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Trash & Treasure is a miscellany of monthly opinions on SFF, fandom and general geekness from Foz Meadows. This month’s entry takes a slightly different approach…
Ever since reading Sarah Gailey’s wonderful, moving Between the Coats essay about navigating their queerness through their writing, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my own queer/narrative trajectory. Among other things, it made me realise that I have no obvious ur-moment for seeing myself reflected in the stories I read in my tweens and teens, because people like me were never there; or if so, it was only ever unnamed, peripheral, tragic. And that makes me wonder: how might things have been different, if I’d known myself in fiction?
The first time I ever had bisexuality explained to me, I was fifteen, hanging out with friends, and experienced an immediate eureka moment – “Oh, so that’s why I feel the way I do about Mila Jovovich!” – that saw me claiming the label on the spot. It bothers me now that I can’t recall what topic sparked that revelation, what show or joke or book we were talking about. I’d like to think it was Daria, and maybe it was, but I can’t be sure. Even so, I remember the word bisexual clicking home for me as clearly as I do a moment two years earlier, when a girl wearing a flamenco dress for multicultural day winked at me across the playground and my entire body flushed hot.
I didn’t know what I was feeling, that first time: only that it was meaningful. It wasn’t something that happened in the stories I read or the films I watched; I didn’t know how to separate the way I was taught to objectify myself by magazines, compulsively examining my body in the mirror, from how I felt when I looked at the models to whom I compared myself. Women were meant to be beautiful, and they were beautiful, and I was meant to want them even as I felt alienated from what they represented. Fiction confirmed that for me, too: no matter what else was happening, story after story went out of its way to emphasise how beautiful the female characters were, as if they wouldn’t be worth including otherwise, and while I encountered some narratives that broke the trend – well. I didn’t know how to learn from them, then, even if they spoke to me; I just knew they were outliers.
I remember reading about a pair of requisitely beautiful lesbian Mord-Sith in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, judged as wrong by some characters and accepted by others: a rare sliver of ostensibly queer content. But what I took away from that portrayal wasn’t that women loving women was normal; instead, I carried away the image of the hero, Richard, stripping one of the couple in front of an audience that included her lover, feeling her breast and then pointing out some mark on it that meant she’d been corrupted by evil. When he cut the mark off, the women renewed their allegiance to him, their narratives only ever a periphery feature of his. Like the famous scene in Cruel Intentions where Selma Blair and Sarah Michelle Gellar made out, it taught me that liking women was inherently performative: you kissed for men, or to practice for men, and that was right and normal – so long, of course, as the men approved.
After realising what I was, I never hesitated to describe myself as bi, but looking back, there was something reflexively superficial about how I processed that part of my identity, in that I didn’t, really. I had no context for queerness beyond the immediate: I liked girls and boys, and so did some of the other girls and boys I knew, and there was a great deal of complicated, friend-incestuous drama around various people in our social group kissing and crushing on and dating and breaking up and sleeping with one another, to the point where you could fit any five of us in a car and have a 90% that everyone present had at least kissed everyone else. But those of us who were queer and not just experimenting – and a few of us did; I know experimentation gets used to dismiss actual queerness as not-real, but sometimes people do test the waters while figuring themselves out – were baby gays, completely disconnected from any wider sense of community or identity or adult-gay supervision. We experimented with kink long before any of us had any notion of how to do it responsibly, which was exactly as risky as you might imagine, and we thought we were so, so knowledgeable, because we had nothing and no one healthy against which to compare ourselves.
One night when we were sixteen, we all crammed into someone’s furnished garage and watched But I’m A Cheerleader!, which was the first piece of explicitly, purposefully, exclusively queer anything I’d ever encountered besides Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. It was funny and moving and wonderful and remains one of my favourite films, but it was also about American kids finding love at a gay conversion camp, the protagonist struggling to reconcile her Christianity and traditional femininity with her attraction to girls. For an Australian tomboy-who-didn’t-yet-know-she-was-genderqueer from a liberal atheist family, it wasn’t exactly the most relatable setting; it still mattered, of course, but at the same time, I never quite felt that it was about me, either.
