I know what's missing from this science fiction: Gay sex!

[sqbr]

No really, that is my theory :)

Basically I am increasingly sick of male writers justifying(1) their creepy exploitive objectification of women by the fact they're being "thought provokingly shocking" yet consistently shying away from the slightest whiff of m/m(2) sexuality (especially on the part of their protagonists omg) even when the plot would naturally lead there, and even though it's a really easy way to shock a (typical) audience.

Unlike a lot of women people I don't get any particular kick out of m/m sex scenes or romance, but I've read enough slash that they no longer stick out at me as being any more unusual than any other sort of sex/relationships. And as a result I've begun noticing how glaringly absent they are from mainstream science fiction.

The flip side of this problem, and they seem to pretty much always go hand in hand, is men never being seen as sex objects for women either. Women may be enthusiastic about sex, but the camera/narrator lingers on their body and hotness, or at most has them talking about how totally awesome the main character is.

(Another thing these sorts of stories tend to do, as part of their fairly strict gender hierarchy, is not having anyone who doesn't fit into neat male/female boxes. Also I've avoided talking about representations of f/f sexuality since I think that has a whole different slew of problems)

****WARNING: contains discussion of creepy, deliberately shocking writing. Also spoilers for Dollhouse.******

Some examples:

• Wanted: the various "uninhibited" bad guys are shown doing "shocking" things, up to and including raping women and having sex with goats (gender unspecified), but nary a whisper of m/m sex. Or in fact, any of the "bad" women doing anything beyond cheerful serial monogamy.
  
• The works of Iain M Banks (eg The Algebraist). His Culture are in theory this completely free and unselfconsciously fluid and enlightened post scarcity society where everyone changes gender, body type, brain chemistry etc at will. But his plots often seem to revolve around people (mostly men) outside the Culture, or misfits within it, who find themselves drawn to/part of much more sexist, violent, primal societies (ie like ours :)), and it seems to me at least that the reader is expected to be drawn to them too (despite their assumed left liberal, anti sexist etc leanings) While he sometimes writes from a female POV, and several of his male characters have been female at one point or another in their history, from my spotty memory all the (often quite violent) sexualised imagery is of women, and we never see any of his male characters show the slightest signs of attraction to any other men. And the only time I can remember seeing a male character be female "on screen" he was just doing it as a favour to his girlfriend and was still definitely male.
  
• Dollhouse: The female dolls are shown in skimpy outfits (even when it's impractical), do a lot of often fairly degrading sex work, and are shot in an objectifying way. The male doll is mostly shown doing non-sexual stuff like being a government agent, and in his ONE sexual/romantic engagement (with a fairly attractive woman) he spends most of the time in a suit being all James Bond-ish (I'll admit he was objectified or at least shown semi naked a little, but not a whole lot). Most male prostitution is m/m yet it's existence at the Dollhouse is at most vaguely alluded to. I think the questions of consent the show claims to be exploring would be MUCH more effective if straight male viewers imagined being (consentually!) brainwashed into wanting m/m sex.
  

Iain M Banks (in an interview I found trying to see if anyone else had a problem with his books) said that he didn't write gay characters because "He didn't feel he understood the lifestyle". This from a man who has written cults, aliens, child slave owners, kings of small asian nations, psychopaths and AIs.

There's also a lot of sf which ignores the existence of same sex relationships or people outside the m/f binary etc when creating their premise eg the Lillith's Brood series which assumes that everyone wants to be in a m/f relationship and make babies (and thus when aliens force them into the former and get in the way of the latter it's only the lack of babies they complain about) But this doesn't annoy me anywhere near as much (YMMV).

And in case it's not clear: I do not in principle have a problem with sf which doesn't contain m/m sex or relationships because the plot just doesn't end up needing it. There's never been any in any of my stories, after all. And I don't even have a problem (in principle) with stories which are open about being softcore porn for straight men. But don't pretend that the reason I don't like it is because I'm an easily shocked prude or philistine :P

EDIT: The way sf (and most other fiction) avoids LGBT characters and issues is definitely a problem! I was just trying to avoid people saying "So what you're saying is I HAVE to insert a gay character into EVERY STORY or I'm a homophobe?". That said, nix's comment made me poke at the fact I've never written any gay characters (lesbian and bi, yes. But not gay, or for that matter trans) and I think it is to some extent a result of my heteronormativity, in fact my Enchanted fic falls into EXACTLY the same trap as Lillith's Brood. Hmm.

