gay characters in genre fictions, according to Hal Duncan

[salinea]

Pat from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist (yes, the same who called Priviledge of the Sword chick lit ^^), re-posted a bit of an interview he did of Hal Duncan (who wrote Vellum and Ink - I reviewed Vellum over there - ETA: Hal Duncan also has a blog which you can check out) which really cracked me up :

Previous depictions of homosexual characters in fantasy/scifi books have always been somewhat clumsy and didn't ring true. And yet, instead of trying to get readers to "accept" it, you just went ahead and put Jack and Puck's relationship as a central storyline throughout both volumes. Was that intentional from the beginning? INK contains graphic sex scenes between the two, and I was wondering what sort of responses those sequences generated among readers and critics?

One of my pet hates is the fetishisation you get in certain types of fantasy, particularly vampire fiction, I have to say, where gay equals frilly shirts, sensitive pouts and lingering looks with doe-eyes. Man, at least slash is subversive in applying that aesthetic to straight characters, and at least slash has the guts to get down and dirty. That stuff is just softcore boy-on-boy goth porn. Even when it's not so deeply fetishised, there still seems to be a tendency to stereotype gays as refined rather than rough, fey rather than fiery, cats rather than dogs.

The second problem with gay characters in genre fiction is that they're generally marginalised as subsidiary characters, which smacks of PC tokenism. Yeah, so your heroine has a Gay Best Friend; big deal. So your team of heroes has a tagalong queer; I'm not impressed.

The last problem is that even when you get a fully-fledged protagonist they're generally just not genre enough. By which I mean, the writer feels the need to show that it's "normal" to be gay, so the characters are rendered in a Realist mode rather than as Romantic heroes. They're intelligent, sensitive portraits of gays as "just like everyone else". Bollocks to that. The fetishised gays are annoying. The marginalised gays are frustrating. But the normalised gays are just plain dull. I want a gay character who blows shit up. I want a gay James Bond, a gay Jerry Cornelius, a gay Superman, a gay Indiana Jones, a gay Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. Achilles wasn't normal. He was an uberfag, dragging Hector's body ten times round the gates of Troy for killing his boyfriend. Now that's what I call a hissy fit!

I see what he means about the first criticism (which one also finds in slash when people speak about "feminization" (sic) of characters), and I think the second exists in a few novels but not that many. I'm not sure I remember any instances of the third in genre fiction, but that may be because of the inherent blandness of such a character type. I actually think that there's a lot of interesting stories dealing with queer themes generally speaking in SFF but that's just IMHO.

It really amuses me when he says slash at least had the guts to get down and dirty ^_^ (I compared his work to specific kind of slash when I did my own review).

Thoughts?

Comments

[ariss-tenoh.livejournal.com]

LOL! Love that comment on Achilles. That was my opinion too when I read the scene. I'll have to check your review of the guy's novels.

Out of curiosity, is the author straight?

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

yeah, I really love how he talks about stuff. He can be a bit pretentious at times, but he's terribly amusing.

And he's about as straight as Clive Barker. He's got a blog as well, which you can check out : http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/ I really liked his alphabet post.

[ariss-tenoh.livejournal.com]

Here's where I sound ignorant, who's Barker?

[kethlenda.livejournal.com]

I will say that straight and bi men get feminized in the same way in vampire fiction. I think the ruffly shirts, etc., are just common cliches of the genre that get applied to male characters of all sexual orientations.

Then again, it may be a cliche because of Anne Rice, whose male vamps were bi but leaned more toward same-sex attraction in the earlier novels. (She's het'ed them all up now, but that's another story.) And so it may be that current writers are borrowing an aesthetic for their straight characters that was originally applied to queer characters.

It's a really interesting post, and I'll be thinking more about it during lunch. :)

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it feels like all vampires are intrasecally queer even when portrayed as "straight". Yeah, Ann Rice was a definite marker of the genre, but I wonder if it didn't exist before as well. Like apparently Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers dates from 1967 and already had a parody of the fabulously gay vampire.

What about when a similar aestheticism is applied to non-vampire character? And then there's the manga outlook on the trope.

[the-corbie.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it feels like all vampires are intrasecally queer even when portrayed as "straight".

I think homosexuality in vampire fiction is to some extent a self-perpetuating circle to do with cultural norms and the origins of the vampire myth, if that doesn't sound too pretentious.

