib on Crossed Genres‘ blog & Outer Alliance posted about FFO as a queer-unfriendly market [Refs #3–4], Bart Leib was approached by Pablo Defendini of Tor.com.  Tor.com is the community site associated with Tor Books, one of the biggest publishers in science fiction/fantasy.  Defendini wrote about FFO’s rejection of the ad:

We find this attitude reprehensible, and would like to do our part in disabusing the public at large of the notion that the SF/F community is not LGBTQ-friendly. Tor.com would be more than happy to host your ad for the LBGTQ issue for free, for a period of, say, two or three weeks leading into the publication of the issue on 01 November? [Ref #5]

The ad at the top of this page went live on Tor.com yesterday. Now, & for the next couple of weeks, it appears as a banner ad on the very top of Tor’s home page (you might have to refresh the screen a few times, as the Crossed Genres‘ ad alternates with other ads placed there).

Now, that might not seem like a big deal.  But it’s an unanticipated act of generosity & welcome not only to Crossed Genres‘ & its LGBTQ issue, but to LGBTQ & allied writers and readers as a whole, from one of SF/F’s top publishers.  Let Tor.com know your appreciation.

I also want to mention here that Crossed Genres isn’t an LGBTQ magazine.  It’s a science fiction/fantasy magazine — as it advertises itself, “science fiction & fantasy with a twist.”  But its also a member of the Outer Alliance, & while there’s only one LGBTQ issue (so far, anyway), they always welcome new submissions with LGBTQ themes, so long as those submissions also have elements of Crossed Genres’ current theme.  See the current genre page for details.

I’ve already been encouraging some of my friends who write good SF/F to think about submitting to Crossed Genres.  I’ll be doing it again myself.

References

1. 9/1/09. “Queer eye for the sci-fi (& fantasy): LGBTA writers & homophobia” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2. 9/12/09. “Cold, Crossed Genres, & Flash homophobia” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
3. 9/9/09.  “SFF market rejects our LGBTQ ad” by Bart Leib (Crossed Genres).
4. 9/9/09. “Regarding queer-unfriendly markets” by mbranesf (Outer Alliance).
5. 9/10/09. “Just keep your wide eyes wide wide open” by Barb Leib (Crossed Genres blog).

Related posts:

1. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
2. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
3. Cold, Crossed Genres, & Flash homophobia

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Crossed Genres ad for its upcoming LGBTQ issue -- rejected by Flash Fiction Online editor Jake Frievald with the explanation "Sorry, I don’t accept sexually themed ads."

A day or so after Outer Alliance Pride Day, in honor of which I posted an excerpt from my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland,[Ref #1] I read on Outer Alliance’s blog that Crossed Genres, a monthly science fiction/fantasy magazine published both online and in print, was accepting submissions for an LGBTQ issue to be published in December November. [Ref #2] In fact, Crossed Genres, itself an Outer Alliance member, had posted a version of its call for submissions as its own Outer Alliance Pride Day post.[Ref #3] Submission deadline: September 30.  If you write SF/F with LGBTQ themes and/or characters, give it a look & consider submitting some work. Besides short stories, Crossed Genres also accepts articles, artwork, serial novels, novellas, and webcomics.  See their full submission guidelines.

Cool.  I’ve been far from trying to market short stories, since I don’t generally write them, & earlier this year I decided that in any case I intend to do most publishing & marketing of any work that I actually complete (one day I will actually do so!) myself.  But on the other hand — this seemed like a great opportunity to challenge myself to something different.  So last Saturday, I started work on a story taking place in the same story universe as Cold, a novel I started writing a couple years ago as a part of National Novel Writing Month.