I thought about giving some examples of sf which doesn't elide m/m sexuality when it comes up as a natural consequence of the plot, but this post is already long enough. I will say that off the top of my head I can't think of any written by a straight man :)

1)In a lot of cases I've read interviews with the author, but you can often just tell that's the mindset. That's certainly what their male fans say if you complain.
2)I was going to say "gay" but that seems unfair to bi etc men.

Comments

[trouble]

I had an interesting conversation or two about Dollhouse and the way Victor is treated in the show.

Victor is being shown as the "typical" women's fantasy, throughout the show. He's on the run from the mob! He's a secret agent! He's a fencer! He wears really tight jeans and checks out horses!

I've been *told* by folks who find such things attractive that the wee little shirts the male Dolls wear are all that and a bag of chips, but it's not my thing, so I'm just taking people's words for it. (My hot guys wear jackets. Long jackets. And sexy eyebrows.

Anyway.)

I really loathe that there was just a throw away comment about queer sex on Dollhouse at all, by Dr Saunders. I don't think we ever see a Doll hired by an outside person (not Adelle) for sex who isn't white/male/straight.

*sigh*

But my issues with Dollhouse are many.

[sqbr]

Huuuh. Yeah I guess I can see that. And you know that actually just skeeves me out more, because again the Dolls are objectified even when there's no in-story reason for them to be so.

I don't think we ever see a Doll hired by an outside person (not Adelle) for sex who isn't white/male/straight.

You know the whiteness never occurred to me. Overall the portrayal of race in the show is really creepy, it's just so easy to get distracted by the portrayal of gender and sexuality :/

[furikku.livejournal.com]

I expect it's an outgrowth of the general Western culture thing that (apparently) being a straight guy is a precarious position, and any hint of not-straight-guyness will cause you to tumble into the abyss of... um, something horrible.

So therefore, it is TOTALLY OK to try to get into the mindset of a whole range of things, but you can NEVER NEVER NEVER try to imagine anything sexuality-related outside the Straight Guy box*. (I, uh, guess that being a straight guy is just that boring or something. It must be terribly difficult being someone whose tastes are constantly catered to. ;_; )

Granted I'm another of those aberrant gals for whom m/m holds almost no attraction, but it would be nice if there were more options of that nature available for people who are into that stuff. (Y'know, just like there's more than just chocolate and vanilla at ice cream stores!)

*With a possible exception for lesbian stuff, so long as we're all clear that it's for the benefit of Straight Guys.

ReCAPTACHA: holding SCHULMAN-
Indeed!

[flamebyrd]

In an episode of QI I watched recently, Stephen Fry mentioned Oscar Wilde's trial, and the profound effect it had on male relationships in England. He said there was a lot of physical (but platonic) affection between male friends, much like there still is today on the continent, but after the Wilde trial, everybody was so terrified that it all disappeared.

I know that being "secure in your sexuality" is kind of a joke these days, but honestly, sometimes it really does feel like your first paragraph is absolutely right.

[softestbullet]

Like Stephen Colbert the character says, "My heterosexuality is holding on by a thread." *g*

[softestbullet]

Oh! And, "I hate gay men. Especially the ones that turn me on."

[sqbr]

I expect it's an outgrowth of the general Western culture thing that (apparently) being a straight guy is a precarious position, and any hint of not-straight-guyness will cause you to tumble into the abyss of... um, something horrible.

Yes. I'm always a bit wierded out by homophobes arguing that the ONLY THING stopping most men from swearing off women forever is homophobic legislation/attitudes etc. Makes me glad my husband is fairly unhomophobic and thus plausibly actually likes me :)

[ex_peasant441]

Makes me glad my husband is fairly unhomophobic and thus plausibly actually likes me :)

I love this remark! ♥

[flamebyrd]

I think that sometimes it is harder to get your head into writing something that is 'real' vs. purely fictional, partially because you know there is a large community out there who will know when you screw up, but very few people are likely to think you wrote child slavery 'wrong'*.

