LGBT – Page 12 – Wis[s]e Words

Unbearable whiteness of British science fiction

Published on March 1, 2011

Pie chart depicting the race of 2011 Clarke Award submissions

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

Published on December 21, 20101 Comment

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

Published on April 14, 2009

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.

Do shut up you horrid little homophobe

Published on December 5, 2007

Some guy called Lee running a third rate comics blog exposed his homophobia to the world last week:

Here we go… I am soooooo friggin’ sick of gay characters being shoved into my comic books I could scream.

[…]

Since I’m ranting anyway, when did it become a requirement that every superhero team have a gay character? When did it become a requirement that every book have a gay character?

Why is it in my face??????

[…]

I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own home. I don’t care if you like men or women or sheep or even horses. I DON’T CARE. Live whatever alternative lifestyle you like but don’t force it upon me. Seriously, I feel that the whole gay culture has been thrust upon me in the last five years. And, thanks to all of this, not only do I get to have the birds and bees talk I get to incorporate the sometimes bees like bees instead of birds talk. Why the F- do I want to have that talk? Guess what, I don’t.

This …impressive… rant was brought about by him reading a comic with a whole two gay characters in it. It wasn’t gay sex or anything like that which set this guy off mind, just the mere fact that “two of the characters are dating each other“! Really, you must be very gay-adverse to be bothered by that. I mean, I can understand getting bothered by what professional homophobe Richard Curtis alleged gets up to in his spare time, but to wig out over the simple fact of a gay relationship? What are you, twelve?

Five years of gay marriage: Amsterdam still no Sodom and Gomorrah

Published on April 1, 2006

picture from the World's first gay marriage

Well, not more so than usual. On this day exactly, five years ago, mayor Job Cohen performed the first true gay marriages in the world; not registered partnerships or church marriages unrecognised by the state, but real honest marriages. With that the last remaining significant legal barrier to full acceptance of homosexuality was removed and gay people could finally enjoy all the rights straight couples had enjoyed
for centuries.

All of this may not make much difference with everyday acceptance, but even from a purely practical point of view, let alone a symbolic one, it was a huge step forward. As a married couple you do enjoy priviledges single people, in a longterm relationship or not, do not, for example in tax and inheritance law. This was already available for gay people through the earlier civil partnership, but that didn;t carry the huge symbolic weight marriage still has. So said some of the gay couples interviewed in the Amsterdam weekly this week that being married helped a lot in the acceptance of their family, as that makes it easier for their family to see their relationship as real and serious.

It’s not a subject I daily think about, but I have to say I am quite proud of my country for being the first to recognise gay marriage, though I’d wish it had done so earlier. It’s about the last true gesture of tolerance, we’ve had here, before the Long Night of Fortuyn, Balkenende, van Gogh, Wilders and Verdonk started.