All posts by fontfolly

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About fontfolly

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.

Adventures in being straightsplained

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Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
Earlier this week I posted about how much I love fantasy and science fiction and one of the reasons why. Specifically that sf/f had been a refuge from some of the cruelties a homophobic society heaps upon queer kids while they’re growing up. Much of sf/f is about escaping oppression of one sort or another. Science fiction in particular is often about the triumph of the light of reason over the darkness of ignorance. That gave me hope, as a kid. Sometimes it was the only hope I had. Which is why it feels like a double betrayal when I encounter homophobia in sf/f circles. One phrase I used to describe the homophobes in question was, “whose ultimate goal is to erase us.”

Which led one commenter to tsk at me and insist that, while the people in question are decidedly anti-gay, there was no evidence they want to erase us.

Oh, goodie! Straightsplaining! Homophobia isn’t what I think it is, at all! How foolish of me to think that my 50+ years of surviving the slings and arrows of homophobia gave me any expertise in the meaning or aims of homophobia!

It’s possible the commenter has a reading comprehension problem and thinks that erasure must always literally imply extermination and is trying to claim that the people in question don’t want all queers dead. So, on the slight possibility that that’s the case, let me just explain that when I say “erase us” I mean “wish that we were invisible and that all or nearly all evidence of our existence was removed from stories, books, movies, television series, and society in general.”

And you know what? Every single homophobe in existence wishes that we were, in the least, invisible. It is part of the definition of being a homophobe! It’s a common lie they tell themselves and us all the time: “I don’t hate gay people, just why do they have to shove it in my face all the time?” Or “I wish they wouldn’t flaunt it all the time!” Or “I don’t want my children seeing that!”

And in the cases of the Sad Puppies, making us invisible is exactly what they’ve been talking about:

  • When they lament the fact that they can’t always be sure when they pick up a “book with a rocket on it” that they aren’t going to encounter gay characters inside? That’s wishing we were invisible.
  • When they insist (in the comments thread of the post linked in the first bullet) that it is deceptive that another book’s back cover blurb didn’t mention prominently enough that the protagonist is gay? That’s wishing we were invisible.
  • When they insist that in a novel about a young person’s quest for self-discovery the fact that the young person is gay isn’t revealed until nearly midway through the book (when the character finally admits it to himself) is some form of malicious deception? That’s wishing we were invisible.
  • And when a pair of artists/writers reveal in the final scenes of the finale of their cartoon series that the female lead and her female companion are in love, and a homophobic sci fi writer compares those artist to termites that need exterminating simply because they included queer characters in their story? That’s wishing we were invisibile.

And while we’re on the subject of John C. Wright: when he says that the “instinctive reaction of men” to “fags” is “beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons,” that’s beyond wishing we were invisible, it’s an explicit statement that they wish we were exterminated.

To the commenter who kicked this off: I don’t know how you could have been paying close enough attention to the Bad Puppies to notice that they were anti-gay, yet missed the many times they have alluded to the bashing (and worse) of queers. Just as I don’t know how you could have been paying close enough attention to these guys to describe Vox Day/Theodore Beale as “vile” and have missed all the times he’s said that homosexuality is an existential threat to civilization that must be either cured or eradicated. Because all of that is also evidence that even more than wishing we were invisible, they wish we didn’t exist.

So please, don’t tell me or any other queer person that we don’t understand our own oppression. To paraphrase bunnika : when you were watching our lifestyles and checking out the homophobes’ web sites, we have been living our lives and experiencing actual homophobia that you have no right to ‘splain.

Thanks for your comment, though. And bless your heart.

Note: Comments on this entire blog have always been moderated. Specific commenters have been whitelisted, but everyone else’s comments sit in a queue until I approve them. And I don’t see any point in approving comments that are insulting, or obviously coming from sock puppets (there have been a lot of those this week) or—such as the comment alluded to here—indicate the person isn’t interested in listening.

Picnic on the Queer Side: more of why I love sf/f

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We're queer, we're nerds, get used to it!
We’re queer, we’re nerds, get used to it!
I was 13 years old and had been a semi-faithful reader of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a few years. I think I found my first copy in a magazine rack in a drug store sometime during fourth grade. I had pleaded and begged for a subscription of my own, and one of my grandparents had bought me a subscription for my twelfth birthday—except they got me a subscription to Galaxy Science Fiction instead. Which wasn’t bad, it meant I got a magazine about the size of a paperbook every month filled with short stories, novelletes, and sometimes serialized novels. But my adventures in the pages of Galaxy magazine is a story for another blog post.

