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Violent homophobia, TV style

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This week my Favorite thing Ever is gay marriage, by way of a ramble through Fame, Glee and the laugh-riot topic of gaybashing. It’s a bit of a weird essay, perhaps; I had mixed feelings about season two of Glee even before they embarked on a certain Kurt storyline.

Glee has so many great things going for it, and the events of “Furt” are very Toobworthy. I don’t care for very special episodes and one thing that’s good about this storyline is it isn’t some self-contained boo boo kiss. McKinley High has been bully heaven since the show hit the airwaves, and Kurt was always the target of choice for its scariest thuggizens. I like that nobody pretends that teachers or school boards or parents can fix the part of human nature that makes mean kids prowl around seeking out weak kids and selectively terrorizing those least likely to get support or sympathy.

This is also why I admire the It Gets Better videos that are popping up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds with such regularity; the soul-destroying abuse of queer kids in schools is on people’s minds and that is great, totally amazing.

My friend Jay Lake, as many of you know, has a stunningly honest and revealing blog about his life and, lately, about his battle with cancer. I admire Jay’s openness, but I don’t aspire to it. Oh, I’ll happily post images of every square inch of Vancouver or anywhere else I happen to go. I’ll tell you about writing, and reading, and teaching and other bits and pieces. But I conceive of and then discard a stunning number of posts that deal with the nuts and bolts of my day to day life, because I suspect a lot of it of being kinda dull, and because I am a fairly private person.

That said, I don’t have much use for closets or coyness. I’ve been always been out online, made it known that I’m proudly queer and genderqueer, and I’ve even occasionally made reference in my blog to having been gay-bashed in my teens. I do this because there’s a difference between privacy and pretense. While I almost never go looking for big conversations or comment streams full of virtual hugs, I’m not gonna lie to avoid ’em.


So, anyway. The part of the Glee episode “Furt,” the bit that poked my gaybash button, was the vivid depiction of one kid causing another to live in abject abject terror. Wow. That was so my life for awhile! Complete with the thing where you forget for a second, and let start feeling something other than fear, and WHAM!

I haven’t ever seen the mirror held up, on a TV show, with such clarity. There was heebie and jeebie, folks.

Then it passed, and instead I got to thinking about the yay of my marriage to Kelly, and that’s what led to this Favorite Thing Ever post. And next week I will spin back to the Eighties and watch Sam and Al get their gay on for TOR.COM when I rewatch “Running for Honor”.

After that, who knows? Though there’s probably a 75% chance that a photograph of a bird will be involved.

Bloody Crimes, Matterhorn

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A few weeks ago a tweet led me to Amazon’s list of the Top 100 Books of 2010.

Which led me to buy Bloody Crimes, which tells the story of the final days of two presidencies: the abrupt death and long funeral of Abraham Lincoln, and the flight from Richmond of Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America.

This is a pop history of a certain type: it takes the train journey of Lincoln’s coffin as it wound through the eastern U.S. to Springfield Illinois and highlights the similarities and differences with Davis’s stop-and-start journey southward as the Confederacy collapsed around him.

I know just enough Walt Whitman to have known Lincoln’s train had borne his body westward,but the sheer scale of the hoopla was new to me, and there’s always something delicious in that kind of reading: Holy Cow! Really? How much bunting did they drape on NYC?. The thematic tying together of the two journeys worked nicely, but when I think of examples of this kind of intertwined yet parallel story, I think of Eric Larsen’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. This, though it’s good, isn’t quite as compelling as that. (It’s an unfair comparison, perhaps, because Larsen is so very good, and his subject matter in that book so deliciously dramatic and improbable.)

Final verdict: Bloody Crimes is a good and quick read for those with an already-fixed interest in its subject matter.

In addition to buying Bloody Crimes, I used the Amazon List to generate my usual end of the year monster pile of requests from the local public library. The first thing I chose to read from the borrowed stack was Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes.

Most of my Vietnam War reading is nonfiction, but a lot of it has the same ambience as this novel: accounts by people who fought in the jungle, detailed descriptions of the miserable conditions and various stupidities of war. But fiction lets one turn the screws on the drama that much higher, letting one create a more seamless effect without having to account for drama-disrupting truths or weird inconsistencies.

Matterhorn has this quality of artistic wholeness. It paints an unforgettable and grim picture. Its prose is functional and transparent, its characters convincing, its story inevitable and heartbreaking.

Novels and movies about war tend to also have a lot of soul-searching. Characters plumb their navels, looking at big picture questions: why do humans do this? And the small stuff, too: how did I end up here? What will be lost if I die? This is a story element that is most likely to strike a false note with me–Thin Red Line, for example, made me gag. But Matterhorn is very consistent about being in the heads of young men. There’s no mature philosophizing here: these are teen boys, groping with things that are far beyond them.

I don’t have a lot of people in my immediate circle who’d be drawn to either of the above books, but if U.S. military history is your kind of thing at all, Matterhorn is especially well done.

Favorite (Joe) Dick Ever

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What I have for you at Favorite Thing Ever today is not exactly stream of consciousness… more like a Canal of Canadian Content. Where I wind up, eventually, is Hugh Dillon’s awesome solo album, Works Well With Others, which is a sort of musical “What if?” What if Joe of Hard Core Logo had lived well into a wiser middle age? This isn’t exactly that album, maybe, but it can feed that fannish desire.

If what you’re itching for is more technological, Kelly has a love poem to her new Kindle up.

Being clubbed

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My very first story sale was to an Alberta literary magazine in 1989. I have no idea if anyone read that story, which was called “Quiet Father” and which earned me ten bucks, and I probably never will.

By 1995, when I went to Clarion West, I’d sold some SF and mystery stories, and once in awhile I met up with people, usually other writers, who’d tell me they’d seen my stories, usually the ones I’d had printed in Crank! This was almost always an entry point into a conversation about their notorious “Kill YOur TV” rejection slip. It was still a face-to-face or print on paper world, is my point–you had to be fairly conspicuous as an author to hear much from your readers. They either had to write to you the old way or make their way to a convention.

So I don’t know what the era of fan contact by snail mail was like. I do know that now it’s incredibly easy, as a reader, to be able to drop someone a line saying how much I like their work. I do this from time to time, usually when I’m very very enthused and excited, and could you please write another one now? Anyway, it is very nice to get feedback on one’s own stories and books.

You also find out about things like this: a couple of book clubs that have been looking at me lately: Torque Control’s Short Story Club read “The Cage,” a few weeks ago, and now editor Cleilie Rich has let me know I am to be Ms. August in the 2011 Women In Fantasy Book Club line-up. Indigo Springs will be in the company of Prospero Lost, by L. Jagi Lamplighter, War for the Oaks by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear‘s All the Windwracked Stars and seven other selections (number twelve is reader’s choice, and thus TBA.)

(If fantasy isn’t so much your thing, I should mention that there is also a Women in SF club, with an amazing reading list and Tiptree mid-month bonus stories, and the sign-up for that one is here.)

You can’t help but feel gratified and appreciative of attention like this, especially when you find yourself in such good literary company. Really, if you’re me, you want to rush over, saying “Hey! Can I do anything? Bake cookies, answer questions, change your oil?”

And that’s where the double-edged sword of “It’s so easy to just drop someone a line” comes in. Because I can’t help thinking it might be a little weird if we authors descended on the club like a bunch of bright eyed and eager birds, waiting to gulp up their every thought on our respective masterpieces.
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And also, possibly, because I don’t know how to change someone’s oil.

Is there etiquette for something like that? Anyone know?