This could explain Banks' comment, but doesn't excuse it, because when a logical progression in your story would call for it, you should probably talk to people about it or otherwise do research so that there isn't a gaping hole in your worldbuilding.

*On the other hand, one would expect that if you're writing far future settings that the culture would be that far removed from present day Earth culture that offending your readers shouldn't be a problem, assuming you're not making anybody evil or anything.

Bringing everything back to Oscar Wilde again, I remember reading way back in high school that it is implied heavily in the novel that one of Dorian Grey's greatest 'crimes' was homosexuality. (I haven't read it since then, so I really can't remember.) Obviously, if your antagonists are the only ones having m/m sex that is kind of skeevy, but if we're talking about uninhibited excesses in modern fiction it would strike me as being conspicuously absent.

*narrator voice* And here we have a prime example of the confused reasoning and thinking 'out loud' that eventually results in no new conclusion, common to my comments on your thinky posts.

[sqbr]

Yeah, it's a more plausible excuse (if still crappy) for his stuff set in the modern day, and much much sketchier for his stuff set in a strange distant future/alternate universe etc.

And here we have a prime example of the confused reasoning and thinking 'out loud' that eventually results in no new conclusion, common to my comments on your thinky posts.

See also the mechanism by which most of these posts are written :D

[rainbow]

I think it may be that western culture at large still isn't at all comfortable with the idea of fluid sexuality; most men are very, very *not* secure in their sexuality these days, imo. Instead there's this huge crowd of identifying-as-straight men who are terrified that someone will think they're queer if they show any evidence that they can identify in any way with queer men. :/

The only sf&f male author I can think of offhand who addressed fluid sexuality as the norm is Heinlein in some of his books, especially his later ones. (I don't know if his own ideas changed or what the publishers would accept for print changed, but the later would surprise me very little given what I've read other authors say on the subject of sexuality and sensuality being not very publishable for a long time in sf&f.)

[sqbr]

The only sf&f male author I can think of offhand who addressed fluid sexuality as the norm is Heinlein in some of his books, especially his later ones.

Hey good point. Even if he was pretty sleazy about it :)

[sanguinity]

I'm moderately sure that Theodore Sturgeon had a fair bit about fluid, non-heteronormative, non-gender-binary sex; I remember several stories that blew my mind as a teenager, and I think they were Sturgeon's.

Ah, yes, plausibly Sturgeon's.

[sqbr]

Oh yes Sturgeon is fantastic. I'm pretty sure he wrote the first published sf story with a positive portrayal of homosexuality (and a negative portrayal of homophobia!).

In "The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of" Thomas Disch claims Sturgeon tried to persuade him into a threesome, so I don't know that he was totally straight (Admittedly I haven't seen references to anything like this anywhere else, so it might be pernicious gossip)

[softestbullet]

And as a result I've begun noticing how glaringly absent they are from mainstream science fiction.

Yeah, y'know, it just looks weird, how freakin' heteronormative and gender-binary scifi is. It's like -- really, all (or almost all of) these alien life forms have male people with dangly bits who are butch and female people with vaginas who are femme, and the only relationships are between those two genders? When real-life humans have more diversity WRT gender, gender expression, & sexuality than your ENTIRE GALAXY, you have a problem.

[sqbr]

YES.

[sanguinity]

Ah, forget heteronormative, I'm boggled by how freakin' mammal-normative galactic interspecies sex is. Sexually selected characteristics, such as sexual organs and markers of sexiness, tend to diverge fast and far in a completely runaway fashion; I just boggle that intelligent species from other planets are as rigidly reproductively male or reproductively female as mammals are, let alone that reproductively male and reproductively female individuals code onto human ideas of sex and sexiness, heteronormative or not. I don't have any room left over to view the heteronormativity as freakish, because I'm too busy wondering if Kirk regularly shagged the livestock back home: that he can look at nearly any species in the galaxy and see "sexay sexay lady!" suggests that his sex-drive isn't much linked to human sexual markers.

