Sometimes it’s just not about us. Really, it’s okay for oppressed and marginalized groups to want to have things that are just for them. I promise you, giving up a teensy bit of space in the world will not kill you. You say this offends you because you consider yourself an ally? Hmm, I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick on the ally concept if you think it means demanding that you be included in everything. In fact being a good ally often involves shutting the fuck up and taking a step back. There’s this curious concept called listening that some folks seem to have left by the wayside. So let me boost the signal a wee bit and point out that when you sound like this person completely ignoring historical and social context in order to bolster your complaints? It is probably a good time to listen to all the people telling you that you’re on the road to Fail. I understand that 2009 seems to be the year where everyone eats their foot, but could we just once not engage in a repeat of the same shitty privileged behavior? I’m starting to feel like we need a “These are asshole moves” bingo board and drinking game for 2010, and that’s a bad thing for my brain and my liver.
No love,
The (mostly) straight woman who would like to stop screaming at the internet.
P.S. Yes, there are certainly some valid criticisms of the way this was handled. And I’m sure there are some valid internal GLBTQ community critiques of the Lambda Awards too. That doesn’t change the fact that this particular critique is built (at best) on privilege and entitlement.
And now a word from our sponsor…
| Your ad could be here, right now. |
Dear Straight Cisgender People Who Are Showing Out
Oh goodness. Let me rant a bit.
1: In a decade, we’ve gone from a situation in which we were lucky to get on mainstream bookshelves at all, to a situation in which “gay fiction” by and for straights competes with LGBT literary and critical works for shelf space.
2: I’m fucking sick and tired of seeing entire floor displays of boy’s love next to a tiny selection of queer comics. Fun Home certainly, maybe a volume or two of DTWOF, perhaps The Freddy Stories if we are lucky. (Yes Lynda Barry is straight, she still has a ton more sensitivity than CLAMP.)
3: Brokeback was good, but a story by a straight woman transformed into a movie produced by and staring straight men that offers a dismal view of gay male experience isn’t definitive or groundbreaking compared to Torch Song Trilogy, a movie from 20 years ago in which the main character breaks up with his own mother rather than be disrespected.
4: I’m also sick and tired of straight writers of gay romance and slash for their own benefit being heaped praise as literary revolutionaries. I’m also sick of cookies given to Rowling for coping to writing Dumbledore in the closet.
I don’t think any of this addresses the issue of forced disclosure. Why do authors have to disclose information I believe they have every right to insist on remaining private. Yes, they don’t have to formally declare their sexuality, but functionally it’s the same. At least I can imagine it is to the military legal code.
Because it’s an award by and for LGBT* people. Plenty of similar awards exist out there that have similar expectations.
Eh, CB, would you mind explaining your comment about CLAMP? Is it that their depictions of some of the relationships tend to be similar to straight couples? ( I.E, in one manga a character said he wanted to be a wife?) Or is it some other thing I’m missing here?
I’m not familiar with the books; is Dumbledore closeted per se? Or is he just not “overtly” gay, whatever that means? My experience is that portraying gay characters as like everyone else (only gay) is realistic.
*sigh* here we go again.
Within the text, Dumbledore’s sexuality and relationship is treated extremely ambiguously. Compare this, in contrast, to Weetzie Bat and Witch Baby where Dirk and Duck are treated just like everyone else, but still explicitly and unambigously a couple.
The problem is that when gay characters have been portrayed in the history of literature, it’s been so carefully coded and buried under ambiguous subtext that it’s impossible to do more than construct a reasonable interpretation. It’s reasonable to say that Watson and Holmes could possibly be interpreted as gay, and it’s reasonable to say that golden-age Wonder Woman can be interpreted as lesbian. When we do so however, we are inevitably attacked for treating same-sex friendship as sexual or projecting our own desires. Which could be the case, but with ambiguous texts, you just can’t tell.
Rowling’s revelation is nice and safe because her text is comfortably ambiguous. And it’s that ambiguous text that readers will encounter in 2020 and 2040. Meanwhile authors of more explicit LGBT-positive literature are routinely challenged in schools and libraries for what they include on the printed page.
Which is a round-about way of getting to my point. Heterosexual authors are showered with praise just for tackling gay issues. And currently there is more than enough buzz about women as writers and consumers of MM content to validate them as the cutting edge of something. My feeling is that works about us threaten to displace works by us, and that’s certainly true a few aisles over where import yaoi is given a much greater presence than queer comics.
Amen. This whole thing has been giving me a headache. And I’m especially confused by comments that ask why a straight woman isn’t “allowed” to write about gay men (as though Lambda is trying to police the literary landscape) but a lesbian is. Um, no, this isn’t about writing autobiographies. It’s about encouraging queer people to write queer stories, and I can’t see how that’s controversial.
The only argument that makes sense to me, as Flemming points out, is the issue of forced disclosure. Lambda seems to be doing it right by letting the entrants self-identify–as far as I can tell, they’re not making any judgments on sexuality or gender–so the risk of outing closeted authors seems like an unavoidable price. Perhaps the risk of entering such a competition is comparable to the risk of publishing queer fiction, anyway.