It was summer, just months before my 14th birthday, when I got hold of the new copy of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and found inside it a story called “Picnic on the Nearside” written by John Varley. In it, the narrator, Fox, who was 12 years old and lived on a colony of the moon sometime in the future, had been in an epic argument with his mother, because he wanted a Change. He didn’t explain right away what the change was, but before that reveal, we learned that people in his society could easily alter their bodies (his mother exchanged her feet for peds/hands before going out to a party; and Fox mentioned a time he had assembled an eight-legged cat). Then Fox’s best friend, Halo, shows up as a nude woman, which finally explained what the change was. Fox and Halo had been best buds for years, and Fox worried that now that Halo was a woman, it would ruin their friendship.

Cover of the paperback edition of on of Varley's anthologies which included the story in question.
Cover of the paperback edition of one of Varley’s anthologies which included the story in question.
There are many other interesting things that happen in the story: Fox and Halo take Fox’s parents’ vehicle out on the surface without permission and get into a misadventure. But the really mind-bending part of the tale was the setting: a society where changing genders was only slightly more complicated than changing one’s clothes, and where everyone was okay with it. That was just mind-boggling!

I have to make a couple of digressions here. The first is that not all queer people are transgender, transsexual, nor transvestite. Gay boys don’t want to become women, we’re guys who are attracted to and fall in love with other guys. The proper answer to the clueless question, “Which one is the woman” is “Neither, that’s the point!” But one of the reasons young gay boys often idolize female characters in their favorite movies, books, and so forth is because the female characters are the objects of desire of the male characters. Similarly, young lesbian girls often idolize male characters in works of fiction. Young bisexuals may find themselves idolizing both, and so on.

Because there were no openly gay characters in any of movies, TV shows, books, short stories, et cetera which made up our cultural landscape growing up, one of the only ways to imagine ourselves in the worlds we longed to live in was to identify with the female characters. So on one level, “Picnic on the Nearside” offered me a more explicit way of projecting myself into that world. It was as if one of my subconscious coping mechanisms had been made manifest in the plot! Therefore, this story so intrigued me not because its imagined future would afford me an opportunity to change genders (which wasn’t what I wanted), but because it offered an escape from the expectations that boys were only allowed to do boy things, and only allowed to be friends with other boys, and only allowed to be boyfriends with girls.

The other digression is about the difference between a gender fluid milieu and a gay/lesbian culture. Varley has written a lot of stories set in the same world as “Picnic on the Nearside,” including several with the same character, Fox, as the protagonist (though the stories starring Detective Anna-Louise Bach {for example, “The Barbie Murders”} may be a bit more famous). Many of his characters change genders and have love affairs with people who have also swapped genders, but many times his imaginary gender fluid society is still very heterosexual. Fox never thinks of Halo as a potential sexual partner until they are opposite gender, for instance. Some of the couples who appear in the various stories seem to be just friends when they happen to be the same gender, then become lovers only when they happen to be opposite.

Many psychologists and sociologists now theorize that men who like to dress up as women and have sex with other men while thus dressed up are actually exploring an exaggerated heterosexuality. Having, in the online world, been sometimes emphatically propositioned by guys like that, and found myself turned off by their “flirting” that consists of trying to get me to say I will treat them the way an extremely selfish chauvinist man might treat a “slut,” I see their point. The men pursuing those scenarios are so into their fantasy of what heterosex could be that sometimes they want to experience it from the girls’ side. They aren’t turned on by the other man as a man, they are turned on by the situation of a woman submitting to a man in very specific ways.

Looking back on some of Varley’s stories, they can feel more like a mostly hetero exploration of gender roles, rather than a pan-gender exploration of sexual orientations.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s a lot right with it.

A lot of the pain, fear, and bigotry directed toward LGBTQ people is grounded in very narrow and strict views of gender. It’s why homophobic men are almost always also misogynist (or at least very chauvinist). So anything that makes us question those assumptions about intrinsic differences between men and women, what roles men and women are each allowed to take in society, and the morality of those gender binaries is a good thing. And there’s no question that Varley’s tales exposed many of hypocrisies at the heart of all those assumptions.

