I know I came to the party a little late. I’ve been writing since I was in my early years, and really made a go of it in my early twenties. But then after a string of rejections, I put things on the back burner, and didn’t really pull it off again until about a year ago.
I’m now in my mid-forties. I always kind of figured that I would do some of my best writing at this point in my life, when I had more life experience under my belt.
So anyhow, the party. As I’ve gotten more and more connected to the LGBT writing world this last year, I’ve realized that there are a whole bunch of authors out there writing LGBT fantasy, sci fi, and paranormal. But the vast majority of them seem to be writing in the MM romance space.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. *grin*
One of the reasons for creating Queer Sci-Fi was to form of a community for these writers, where they could exchange ideas and promote their works. But another reason, near and dear to my own heart, was to encourage us as a community to branch out a little more.
And when I say branch out, I mean in terms of the characters that we choose – not just cute young gay men in love, but also older men, men who don’t fit the typical mold, female characters, transgender characters, bisexual characters – the whole gamut of who we are as an LGBT community. And let’s add asexual, questioning, and intersex characters to the list as well.
But I’d also like to see us do a little guerrilla action in the mainstream sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal space. While I think there will always be a great market for MM romance in these sub-genres, I like to see more works that didn’t depend on the romance, but instead were more driven by the genre premise.
For instance, what Hari Seldon, if the main character in Asimov’s Foundation series had been a lesbian? Or what if Frodo had been actually portrayed as gay? What if Rand Al Thor had swung both ways? How would that have changed your perception of the world growing up, to have read strong LGBT characters in mainstream sci-fi, fantasy, and paranormal?
To my question today – what should our next step be to broaden the work that we do in the fantasy, sci-fi, and paranormal genres?