To explain: vampire legends became associated (through Dracula and some of the other early novels) with sexuality and sensuality. But these novels are being published in a time when it is not permissible to express these things openly. Therefore, right from the beginning the stories were sexually subversive, associated with forbidden 'underground' activities and therefore alternative sexualities.

So we have a mythos, if you like, that is tailor-made for the depiction of homosexuality (even before the frilly shirts are donned). Not surprisingly, you then get a fair number of thinly-veiled homosexual stories, especially since such stories can't be written openly (interestingly, though, in the early stories and films I'm thinking of it's actually mostly lesbianism that is getting the treatment. And no, I am not referring to the later sexploitation flicks, although there are those too...)

So the genre becomes a place where you can depict homosexuality, and so people do: and so as the genre develops, the tropes become even gayer, if you will, and the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing. By the time Anne Rice came along and created a whole new set of homo-vampire cliches she was operating in a tradition of gay vampirism that you could write a thesis on (and I'm sure people have).

Hope that made sense. It's late and I'm tired. :p

[scriva.livejournal.com]

I think his second point is much more present in TV shows set in the modern life, and I do find it sort of annoying. I have never read so much Vampire fiction, therefore I wouldn't know if there are more stories with the token gay best friend.

I would like to read about characters he presented in the third point, especially warrior type characters (like Achilles).

It seems now that I should read Vellum. ^_^

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

read Vellum, yes. But to those on this list (I am sure you've already encountered discussion of Vellum on the boards, scriva) who haven't heard much about it, beware. There isn't much of a linear narrative -- it's recursive. The characters are consistent, but they have different names in each iteration of narrative.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I think his second point is much more present in TV shows set in the modern life
Word! And is very annoying. And also affects other minority characters.

I have never read so much Vampire fiction, therefore I wouldn't know if there are more stories with the token gay best friend.
My impression of Vampire fiction is that it's the main character who's fabulously gay/bi. Oh, and in LKHamilton they're nominally bi, but don't actually get on because that freaks out LKH's sue. However I'm not an expert either.

I would like to read about characters he presented in the third point, especially warrior type characters (like Achilles).
Xray mentions Cnaiur bellow. I do adore this character although he's anything but nice. Richard St Vier from Kushner's Swordspoint is an expert duellist. There is GRRM's Dying of the Light, although that one could probably also be criticized. There's a few secondary character in Mary Gentle's Book of Ash who are very badass, and one very bad ass lesbian crossdressing field surgeon (not badass in the warrior sense, though)...

Vellum is a pretty fun book, especially if you love fucked up mythology and archetypes as much as I do ^_^

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

Like the various-ethnicity writers before Duncan, genre fiction is not going to get a variety of fantastic gay characters until there are more gay writers (especially gay male writers), or writers who are at least not skeeved out by a bit of buttsecks. I bet Sarah Monette could write a non-effeminate gay male character -- but unfortunately (for this particular discussion because I do like his character) she hamstrung Felix by creating a pseudo-Baroque world in which to set her story, and that dictated that Felix be a total nelly.

The only other uber-male gay character I can think of right now is Cnaiur in the Prince of Nothing trilogy. I mean, c'mon: Breaker of Men and Horses? I am sure one exists, but I sure can't remember the last time I read about a gay barbarian (especially one as deeply conflicted as Cnaiur is throughout the trilogy).

[scriva.livejournal.com]

I thought if I should mention Cnaiur as an example for the "gay barbarian", but then he spends much more time in the book having sex with women or an avatar in the form of a woman. The scene with Proyas is more about punishment than sex. So it's not as if he is really a gay character who blows shit up and is still gay. *shrug*

For the rest, I agree. Gay (or good lesbian) characters will not become mainstream or more varied in genre fiction.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I totally need to read Sarah Monette.

Is SFF so lacking in gay writers? I mean, even if I look at the French field, it feels like there's a quite a few... I don't think the situation is as bad as it is for CoC, although I do think it could be very much better of course. And I totally need to read Monette soon.

Cnaiur... actually the problem with Cnaiur (though I adore him to pieces, and don't repeat that to anyone >_>;;) is that the extremely-macho-man and homophobe who is really a repressed homosexual is already a stereotype/archetype. It'd be nice to have a gloriously assumed gay character who also was the macho badass Duncan is describing.

[strangerface.livejournal.com]

I want a gay James Bond, a gay Jerry Cornelius, a gay Superman, a gay Indiana Jones, a gay Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare.
Wait, wait! Superman's not gay?!?