I became a Varley fan that summer. Even more so, I became a fan of the protagonist, Fox, who went on to appear in the short story “The Phantom of Kansas” and the novel Steel Beach. Questions of gender and sexuality are at most a minor consideration in most of his stories, and I’ve come to appreciate his ability to take seemingly any speculative notion (no matter how weird) to its logical conclusion, and still tell a cracking good yarn along the way. What grabbed me that summer, while re-reading Fox and Halo’s misadventure again and again, was that there was at least one writer willing to tell stories that didn’t exclude a queer viewpoint. And there were editors who would print it, and by implication, readers other than me who wanted to read it.

And that was an amazing epiphany for a 13-year-old gay boy in the rural and very redneck Rocky Mountains.

Visions and Ventures: why I love sf/f

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tumblr_nkryuujLIC1sndzdgo2_540I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a fan of fantasy and science fiction. Which is not surprising, since my mother accidentally taught me how to read at an early age by reading to me from her favorite authors (Agathe Christie and Robert Heinlein) and making me repeat back entire sentences. Tales of the fantastic by Heinlein, Andre Norton, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edgar Eager, Edith Nesbit, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leigh Brackett, Gordon R. Dickson, Lin Carter, and so many others fed my imagination, encouraged my curiosity, fueled my thirst for science and math, and provided a refuge from the cruelties and contradictions of life.

One might wonder how cruel an existence growing up as a white boy in mid-twentieth century America could be. When you have a physically abusive alcoholic father heading up your working class rural evangelical fundamentalist family, real life can be quite unpleasant—especially for a gay, nerdy kid who talked to himself and was more comfortable with books than kids his own age. Science fiction and fantasy promised worlds where all you needed to defeat evil was a bit of courage, a lot of cleverness, and people you could count on. Every time my dad’s job transferred us to a new town, I would quickly ingratiate myself with the local librarians and proceed to devour every science fiction and fantasy book I could find on the shelves. Not to mention mysteries and science non-fiction books.

It wasn’t just the imaginary worlds of the various stories I read that provided a refuge, but from the introductions and interstitial texts of anthologies such as The Hugo Winners, Volume n, Best Science Fiction of the Year XXXX, and so forth, I also learned of conventions, where the creators and fans of these fantastic worlds gathered to talk about their favorite books and stories, encourage each other to write more stories, collaborate in various ways, and maybe even have a fun party or banquet where awards were handed out. And that sounded so amazing. Before middle school I knew about the Nebula Awards and the Hugo Awards. I knew that the Nebulas were voted on by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and that you had to be a professionally published SF writer to get in. But the Hugos were voted on by the attendees of WorldCon—by fans and professionals alike. So in theory, at least, I didn’t have to wait until I’d been published to participate in those.

I’d decided to become a writer sometime around the age of five or six. I’d been making my own books out of whatever notebooks or paper I could get my hands on since before I could write. I started writing my own stories as soon as I could assemble my sloppily-drawn letters into words. I was determined to be a writer. And I hoped that someday I might be a member of that community of writers vying for a Hugo.

As an adult, I’ve been attending sci fi conventions for decades. I’ve even been a staff member at a few. I’ve had some of my own tales of the fantastic published, even though most of my published stories have been in fanzines and other small semi-pro publications. I’ve had the good fortune to be the editor of a fanzine with a not insignificant subscriber base. I count among my friends and friendly acquaintances people who have been published in more professional venues, people who have run those conventions, people who have won awards for their sf/f stories and art, even people who have designed some of the trophies. Not to mention many, many fans. I have even occasionally referred to that conglomeration of fans, writers, artists, editors, and so forth as my tribe.

All of that only begins to scratch the surface of why I find the entire Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies mess so heart-wrenching. Yes, part of the reason the situation infuriates me is because the perpetrators are all so unabashedly anti-queer. For this queer kid, sf/f and its promise of better worlds and a better future was how I survived the bullying, bashing, hatred, and rejection of my childhood. To find out that there are fans and writers who so despise people like me that they have orchestrated a scheme whose ultimate goal is to erase us goes beyond infuriating.