From an early description of Cold, before I commenced writing it:

Cold is (or will be) a novel about two young women who live on a planet in the late stages of terraforming. They’ve just met again at age 17 after one of them, Boleyn, returns from a sort of exile that she & her family have been in since Boleyn was 12 due to some kind of disgrace that her parents got into — they’d been sent to some kind of hardship duty at a remote project facility for five years. Emphasis will be more on human & social issues than on science (good thing, since I’m not a scientist) — I want to explore how human communities, & the overall ecologies they are part of, might evolve in a place that’s truly new, with no other populations whether human or alien to be “conquered” or “assimilated”? How does a planet that was formerly barren of life become, eventually, “home”? [Ref #4]

November 30, 2007: Celebrating the successful completion of NaNoWriMo 2007 with my friend Chris, another NaNoWriMo winner that year

The good news about Cold: I successfully wrote 50,000+ words during a very frantic November 2007, & was a NaNoWriMo winner that year. The bad news about Cold: as most NaNovels are at the end of a frantic November, it’s still pretty drafty, & far from finished.  (I started a “second” Cold in November 2008, to continue the story, but got not quite halfway through the month before personal issues got in the way of my being able to write.)  One day….

But in the process of writing in November 2007, I learned a few things about the history  of my characters’ terraformation project, some of it going all the way back to its origins in our own solar system. And so when I decided to attempt a submission for Crossed Genres‘ December LGBTQ-themed issue, I decided to take it back to that time, when the first ships containing human populations first set out for the generations-long passage across the Long Dark between the stars.

I’m not sure of its title yet — it might even be “Long Dark.”  I know the name of one of my two principal characters, which I discovered last Saturday at one of my favorite “what to name the baby” (that is, “what to name the character in my story”) websites: Jyoti, an Indian female name derived from the Sanskrit ज्योतिः (jyotis) meaning light.  At the time, it was simply important that the name be an Indian female name that I like, but in writing today I discovered that its meaning is plenty important too, & that’s very cool: I write at my best when I’m making discoveries in the process.  The name of the other principal might be Esti, which might mean sweet or honey if you’re Basque, or star if you’re Persian, or a misspelled version of Eesti, which is Estonia.  I’m happy with any of these meanings.  And now you know that the names of my characters is pretty important to me.

Will I finish this story in time to submit it? Beats me, but I’m sure gonna try.  Will it be accepted? Not up to me, but I’m sure gonna try.  Is it worth the doing in any case?  Yes.  So I’m on my way.

* * *

Meanwhile, in the busy week between last Saturday & this, in which I spend a good chunk of my waking time in the grey, another chunk of time (some of it overlapping) at work, another chunk writing about the (so far) failed lawsuit against the Alaska Judicial Council, & another chunk rewatching episodes from “Dexter” Season 3 — stuff was going on with Crossed Genres too.

Namely, some of the same type of gunk I wrote about in my second post on Outer Alliance Pride Day: homophobia in the world of science fiction and fantasy. [Ref #5] This took the form of the chief high muckety-muck of Flash Fiction Online, a guy named Jack Frievald, rejecting Crossed Genres’ ad — the same ad I’ve posted at the head of this blog — with the explanation, “Sorry, I don’t accept sexually themed ads.” [Ref #6]

WTF?  Sexually themed?

Bart Leib, the Crossed Genres editor who was placing the ad, had much the same reaction, so he wrote to Frievald seeking explanation.  While Frievald’s response — you can read it here on the Crossed Genres blog — was civil & thoughtfully written, it’s essentially again of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” variety: in essence, Frievald accepts that, in his words, “LGBTQ people are children of God — literally — and as worthy of respect as any other human beings” and “*being* gay — having those feelings — is simply how LGBTQ people are, and attaches no guilt to them” — which is, granted, a good deal less nasty than what we in Anchorage heard all summer from the Christianist right during our late great Summer of Hate.  But nonetheless, Frievald believes that no one besides monogamous heterosexual couples who have never been divorced should be permitted to marry, that only married couples should ever have sex, and that “those who promote ‘gay rights’ are acting under misguided beliefs about what we should or shouldn’t do as a society, and I don’t want to promote or condone those behaviors or beliefs.” [Ref #6]

I.e., he’s saying to us: “you’re a child of God, & being LGBTQ is simply who you are, no guilt attached — but your efforts to secure equality under the law with other children of God who are simply being who they are is misguided & wrong.  It’s not only okay for you to have fewer rights than us heterosexuals, but is in fact exactly how I believe society ought to be ordered.”

Here we go again.  Is that hate?  is that homophobia?

