Andrew J. Peters's Blog, page 3
August 13, 2018
Irresistible Release Day!
Strike up the band and fire up the roman candles because Irresistible release day is here!
That means you can get your very own copy at any of the big retailers.
Or, most definitely, you can order it at your favorite independent bookstore. Here are the particulars:
Brandon thinks he’s won at life when he hooks a guy so gorgeous he parts crowds walking down the street. But he and Cal will have to overcome a jealous BFF, Romanian mobsters, hermit widowers, and a dictatorship on the brink of revolution. Their dream wedding in the Greek isles turns into a madcap odyssey in this modern, gay salute to Chariton’s Callirhoe, the oldest extant romance novel in the world.
ISBN: 978-1-949340-40-2
Publisher: NineStar Press
Date: August 13, 2018
All this month, I’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes info about the book. For today, I thought I’d talk about how the story came to be in answer to a likely question: Why’d you write a contemporary romance? I thought you peddled in fantasy and ancient world mythological style stories?
So yes, it’s true, Irresistible is the first modern romantic comedy most readers have seen from me. I’ve published some modern, realistic short fiction, but anything on the romance side has been experimental and unfinished, and only shared with a few writing buddies.
The idea for writing Irresistible actually emerged from research I was doing for The Lost Histories series (The City of Seven Gods). I was looking for translated religious texts and other writings from the classical age to hone my ear for the way people from the ancient world talked about their lives. I knew about plays and histories and epic poetry, but I was surprised to discover the novel form has its origins in the Roman era.
On reflection, that certainly stands to reason since the French word for novel is roman. My Western Civ and English lit from college is a fairly distant past of its own, and I thought the invention of the novel was typically attributed to the Medieval age with works by Chaucer and Norse sagas and Beowulf and all that. Already, I digress.
I learned about a number of first-century novels, and my curiosity was immediately drawn to Callirhoe by Chariton of Aphrodisias. Callirhoe is acknowledged by scholars as the oldest, extant romance novel in the world, and I could digress again about the technical distinctions concerning “romance” in the study of literature, but I don’t really have to because Callirhoe can be easily categorized as a romance by scholars and lay-readers alike. The excavation of the text had to have inspired the same jaw-dropping reaction that struck archeologists who discovered the buried city of Knossos with its uncannily modern-looking artwork. The story has the strident themes of a Harlequin romance — true love at first sight, star-crossed lovers, a hero risking life and limb to refind his beloved — while also having many of the nutty conventions of a soap opera. Unlike the epic poems, no gods figure in to manipulate the fates of the characters nor do any mythical creatures. It’s a story about real life people, fictionalized of course, but portraying their everyday grapples in a much more straight-forward manner than say Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s The Aeneid. I’ll give you the quick summary.
Callirhoe is the daughter of the ruler of Syracuse, and a renowned beauty beset by many suitors. But when she passes by a handsome, young nobleman Chaereas, the two immediately fall in love and quickly make plans to marry, pretty much on sight. Her jealous suitors try to sabotage the wedding by breaking into her home and making it look like she threw an orgy when Chaereas was away. Chaereas is indeed incensed by their trick, and he kicks Callirhoe in the stomach, knocking her into a coma while her fiancé and everyone else believes she’s dead.
Devestated, Chaereas presides over her funeral, but before she’s buried, a band of grave robbers come by at the moment she wakes up. They take her and sail off, and then their captain becomes spooked by her beauty, fearing they have stolen a goddess. He sells her as a slave at the nearest port, and Callirhoe’s irresisitbility leads to a string of misadventures with men vying to claim her until eventually her repentant and ever-loyal Chaereas refinds her.
It’s incredibly melodramatic in a remarkably unselfconscious way. Callirhoe is given to frequent asides bemoaning her tragic beauty, which like Helen of Troy has led her into disaster. Chaereas is so overwhelmed by her beauty that: “like a hero mortally wounded in battle, he was too proud to fall, yet too weak to stand.” When they are finally reunited after an absurd series of events, they rush into each other’s arms and immediately faint and collapse to the floor. The story has the flavor of a campy Shakespearean comedy, or a Monty Python skit.
