Me and the Queer Thing and male with male characters
When I first began publishing s.f., I was told that I did male characters better than female, and that I should go with my strengths. Most of the sex was very strange (bird sophonts feeding toilets) or straight. Behaviorially, I fell in love with women and slept with men in my 20s, and am finding that a number of women near my current age (61) had hetereosexual youths, marriages, children, and came out in their forties or even fifties.
Some of us have what one of my on-line friends called an "inner fag," and I know a female to male transexual who is attracted to men (I'm still of an age and cultural that has me shaking my head a bit over that). I'm not quite sure what it is, whether it's that the male sex drive is more forceful, or if female sexuality is more fluid.
Perhaps we know more about gay men because they're more likely to have written more frankly about their experience than gay women, who wrote more coded work (consider Gertrude Stein).
Queer women and gay men -- I remember one older gay guy berating the lesbians for running off to join the feminists and not sticking with their gay brothers to fight for gay rights. And I noticed that I was one of a few women who showed up at the Silver Foxes, and while that group was fun, it was somewhat disconcerting that so few women were there, much like some other groups I'm part of (an on-line photography group in particular).
Interesting times. The CIA has gay support groups for its queer personnel and the FBI only wants to hire out queers to avoid possible problems with blackmail. When I was a teenager, the liberal position was that homosexuality was a disorder, not a moral defect.
One of the things that happens to women in popular fiction is that they're reduced to their sexual relationships with men. This is so common in US television that I was amazed by a Canadian vampire show -- two women secondary characters who weren't love interests of the hero, but were professional women (one a doctor, one a bar owner) who were friends with the vampire hero, not defined by sexual relationships (the bar owner was another vampire who'd known the hero for quite some time).
What appears to be a problem for gay males reading slash is that gay men in that are often, but not always, reduced to their sexual relationships, their sexuality. The complexity here is that women's models for discussing sexuality at all is that it is defining in ways that aren't true necessarily for men, who may be more defined by who they defeat in various forms of combat than in who they bed. When I wrote Centuries Ago & Very Fast, I asked men to read it, and I paid attention to what gay men were saying about their lives. Samuel R. Delany's writing helped me understand facets of his life that were about things I hadn't experienced myself as a woman. The work I did was to see if I understood what I'd learned from Bread and Wine and The Mad Man.
I remember feeling cut out of a lot of women's poetry because it was about their relationships with men, and just that. Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop, and even Edith Sitwell, were women I could read who didn't shut me out (and not a tremendous surprise to find out that at least two of them were queer). The guys wanted the poetry to be about them. My two closest poetry friends were straight women, but they were more than the sum of their relationships with men.
If gay men could see some of what's happening in slash as a reflection of the restrictions on women rather than an appropriation of their lives, maybe we could work together better than we have been working. Women grow up in a world that defines them by their sexual connections. Gay men come close to this, but Harkness was defined by more than his gayness. The UK version of Queer as Folk was closer to slash sensibilities, but the women were still more defined in traditional female roles than the men. Even the lesbians were nesting.
What's been fun about White Collar that transcends its unreality (ever been in secure cleared circles, nobody like Neal Caffrey would be walking around FBI offices unescorted) are the women, who are spectacular eye-candy, but who aren't always defined by their relationships with men (or women). Most of the best ones are bad girls, and one rather wishes that they would manage to escape sometime (Neal's fence friend seems to be managing quite well). Dr. Fiametta was particularly tasty, a woman who wasn't conventionally young and utterly smooth faced.
Creating fictional women who are more than who they bonk or give birth to requires some precidents -- both in real life (a neighbor in Charlotte had earned an MD but quit practicing to be a wife and mother) and in fiction. The other side of it is keeping the women sexually alive, too, without making them either "the lesbian" or the mom/bonk. My two poet friends were mothers and found that they were pretty unique at the time being writers and mothers.
I'm not particularly interested in women characters who are men in drag, either, who have girl bits but who are otherwise more like men than women, tough, hard-bitten, physical fighters. Like one of the women art thieves in White Collar said, women have other things to work with. Mollie Millions is a man's fantasy, as good as Gibson is otherwise.
(One of the big gender fuck things in White Collar is a male who is gay in real life playing a man who inverts the paradigm of woman looking for her man and who appears to be a sexual toy for the women around him more than the reverse.)
