Even in the context of the military-industrial complex. Only hours after the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, keep yourself in the closet and we won’t fire you from the army policy, one gay soldier prepares for the scariest moment in his life: telling his dad that he’s gay:
LGBT
Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans & genderqueer matters
Ten Years of gay marriage — Holland still not washed away by the tears of an angry god
You think what with the monotonous regularity God strikes immoral countries, at least according to Yankee fundamentalist wankers, Holland would’ve long ago been wiped out by a superflood/earthquake/volcanic eruption combination for being the first country to make gay marriage legally the same as “normal” marriages. Yet ten years later, we’re still here, gay people can still marry if they want to and no sign of any wrath of god yet.
One of the few times I’ve genuinely been proud of my country. No nonsense, no hysteria, just a (belated) recognition that yes, there is no reason why gender should matter in who you could marry. The only thing that mars it is that civil servants who have problems with performing gay marriages can refuse to do the work they’re paid to do. Ten years should be enough of that nonsense.
Unbearable whiteness of British science fiction
Everything is Nice has some nice, juicy posts up analysing the eligible submissions for the 2011 Clarke Award. The Clarke Award is awarded annually for the best science fiction (or fantasy) novel published in the UK the previous year. It doesn’t have a long list but a short list is selected from all submitted novels; those submissions cover roughly 90-95 percent or so of new sf&f novels being published in the UK each year. Some works of course always slip through the crack, especially from non-sf publishers who don’t know or care about the awards. The Clarke Award submissions list than is a good, but not perfect indicator of the state of the UK’s sf publishing industry and as such Martin Lewis has analysed them, which resulted in e.g. the figure above.
In other words: sf publishing is only marginally less white than the group of writers the BBC thinks represents the future of British literary fiction. And worse, it has a much bigger gender imbalance: only 17 percent of the 54 novels submitted this year were written by women. Martin also looks at other identity markers (sexuality, nationality) and it all points to the conclusion that it’s largely straight, white British or American men that were published last year. (The raw data for all this can be found at Torque Control. )
The questions this inevitably puts to mind are a) is this analysis reliable when applied to the general state of the UK’s sf&f publishing industry as opposed to just the Clarke Award submissions b) is this a bad thing (imo: yes) and c) what can we do about it?
Assuming the answer to a) and b) are both yes, the question what we readers can do to change this situation is a difficult one to answer. You can only buy what’s being published after all and if only two books out of fifty-plus are by people of colour, how big an impact will it have when enough people buy their books? It’s easier to send a signal by boycotting a given company’s products, not so easy to express a preference through your buying habits. More projects and media attention to under represented people in science fiction as with the various “women sf writers” reading projects started this year would be a start, but are only suited to provide attention to this problem, not solve it. Suggestions?
What a porn ban would also do
Make it that much harder for transgender teens to get support:
Yes, they exist. I hated what I was for nearly all my teenage years., wanting to rip the skin from my body, sobbing myself to sleep at night because I couldn’t understand what I was. But then came along the internet. Oh, the internet. It fucking saved me. It gave 18 year old me a view of the world that made me realise that I wasn’t alone, that I could do something about the pain that made me want to die.
Claire Perry, and her evil piece of legislation, would take that lifeline away. Oh, maybe not conciously. I doubt she even knows that trans people exist, let alone that there are trans teenagers out there who rely on the internet for vital support. She wouldn’t notice as the sites they use to gain crucial advice from are blocked, due to having never-quite-defined “adult materials”, as support channels are closed down for “endangering youth”. She wouldn’t notice as sites all over the net are blocked for containing mention of sex, genitals, puberty and sexuality, when what they are doing is educating a badly unrepresented and unsupported section of society.
Not that such a scheme, as proposed by some daft British MP, would actually work in the real world anyway, but it could do quite a lot of collatoral damage anyway. Worse, any such scheme is going to disproportionally hurt self help sites and support sites rather than truly exploitative sites, because the former are always going to be easier to find and shut down.
Amazonfail
Just because it turned out that the delisting of thousands of gay and lesbian and feminist books as icky adult titles was an accident does not make Amazon innocent or what happened less bad. Richard Nash, ex-publisher of Soft Skull Press, explains why:
The onus is on us, as Tim Wise has taught so well on the topic of white privilege. We cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is always us who get the benefit of the doubt in our society, and if we are to take the pink and lavender dollars, and if we are to say, you don’t need A Different Light, or Oscar Wilde Bookstore, we’ll hook you up just fine, then we can never let this happen. I learned this as a straight white male publisher of queer books, it was why I took care to try to find staff who are gay or trans, to catch my complacency, my temptation to think I deserved the benefit of the doubt.
I didn’t, nor does Amazon. The vigilance and outrage demonstrated on Twitter are necessary, not because the folks at Amazon are bad people, but because the books that were de-ranked were de-ranked because it is always the outsider whose books get de-ranked and “mainstream” society and the capitalist institutions that operate within it, whether my old company or Amazon, must self-police ruthlessly in order to guard against this kind of thing happening.