I submit for your consideration the thought that homophobia or hatred doesn’t by necessity require spittle-flecked lips, such as we in Anchorage had to continually shield ourselves from over the summer just passed.  I don’t imagine that every husband who believed it was the proper order of the world that his wife be disallowed from voting, from owning property in her own right, or from refusing sexual intercourse when he wanted it, believed that he hated his wife.  But I’ve sure never been able to put those beliefs down to love either. Or justice.  Or with how a society ought to be properly ordered.

Maybe I could put it down to liking.  After all, Frievald has divorced friends, single mother friends (even single mother family members!) who had sex out of wedlock, heterosexual married friends who use contraception — all of these friends having made choice he disapproves of, he nevertheless still likes them.  One can imagine he has gay, lesbian, bi, and/or trans friends that he likes, too.  In fact, in comments on Crossed Genres‘ blog post about the ad rejection, after Rod Santos — a gay writer who had previously sold work to Flash Fiction Online — expressed regret about Frievald’s beliefs, Frievald responded,

Hi, Rod, and thanks for the comment. I enjoyed working with you and liked you before I knew you were gay, and now that I know, I still like you and would enjoy working with you in the future, if you care to do so.

You’re one of the very few who has shown a modicum of actual tolerance — mutual respect despite fundamental differences — and I appreciate it. [Ref #6]

Yep.  He likes him.  Just as so many of the red-shirt-wearing Christianists in Anchorage this summer who claimed to have LGB or T friends but nonetheless testified before the Anchorage Assembly that we were undeserving of equal protection from discrimination.

Some friends.

Not.

I submit for your consideration the thought that liking someone does not by necessity mean that you care one whit for that person’s fair treatment or well-being.  I submit for your consideration the thought that considering someone to be your friend does not by necessity mean that the other person feels likewise about you, or that your behavior with regard to that friend is, in fact, friendship.

I will add that Bart Leib expended a considerable amount of time and energy discussing the issue of the ad rejection and his correspondence with Frievald with other members of the Outer Alliance before he finally decided to post Frievald’s email.  I finally got a chance to review that discussion tonight.  It was only at the very end of it, after a discussion involving about 100 posts from various people, that Leib even revealed to us the identity of the market & the editor who rejected the ad, & only because in the end he decided — as most agreed — that it was a responsible thing to do to make LGBTQ SF/F writers aware if there was a market that had editorial policies unfriendly to their work, or that assumed that LGBTQ-themed work was by its nature “sexually themed.”  Some of what Frievald said specifically addressed his editorial policies with regard to LGBTQ-themed material:

I would probably not publish stories where the purpose was to justify or condone homosexual relationships, polyamory, and so on — I reject all “message” stories, even those that I agree with — but that doesn’t imply that stories containing those elements will automatically be rejected…. That said, I’ve only published one story that focuses on divorce, and it shows how dysfunctional divorce is (without being a “message” story)…. [Ref #6]

It’s not too hard to connect the dots — especially if you read Frievald’s entire letter — & conclude that even stories which portray characters who “just happen to be” in healthy homosexual relationships could easily be rationalized as “message” stories which justify or condone homosexuality — or that stories portraying an unhealthy or badly-ending homosexual relationship could easily be rationalized as a “non-message” story — if only because it didn’t justify or condone homosexual relationships.

In the end, I agree with others that that Leib’s responsibility towards writers who write LGBTQ-themed fiction trumped any privacy concerns about Leib’s correspondence with Frievald.  In the words of one commenter on Leib’s post,

Thanks for letting us know where not to waste our time. I think you made the right choice. [Ref #6]

So do I.

The Outer Alliance had this to say about it:

After much discussion within the Outer Alliance, a consensus has been reached that when our writers or publishers encounter a market that is specifically unwelcoming to queer content, that we ought to make sure our membership is aware of it so that they may decide individually whether or not they wish to try to conduct business with such a market.

It is adamantly not the function of the Outer Alliance to tell its members how to behave nor to police the world of speculative fiction publishing. We do, however, believe that our membership, and many more people outside the Alliance, would prefer to have the information when it becomes known that a publisher is specifically opposed to the things we stand for. [Ref #7]

While I was not party to the discussion at the time, I agree with this consensus all the way.

What again is it that the Outer Alliance stands for?  What do I, as a member of the Outer Alliance, stand for?

