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

[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.

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I think that he does come around at the end, which is what makes his particular narrative arc so satisfying. But this is all just my reading of the character, and I'm open to considering others. (I'm just not feeling very eloquent today.) :)

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

Also, yes. I do recommend Monette, although her first book drove me to distraction. I love her writing, but did not like Melusine for a variety of reasons. Then I read The Virtu, and was much more ready to get into the story of Melusine. :)

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I totally agree he's got a great arc overall. I meant, that's the problem with using him as an exemple of the kind of gay character Duncan mnetions. That's all.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Besides Duncan, the only gay SFF writer I can think of off the top of my head is one of my all-time favorites, Samuel R. Delany. Some of his main characters are gay, and some are bi, and a very few are straight, mostly in his early works. They certainly don't fall into the first two categories Duncan mentions, but even the Liberator, a hero of an entire Delany sequence, is a hero who isn't very much like James Bond. Hmm...

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

They are a few others. Like Clive Barker (as previously mentionned), Ellen Kushner, Octavia Butler, Johanna Russ, Tanya Huff...

I've never read Delany, but I know I should ^^ and of course not all gay writers would want to write the same kind of gay characters, at least not always.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I knew about Clive Barker, though none of the others, though I've read at least some of all of their books.

Delany is good. Sometimes I think he's the best. Probably the best place to start is The Fall of the Towers or Nova/