[softestbullet]

Word. Sex with the random aliens they encounter should be so much more complicated than it is.

[sqbr]

Again, YES.

I once encountered the idea that Time Lords see humans as pets and sex with us as bestiality, it makes a lot of sense, especially the doctor's attitude towards the Master having a wife :)

What also weirds me out is when the aliens don't look/act like us, but are still attracted to us (especially our ladies).

About the only exceptions to the mammalian male/female model is cloning and hives of one sort or another :/

[attentive]

It's Trek though - the biology and sociology don't work any better than the physics.

sqbr - I'm in total agreement with your theory by the way. I'd add that in the case of depicting male-male sex or attraction in TV programs, the biggest constraints are almost certainly coming from the broadcasters and producers.

Back on books and away a bit from what gets called "sf", did you read the review+rant of Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains on fantasywithbite recently? If nothing else - and it was made to sound like a terrible book - it apparently contains vast, vast amounts of gay sex involving an otherwise rather Conan-esque character.

Samuel Delany does a nuanced job of portraying the wide-range of male sexuality in his books about Neveryon ...

[sqbr]

*nods* I think the dynamic in fantasy is a bit different to sf though, and as someone who doesn't read so much of the genre I didn't feel comfortable discussing it.

Samuel R Delaney awesome (I haven't read Neveryon, but thought he did a good job in "Star in my pocket like grains of sand"), but he's also gay :)

[attentive]

If by "different" you mean "worse", in a gender sense, you're probably right ... it's interesting that people are finally catching on to the fact that the breakthrough "dark" fantasy of writers like George Martin has hardly broken through fantasy's endemic problems with gender depiction.

Delany's Neveryon: the story "Gurgik the Liberator" was pretty mind-enlarging when I read it aged seventeen or so. It features a lot of light bondage and fetish sex, bisexuality, anonymous sex, and sex between people of vastly disparate power and social status, with careful framing of the impact on the participants. I'd have to read it anew to check what my opinion would be as an adult. It's not soft stuff ...

[sqbr]

I'm not sure it's so much worse as more varied: fantasy aimed at women has some quite good portrayals of gender, and I'd say there's more of that than there is sf aimed at women. But I don't know, it's hard to make informed generalisations about this sort of thing without doing a much more broad and rigorous study than I can be bothered with.

Heh. See the thing putting me off Neveryon is it's epic fantasy-ish-ness, since I'm not in one of my epic fantasy reading moods.

[attentive]

Babel-17 might be more up your alley. Future sex in a society with three genders. Plus, you know, lots of language games.

Babel-17 and Nova are both probably better than Tales of Neveryon anyway. I found Neveryon interesting, and very worthy, but not that gripping.

His longer works such as Dhalgren and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand I think also cover the same ground, but they're bloody difficult to read (I actually finished Stars ... but I was completely on autopilot).

[sqbr]

I read Babel 17 ages ago but remember really liking it.

I liked "Stars.." too, though :)

[(Anonymous)]

Neveryon is, IMO, really not epic fantasy--it's not about grand kingdoms and saving the world and prophecies, it's very local and detailed. If anything, it's Delany deconstructing classic sword and sorcery.

[sqbr]

Oh that sound more promising then, thanks.

[sanguinity]

:: I think the questions of consent the show claims to be exploring would be MUCH more effective if straight male viewers imagined being (consentually!) brainwashed into wanting m/m sex. ::

Word.

[ex_peasant441]

I've long since given trying to understand why so many heterosexuals are homophobic.

For me a more interesting question is why gay writers aren't writing and publishing gay sci-fi relationships either. Fandom (very high percentage of gay folk) demonstrates that there is no lack of interest. Yet if the stories are as absent as you say then I have to wonder why. I have never set foot in a gay bookshop in my life (I'm not sure I've ever seen one for that matter) but I wonder, is there a sci-fi section? If not, why not?

Thank God for RTD and Torchwood rebalancing things.

Have you seen Children of Earth yet? The women in it are just awesome - you are going to want to slash your little heart out.

