Some of my favorite fantasy series – Lord of the Rings, the Shannara Series, the Wheel of Time – take place all or mostly separated from current day. Although I have to acknowledge that Terry Brooks has since gone on to connect the Shannara books to his A Man of His Word series, which did bring the idea of his fantasy series into the present.
It seems to me that this blending of Fantasy elements and the modern world offers a unique opportunity to explore the LGBT community’s place in society, by giving us tools to look at how we fit into the world a little differently.
This can take the form of magical realism, like in one of my oft-cited favorites, Larque on the Wing, in which a straight housewife morphs into a gay man, her “true” identity. Or in my about-to-be-published story “The Bear at the Bar”, in which a Freaky Friday type exchange allows a gay gym bunny to see things from the other side of the tracks for a day.
Or it can deal with creatures from the other side – elves or fairies from Faery, for instance, and how the differences between their culture and ours can hi-light our own shortcomings and hangups as a society. Editor Lawrence Schimel dealt with this aspect in The Drag Queen of Elfland.
So my question today – have you ever written (or read) a fantasy that dealt with LGBT issues in a modern setting? And how did it use the blending of the two to shed light on the LGBT experience?