Now, in revealing this inspiration point, I may be doing little to sell my book, but I was immediately intrigued by the notion of retelling the story in a modern context and as a gay love affair. Setting aside the story’s absurdities, I was charmed by its unapolegetic assertion of the power and inevitable triumph of love, the beguiling mystery of beauty. On one hand, I felt a sense of purpose in reclaiming a story of idealized love, recast with gay men as the heroes because it’s true we fall in love this way; or I should say the essence of that is true. Love overwhelms us, makes us weak, makes us manic with joy, crazy with desire. It’s a universal condition, but gay love doesn’t get the chance to shine on the literary stage as often as it should.
I also felt the beauty theme had particular meanings for gay men which were worth exploring. The idealization of youth and beauty is deeply embedded in our culture, whether for good or ill, thus in some ways it was easy to imagine a gay male Callirhoe who had guys falling over one another to claim him.
Equally, to return to the story’s absurdities, I was excited about imagining what comic possibilities could happen with such a story brought into the twenty-first century. I think you will find the result remains absurd but hopefully enjoyably and redeemably so. I describe it as a gay mash-up of There’s Something About Mary and My Big, Fat Greek Wedding.
So, you see there is an ancient world, folktalish theme hidden within this modern rom-com. Let me know how you like it, and as always, thanks for your support. 
August 5, 2018
And now, the big reveal…
I’ve been coyly hinting at an upcoming release, and frankly been neck deep the past few weeks working with the production team on copyediting, proofing and conceptualizing the cover design.
The ARCs are out, and the title is up at the publisher’s website, so at long last, all can be revealed!
Ka-bam!
The book releases everywhere on August 14th, and I’m designating August as “Irresistible Month,” with a bunch of posts about the story-behind-the-story, book extras, and fun stuff like that. Here’s the back cover blurb:
Brendan Thackeray-Prentiss is an Ivy League-educated trust-funder who Gotham Magazine named the most eligible gay bachelor in New York City. He lives for finding his soulmate, but after walking in on his boyfriend of three transcendent months soaping up in the shower with an older female publicist, he’s on a steady diet of scotch, benzodiazepines, and compulsive yoga. Men are completely off the menu.
Callisthenes Panagopoulos has a problem most guys dream of. With the body and face of a European soccer heartthrob, the vigorous blond hair of a Mormon missionary, and a smile that makes traffic cops stuff their ticket books back in their utility belts, he’s irresistible to everyone. But being a constant guy-magnet comes with its discontents, like an ex-boyfriend who tried to drive his Smart car through Cal’s front door. It makes him wonder if he’s been cursed when it comes to love.
When Brendan and Cal meet, the attraction is meteoric, and they go from date to mates at the speed of time-lapse photography. But to stay together, they’ll have to overcome Cal’s jealous BFF, Romanian mobsters, hermit widowers, and a dictatorship on the brink of revolution during a dream wedding in the Greek isles that becomes a madcap odyssey.
A gay romantic comedy of errors based on Chariton’s Callirhoe, the world’s oldest extant romance novel.
You can get in on pre-ordering the e-book at NineStar Press.
Here’s the link at Goodreads to add it to your shelf.
Last but not least, I’m hustling to get reviews, so if you do that kind of thing, the title is available at NetGalley, and I’m also happy to share the e-ARC with folks who are interested in writing early reviews. Just hit me up!
July 5, 2018
A Gran Canaria Photo Essay
My husband and I met our German friends in Gran Canaria for our annual summer vacation. Here we are atop the 16th century Catedral de Santa Ana in the old district of Las Palmas, where you can see the cathedral’s cimborrio (cupola) and the nearby Atlantic Ocean in the background.
And here’s me with our German friends (l to r) Thorsten and Jurgen at the Plaza Las Maranuelas in the south coast village of Arguineguin where we sought out a fish restaurant for dinner that was closed for the St. James Day festival.
I found some statues of interest in Las Palmas. At the Plaza de Santa Ana, there are eight dogs guarding the cathedral, a nod to the island’s history. Canary comes from the Latin: insula canaria – island of dogs. Gran Canaria was named by the Romans, and the historian Pliny the Elder claimed that it was inhabited by “multitudes of dogs of very large size,” which is something of a mystery. There certainly are no longer wild dogs living on the Canary Islands, and it has been speculated that the association with dogs may have been a misappropriation refering to the barking monk seal, though monk seals are no longer found on the islands either. The Greeks called the Guanche natives “the dog-headed ones,” which could have been a reference to a priestly worship of dogs (similar to the Egyptians).