References

1. 9/1/09. “Outer Alliance Pride Day 2009: An excerpt from Mistress of Woodland” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
2. 9/2/09. “Submissions: Crossed Genres Calls for LGBTQ Spec Fic” by Natania (Outer Alliance).
3. 9/1/09. “Outer Alliance Pride Day” by Bart Leib (Crossed Genres). Announcing its 12th issue, to be published December 1, 2009, as an LGBTQ-themed issue. (An announcement is also on Crossed Genres’ current genre page, but looks like the content there will change when they select their next theme.)
4. 10/1/07. “About ‘Cold’” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
5. 9/1/09. “Queer eye for the sci-fi (& fantasy): LGBTA writers & homophobia” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa).
6. 9/9/09.  “SFF market rejects our LGBTQ ad” by Bart Leib (Crossed Genres).
7. 9/9/09. “Regarding queer-unfriendly markets” by mbranesf (Outer Alliance).
8. 9/9/09. “Freivald’s Flash Fiction Online is a Queer Unfriendly Market” by tacithydra (Venturesome).
9. 9/10/09. “The Rejection Heard Round the World (well, technically…)” by Kay Holt (posting as sandykiss, LiveJournal blog). Kay Holt is co-editor with Bart Leib of Crossed Genres.
10. 9/10/09. “Just keep your wide eyes wide wide open” by Bart Leib (Crossed Genres).

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live
2. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
3. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

I live in Anchorage.  Like most of LGBT folk in Anchorage, along with our allies, a lot of my emotional & political energy over the past few months has been taken up in our fight for protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. On August 11, we won that fight — temporarily — when the Anchorage Municipal Assembly, by a vote of 7 to 4, passed the Anchorage equal rights ordinance, AO 2009-64.  But a few days later, on August 17, Mayor Dan Sullivan vetoed it.  While the Assembly has a few more days to try to override the veto, it doesn’t seem likely.  And so, for the third time in 35 years, Anchorage first granted equality to at least some of its LGBT citizens, and for the third time the forces of intolerance, Christianist supremacy, and homophobia took it away again.

So you’ll pardon me if it wasn’t until today that I got the full skinny on why the Outer Alliance was started some days ago with the goal to “educate, support, and celebrate LGBT contributions in the science-fiction and fantasy genres.” [Ref #1] I knew it had something to do with some creepy comments made by a certain science fiction/fantasy writer, but I didn’t actually know what he said.

Now I know.  And let me tell you, it rates every bit as full of hatred and ignorance as the worst offal spewed in Anchorage this summer out of the mouths of Christianist hate-pastor Jerry Prevo, self-proclaimed homophobe and “rascist” Eddie Burke [see note 1 below], and the numerous red-shirted individuals who carried their “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech into the Assembly chambers or spilled it into the comments on the Anchorage Daily News website [note 2].

The SF/F fiction writer in question was John C. Wright, Nebula Award-nominated author of the fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos, along with other SF/F titles.  His Wikipedia entry provides a good summary (I’ve removed the links and internal footnoting for ease of reading):

On July 29, 2009, Wright posted an entry in his blog entitled More Diversity and More Perversity in the Future! where he criticized SyFy’s [formerly known as the SciFi Channel] promises of more diversity in programming, calling homosexuality an “abomination”, “an irrational lust”, “a malfunction of love”, “perverted” and not “normal and natural”, drawing comparison to racism and suggesting its depiction to be similar to that of “love affairs with corpses, small children, and farm animals”. This caused controversy within the science fiction community, drawing heavy criticism from fellow sci-fi writer such as Hal Duncan. Wright later deleted the original post, complaining of “slander” at having his views about lesbian and gay people identified as homophobic and bigoted, and sought to clarify that he shared the views of his church that homosexuality was against nature. He concluded, however, by saying “The love a homosexual feels toward his lover may be disordered — but it is still love, and love is still divine.” [Ref #2]

As wryly noted by Mari Kurisato a few days later,

John C Wright has decided to try to outdo Orson Scott Card and other misohomosexuals, primarily by being a stellar shit thrower  on the internet and then going “well, I didn’t mean it exactly like that.” [Ref #3]