I had the same problem with Alec and Seregil in Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series. I remember understanding, once it was spelled out to me in the narrative, that Seregil was gay and interested in Alec, but as a trope-literate reader who had by that point encountered a lot of heterosexual romance, I felt weirdly and continually frustrated that Alec and Beka weren’t a couple, because that’s what stories were meant to do, wasn’t it – put the men and women together? Only these books weren’t doing that, which thirteen-year-old me could only view as a sort of stubborn, deliberate failure. The fact that the series was recommended to me by a queer female friend with a crush on me only makes the whole thing more ironic in retrospect: she’d lent me the books in part as a see me gesture, hoping I’d enthuse about Alec and Seregil with her, and instead it went completely over my head. Though she later confessed her feelings during a sleepover, I was years away from knowing I was bi; and by the time I did, her aggressively Christian high school had shoved her into the closet.
And all the time, I never knew I was genderqueer as well as bi, completely unable to label my dysphoric moments as anything other than weirdness. I loved Robin Hobb’s Farseer and Liveship series, but I never understood the Fool/Amber as someone I might relate to. They were always alien, ethereal, their gender never quite named, and always there was the spectre of Regal, villainous and implicitly queer, hanging over the story. In fact, that was true of a lot of queer men in even my most beloved and formative SFF series. Outside of Flewelling’s work, what I far more often saw – for a given value of the word ‘often’ – were stories where men were raped by men, or where the paedophilic interest of older men in young boys was the requisite backstory to any queer adult characters, both in SFF and elsewhere. Queer women were even harder to find; trans characters rarer still, and when the latter appeared, they were almost always shown as cartoonish at best and monstrous at worst.
A metaphor enacted: my childhood bedroom was two rooms, one of which had originally been a balcony that was later enclosed with windows, so that the two spaces were joined by a connecting door. In my head, from the age of about eight onwards, one room was feminine and the other masculine. I’d periodically change my mind about which toys, which possessions, which posters and bits of décor counted as which, and I certainly never told anyone how I thought of it, but it’s a thing I did nonetheless. A literal act of compartmentalisation; and I am, even as a self-aware adult, a very compartmentalised person. It’s a chicken and egg problem to me, these days: did I compartmentalise because I didn’t know how to express myself, or did I not know how to express myself because I compartmentalised? And would seeing different, more and better portrayals of queerness at a younger age have made a difference either way?
To me, it’s telling that I only really started to explore queerness in my own writing once I started meeting other queer people in person, online, and talking to them. The box in which I’d put that part of myself began to open, the contents slowly, gradually filtering into my writing. Discovering fanfic helped speed up the process enormously – a not uncommon experience. And now I look back on the limits I used to set myself, on all the things I pretended didn’t matter, and wonder how I ever occupied so small a narrative space.
With all the amazing queer content that’s become available in the past few years, it’s hard to say exactly which books or shows or films would’ve made the biggest difference to my younger self. But one thing I feel certain would’ve struck a chord is Steven Universe: specifically, the character of Amethyst, who frequently shapeshifts between feminine and masculine. Amethyst is almost painfully relatable to me at times: she’s constantly eating, habitually and unapologetically messy, extroverted and confident, except when that confidence crumbles and she’s reduced to bouts of depressive self-hatred, snarking jealously at everyone or else bitterly feeding eggs into the garbage disposal as she struggles to leave the house. That I have a character like her now in a show I love – along with so many others – means the world to me; but what would it have meant, to have known her at eight or ten or thirteen?
I can’t ever know the answer, but I can sure as hell write stories that help other people to answer it for themselves. And that, I hope, is no small thing.
The post Trash and Treasure: Foz Meadows on Queer Reflections appeared first on The Book Smugglers.
Old School Wednesdays is a regular Book Smuggler feature. We came up with the idea towards the end of 2012, when both Ana and Thea were feeling exhausted from the never-ending inundation of New and Shiny (and often over-hyped) books. What better way to snap out of a reading fugue than to take a mini-vacation into the past?
Logo designed by the wonderful KMont
Title: Night’s Master
Author: Tanith Lee
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Daw
Publication date: First published 1978
Paperback: 208 pages
NIGHT’S MASTER is the first book of the stunning arabesque high fantasy series Tales from the Flat Earth, which, in the manner of The One Thousand and One Nights, portrays an ancient world in mythic grandeur via connected tales.
