LGBTQ fiction that isn't about *being* LGBTQ...

By Wreybies · Nov 20, 2018 · ·
  1. This will be a blog entry that is continually updated.
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    Sometimes I feel like my own community has no idea what it wants. We want representation. Clear representation. Fuck your subtext. Stick the lines between which you expect us to read right up your wazoo. Queer-in-name-only is a smug copout. Fuck that right in the face with all nine inches of my disdain. No, reboot Lando, your vague flirtations do not earn you a Rainbow Pass.

    And then I come across things like this post, currently doing the rounds at all the major LGBTQ internet venues...

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    So, in response to the above, my little list of books I've read that I feel satisfies both the need for real, honest, upfront representation and also the need for such stories not to always be coming of age, sappy love stores about how people come to grips with their sexuality. Like, let's move past that, culturally, into other realms. This list isn't remotely all-inclusive, and, full disclosure, it clearly represents my own personal tastes as a reader and as a gay dude of a certain generation. Again, I'm not including any stories that revolve around being LGBTQ, just works that I have enjoyed that include LGBTQ in the framework of stories, front and center, above and beyond just being LGBTQ.

    I begin with Robert J. Sawyers Neanderthal Parallax.

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    Pontor is a Neanderthal (the word they use of themselves is barast) scientist involved in a neutrino identification experiment in an alternate timeline that parallels the work of neutrino scientists in our world working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A freak mishap that occurs simultaneously in both timelines causes a juncture point and Pontor is shunted into our world. All of this taking place in Canada (and boy, Sawyer drops a uniquely Canadian product placement every other paragraph to be sure we don't forget it), Pontor is engaged by his homo sapien counterparts with that most mythically ensconced of all Canadian virtues, overtly performative politeness.

    We learn along the way, and rather early on, that Pontor is bisexual and involved in a polyamorous relationship in his own world. DO NOT expect the definition of either of those concepts in these books to represent the Party Approved™ meanings we use in our current world. Sawyer makes use of a little-known bit of real-world scientific knowledge that concerns the unusual gender assortment we tend to find when Neanderthal fossils have been found in groups. There is a mild tendency (not a rule, but a tendency) for these fossils to be found in same-sex groupings. Sawyer lifts that small statistical anomaly and uses it to create a Neanderthal world where everyone has both a husband and a wife. Everyone. He gives Neanderthals a mating season, rather than a monthly cycle like homo sapiens, and uses the two dynamics to create a society where you live with your same-sex spouse for most of the year (it is a full and complete sexual relationship), and then when the urge to make babies comes upon you, you go stay with your opposite-sex spouse.

    I have no idea if Sawyer is or is not a member of the Rainbow Community, but he does fixate on Pontor as a sexual object. He finds himself desired in the homo sapien world of people he encounters, and, we learn, to put it plainly, that Pontor is remarkably well endowed. Sawyer spends a whole scene detailing Pontor's prodigiousness.

    Gay or not, Sawyer is a size queen.

    But it's not Pontor's bedroom proclivities that anchor the story (though Sawyer is not shy in giving these details). It's the differences between his world and ours, the mistakes we've made that they haven't and widdershins likewise, the chance for a peek into how things could have been had different choices been made, for both Pontor and the homo sapiens who befriend him.
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    Richard K. Morgan's series A Land Fit for Heroes.

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    Ringil Eskiath is a man stuck on the wrong side of time and history. Once a hero of epic proportion, swinging sword and fury into the scaled enemy threatening their borders, ready to kill or die a furious death rather than submit to subjugation and defeat, Ringil is now part of an inconvenient prior age. Younger thoughts and minds (and even some of his contemporaries) find his presence a nuisance to their newly freed abilities to think as they wish and do as they like. He is the victim of irony and already sliding down the backside of youth and beauty, known now only as a despoiler of honest men in sweaty pawings within dirty barns.

    But fate is not done with Ringil. Like a dispassionate army that keeps tabs on its veterans, Ringil is called back into service. There is yet need of the steel sword he wields, no matter how much the citizenry may resent and disdain him for what he does with the flesh-sword with which he was born.

    I love Ringil for not being young or epically handsome or tied to those youthful days when we clutch our definitions to our bosoms with such prickly heat. Ringil's definitions have long ago proven to be lies. Those whom he loved have died or found settled lives of mere mortals, not the gods of war they once were, now grown small and quiet.

    These books will appeal - I think - to older LGBTQ folk. You'll find no sentimentality or saudade here. The realism of muscles gone soft with age and the ever-present enemy called gravity are taken into account. @BayView, if you've not come across these books before, they answer, I think, to the topic you brought up concerning emotional truth, rather than sticking to expectations or any kind of historical realism. In this case there is no realism to be stuck to since Ringil's world is not our own. Instead, here we find rather modern mouths speaking in modern ways to connect that emotional truth, rather than cleave to tropic expectations of how people will speak or behave in a typical Sword & Sorcery novel.

    As regards LGBTQ concepts, sexualities run the gamut in these books, but again, these are all people who have lived, who have run through the years that lead to regrets and are on the other side of that gauntlet, imperfect, sometimes broken, morally clouded, very real.
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    The Hexlisnger series by Gemma Files.