But it’s worse and so much more than a bloc-voting scheme.

This is hardly the first time I’ve encountered homophobia, misogyny, and racism in the fandom. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve encountered it among the professionals! While it’s disheartening to have people sneer and make denigrating comments; and it’s chilling to be told people like me deserve extermination. The worst part is to be told that even putting characters that are like me into stories about space battles or post-apocalyptic worlds or bio-engineered futures makes those stores cease to be “real science fiction.”

If your imagination is so small that you can’t conceive of a future where gay people and women and non-white people actually exist and do interesting things—that those people can sometimes be the heroes of the tale—then I just don’t see how your speculative fiction can be very creative. If you can’t conceive of a world with gays and straights, women and men (trans* or cis), and people of all races, living and working together, you’re hardly a visionary. If you’re so afraid to share imaginary worlds with such people, you’re the exact opposite of an intrepid adventurer.

Update: Some of the Sad Puppy supporters have decided to send me messages, accusing me of blindly believing propaganda. The implication seems to be that the various organizers of the Sad Puppies have never said the things alluded to here.

Let me be clear: I’ve been reading the blogs and other postings of John C. Wright, Brad R. Torgersen, Larry Correia, and Vox Day/Theodore Beale for years, because they’ve been on their anti-SJW and anti-gay kick for a while. Everything I’ve mentioned in this post and previously I have seen myself, from their own words. That they have deleted and revised many of their old posts to obfuscate that doesn’t change anything. They can claim they didn’t say what they said, but we have screen captures and Google caches and Wayback Machine caches that say otherwise.

And even the revised posts are still clearly anti-gay: [The unraveling of an unreliable field | Brad R. Torgersen]

A new month, a new goal kick

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When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year, which includes posting regular updates. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!

So, how did I do…? Continue reading A new month, a new goal kick →

Friday Links (marriage, riots, and weird dinosaurs edition)

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Harlem United's H.O.M.E Program Group taking a stand in front of the notorious Atlah church sign.
Harlem United’s H.O.M.E Program Group taking a stand in front of the notorious Atlah church sign.
It’s Friday! A grueling week of work is very nearly over! It’s the first Friday in May!!! And my husband and I have an awesome date night planned for tonight. Then tomorrow I and a bunch of my nerdiest friends are going to go see the new Avengers’ movie! Wicked, right?

Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:

Former Homeless Teen Cyndi Lauper Testifies Before Congress On Ending LGBT Youth Homelessness.

Dan Savage Presents His Manifesto For Straight Guys Attending Pride.

The glaring contradiction at the heart of the anti-gay marriage argument.

The Long Road Ahead: the ongoing fight for justice after marriage equality.

Harlem United’s H.O.M.E Program Group Strikes A Unified Pose Outside Notoriously Anti-LGBT Church.

How Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped pave the way for marriage equality.

Outside the Supreme Court, ‘love conquers hate’.

Why the ‘Religion is against gay marriage’ line no longer works.

Bloomberg Quick Take: Gay Rights.

On marriage debate, GOP candidates forget what year it is.

The central delusion of the Christian right: Americans aren’t really churchgoers after all.

Marriage opponents protest D.C. church.

It’s Not Gay Marriage vs. the Church Anymore.

The best part of the Supreme Court oral arguments about marriage equality was when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg alluded to S&M. Sort of…

Two gay West Virginia high school athletes attend senior prom as couple, and no one freaked out. Their pictures are adorable!

5 Horrible Ideas Republicans Will Never Let Die.

Bobby Jindal just splintered the GOP: The unholy alliance between Fox News and the 1 percent can no longer stand.

The First Rule For Interviewing An Anti-Gay Hate Group. I refuse to use the scare quotes!

Rich Gay Republicans Very Sorry For Not Knowing Ted Cruz Is An A-Hole.

The joke was that Obama wasn’t joking.

Women are overpriced vagina buses that won’t let you ride them, Man Going His Own Way explains.

David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish.

The night the news died.

In case you had any doubts, media is rolling with Washington Post’s stenography for Baltimore PD.

Larry Wilmore rips Fox and CNN for ‘thug’ debate: ‘Here’s an N-word’ for you — ‘news’.

Morgan Freeman: Unrest in Baltimore exposed ‘the terrorism we suffer from the police’.