[nixwilliams]

there *are* stories there, and you should go and check out a queer bookshop if you can access one, because the bigger ones do often have small spec-fic sections.

but perhaps the stories aren't there not because queer writers aren't writing sf/f, but because homophobic (or at least heterosexist) agents aren't promoting them, publishers aren't publishing them, shops aren't stocking them, straight people aren't buying them. or maybe because the sf-reading public is assumed to be so sexist and homophobic that queer writers don't even bother trying to publish what they write.

[ex_peasant441]

Finding a queer bookshop would be a huge and very daunting expedition for me in so many ways. Thankfully there is Amazon :)

but perhaps the stories aren't there not because queer writers aren't writing sf/f, but because homophobic (or at least heterosexist) agents aren't promoting them, publishers aren't publishing them, shops aren't stocking them, straight people aren't buying them. or maybe because the sf-reading public is assumed to be so sexist and homophobic that queer writers don't even bother trying to publish what they write.

Could be. The trouble is this is just speculation (I assume?) and even if it happens to be accurate it just pushes the questions back a level. Why should this be the case in SF when it isn't in most other literary genres? If the mainstream publishers are in fact being homophobic why has the gay press not made a deliberate effort to counteract it? Why would the SF readership be assumed to be sexist and homophobic? And so on.

The problem is that without actual research into these attitudes we are just guessing. This is actually a huge problem in all these conversations - we rely so much on anacdotal evidence, and frequently anecdotal evidence from only one side of the matter (in this case readers). I feel I am always left squinting at the result and asking the same eternal question 'why?'

The 'what' I find depressing and all too familiar. The 'why' nobody seems to even wonder very often, let alone have answers for. Seriously, google 'why are people racist' or 'why are people homophobic'. I would have thought those were entry level questions and yet you have to hunt for a long time before you even begin to find a serious study that tries to answer them. I do have to wonder how the relevant university research departments spend their time.

[nixwilliams]

actually, i was just thinking about the whole 'go forth and find a queer bookshop' line is issue-riddled in itself: why aren't the books available there available in other bookstores?

i agree with you about there not being academic research into this area - and it'd be fascinating. if only i hadn't burnt myself out with my current project . . . perhaps in a few years!

but the other thing is that some of these anecdotes are legitimate evidence. i have seen students in university writing classes told that they shouldn't write sf/f because it's not literary enough (i was one of them), i have heard young writers being told not to make sexuality (by which was meant 'homosexuality') their only "issue" in writing because it's only good for one story or book (because of course heterosexuality is normal, but queer sexuality is a Big Deal and can't just happen in the background, and writing about it would make you a one-trick pony). so, i guess when you have that double bind of being encouraged away from queer texts and away from spec. fic, then that's already drastically reducing the chances that it'll be written. the context of production or non-production is v. v. interesting.

also, you know, there are tonnes of queers writing fantasy and consuming queer fantasy - in fandom. it's an alternative context of production and consumption, and it's one that a lot of people actually prefer. maybe it's inherently friendlier to minority voices because there are fewer people between the writer and the reader to get rid of queerness or to fight to get the writing out (you know, and also, lots of crap writing! which is genius in itself!)

ok, i'm really tired, but this is an interesting discussion!

[sqbr]

Oh no, there is lots of sf about GLBT characters (though not as much as one might like. But I put that down more to the publishers than the writers). I was just complaining about a particular type of homophobic writing done by straight writers. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT-themed_speculative_fiction

There is definitely a lack of onscreen depictions though, and yes huzzah for Torchwood in that regard. I'm still slowly working my way through CoE, I'm finding it good but very intense :)

[ex_peasant441]

Oh, good. I'm glad I just misunderstood what you were saying then.

CoE is most certainly not a gentle ride for anyone.

[nixwilliams]

I do not in principle have a problem with sf which doesn't contain m/m sex or relationships because the plot just doesn't end up needing it.

i do. i have the same amount of problem with it as i do with people putting hetsex or het romance into sf when the plot doesn't really need it. and while each individual story only annoys me a little bit (each individual story with unnecessary hets or without queers), it's so common that it ends up PISSING ME OFF. quite a lot.