It seems like people want the Lambda Awards to do one of two different things:
A. Award queer authors for writing Queer Literature
B. Award any authors for writing Queer Literature
But what about awarding queer authors for writing any kind of literature? Wouldn’t that be a greater boon to the queer author community? Otherwise, they might feel they have to write queer books to be recognized. Awards specifically for black, female, American, etc. writers don’t limit the subject of the text to stories about blacks, females, or Americans. Or maybe there should be two separate awards:
A. Award any authors for writing Queer Literature
B. Award queer authors for writing any Literature
That maximizes the amount of queer literature and queer authors that get attention. More total attention for queerness! I know, I know, I’m straight so it’s none of my beeswax, but doesn’t that just objectively make more sense?
P.S. As a straight cisgender, is it ok for me to say “queer”?
Sure, there are reasonable objections to the policy. I don’t feel that declaring that your fiction is better than gay men’s writing about their own lives, that you are a victim of censorship, that recognition of queer authors is illegal, and that you just won’t write gay characters if you don’t get a pat on the back by a gay rights organization strike me as unreasonable responses.
Minor quibble on CLAMP, just because I’m a fan — CLAMP writes shoujo (which includes the subcategory boys’ love). By girls, for girls. In their amateur material/doujinshi they write yaoi — not only by girls/for girls, but so deliberately bizarre that no one can mistake it for any attempt at real life. They’re not even trying to do real gay guys, any more than porn for men tries to do real lesbians.
I agree with you that boys’ love shouldn’t be shelved next to actual queer stuff; that’s stupidity on the part of the bookstores. But the artists, at least in this case, understand the difference.
I’m straight so it’s none of my beeswax, but doesn’t that just objectively make more sense?
Robin – please check out item number 4 of karnythia’s excellent post today “do’s and don’ts of being a good ally”
Lambda can give out their own awards to whomever they like, with whatever criteria suits them, whether it makes “objective” sense or not. End of story.
(and personally I think it’s a little strange . . . this market for straight women writing novels about boys’ love for (sounds like) other straight women . . . but whatever)
And I don’t think that many people will (overtly) call in the language police – for you as an ally not a foe – for using the word queer. Some people, though, will feel that you are taking familiar licence. I would . . . if we were speaking face to face about queer issues. But that’s just me.
And the concern about outing authors? The award is for authors who live in an openly queer identity. For authors who want to pretend they’re straight (for whatever reasons) – don’t expect an award from Lambda.
Comment 6 adequately answered my question; now I want to underscore that it was a sincere question—I’m not gay and not an English major and haven’t read Harry Potter and so, not having any knowledge of the subject, I wasn’t intentionally taking a position.
So, everyone, what are your thoughts on yaoi?
Hershele, I wrote about Dumbledore here not long after JK’s announcement — http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2007/10/20/hes-gay-and-hes-native-american-rowling-and-scalzi-claim-marginal-identities-for-charcters-after-the-fact/
I agree that Lambda can do whatever it likes with its awards. There is a lot of precedent, though, for the idea of having two awards, one for in-group members who write about any subject, and one for anyone who writes about the subject featured by the award. For instance, I think the most prominent SF awards for POC are split that way.
I like the word queer because it’s very good for encapsulating people with a number of different fractional identities. As a bisexual woman, I find it to be one of the more inclusive and welcoming terms. It seems to me that the language I see people using is moving more and more toward queer being an acceptable, nonremarkable word, but that may just be my limited reading.
I like the word queer because it’s very good for encapsulating people with a number of different fractional identities.
Oh, I agree. I love the word queer, and I’m glad that it’s gaining acceptance. Both my mother and mother-not-in-law told me – on different occasions – to not use that foul word to refer to myself, which kind of makes me love it all the more.
So maybe there’s a new generational change going on? Perhaps younger people are using it less as an ingroup word and more as a general descriptor of everyone non-straight. And that’d be great, also, for the LG people in LGBT since the word “gay” has taken on such negative overtones among young people (although, perhaps we’ll have to reclaim that word).
But, still, if I were talking with someone I knew to be straight and she was using the word queer I’d feel a little funny. Perhaps I’m just old fashioned!
. . . I’m still having lots of trouble, myself, with my very-straight sister’s constant talk of all her “girlfriends” (i.e., her straight female friends, as in “my girlfriend Rosa and I went to the beach”; although she uses the term “boyfriend” exclusively for male/female romantic relationships) . . . but I’m trying to be accepting.
From my understanding, it seems that the Lambda awards were always meant to benefit LGBTQ authors. It went unstated because the majority of queer fiction WAS being written by queer people. Now that there’s a growing straight market for gay fiction, I think Lambda realized that they needed it in writing. So this doesn’t even strike me as a new controversial policy, just a clarification of their old one.
And honestly, it’s a good thing they DID put it in writing beforehand. If they hadn’t, and everyone had entered but a gay author had won, I can just imagine these same straight cisgendered women complaining that “so-and-so got special consideration just for being gay.”
As for “queer,” I personally love the word as well, but only use it in specific contexts, e.g. when I’m making a point of avoiding labels or when I want to be especially inclusive. It’s such a revolutionary word that I think everyone should be free to use it, but I’d like them to understand its significance first.