Of course, I could not resist posing with a statue of a local literary icon: Nestor Alamo. who was a musical composer and writer. This is also in the old district of Las Palmas.
Meanwhile, we saw many more cats than dogs. This fellow was a resident of our hotel and liked bossing his companions around.
The Jardín Botánico Canario Viera y Clavijo, near Las Palmas, is Spain’s largest public garden and I’d say a must see. I took a ton of photos and chose to share this close-up shot from the lily pad pool.
We visited the village of Agaete on the north coast, which was settled in the 16th century and retains much of its original Spanish colonial architecture.
Also at Agaete, an important archeological site known as Maipes, the Valley of Death. Reconstructed stone tombs on a Guanche burial site where the dead were mummified and laid within circular or boat-shaped mounds of volcanic rock.
View from above Agaete. The faint silhouette across the water is visible most days looking out from the northwestern coast. It’s the island of Tenerife with its prominent volcanic mountain Pico de Teide. Snow-capped, Pico de Teide is the third tallest volcano in the world and the highest mountain in the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the highlights of the trip for me was discovering remote Guayedra Beach on the western coast of the island. It’s only accessible via a short but fairly rugged hike off the road, and the reward was spectacular. I had hoped to find the even more remote Gui Gui beach during the trip, though the idea didn’t catch on with my companions. That beach requires a two and a half hour hike over very difficult terrain. Maybe next visit.
The Fabrica CEISA, a cement factory, is a strange industrial landmark that is perenially in view around the southeastern coast of the island. A reminder you’re not far aloft from the modern world despite the island’s wide swaths of protected parkland and its quaint seaside villages.
We took a day-trip aboard a “Turkish gulet” called The Aphrodite, and I failed to take good photos of the old-fashioned, wooden sailboat, but here’s one.
And, on that sail, we saw dolphins, which nearly eluded me completely photo-wise, but here’s a middling shot.
Wind turbines are ubiquitous on the island, and quite a reasonable way to generate energy on one of the windiest islands in the world. Surprisingly, wind energy is only used marginally at present, but there’s a project underway to better harness the output of Gran Canaria’s wind turbines using its inland reservoirs as something like storage batteries, however that’s done.
At an overlook to the Caldera de Tejeda, a volacnic crater.
Another breath-taking vista is the Mirador del Balcon, which was built on a jutting cliff on the western coast of Gran Canaria.
The most famous landmark of the island is a sacred rock formation known as Roque Nuble, atop one of the highest points in the island. The lesser rock to the left is called Friar’s Rock due to its unique shape and seeming protective gaze toward Roque Nuble. Here we were at the foot of the trail up to the top.
We visited a popular market in the beautiful mountain village of Teror. Market stalls are set up around the town’s beloved basilica Nuestra Senora del Pino, a tribute to the Virgin Mary. I bought a locally-made spicy mojo which is used as a seasoning for the traditional dish papas arrugadas (wrinkled potatoes). We ate a lot of those at tapas restaurants and elsewhere.
We found this charming fountain stairway while walking around Teror.
Once again, not showing off my best photographic skill, but I took some shots of the characteristic wooden balconies of Teror.
Driving through the central mountains, we came to the Fataga Valley, which is something like a miniature Grand Canyon, though it’s too dry to have a river in its center, just some shrubby greenery and palm trees that survive from the moisture in the air. It only rains five days of the year on average.
Part of the zig zag road we took down from Fataga to Maspalomas.
Just some street art I found while walking through Arguineguin.
Could not resist snapping a shot of this fountain statue near Lopesan Shopping Center in Meloneras. I didn’t find any information about it, but it could be a representation of Triton, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, as there’s a famous statue of him in Las Palmas.
We hiked the trail through the famous Maspalomas dunes on an overcast but very hot day. You can take camel rides through the dunes as well, which would have been a must more pleasant way to travel.
Here you can see folks who climbed to the top of one of the dunes.
We walked the boardwalk along Maspalomas beach, which is a favorite spot for artists to make sandcastles.
Pink peonies were abundant throughout the Meloneras district where we stayed.
And that’s my trip to Gran Canaria. Amazing scenery, I learned a thing or two, and had a great time with my husband and our friends. 
June 20, 2018
Some photos from the BGS-QD Pride Reading
Last night was great! What better way to celebrate Pride month than reading fierce, audacious, queer stories in what must be the queerest bookstore in New York City (if not the United States, the world?).