Links within the quote are hers, and worth checking out.  They are, in order, the full text of John C. Wright’s original LiveJournal entry, which someone retained after Wright took it down from his own blog; the portion of SF/F writer Orson Scott Card’s Wikipedia entry on his views about homosexuality; and an entry from Wright’s blog indicating a putative “apology.” [Refs 4, 5, 6] For her part, Mari Kurisato, a talented illustrator, went on to design Outer Alliance’s logo. [Ref #3]

But the actual post I ran across which first gave me a rundown, and some highly useful commentary, about the John C. Wright controversy was one by Kip Manley called “John C. Wright is recoiling in craven fear and trembling, and I don’t feel so good myself” [Ref #7], which takes Wright’s nonsense and makes it — well… nonsense.  Because that’s what it is.  And pretty atrocious nonsense too. Much as we became accustomed to hearing in Anchorage in the course of our Summer of Hate. [Note 3]

At one point, Manley quotes from an older post of his, when the topic of discussion was Orson Scott Card — a writer I used to call “my favorite Mormon science fiction writer,” up until the time Card started displaying his own antigay attitudes.  Manley wrote in 2004:

Science fiction is largely a fiction of setting: the bulk of the iceberg that’s unseen, underwater, is the act of world-building, and in that act, politics is paramount. (One is building a polis, after all.) —Therefore, it’s all-too-appropriate to keep in mind an author’s politics when considering their science fiction: an author who, say, considers homosexuality to be an aberration, is un- (or perhaps less) likely to build a world that would appeal to a reader who does not. There’s an assumption clash: one of his fundamental, foundational bedrocks is abhorrent to me, and vice-versa.

One can respond: well, yes, but there’s nothing about aberrant homosexuality in Ender’s Game, so how can it clash? Heck, there’s nothing in that book about homosexuality at all! And I will resist the urge to say oh, you think so? and I will even resist the urge to say precisely! —Instead, I’ll allow as how there’s frequently large gaps in the jerry-rigged polis left as exercises for the reader: one can hardly describe every kitchen sink, after all; one must make assumptions, and count on the reader doing likewise (which among other reasons is why fan fiction [and slash fiction] is so popular in science fiction). But that’s precisely why when those assumptions suddenly clash, it’s unsettling, even violently dissonant. [Ref #8]

I struggle with those issues myself — whether or how completely to divorce the art from the artist — even with people like Orson Scott Card, whose second “Ender” novel, Speaker for the Dead, has always struck me as deeply compassionate in its  acceptance of difference between people. But if the artist is not necessarily the same as his art, nor is Card the same as Ender Wiggin.  At least not when it comes to homosexuals. [Ref #9]

But deciding whether or not to purchase or read or boycott the work of writers who have publicly demonstrated their homophobia, or any other moral failing they may have, is not what the Outer Alliance is about.  Rather, it is, as previously stated, to to “educate, support, and celebrate LGBT contributions in the science-fiction and fantasy genres.” [Ref #1] And here’s one reason why:

This is a point that probably does not need to be reiterated too often among our group, but one that never quits being useful: when they (the members of the majority culture, or whatever you want to call them) know personally even one of us, then they tend to be more open-minded about who we are, more ready to give up those prejudices based on what we are not.  This fact, more than any other, is why we are winning what American right-wingers like to call “the culture war” in spite of our vast numerical disadvantage. Every single time a queer comes out or a straight ally speaks up in favor equality of human dignity, at least one, and usually more, of our opponents fall back and retrench or just give up. The John C. Right [sic] Affair is good example of it. [Ref #10]

As a writer — now hoping, frankly, to move on from the Summer of Hate and back to my writing — this is something I can wholeheartedly endorse and take part in.  As a lesbian citizen of Anchorage, for whom the Summer of Hate is a very recent and very lasting memory, it’s how I intend to conduct myself in my day-to-day life: to live openly, happily, and fully as who I am — knowing full well that eventually, even the likes of Jerry Prevo and Eddie Burke will fall away.