This animal is so weird that researchers are calling it ‘the platypus of dinosaurs’.

Rosetta Captures Stunning New Images of Comet’s Surface and Activity.

A Million H-Bombs per Second Heat the Sun’s Corona.

Romer’s Gap and the Four-Limbed Critters of Nova Scotia.

Bizarre ‘Bat Dinosaur’ Discovered in China.

11 Amazing Images From the Final Days of NASA’s Messenger Probe.

Internet delivers justice to man who left snarky joke instead of a tip. Thanks to @seashellseller for the link!

NOM: We’re broke and need money before you see no reason to ever give to us again. My heart bleed purple peanut butter for them!

In much sweeter news: Homeless Pit Bull Found Nursing Abandoned Kitten On Roadside.

And I wrote How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list.

And that It bothers some people that we exist, part 2.

And I confessed that I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached.

Misconceptions about Caffeine – mental_floss on YouTube (Ep. 24):

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Adam Lambert – “Ghost Town” [Official Music Video]:

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Barney Frank on the Supreme Court’s Gay Marriage Ruling – speculates that Justice Scalia will go up in a puff of smoke:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Why Action Movies Are Musicals For Dudes – Today’s Topic:

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Cyndi Lauper Testimony: Hearing on Effort to End Youth Homelessness:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Alex & Pam: Hallmark #PutYourHeartToPaper:

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Conchita Wurst – You Are Unstoppable (I can’t believe how aweseome every song that has been released from Conchita’s upcoming album is):

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached

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ClearThere are so many topics I want to write about now, but most of them are so outrageous that trying to figure out how to reasonably discuss them will take too much time from my other writing, so I’m instead going to write about how forgetful I am.

This story requires a little context. I’m not a morning person. At all. I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have worked most of my life in jobs that don’t demand that I be at my desk precisely at 8:00:00 am ready to go. While I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, though, I still have to get to the office within a certain window each day.

My poor husband is not any more of a morning person than I am, but his work requires him to be there earlier than, frankly, I even want to be awake. And I have such a hard time getting up in the morning, that I have a three-level alarm system to get me moving. My husband is usually leaving for work about 15 minutes before the second alarm in my system goes off, so I’m usually still in bed at least half-asleep when he comes in to kiss me good-bye.

Monday morning I stayed in bed until the third alarm went off, so I had almost no time for anything to go wrong in my getting-ready-for-work routine. After I had eaten, packed my lunch, showered, gotten dressed, packed my backpack, I was getting all of my pocket stuff together: phone off charger and into one pocket, watch off charger and on my wrist, keys in another pocket, and wallet–

My wallet was not where it ought to have been. Now this is no cause for panic on its own, because I am one of the most absent-minded people on the planet, and despite decades of trying to teach myself to always put things in consistent places so I can find them, the reality is that I misplace either my keys, eyeglasses, phone, shoes, hat, et cetera nearly every day. So when my wallet wasn’t where it belonged, all that meant is that I needed to check the five other places where it sometimes gets left around the house. That only took a couple minutes, no big deal, usually.

Usually.

My wallet wasn’t in the usual places. So I started looking underneath things, pulling out drawers and packs, poking into the pockets of coats in the closet, pulling pairs of pants out of the hamper and checking their pockets, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Throughout this process, I am getting increasingly angry and frantic. At first I was just muttering under my breath, “Where did I leave it?” Which soon became “Where the f– did I leave it!?” Soon I was no longer just muttering. How could I do this to my self again?

About forty-five minutes later I had turned over every corner of the house, when it finally occurred to me to check the car. As soon as I think of the car, I know exactly where it is. On Sunday, after we’d finished grocery shopping, we took the car to the automatic car wash. Because we had been planning to do that, as I was getting in the car in the grocery store parking lot, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and set it on the inner console, because wrestling with my pocket to extract the wallet so I can put cash in the little machine at the car wash after I’m belted in is not fun.

I ran out to the car, my mind boiling over with the recollections of the times our car has been broken into, along with all the recent reports (both in the news and from neighbors) of overnight car prowls in our neighborhood.

I got to the car. Relieved to see no broken windows. There, sitting on the console, is not only my wallet, but a very visible wad of the bills the car wash payment machine had given me as change. I unlocked the car, retrieved the wallet and money, locked the car again, and rushed back inside.