Many thanks to our fearless leader Tom Cardamone (The Lurid Sea, Green Thumb), and the owners of Bureau of General Services – Queer Division Greg and Donnie!
I’ll keep this post-event dispatch brief, just sharing a few photos from the event with captions.
Here are all the authors (l to r): Nora Olsen (Maxine Wore Black), Ann Apkater (Cantor Gold series), Tom Cardamone (The Lurid Sea), Nell Stark (The Princess Deception), Alexa Black (The Outcasts), and me
My favorite shot from the night. We invited folks from the audience to join us to give President Trump a Robert Deniro Hello from the queer literary community. You can see some of the cool artwork on display throughou the shop.
June 12, 2018
Pride Month Reading at BGS-QD
New Yorkers looking for a little something literary to do on a Tuesday night: Next Tuesday, June 19th, I’ll be on an author panel talking about LGBTQ+ lit and reading from our latest work. For me, that’s The Sim Ru Prophecy (Werecat #4), which is celebrating it’s one-year book birthday this month.
June 9, 2018
#PrideReads
I’ve caught the Twitter hastag bug again, and this is a really good one. For June, which of course is Pride Month, the #PrideReads meme is trending to bring attention to queer books and authors. While I’m participating on Twitter, I thought I’d share some of my responses here. There are links to Goodreads in case you want to check out my recommendations.
Describe an LGBTQIA+ novel you’d like to see written?
That pretty much describes my own writing process, but I’ll pick something outside of my wheelhouse. I love historical fiction, so I’d love to read a novel featuring LGBTQIA+ lead characters set in an evocative and underrepresented setting, like say pre-colonial Mesoamerica, or Mogul-era India, or Qing dynasty China.
Tell us about an underrated queer book.
I’ll give you three. First, John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, which is like The Catcher in the Rye set in New York City during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Second, Ben Neihart’s Hey Joe, which was awesome, modern gay YA before awesome, modern gay YA became a thing. Third, only because I read it most recently, and it’s also underrated, being far ahead of it’s time in terms of modern, matter-of-fact gay portrayals, Philip Ridley’s In the Eyes of Mr. Fury.
Queer #ownvoices authors we should follow.
@ScareBearDan @lawrenceschimel @alexharrowSFF @jscoatsworth @jp_howardpoet @Xtianbaines @johncopenhaver @JoeOJazzMoon @allanbrocka @AnnAptaker @TrustMiguel @Hans_Hirshi @BrianCentron @CAClemmings @KenJONeill & sorry I ran out of characters
Your favorite queer books.
[Head explodes] Well gosh, here I’ll stick to my wheelhouse to put some boundaries on it. For SFF #Ownvoices, Samuel Delaney’s Tales of Neveryon, Ricardo Pinto’s Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy, and Douglas Clegg’s Mordred, Bastard Son are probably my favorites.
Does a queer book need to include romance?
Absolutely not, though my reading “sweet spot” is action-adventure with a minor romantic storyline that doesn’t have to be HEA.
Who’s a queer supporting character that should get their own book/series.
I’m going to go off canon because I didn’t read the books (shame, shame, shame), and I understand the character of Olyvar in Game of Thrones was created for the TV series. Anyway, he’s my favorite gay character in the series (and the only one who hasn’t been killed off!), so my vote is for Olyvar to get a platform to do some damage in Westeros.
Favourite books with lesbian rep?
I really liked Malinda Lo’s Ash. Also, though not an #Ownvoices title, Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains has a well-developed lesbian character Archeth who I thought shone through as the best POV character.
Favourite books with gay rep?
I mentioned a bunch of them above, but this gives me a chance to share more! For literary/history, I’ll shout out Felice Picano’s Like People in History. For mystery, Michael Nava’s The Burning Plain is probably my favorite title from his Henry Rios series. For family saga/coming of age, Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens. For YA, anything by David Levithan. For romance (guilty pleasure), Scott Pomfret’s Hot Sauce. Last, for humor, far, far off the radar: Andrew Killeen’s The Khalifah’s Mirror and Jim Anderson’s Chipman’s African Adventure.
Favourite books with bi rep?
Going to do a throwback here, I read Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia as a young adult, and it’s one of those books that stayed with me for years and years.
Favourite books with trans rep?
I haven’t read nearly as many trans books as I should have, and the book I’m going to mention probably fits better as intersex. But Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex is a terrific cultural and historical saga in which the main character was born with ambiguous genitalia and lives as a girl and a young man and later as someone in-between.