I hope that readers of this blog, most of whom (I think) are Alaskans, and some of whom (I hope) are readers of science fiction and fantasy, will consider joining the Outer Alliance and will take a look at some of the numerous posts posted today in honor of Outer Alliance Pride Day.  They’re all listed on the Outer Alliance’s website. [Ref #11]

Maybe even take a look at mine. [Ref #12] I’ve gotta say, as interesting as Palin getting punked might be, such that my post on it’s gotten 130 hits today as of this writing — it would sure be nice to have more than 11 hits on the excerpt posted early today of my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland.  Who knows, you might even like Mielikki more than you like Sarah Palin.

Notes

1. The red-t-shirt rightwing talk radio host Eddie Burke wore when he testified at the Assembly identified him as a “Homophobic Red Shirt Bible Thumping Nazi Gay Bashing Tea Bagging Rascist White Guy Bigot.” Speculation is that either (a) Burke doesn’t know how to spell or (b) he was purposely combining the words racist and fascist and identifying himself as both.
2. “Truth is Not Hate” was, of course, the most frequently seen sign carried by anti-ordinance protesters over the course of the summer.  “Love the sinner, hate the sin” yada yada. I plan to examine the falsity of these claims of “not hating” in the near future.  The signs were printed by Alaska Family Council, which along with Prevo’s Anchorage Baptist Temple took the lead in the Christianist assault on equal rights in Anchorage over the summer.
3. “Summer of Hate” is a term I’ve adopted from Brendan Joel Kelley’s account of the Anchorage equal rights ordinance battle in his August 28, 2009 post for Dan Savage’s blog, “Meanwhile in Alaska: Anchorage’s Summer of Hate” (The Stranger). Brendan Joel Kelley is associate editor of the Anchorage Press.

References

1. 8/09. “About Us” (The Outer Alliance).
2. “John C. Wright.” Wikipedia entry.
3. 8/19/09. “Perversion versus Obscurity” by Mari Kurisato (Mari’s MetaMusings).
4. 7/29/09. “More Diversity and More Perversity in the Future!” by John C. Wright (John C. Wright’s Journal, reposted on the PaBlog). Wright’s statement is also reposted as comment 42 to the August 13, 2009 post “Justifying homosexuality without justifying incest” by Amerpersand (Alas! a blog).
5. “Orson Scott Card.” Wikipedia entry, section on “Homosexuality” (Card’s views about it).
6. 8/18/09. “APOLOGIA PRO OPERE SUI part I” by John C. Wright (John C. Wright’s Journal, LiveJournal).
7. 8/15/09. “John C. Wright is recoiling in craven fear and trembling, and I don’t feel so good myself” by Kip Manley (Long Story Short Pier).
8. 4/24/04. “Negative space, or, Why I don’t trust æsthetes” by Kip Manley (Long Story Short Pier).
9. 7/28/08. “Editorial: It’s Time to Call Out Anti-Gay Author of ‘Ender’s Game’” (AfterElton.com).
10. 8/25/09. “Outer Alliance Pride Day 9/1/09″ (The Outer Alliance).
11. 9/1/09. “Outer Alliance Pride Day Posts Begin!” (The Outer Alliance).
12. 9/1/09. “Outer Alliance Pride Day 2009: An excerpt from Mistress of Woodland” by Melissa S. Green (Henkimaa.com).

Related posts:

1. In some parts of the world, it's already Outer Alliance Pride day
2. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live
3. Cold, Crossed Genres, & Flash homophobia

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity.  I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

I’ve been reading the SF & fantasy for most of my life, thanks to me picking up the habit from my brothers Dave & Mark.  I’ve been reading SF & fantasy by LGBT writers and allies for almost as long, starting in the late 1970s after I came out when I was in college.  From those days I remember  Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, first published in 1975 when I was still in high school; Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1978), a utopian classic reflecting the lesbian-feminist separatist politics of the late 1970s; Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles — I wrote a review he first two books in this series, Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978) for Boston’s Gay Community News not long after the latter title came out.

I’ve read plenty of good queer speculative fiction since then, by LGBT and non-LGBT authors alike — people like  C.J. Cherryh,  Samuel R. Delaney, Kelley Eskridge, Nicola Griffith, Ursula K. LeGuin, Elizabeth A. Lynn, Marge Piercy, Melissa Scott, Joan Slonczewski, John Varley— the list goes on.  And should go on. Which is why I joined the Outer Alliance.

