The foremost concern, that an explicit queer sex scene will automatically make certain readers not buy your book, has an unfortunately strong basis. Discussion of one of the examples I use frequently, Richard K. Morgan’s The Steel Remains, is a case in point: many reviewers and commentators, as well as commenters here, expressed the sentiment that they would not ever pick up the book because they didn’t want to see the gay sex in it.
…
I hate this argument to not read a book, unless the reader chooses to never read a book with sexual content at all ever. I think it’s generous to say that 90% of speculative fiction is about straight characters, many of whom have sex with other straight characters in varying degrees of explicitness.

And you know what? Queer people read those books, and most aren’t particularly excited by those straight sex scenes—but if they’re in a good book, what’s the problem? It’s part of the characters and their relationships. The point of sex in speculative fiction is not solely to be an erotic experience for the reader. If the entire turning point of a reader picking up a book is how titillating they personally find the sex in it, I suspect they should be reading erotica, not speculative fiction. If a queer person reads straight sex in a good book, why won’t a straight person read queer sex in a good book?

The excuse that a book isn’t worth reading solely because it contains queer sex is homophobic. Cushion it however one may, it is. The fear and disgust that motivates a reader to avoid a book about a queer character has a definitive root, and it isn’t prudishness.

George R.R. Martin is Not Your Bitch

Via io9, Best Song Ever: “George R.R. Martin Is Not Your Bitch”.

Von Shirt.Woot, wieder via tdw.

Dieses Jahr gibt es zwei Gewinner:

Greer Gilman, Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales, (Small Beer Press 2009)

Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 (VIZ Media 2009)

Ooku ist hier für mich doppelt interessant, da ich mich für ein anderes Projekt mit eben diesem Thema beschäftige. Also weise ich doch bei dieser Gelegenheit mal ganz unauffällig auf meinen Amazon Wunschzettel hin

We chose Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku, Volumes 1 and 2 as our Tiptree winner with some trepidation. No one on the jury has read much manga; no one is an expert in Japanese history. What we fell in love with was the detailed exploration of the world of these books — an alternate feudal Japan in which a plague has killed 3/4s of Japan’s young men. In Ooku, the shogun and daimyo are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the Shogun’s harem.

The first volume (set in a later time period than the second) shows us a world in which men are assumed to be weak and sickly, yet women still use symbolic masculinity to maintain power. The second volume focuses on the period of transition. Through-out the two books, Yoshinaga explores the way the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios.

The result is a fascinating, subtle, and nuanced speculation with gender at its center.

|via SF Signal|

|via pasa la vida|

|Julie Dillon’s deviantART Galerie und Homepage: via agaudi|

|Fantastische Illustrationen im doppelten Sinn, mehr auf Kakotomirai’s deviantART Galerie; via agaudi|