I was running quite late by then. Fortunately, I had no morning meetings on Monday, and no one anxiously waiting for me to handle any emergencies when I got in.

Tuesday morning, I tried to get up and moving sooner. I had one meeting before noon, and I was feeling a little worried about something else going wrong.

My worries were not misplaced. I couldn’t find my keys. I tore the house up, again, checking all the usual places. The wallet has only four or five usually misplaced locations; the keys, unfortunately, have about thirty such places. Once I had checked those locations with no luck, I pulled everything out of my backpack and felt around in the bottom of its compartments before I gave up and called my husband to see if he remembered seeing my keys at an unusual spot. He had not.

We haven’t gotten any extra house keys made since the new doors were put in (I just keep forgetting), so I didn’t have any way to lock the deadbolt behind me. My husband told me to just lock the lower lock and get to work.

I hadn’t spent as much time looking, but I had to catch the next bus if I were going to make my meeting. I didn’t run the almost half-mile to the bus stop, but I walked really fast. Which wasn’t entirely easy, because my hasty re-packing of the backpack had left things cattywumpus in there, and I had an uncomfortable lump in the middle of the pack pressing into my back the whole way.

By the time I got to the bus stop, One Bus Away indicated I had about seven minutes until the bus arrived, so I sat on one of the benches and contemplated the pros and cons of trying to straighten out the contents of the backpack. I felt the lump in the center of the back of the pack… and it felt an awful lot like keys.

This backpack has a weird little elastic pocket on the back panel of the main compartment. It is odd shaped and in a spot that’s difficult to get into, so I never use it. Monday afternoon the weather had been very warm, so before leaving the office I had shoved my jacket and my keys on top of everything else in the main compartment before walking home. When I reached home, my husband was already there (as usual), and the door was unlocked, so I hadn’t needed my keys to get into the house. The keys had apparently worked their way into the pocket, not sliding down all the way into it until after I took the pack off when I got home.

I felt like such an idiot.

Wednesday morning, for whatever reason, I woke up, fully awake and ready to get out of bed, about a half hour before the second alarm went up. So I was puttering around the living room and kitchen when Michael needed to leave.

He came downstairs and asked, “Where are your keys?”

I walked over to the coffee table, pointed to my keys, wallet, and hat. “That’s the wrong question,” I explained. “If my luck keeps running badly, today it will be something else entirely. My glasses, or my phone, or—”

“So, where are they?”

As I was gathering my glasses and phone, he started listing other things. “Where’s your jacket? Your iPad? Your headphones? Lunchbag?”

I asked him why he puts up with me. He just laughed and kissed me good bye.

It bothers some people that we exist, part 2

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...especially if it means make the world a brighter place. (MemeBlender.Com)
…or especially if it means make the world a brighter place. (MemeBlender.Com)
Being reminded that queer people exist at all drives some people to crazy lengths. For instance, as noted at the Crime and the Forces of Evil blog, the Sad Puppies are angry that books containing queer characters aren’t clearly marked. For those not in the know, the Sad Puppies (and an allied group, the Rabid Puppies) are a bunch of arch-conservative sci fi writers and fans who organized a bloc-voting scheme to game the selection process for the Hugo Awards and put a specific slate of anti-progressive authors, editors, and fans in every major category. Their rhetoric leading up to their success was full of blatant misogynist and homophobic language (and threats), and only slightly-less-blatant racist language. It’s worth noting that they’ve been trying this for a few years without success. It appears that their success this year is primarily due to the fact that they managed to enlist a bunch of GamerGate trolls into the process… Continue reading It bothers some people that we exist, part 2 →

Marriage legal for everyone, everywhere

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11175054_3836322863643_6839804740260912550_nThe Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on four cases involving Marriage Equality. Over the last year, the Court has declined to hear appeals of cases where a federal court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage. These four cases are ones in which the lower courts have struck down some aspect of a state ban, and an appellate court has stayed or overruled the lower court ruling. It’s not a done deal by any means, but it seems clear that a majority of the court is at least willing to let marriage equality become the law of the land. My own worry is not that the court won’t rule that gays have a right to marry, but rather that the less enthusiastic justices will force a very narrow ruling that would ultimately allow people to get fired from their jobs if they marry, businesses to refuse to sell to gay people, and so on.