Besides which, I write some of this stuff myself. In celebration of the inauguration of the Outer Alliance with Outer Alliance Pride Day 2009, I’m sharing an excerpt from my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland.

(And note, as did a friend of mine, the considerable irony of September 1 being both first day of legal same-sex marriage in Vermont, and the beginning of Mayor’s Diversity Month in Anchorage, a city whose mayor last month vetoed a measure which would have provided equal protection from discrimination for LGBT citizens.)

Mistress of Woodland (or MoW as I call it for short) takes its title from Mielikki, a forest spirit of Finnish myth known also as metsolan emäntä, mistress of woodland — and one of MoW’s principal characters.

MoW is the story of Rachel, devastated by the sudden loss of an important relationship. Now she’s trying to make sense of a world that seems to have been thrown into the air and scattered like playing cards in a child’s game of 52-pick-up.

But Rachel isn’t the only person trying to make sense of things. Hidden away in Rachel’s life are Mielikki and two other figures of Finnish myth, Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen, who decide to send her to the Questors’ Fire, a metaphorical world devised by the mysterious Dice, who may in fact be the Spirit of Luck. By way of the Questors’ Fire, the three Finnish gods hope to lead Rachel back to Henkimaa, her spiritual home.

This excerpt is from a chapter called “Pain Mountain,” in which Rachel’s spiritual self — known by the other questors at the Questors’ Fire as Helvetti — is suffering from the effects of a grievous wound.

* * *

Helvetti fumbled with the buckles of the scabbard and removed it, standing sword and scabbard against the deadfall alongside her staff. Setting up the tent was usually an easy chore, but each step of it now seemed endless — pulling it out of the bag, spreading the tent itself out on the ground, snapping the poles together and kneeling down to push them through the sleeves of the tent. She felt faint and clammy, and she thought her face was wet with sweat more than rain. Her belly — but she tried not to think of it, of how the Holly-demon had driven the sword into her. She forced herself to work on until the tent was up, then the rainfly. She retrieved her staff and sword and knelt down to the door zipper and tensed. What if Holly…? — but no, she imagined the interior as she wanted it to be, and unzipped the door to find it so: her blue and purple sleeping bag, the red and black-checkered wool blanket she liked to take on road-trips, a couple of blue foam camping pads. Safe.

She tossed in the staff and sword and crawled into the tent, staying to the floor so as not to muddy her bed. She lay down, unable for the moment to sit up even to zip the tent shut. Rest, just rest, she thought. She only had to shuck her wet clothes and climb into the sleeping bag and everything would be okay. Raindrops beat a quiet tattoo on the rainfly. She drew up one foot, then the other, unlacing her boots and kicking them off, peeling off her wet socks. The air was cold on her damp wrinkled feet. She unbuckled her belt and unzipped her trousers, pulled her shirt loose of her jeans. It was damp to the touch. It shouldn’t be. It was just the dampness of her fingers, she told herself, she’d been touching so many wet things. But when she brought up her left hand, her fingers were smeared red.

Panicked, she lifted her head and looked down the length of her body as, hands shaking, she pulled up her shirt. “Oh no,” she moaned, “please, no….” Her lower belly, that at Ophelia’s cabin had been as pale and smooth as if no sword had ever touched it, was dark with blood. She dropped her head back and wept in fear. “No, please… I don’t want to die… please, god, please… help me….”

“Ai, kiitos,” a voice softly exclaimed, “that’s all the excuse I need!”

With unthinking fear Helvetti scrabbled away from the doorway, grasping wildly for her sword. “No, no, don’t kill me!”

But the woman stooped in the doorway wasn’t the Holly-demon. It was no one Helvetti had seen before.

“It isn’t my plan,” the woman said gravely. She wore faded blue jeans and a forest-green slicker beaded with rain. Her eyes shifted from Helvetti’s face to the sword half-drawn in Helvetti’s one hand, then to her other hand pressed to the wound — holding my guts in, Helvetti thought, feeling how warm her blood was seeping through her fingers.

