Hey all,
Bit of a philosophical question today. Most of the folks here read or write (or both) a lot of LGBT fiction – from MM romance to transgender urban fantasy.
It got me thinking/ I know there are some obvious differences between these works and mainstream fiction – ie: the protagonists are LGBT.
But does it go deeper than that?
For instance – if we took a seminal work of mainstream fantasy, like The Wheel of Time – and changed all of Rand’s women to men, would it suddenly be a “gay fantasy” work? And if not, why not?
What I’m trying to get at is this – what parts of our humanity and society can LGBT speculative fiction illuminate that a comparable mainstream (ie: no LGBT characters) work cannot?