A Conversation between Steve Berman, Christopher Barzak, Richard Bowes and Craig Laurance Gidney on Gay Speculative Fiction

Steve Berman: While there are tens of thousands of books released every year, there are certainly fewer gay titles and even fewer gay fantastical books. I wanted to edit a work of quality queer speculative fiction and fairies happen to be hot right now, so that was my rationale for the book. But what about yours? All three of you identify as writers. But do you have an identity as a gay writer of spec fic? A spec fic writer who happens to be gay?

Rick Bowes: I am gay. I write. I work mostly in speculative fiction. A lot of my stories have gay characters. As I remember, when you asked me to contribute to So Fey I said I didn’t have any plans for a story about gay fairies. But that if an idea came to me and I wrote the story I’d send it to you.

I then wrote “A Tale for the Short Days” for the Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling trickster tales anthology Coyote Road. That was the first story I’d done for a theme anthology. I surprised myself right after that by writing “The Wand’s Boy,” which you bought for So Fey. Recently I wrote “The Margay’s Children,” for the Datlow/Windling, magical animal anthology The Beastly Bride.

I wrote the story, “In the House of the Man in the Moon” for Bending The Landscape – Fantasy back in the 1997. But I don’t consider the three Bending the Landscape volumes as theme anthologies. The requirements were that each story be Fantasy, Science Fiction or Horror and that it have at least one major gay character. I don’t recall that the sexual identity of any of the writers was ever discussed. At least several who got published were, I believe, straight. The stories stood or fell on the basis of their strength as stories.

Craig Gidney: I am struggling with this question because I am fascinated with how a black gay American man ended up writing a story about an 11th Century Japanese monk. Sometimes I think writing is like “channeling” voices; other times, it’s a pain in the ass! The setting came from the fact that I was listening to a lot of Japanese music and the opening image came to me in a dream—that’s the channeling part. The pain in the ass part came when I had to carefully research the historical past (that was fun, too).

All of my fiction has to do with Otherness. What gay person hasn’t felt like a changeling every now and then? I am drawn to speculative fiction because it literalizes metaphors; and it's pretty cool to write about magic, too. I am fairly certain that my identities inform my subject matter: the thrill and danger of forbidden desire, and the disguises we have to hide behind are themes that are present in “A Bird of Ice.”

Christopher Barzak: Probably I'm in a most unpopular position, but I think the current definitions of sexuality in America are social fictions of a sort, attempting to simplify a complex aspect of identity. Basically, I don't fall in love based on genitalia. I write about a lot of different kinds of characters, gay, straight, everything in between those two poles and outside of them, who also are from various classes, races, genders, nationalities, political backgrounds, regions, etc. Everything I write doesn't come from my sexuality; it comes from my experience of living in this world, which has a very diverse array of people in it, all of them interesting to me, and all of them worth writing about.

The same goes for whether or not I identify as a writer of spec fic. Well, sure, except I also identify as a working class writer, a regionalist writer, a political writer, and a writer in various other genres as well. I'm not an either/or sort of guy. I'm both/and.

Berman: Diversity has been brought up. If I were to focus on the folklore that served as the basis for many of the stories in So Fey, it certainly would be a diverse mix of cultures. Yet, when many readers think of ‘fairies’ they tend to imagine diminutive sprites like Tinkerbell or medieval elves. While the anthology does have stories with such fairies, your stories offer a very different take on the notion of 'fey', a term that can be refer to enchantment or, in more modern slang, queer. Care to discuss the newer boundaries of fey used in your story?

Gidney: It’s very important to explore the world's folklore and mythology and move beyond the Celtic Twilight post-Tolkien model so prevalent in commercial fantasy. When the idea for a story about fairies was pitched to me, I saw it as a challenge to explore other myths. I discovered the yosei, which are analogous but not quite the same as European fairies. I found that the yosei also had qualities that meshed with the other meanings of fey.

Barzak: I love old-fashioned stories about faeries, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, other planets, etc. But what I like to read more than anything are stories that use the frameworks of these generic conventions in new ways, yet somehow retain the magic of the original form. In the case of my story, I wanted to write about changelings. But I didn’t want to write a hackneyed version in which healthy human children are replaced with elderly faeries or ill fae folk. I wanted to look at the idea of changelings, how people can be raised in families that do not feel like family, how some people can feel they were born into the wrong world. In “Isis in Darkness” I found an analog in runaway teens who have odd magical abilities that rarely help them in any way, and which they don't understand because the human world they've been born to is mundane. On top of trying to write a changeling story without using the word “changeling” in it at all, I wanted to write a story that could also be a sort of response to the English boarding school world of Harry Potter, which is fun but feels archaic despite its attempts to be contemporary. Perhaps it’s a class thing. I wanted to write about kids with magical abilities who live in the streets and have no teachers, families, no one who cares for them the way even the poor children in Harry Potter books have loving mothers and fathers and very close brothers and sisters.

Steve: Rick, you have a Lambda Literary Award for your novel Minions of the Moon and a World Fantasy Award for “Streetcar Dreams.” So you’ve been lauded by two very different camps. If I go to my local gay bookstore or search online at spots like queerbooks.com or tlabooks.com, I see there are a fair number of queer-themed fantasy and horror titles releasing. Yet, I’ve noticed that most of these books do not receive the attention in the gay press that the latest torrid drama or gay gaggle novel seems to. Would you all say gay readers are closeted about being spec fic fans? Or is this just a common, sorry state for all demographics?

Bowes: If you’re asking why Fantasy doesn’t get attention in the gay press, I think it might have something to do with fantasy publishers not pushing it in the gay press. I'm unaware that the gay population is any more adverse to spec fiction than readers in general. The problems of gay spec fiction are inherent in any attempt to combine two forms neither of which commands a big market share.

Barzak: I’m never really good at guessing about reader trends. But I do think that speculative fiction in any community it tries to reach outside of its own, singular speculative fiction reading community often does not receive as much notice as a mimetic novel, following the rules of realism, does.

Gidney: I'm not a Seer, but I do think in the next few years, there will be more queer/queer-themed spec lit hitting the shelves, if only because all of the would-be authors are fascinated by both gay and spec lit ‘markets,’ because of more acceptance of the gay community, and, let's face it, that's where all the new FABULOUS story ideas and characters come from.

Steve: Thanks, guys, for sharing your thoughts with me. So, last question. What queer-themed fiction can we expect from you in the near-future?

Barzak: I'm working on some revisions to my second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, which will release from Bantam Books most likely in 2008. It’s set in Japan, and is told from multiple points of view. It has a ghost story at its heart like my first novel. One of the novel’s subplots is concerned with the relationship between a Japanese man and an American man, and how far one will go to bind the other to them. I also have stories coming out this December in George Mann's The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, and in Sharyn November’s Firebirds Soaring in fall of 2008.

Gidney: My next story is in limbo because the anthology is in limbo. But I’ve tentatively sold a piece for Touched: A Gay Spell Anthology. My story, “Black Clay” is set in the Harlem Renaissance and features an alluring transgender sorceress/muse as a heroine. I’m in negotiations with a small press to edit a collection of queer ethnic spec fic.

Bowes: I have stories out or due out in The Datlow/Del Rey book of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Subterranean Magazine and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, all of which involve gay protagonists or a gay narrator and all of which are intended to be chapters in my next novel, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street.

Read more about So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction at:
www.SteveBerman.com/sofey.htm
Read an excerpt of 'The Wand's Boy' by Ricard Bowes
Read an excerpt of 'A Bird of Ice' by Craig Laurance Gidney