Anyway, they will hear arguments today, but the ruling is not likely to be announced until nearly the end of the term, in June. Still, people are rallying in Washington, D.C., and there are local rallies happening around the country today.

But here are two nice videos that sum up our side of things:

Nobody’s Memories – PFLAG Canada:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

It’s Time for the Freedom to Marry:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list

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Some years ago (on another blog) I said some extremely stupid (and dickish) things about wish lists. One friend brought the dickish aspect to my attention, and I felt like a complete heel. As well I should have. I didn’t say what I said merely because I was a jerk1. I had reasons for feeling the way I did. But like any emotional baggage, we are seldom aware of just how off-kilter our perception is thrown by carrying it… Continue reading How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list →

Weekend Update: 4/25/2015

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Click to embiggen!
Click to embiggen!
There are a few stories I linked to yesterday (or in earlier Friday Links) that have had further developments. There are also a few stories I found after posting Friday Links that I would have included if I had seen them sooner.

First, I posted about the straight high school student who, when seeing that his best friend who happens to be gay was lamenting online about the fact that once again he’s on the planning committee for a dance, but he doesn’t have a date, got together with a couple of friends to make a big banner that said, “You’re hella gay, and I’m hella Str8, but you’re like my brother, so be my D8.” Here are some more pictures. I like this because, well, just think about how far things have come. It’s been pretty amazing that so many kids are out as queer in high schools, now. And it’s cool that most of them can go to prom without hassle from fellow students, or administrators threatening to expel them (only most, there were a few of the other kind in the news earlier in the month, alas). And it’s cool that openly lesbian, gay, and trans students have been elected Prom Kings and Queens.

Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
But when a straight guy can do this, and nobody bats an eye (look at the grins on the faces of two of the kids taking pics/vids of Anthony and Jacob), where the straight guy doesn’t worry about what people will think… well, it’s even more amazing. And in a really good way.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a virulent anti-gay group that has been losing, and losing, and losing and refusing to admit it, is hosting their third annual March For Marriage in Washington D.C. today. Two years ago they got 2000 people, but claimed to get 15,000 (and they photoshopped a picture of the crowd from President Obama’s inauguration into one of their pictures, posted it to the web, and tried to claim it was their rally). Last year they got far less than a thousand—and half the crowd were older ladies who spoke no English who were tricked into taking “a bus ride to see the monuments in Washington DC!” by an anti-gay New York state legislator; I’m not kidding, the ladies stood around confused until all the speeches the didn’t understand were over, then they didn’t march, the left to go look at monuments on their own! Even the most conservative news sites admitted the crowd was disappointingly small. I haven’t seen numbers, yet, but Jeremy Hooper from Good As You, posted (along with a link to their livestream) “Watch live at 11:30 ET: NOM’s hilariously out of touch (and likely final) #March4Marriage.”

I listened to one of the speakers while I was catching screen caps for the first update and writing part of this post, and it is definitely out of touch. The speaker was repeating their usual claim that activist judges have forces marriage equality on all 37 states that currently have it (completely ignoring four states where the voters approved marriage equality at the polls, and the several states who have approved it at the legislature). He doubled-down on that falsehood a minute later, repeating their lie that no marriage equality measure has been approved at the ballot box and that the vast majority of americans are opposed to “gay marriage.” They’re holding the rally on Saturday this year, instead of a weekday like before. And even more hilariously, instead of Tuesday, when the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on Marriage Equality. Everyone is assuming that they’re holding it today and not Tuesday because they might get a bigger crowd to show up on their side on a weekend when fewer of their base would have to take a day off work, and because it is pretty certain that the pro-equality side will have huge crowds on Tuesday. 5 Reasons NOM Will Need Much More Than A Prayer At The March For Marriage 2015.

In much, much happier news, Nation Public Radio reports Transgender Teen Wins Case To Wear Makeup In DMV Photo. When will these state officials realize that, if nothing else, it’s a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection before the law to impose dress codes and so forth based on a person’s gender. In many ways, this isn’t even about the fact that she’s transgender. Insisting that because they believe she’s a guy, she can’t wear makeup for her photo? Anyway, I’ve glad Chase has won, and hope she looks better in her new driver’s license picture than most of us do.