We learn to write from other writings. If the work we use to take off from isn't ultimately satisfying, then we have to make the models for our futures.
Some of us have what one of my on-line friends called an "inner fag," and I know a female to male transexual who is attracted to men (I'm still of an age and cultural that has me shaking my head a bit over that). I'm not quite sure what it is, whether it's that the male sex drive is more forceful, or if female sexuality is more fluid.
Perhaps we know more about gay men because they're more likely to have written more frankly about their experience than gay women, who wrote more coded work (consider Gertrude Stein).
Queer women and gay men -- I remember one older gay guy berating the lesbians for running off to join the feminists and not sticking with their gay brothers to fight for gay rights. And I noticed that I was one of a few women who showed up at the Silver Foxes, and while that group was fun, it was somewhat disconcerting that so few women were there, much like some other groups I'm part of (an on-line photography group in particular).
Interesting times. The CIA has gay support groups for its queer personnel and the FBI only wants to hire out queers to avoid possible problems with blackmail. When I was a teenager, the liberal position was that homosexuality was a disorder, not a moral defect.
One of the things that happens to women in popular fiction is that they're reduced to their sexual relationships with men. This is so common in US television that I was amazed by a Canadian vampire show -- two women secondary characters who weren't love interests of the hero, but were professional women (one a doctor, one a bar owner) who were friends with the vampire hero, not defined by sexual relationships (the bar owner was another vampire who'd known the hero for quite some time).
What appears to be a problem for gay males reading slash is that gay men in that are often, but not always, reduced to their sexual relationships, their sexuality. The complexity here is that women's models for discussing sexuality at all is that it is defining in ways that aren't true necessarily for men, who may be more defined by who they defeat in various forms of combat than in who they bed. When I wrote Centuries Ago & Very Fast, I asked men to read it, and I paid attention to what gay men were saying about their lives. Samuel R. Delany's writing helped me understand facets of his life that were about things I hadn't experienced myself as a woman. The work I did was to see if I understood what I'd learned from Bread and Wine and The Mad Man.
I remember feeling cut out of a lot of women's poetry because it was about their relationships with men, and just that. Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop, and even Edith Sitwell, were women I could read who didn't shut me out (and not a tremendous surprise to find out that at least two of them were queer). The guys wanted the poetry to be about them. My two closest poetry friends were straight women, but they were more than the sum of their relationships with men.
If gay men could see some of what's happening in slash as a reflection of the restrictions on women rather than an appropriation of their lives, maybe we could work together better than we have been working. Women grow up in a world that defines them by their sexual connections. Gay men come close to this, but Harkness was defined by more than his gayness. The UK version of Queer as Folk was closer to slash sensibilities, but the women were still more defined in traditional female roles than the men. Even the lesbians were nesting.
What's been fun about White Collar that transcends its unreality (ever been in secure cleared circles, nobody like Neal Caffrey would be walking around FBI offices unescorted) are the women, who are spectacular eye-candy, but who aren't always defined by their relationships with men (or women). Most of the best ones are bad girls, and one rather wishes that they would manage to escape sometime (Neal's fence friend seems to be managing quite well). Dr. Fiametta was particularly tasty, a woman who wasn't conventionally young and utterly smooth faced.
Creating fictional women who are more than who they bonk or give birth to requires some precidents -- both in real life (a neighbor in Charlotte had earned an MD but quit practicing to be a wife and mother) and in fiction. The other side of it is keeping the women sexually alive, too, without making them either "the lesbian" or the mom/bonk. My two poet friends were mothers and found that they were pretty unique at the time being writers and mothers.
I'm not particularly interested in women characters who are men in drag, either, who have girl bits but who are otherwise more like men than women, tough, hard-bitten, physical fighters. Like one of the women art thieves in White Collar said, women have other things to work with. Mollie Millions is a man's fantasy, as good as Gibson is otherwise.
(One of the big gender fuck things in White Collar is a male who is gay in real life playing a man who inverts the paradigm of woman looking for her man and who appears to be a sexual toy for the women around him more than the reverse.)
We learn to write from other writings. If the work we use to take off from isn't ultimately satisfying, then we have to make the models for our futures.