“I must look at that,” the woman said. She stepped into the tent, and Helvetti kicked off from the floor to scuttle away, but her shoulders and head hit up against the tent wall. She gripped the sword, not yet free of the scabbard, but the woman ignored it and knelt on the muddied floor beside her. “Keep your hand there,” she said, laying her own hand over Helvetti’s bloody one, adding to the pressure. Her accent was peculiar and at once familiar. “No, please don’t struggle — I’m not here to harm you. I’m going to help you.” She had blonde hair, a windchapped face. She turned her head, the thick braid at her back flinging out a spray of moisture. “Kauko!” she shouted.

“Who are you? Where… where in hell did you come from?”

“From the very depths of Helvetti herself… — Kauko!” the woman yelled again, and from outside the tent another voice called, “Täällä!”

“Missä laulaja?”

“Lähellä. Hetkinen, haen hänet.”

There was the woman’s face again, wide and strong, cheeks ruddy with the outdoors. “Kauko’s fetching the Singer. You’re bleeding overmuch, but he’ll fix you.” She lay a cool hand on Helvetti’s forehead. “Clammy. You’re pale. Going into shock, I think.” Her hand was steadying, calming. The terror was still there, but distant. “You do like a close call, don’t you? But you called me in time, just in time –”

“Called…you…?” Helvetti’s voice seemed to come from somewhere remote. Somewhere else far away her fingers released the sword.

“You called me, yes. ‘Please, god, please,’ you said. So here I am. Hmm — I’ve got to get these wet clothes off you, get you warm… but it’s not good to move you….”

“You’re… god?”

“Well, I’m not Ukko, or one of those from your Bible, and I’m not the Cosmic Egg. But you’re the one who says god is the universe and everything in it, so I’m close enough, eh? Tietysti! — I can poof as well as you, now, can’t I? That’s how I’ll move you.”

The woman’s eyes were almost oriental, the hint of what might have been epicanthic folds at their inner corners, crow’s feet at the outer. They were grey eyes. Warm. Warm, like her hands were now on Helvetti’s forehead, on Helvetti’s hand still held against the bleeding wound, far far away, warm like her voice chanting something low under her breath. Warm; but there was still the cold on Helvetti’s legs and feet from chill air and wet trousers.

Then a moment of strangeness, a shift, and the warm satiny feel of her sleeping bag against her skin, the bag zipped half down as Mielikki — yes, it must be Mielikki, finally Mielikki — leaned into her belly, the pressure of her hands holding back the blood, her grey eyes looking down on Helvetti, staving off fear.

Ft. Richardson woods, on the eastern edge of Anchorage — where much of MoW is set.

Related posts:

1. In some parts of the world, it's already Outer Alliance Pride day
2. Breaking through on Ophelia
3. Mielikki

It’s still August 31 in Anchorage, but in some parts of the world — most of it by now, in fact — it’s already Outer Alliance Pride Day.  That means that around the world, Outer Alliance members are already posting excerpts from their fiction, opinion pieces, and other writings related to the Outer Alliance pledge, which reads:

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Since I live in one of the last time zones to experience September 1, my Pride Day post will be one of the last posted — to be exact, at the stroke of 1 minutes after midnight, Alaska Standard time.

But the Outer Alliance Twitter feed has already announced publication of several Pride Day posts, so I’m collecting them here. (And will update later this evening before I go to bed… before my post is posted, probably.)

Here they are so far:

• Anna Caro — Wellington, New Zealand
• Sam Fleming — Edinbugh, Scotland
• Lynne Jamneck — a South African living in Wellington, New Zealand
• Christopher Fletcher (M-Brane SF) — Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. He also has an “adult content” Pride entry at his LiveJournal blog.
• Cesar Torres — Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Mari Kurisato — hikkimori
• Paul Evanby — Dutch writer living in (I think) Iran
• Benjamin Solah — Melbourne, Australia

Outer Alliance also has a list here — but note that some of them (including mine) aren’t live yet.  (Unless you’re reading this post a few hours later than when I’m posting it.)

What is the Outer Alliance? Per its inaugual post:

Related posts:

1. Outer Alliance Pride Day 2009: An excerpt from Mistress of Woodland
2. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live
3. Queer eye for the sci-fi (& fantasy): LGBTA writers & homophobia