Awesome – our own ‘Nathan Burgoine was featured on SF Signal:
‘Nathan Burgoine grew up a reader and studied literature in university while making a living as a bookseller. His first published short story was “Heart” in the collection Fool for Love: New Gay Fiction. Since then, he has had over two dozen short stories published, and his first novel Light is available in e-book and print from Bold Strokes Books.
Steve Berman: Thank you for baring your soul to SF Signal readers!
‘Nathan Burgoine: Uh oh. Soul baring? Understand I’m a Brit-born Canuck. Everyone is going to be blinded by the glare if I so much as unbutton off my shirt, let alone my skin.
SB: Your new novel, Triad Blood, features three fantastical/supernatural elements: demons, vampires, and wizards. Of these three, the vampire is the one more encountered in queer speculative fiction; from Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” to Anne Rice’s Lestat, the vampire’s role as an erotic predator and occasional anti-hero are well-established for contemporary readers. The others…I would hard pressed to name five famous gay wizards (Albus Dumbledore finally came to mind) or five gay demons (Grazz’t from D&D always seemed bi to me). Did you find this territory also unexplored? As a gay man did you feel. ‘Of course there would be such creatures, such sorcery, that yearned for the same gender?’
NB: For contemporary gay wizards, the only characters I can think of off the top of my head from the mainstream were more of a suggestion than a reality. I think the author based them on real people and as such didn’t want to say anything that would violate their privacy, but Tom and Carl in Diane Duane’s So You Want to be a Wizard (they appeared throughout the series) were probably the only wizards I bumped into that made me think, Huh. These guys might be like me. That was a YA series, too, so bonus points.
As for demons, I’m afraid they’re so much more often in the realm of horror, where I’m not nearly as well read. I wonder about Pie’Oh’Pah, but Pie was a shape-shifting assassin more than a demon, right? Definitely a form of a genderfluid character, and pan- or bisexual, perhaps? Hrm. I need to re-read Imajica…