That's an awesome quote. I don't usually like the interviews Pat does.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I didn't pay much attention to his interview before, but that quote just rocks!

[catrionamacnair.livejournal.com]

I love the comment about slash.. it's one true statement though. Same about Achilles - I have fond memories about watching Troy with lots of *rolleyes* and *oh, he's his *cough* COUSIN now* :)

I seem to have a lot of reading to catch up on.

And now I really want to read the Watchmen comics, over which I coincidentally stumbled yesterday while looking for something completely different.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I actually never watched Troy mainly because I was so annoyed by this and a few other things.

Watchmen is absolutly fucking brillant and a must read, even though the gay characters I mention are rather peripheric to the main story (although one could make a case for Rorscharch as gay, but that's a topic for slash ^^)

[bog-mod.livejournal.com]

For those of you in the RPG arena the main villain of the Aberrant series was gay. Divas Mal, most powerful character in the setting. Would that count?

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I didn't know the big Trinity/Aberrant/Adventure villain was gay. How is he like? He does sound badass from the little I know, but I never dived much into that canon.

And of course Exalted is full of queerness of all kinds (and that's one of the reason why I love it so).

(of course in my fanon Magneto is bi as well ^^)

[imadra-blue.livejournal.com]

That is really kind of awesome. I like the slash shout-outs there. What I like about us is that while we're obviously fetishizing homosexuality, there are so many good slash writers who do that without fetishizing the characters. We do get down-and-dirty, and a lot of us like our boys kicking ass all while wanting to get in their boyfriends' pants.

I can't say I've seen too much about the last problem in genre fiction, myself, but it sounds about right for mainstream fiction. There's too many token gays, and I have seen shows where they treat it as normal, which would be interesting if they explained how they arrived there, because it's normal on our world. And, yeah, I like gay James Bonds and gay Obi-Wan Kenobis and gay Indiana Jones, etc. Guys who kick ass can be gay, too!

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a good point. I admit, I've never been comfortable with the fact we fetishize homosexuality (not that it stopped me obviously >_>;) but you make a great argument.

And yes! to kicking ass. Characters who kick ass are sexy, which makes porn featuring them much better.

I agree with you it's more in mainstream that tokenism happens. I think there's some of it in genre as well of course (Kay, for example, or even GRRM can be guilty of it... and JKR is of course) but I think generally speaking they're either on the forefront or invisible.

[were-lemur.livejournal.com]

Mmmm ... gay James Bond. :D

a lot of us like our boys kicking ass all while wanting to get in their boyfriends' pants.

Definitely. What I like about slash is that it's manly men sexin each other up, not metrosexuals or aesthetes or frilly-shirted girly men.

[originalpuck.livejournal.com]

Achilles wasn't normal. He was an uberfag, dragging Hector's body ten times round the gates of Troy for killing his boyfriend. Now that's what I call a hissy fit!

That line is so very much love -- I'd link to it on my LJ just for that, heehee. I agree with every point that this man brought up, and am so glad that he's getting it out there, for discussion.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

glad you appreciate the quote.

Hmm, I didn't really get his autorization to quote him though XD

Here via metafandom

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I want a gay James Bond, a gay Jerry Cornelius, a gay Superman, a gay Indiana Jones, a gay Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. Achilles wasn't normal. He was an uberfag, dragging Hector's body ten times round the gates of Troy for killing his boyfriend. Now that's what I call a hissy fit!

May I just join with everyone else in declaring my utter love for this quote? (also, I now have this urg to re-watch Where Eagles Dare and write slash for it).

I don't know if I've seen much of #3 (gay characters done in realist mode rather than romantic hero mode), but then, I tend to avoid realist-mode SF in general. I want my epic fantasy and space opera and giant explosions and melodrama, so that's what I tend to go for.

certain types of fantasy, particularly vampire fiction, I have to say, where gay equals frilly shirts, sensitive pouts and lingering looks with doe-eyes.

Hello, half the male cast of the Anita Blake books. Which compound things by keeping all of the gayness nicely offstage and secondary to the none-stop Anita-sexing (apparently s&m sex with wereleopards while they're all furry is cool, but gay sex is icky). Also, I would like to have the mystery/serial killer plots back, kthanx plz?

Re: Here via metafandom

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

but then, I tend to avoid realist-mode SF in general.
That makes sense.

Hello, half the male cast of the Anita Blake books.
My thoughts exactly! And I do miss the mystery/crime plots too :(