Favourite books with non-binary rep?
Here again I’m shamefully poorly-read, and to mention Ursual Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness feels somewhat lame, since so many books about trans and non-binary experiences have been written since that groundbreaking SFF came out. But there I did it. I’ll add Daniel Heath Justice’s The Way of Thorn and Thunder, which takes inspiration from Indigenous lore and traditions, including non-binary ways of living.
Favourite books where everyone is queer?
I love this question because I think it’s an underrated approach to queer fiction, and it’s not uncommon to see reviews of queer books that complain it’s “unrealistic” there are so few straight characters (barf). So here’s to Alex Sanchez’ Rainbow Boys series with three rotating gay male narratives and Allison Moon’s all-lesbian Lunatic Fringe, and Matthew Rettemund’s Boy Culture, and all the fabulous queerly retold fairy tale collections like Lawrence Schimmel’s The Drag Queen of Elfland and Jeremy McAteer’s Queer Tales: Fairytales for Gay Guys.
What queer character do you identify with?
As a closeted queer teen, I devoured Paul T. Roger’s Saul’s Book, and thought I found in the narrator Stephen a deeper understanding of myself. Later, I’d say I saw more of myself in Duncan from David Levithan’s Wide Awake, with his heartfelt conviction in social justice. Nowadays, with a dearth of stories featuring older queer characters, the one who comes to mind is Gabriel Noone from Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener.
What sparks your interest in a book? Cover? Reviews? Blurb?
This is an interesting question in the context of queer books, because thinking back to my coming of age in the 80s and 90s, living in upstate New York, it was hard as hell to find the kind of books I was interested in! I pretty much had to sneak into the stacks at librarires or bookstores and find the sexuality section, which felt like a huge taboo in itself. Even then, I had to find titles catalogued with the sterile, scientific label: homosexuality and hope they weren’t insidious, pseudo-scientific, neo-Freudian, pathologizing horseshit.
The covers of those older books rarely gave hints about the story, and the books were all fairly tragic, violent and highly sexualized (not a bad thing necessarily, especially for the young, disaffected me who was also quite eager to learn what gay men did together).
With the advent of the Internet, it became a whole lot easier to find queer books I might like. Covers matter to me, though looking through my Goodreads shelf, some of my favorite titles have pretty awful ones and that doesn’t stop me from singing their praises. I read blurbs to see what the story is about, and I’ll check out what people have to say on fan sites and Goodreads.
Favourite queer couple?
I often say my favorite couple is Gorgik and Little Sarg from Samuel Delaney’s Tales of Neveryon. They lead a frickin’ slave rebellion that liberates an entire country, so try beating that. Honorable mentions: Maurice and Scudder in E.M. Forster’s Maurice (I weep at the end of the movie), and though the relationship is muted and ill-fated in Gregory Maguire’s inimitable way, I loved Liir and Commander Cherrystone in Son of a Witch.
Does a queer book have to have a happy ending?
That’s a provocative and important issue to talk about. I expect a lot of readers would say we need more queer lit with happy endings to balance out the long history of tragic queer stories–those classics like Lillian Helman’s The Children’s Hour and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which suggested the impossibility of queer people finding love and leading happy, well-adjusted lives.
Some of those books, now called “bury your gays” tropes, were written from a non-queer point-of-view, which is susceptible to marginalizing, tragedizing, and at its worst demonizing queer people, e,g, the tendency to portray villainous characters as sexually ambiguous as a foil to the heteronormative hero/heroine. Yet some queer tragedies of the past were written by queer people themselves, like James Baldwin, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), the aforementioned Lillian Hellman, Patricia Highsmith, and you could say most of the authors known as The Violet Quill who broke ground with realistic portraits of gay men living in the 1970s and 1980s (Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and others).
Themes of death and suffering reflected salient aspects of real life for queer people, and I’d say writing about those issues was both realistic and helpful for readers, both queer and straight, to better understand the challenges faced by queer individuals (and for queer readers, to realize they’re not alone with their personal struggles).
All of this is to say I subscribe to the notion embodied in a famous quote by Ernest Hemingway: “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” And the truth is some queer lives are tragic, some are triumphant, and all of them are filled with many moments of both. So no, a queer book doesn’t have to have a happy ending. But I would hope there’d be at least an equal number of books with happy endings as books that end tragically. And then, of course, stories are more complex than happy vs. sad. I tend to enjoy books that take me on a journey that runs the gamut of emotions.