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    Chess Pargeter and Asher Rook… where to even begin?


    Firstly, these are not nice people. Seriously - not nice. Ash is an ex-reverend turned desperado turned hexslinger (that’s cowboy talk for warlock). Chess Pargeter is a son-of-a-whore in the most literal sense. There certainly is a love story here, but it’s not cute or saccharine or pining for some fairytale stupidity. It’s dirty and broken and fucked up and deeply darkly sexual.

    Long story short, Chess and Ash are on the run for bad things they did at the end of the Civil War and because hexlsingers ain’t exactly “polite company” in this alternate world. They have some crazy times, take a great many lives, and those that manage to survive at their side never come away without some taint by association.

    Chess was born to a San Fransisco jezebel name of “English Oona”. When he was old enough to be brought into the fold of selling his flesh, he did so. Chess has no need to be forgiven for his past sins. Any accusation of sin is your problem, not his.

    And lord, he is desirable. In not so many words, Gemma Files makes it clear that if Chess weren’t so damned dangerous, if you didn’t have to regard him as you would a rattlesnake with whom you share a room that’s only 3 feet square, if you could slip past his ferocity, you would see that he is uncommonly, perhaps even unnaturally, beautiful.

    To fuck Chess Pargeter, or to have him fuck you, is to lay with an angel. But if you know your Bible, then you know that not all angels are to be trusted.

    Angel becomes a god when Chess and Ash are drawn to a conflagration of other hexslingers, brought together by an ancient goddess of Aztec or Mayan (in her eyes, she’s older than either) origin. She takes Ash as her husband and flings Chess into the rotten bowels of Xibalba, where the gods play ōllamaliztli with our souls in their sunken ballcourt, to make his way out... if he can.

    These books are not for the sensitive. They are not for those of you still demanding we be represented in a certain sort of idealized light. There are no pedestals to be seen. These people are outlaws, dirty to the core, fucked up from the floor up, and amazingly engaging and satisfying to read.
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    Clive Barker's Imajica

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    In this story, the LGBTQ aspects are not quite as front and center, but I think it certainly merits a place on this list.

    John Furie Zacharias is no ordinary mortal, though he’s pretty sure he’s as ordinary as they come. He becomes entwined in the machinations of secret societies, assassin angels, and realms beyond Earth. He goes by the nickname Gentle - a bit of foreshadowing - and eventually comes across the idea that he may, in fact, be the Second Coming.

    Yes, that second coming.

    But this is Clive Barker, so don’t expect any humble genuflecting or deference to religious sentiments. This is the same man who brought us the Hellraiser series. ;)

    In this story, God is not what we think. Earth, The Fifth Dominion, has long been separated from the other four dominions and stories have grown strange and distorted from that long ago time when we knew better. God (of the Abrahamic flavor) is not a creator, but a conqueror named Hapexamendios. A power-hungry warlord who burned an unhealing scar across the dominions in order to ensconce himself alone and quite mad in The First Dominion, what you and I refer to as Heaven.

    Jesus was his first son, but he didn’t come to save us from our sins; he came to save us from Daddy.

    Gentle's circle of friends includes many in the Rainbow Community, whom he loves and holds dear. In his otherworldly adventures, he comes across a shapeshifting angel named Pie'oh'pah whose original reason for coming into the story is as a hired assassin with Judith, a friend of Gentle’s, as target. Later, Pie'oh'pah becomes Gentle’s lover. Pie'oh'pah’s gender is never a fixed thing, especially with regards matters of sex, though most of his/her time is spent in the guise of a strikingly handsome black man.

    But, when you’re tasked with saving the world from God, and God’s a baddie, not a goodie, and also your own daddy, the exact gender of your angel assassin lover is pretty far down the list of things to worry about.

Comments

  1. Malisky
    I don't know about books but at least lgbt characters seem to pick up in series and movies. The 100's, Sense8, Romeo Section, The Wire, True Blood, Mr. Robot, Game of Thrones, A Frozen Flower, Thelma, The Handmaiden, Moonlight. I'm sure I've seen much more but I can't remember right now. But yeah, in books it's rare I came across a gay character. The only ones I came across so far where Anne Rice's' Vampire Chronicles.

    Nice post. I went to three bookstores and asked if there were any novels with gay characters in it and the sellers looked at me like I was an alien or something. Keep us updated! :)

    Edit: Oh! And John Connolly's "The Reapers"
  2. Wreybies
    @Malisky : Yes, it's a conundrum. A secret that's hidden in plain sight. I felt the same way when I was younger until someone pointed me in the right direction. It was different then. LGBTQ characters were marginal, hinted at, mentioned and then forgotten. And sometimes it was even treated as if that were the right thing to do. "Shouldn't it be no big deal? Isn't that what you yourself have been saying? See, Arthur C. Clarke slips in the odd mention, and it's no big deal. Isn't that ideal?"

    No, it's not. It's the copout.

    But soooo much has changed in the last few decades. There's more and it's bigger, bolder, in your face-ier. ;) When I was a kid, Gemma File's books would have incited riots. Now they just inflame passions, as well they should.
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