Long time ago when the Earth was Flat, beautiful indifferent Gods lived in the airy Upperearth realm above, curious passionate demons lived in the exotic Underearth realm below, and mortals were relegated to exist in the middle. Azhrarn, Lord of the Demons and the Darkness, was the one who ruled the Night, and many mortal lives were changed because of his cruel whimsy. And yet, Azhrarn held inside his demon heart a profound mystery which would change the very fabric of the Flat Earth forever…
Come within this ancient world of brilliant darkness and beauty, of glittering palaces and wondrous elegant beings, of cruel passions and undying love.
Discover the exotic wonder that is the Flat Earth.
Stand alone or series: First in the Flat Earth series
How did I get this book: Bought
Format (e- or p-): print
This is another entry in a series of Old School Wednesdays posts, brought to you by the amazing folks who supported us on Kickstarter. As one reward level, backers were given the opportunity to pick an Old School title for one of us to read and review online.
Trigger warning: rape, paedophilia, queers as villains.
Hello. My name is Ana Grilo and I did not like this book.
This is my first Tanith Lee novel and I am so sad it didn’t work out that well. I am all for reading older works by masters of Fantasy, especially when they are written by non-white dudes. But jfc, was this… not… for me. I couldn’t even finish it.
Night’s Master was first published in 1978 and is the first in the Tales from the Flat Earth series. It is my understanding that much like this first book, each book is composed by interconnected stories, creating a wider world, expanding on it with every subsequent tale. The prose here is very much reminiscent of myth-creating, fable-spinning writing, the type often focused on world-building rather than character development (first red flag – granted, this first one is at least a personal taste one). In many ways, characters’ actions are presented as factual announcements rather than as a progression, an arc. For example: “he looked at her and fell in love” (that… happens a lot here. Second red flag).
There are three parts – or three stories – in Night’s Master and the main thread that connects them is the presence of Azhram, Prince of Demons in all of them. Azhram is sort of like an anti-hero, a demon that often messes with the lives of humans in a love-hate relationship. I get the feeling we are supposed to be sort of amused by Azhram while he finds out that he in fact, loves mankind?
In the first story, Azhram, witnesses the birth of a human boy and upon the mother’s death, decides to raise the boy – Sivesh – in the Underearth. Sivesh grows up and turns into a beautiful young man and upon turning sixteen is seduced by Azhram and becomes his lover (on the one hand, yay bisexual characters. On the other hand, uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh, paedophilia. Hello HUGE RED FLAG NUMBER THREE) Yes, Azhram groomed the boy since he was a baby to become his lover (red flag number four). And ok, Azhram is a demon – I get that. BUT do I need to go through the reasons why conflating queer characters with villainy and paedophilia is a bad thing?
Anyways, eventually, Sivesh falls in love with Earth and longs for its sunny surface so Azhram creates a beautiful woman – Ferazhin – to be Sivesh’s wife (red flag number five) but Sivesh eventually decides to remain on Earth, leaving both Azhram and Ferazhin behind. Ferazhin then spends her time crying until a time comes when some dude falls in love with her and she becomes his wife, then she dies as part of Azhram’s vengeance to cause the dude pain.
(It’s only the first story and I am already starting to lose track of the number of red flags.)
(Even the original cover is a red flag.)
At this point though it was still my hope that things would get better – maybe this one was the odd story out?
Story number two starts Azhrarn overthrowing a vain King and killing his children. One child, the youngest daughter – Zorayas – survives but is horribly disfigured and disabled by an attack. She is found by a kind magician who adopts her and the two live a lovely life in a cave away from the world.
Zorayas grows up as the Ugly Innocent until one day a dude comes over and horribly rapes her in a graphic, triggering scene.
She is then moved to become a powerful sorcerer to avenge herself, is made into a Beauty and becomes a villain worse than you can imagine then she dies a horrible death when she annihilates herself by falling in love with her own image.
And that’s when I threw the book against the wall and decided not to read the rest. Life is too short, the world is a dumpster fire and I do not have the time or the spoons for this.
Dear readers: did I start with the wrong Tanith Lee novel?
Rating: DID NOT FINISH
The post Old School Wednesdays: Night’s Master by Tanith Lee appeared first on The Book Smugglers.
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