Does a queer book have to have sex scenes?
Here’s another question that on its face sounds simple.
No. Why in heaven’s name would a queer book have to include explicit sex? There are tons of ways to write about queer people that don’t involve what they like to do to get it on.
So yeah, I enjoy all kinds of queer stories that have no sex or very little sex, and I certainly don’t feel as a writer that I need to add a sex scene in order to develop a queer character or make the story more interesting or marketable.
But as a guy who’s always been much more interested in queer liberation versus assimilation, I also feel it’s important to add that queer sex scenes can be marvelous and subversive and fabulously declarative and rebellious. Writing queer sex is a political act, and I respect writers who do it and think it’s important that it has a place in our literature.
May 25, 2018
Listen to an audio excerpt from Poseidon and Cleito!
Nice surprise this week: the sci fi/fantasy podcast Sage and Savant is featuring Poseidon and Cleito, including an awesome reading of the first chapter by voice actor, musician and composer Chip Michael!!
This is the first time I’ve had an audio recording of my work, except my own droning attempts to do readings (that’s a continuous work-in-progress for me!). So it was pretty gosh darn amazing to hear the story read by a professional with a dramatic flair. Really brings the story to life.
Listen to the podcast here. They also interviewed me for the feature in regular print form to talk about my inspiration for the book and the relationship between social justice and writing.
May 18, 2018
On #OwnVoices in Gay Fantasy – A Look at Recent and New Data
I recently received a comment on my 2016 report on the State of #OwnVoices in Gay Fantasy. Then, I saw a lot of Twitter chatter about #OwnVoices in response to Helene Dunbar’s upcoming YA title about a gay boy coming of age in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, of which she made the unfortunate claim that no such stories have ever been written before.
I HAVE NEWS!!!
So thrilled to be working on this book with @EditorALB & @SourcebooksFire! More about this 1983 NYC story about love & fear in the very early days of the AIDS crisis, here:https://t.co/FyK0NiNLPk
— Helene Dunbar (@Helene_Dunbar) May 8, 2018
Then, I saw an author sharing a list of #OwnVoices in adult fantasy to make what I consider the excellent point that the YA community has organized well to bring attention to diverse authors, but the adult fantasy world, not so much. (And sadly, to that point, I promptly lost the reference on my Twitter feed. Maybe the thread disappeared.)
All of that was enough to push me to revisit the topic and share some of my latest thoughts.
I won’t rehash all the data from my first look at #OwnVoices since you can read the (fairly) short article here. In brief, I looked at authorship of gay fantasy titles across three dimensions: popular books, recommended books, and award-nominated books. For popular books, I took data from two Listopia lists: Best Fantasy Books with Gay Main Characters, and Best Sci Fi Books with Gay Main Characters. For recommended books, I took data from the ALA’s Over the Rainbow Lists for Young Adults and for Adults. For award nominated books, I took data from the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and the Lambda Literary awards (the Lammys) for Best SFF/Horror.
#OwnVoices titles ranged from zero to forty-four percent, and were more likely to be found in award-nominated and recommended lists. My analysis included data from the period of 2012 through 2016. I didn’t drill down on intersectionality, i.e. titles written by gay authors of color, though my guess would surely be the slice of titles by those authors is quite troubling. I’m just a little wary about trying to quantify that with accuracy, and I don’t have the resources to survey authors. It’s become somewhat of a norm for gay authors to say they’re gay (or have a husband) in their bios, but not so much that they’re black or white or Asian, etc.
So now it’s a little over one year later. Has anything changed? Can we glean anything more by looking at other sources? These were my curiosities, so I took another look.
Goodreads’ Listopia lists are established by reader votes as well as the number of ratings and the average rating for each title. From my periodic perusal, they don’t change so dramatically from year-to-year. But to the extent new titles come out all the time and can shuffle things around a bit, I thought it was worthwhile to look at the same lists I analyzed back in 2016.
In 2016, the top 100 titles in Best Fantasy Books with Gay Main Characters included five #OwnVoices titles and four titles by authors whose sexual identity I could not determine. So, somewhere between five to nine percent were #OwnVoices.