[sqbr]

On the one hand, I just meant to pre-empt any complaints that I was accusing say a short story about robots which features no relationships at all of being homophobic.

But on the other hand (a)While I do think the lack of LGBT characters in sff is a huge problem in general I didn't say so and (b) Editing my post to reflect this I poked at the lack of m/m relationships in my own writing some more than I did the first time and I do think it reflects a heteronormative bias(*), and this is actually a moderately glaring omission from one story (and the lack of consideration of trans and intersex people is actually more significant. And I only just noticed! I suck!).

So thanks for pointing that out and sorry for letting my straight blinkers get in the way. I need to go think about how to edit my story!

(*)It's not that I would never write a m/m relationship, in fact I've been pondering adding one to my current story, but the fact it's "just happened" not to turn up so far in my writing is I think actually pretty significant :/

[nixwilliams]

you don't suck! that's how privilege works. i know that most of the writing i ever did (i rarely write anything but occasional fic, now) had no POC . . . because i wasn't sure how to do it.

[sqbr]

Thanks. And yeah, I'm not beating myself up about it too much, it's just never nice to have this sudden POV shift where you go from "Yep, I've thought about this and it's totally fine" to "WTF how did I not notice how screwed up this is? Wait, how much of my other 'fine' stuff is this screwed up?".

[nixwilliams]

yeah, i feel you on that!

i remember reading through trudi canavan's 'black magician' trilogy [spoilers follow] and, even though i was quite annoyed with the main characters, i remember being so amazed that there was a gay (bi?) man in it who actually ended up moderately happy and not dead. he's not a major character, but it was such a relief. and it was really only then that i realised i'd been carrying the expectation around with me that he would end up dead and/or totally miserable, because that's what happens to gay characters!

[sqbr]

he would end up dead and/or totally miserable, because that's what happens to gay characters

I'm straight and it's blatant enough to irritate me. There's been a recent run of "Lesbian romances with happy endings" at 12films_poc it's been awesome :) I should find some "Gay romances with happy endings" too.

*notices added meaning of this icon in this context*

[nixwilliams]

oh, that's a cool wee project!

ha, and the icon does work particularly ... meaningfully, given the subject. heh.

[ex_peasant441]

the fact it's "just happened" not to turn up so far in my writing is I think actually pretty significant :/

It may partly reflect the fact you are mostly interested in and identify with female characters.

I just meant to pre-empt any complaints that I was accusing say a short story about robots which features no relationships at all of being homophobic.

Especially because it's important not to assume that any character without an explicitly stated sexuality 'defaults' to heterosexuality.

Also, if you are interested in widening your bases, can I put in a plea for asexuals, who in terms of representation vanish to almost non-existence. Especially so since the Doctor has now been sexualised.

[sqbr]

Oh yes, I don't feel bad for not having any gay male protagonists, since pretty much all my protagonists are female(*). But I have a fair number of incidental male characters, and their current/past/projected relationships sometimes come up in the plot.

Specifically, in my Enchanted fic I have Nancy (a modern New Yorker) consider the consequences of a system where any woman can become an all-powerful queen by marrying the prince..yet never mention the possibility of the prince marrying a man (or a princess marrying a woman) One could argue that it wouldn't occur to her, but that doesn't let me off the hook for not thinking of it myself.

However, I can say happily that my Charlotte Lucas is asexual, or at least aromantic. I don't know that it's going to become any more apparent in my fic than it was in Pride and Prejudice, but that's definitely the characterisation in my head.

Also this discussion has reminded me of a Hiro/Ando plot bunny I had a while back which I may get around to writing :)

(*)In fact the only male protagonist I can remember writing ever was the title character of a story I wrote in highschool with the tentative title "The Attack of the Giant Space Potato".

[happydork]

Iain M Banks (in an interview I found trying to see if anyone else had a problem with his books) said that he didn't write gay characters because "He didn't feel he understood the lifestyle".

Wow, okay, well that makes me feel like I've been slapped.

[sqbr]

I was pretty shocked too.