My snapshot of the same list from a couple of days ago included eight #OwnVoices titles and one title by an author whose sexual identity I could not determine. As in 2016, none of those titles were in the top 10. Only one was in the top 40 actually (Jesse Hajicek’s The God Eaters). This shows a slight improvement, I guess. #OwnVoices are up to eight to nine percent of popular gay fantasy titles on Goodreads versus five to nine percent in 2016.
In 2016, the top 100 titles in Best Sci Fi Books with Gay Main Characters included twenty-two #OwnVoices titles and three undetermined titles. My more recent look: twelve #OwnVoices titles and seven I could not determine. That’s a drop from 22-25% to 12-19%. The results from that list are even more dismal when you consider some of the highest-ranking titles are popular sci fi books that don’t even have gay or bi lead characters, e.g. Frank Herbert’s Dune?
But, onward we go.
To expand my survey of popular titles, I bit the bullet and looked at an Amazon Best Seller list. I’d been skeptical about using that data source since gay fiction bestsellers on Amazon are notoriously strange, overrepresenting titles from their self-publishing platform, and heavily skewed toward erotica, regardless of the purported categorization.
Another problem is the ranking algorithm favors recent releases as it relies on predictive data. Many of us authors have experienced a new release popping up at the top of the charts because books get the most sales around release time. But Amazon treats that as a predictor of how many sales the title will get on an hourly basis, and typically over weeks, months, or years certainly, that once best-selling title takes a dramatic plunge in the charts based on actual buying behavior over time.
I’m still a bit skeptical about what the data tells us, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the titles and authors. So I pulled up one list, which is of course just a snapshot in time: Top 100 Best Sellers in LGBT Fantasy.
While there are a few L and T titles included, it definitely leans heavily toward stories with gay or bisexual male leads. I only considered those books when parsing out #OwnVoices titles.
I found eight #OwnVoices titles in the top 100. Twelve others appeared to be written by men, but I couldn’t determine if they were gay or bisexual.
A brief aside: This time around, I was slightly less assiduous in researching author sexual identity while also more conservative about counting an author as gay or bisexual. For one thing, when an author’s bio doesn’t say he’s “openly gay/bi,” it’s tedious work, combing through the media surrounding each author, looking for mentions of a husband or a coming out story. For another, the use of author pen names and fictional identities makes the research even tougher, and sometimes unreliable, with the stark possibility there are even fewer titles written by gay/bisexual male authors. (FYI, I had counted Santino Hassell’s books as #OwnVoices in my last report).
My conclusion, however questionably supported, is that Amazon best-seller titles trend similarly to popular gay SFF on Goodreads: between 5-20% are #OwnVoices.
Next, taking a look at recommended lists.
ALA’s GLBT Roundtable had thirteen gay/bi male SFF titles on its Over the Rainbow List for Young Adults during the period of 2012-2016. Three of those were #OwnVoices. Their Over the Rainbow List for Adults had only seven gay/bi male SFF titles in the same time period and three were #OwnVoices. Overall, #Ownvoices made up a 30 percent share.
For 2017, the list for Young Adults included four gay/bi SFF titles. Two were by Rick Riordan. The other two were #Ownvoices. The Roundtable chose zero gay/bi SFF titles to include on its 2017 recommended list for adults. That list favors contemporary coming out stories, especially in underrepresented communities.
I tried to find another decent source to analyze recommended gay SFF titles, but it’s really the wild west out there on the interwebs. I mean, there are a lot of click-bait articles like “Seven must-read fantasy books with kick-ass queer heros/heroines,” but they’re so idiosyncratic and in some cases self-promoting, they don’t seem worth analyzing. If you’ve got an idea about where I should be looking, let me know.
Now for the major awards programs in queer SFF. Shockingly and disappointingly, Gaylactic continues to not be able to find a single #OwnVoices gay/bi male SFF title worthy of their consideration. I mean zero. They had zero from 2012-2015, and they had zero in their most recent (2016) awards program.
Lambda Literary Foundation does better. They had 44 percent #OwnVoices titles in their short lists for Best SFF/Horror 2012-2016. 2017 is a different story.
Now I should say, the number of Lammy SFF/Horror finalists for 2017 is small: eight titles; and it’s a mix of lesbian-themed, bisexual-themed, transgender-themed, non-binary themed, and gay-themed titles that all sound fascinating, worthy of recognition, and nicely representative of authors of color. Also, they favor titles with overlapping themes that explore gender in really interesting ways and in many cases include all kinds of variations of same-sex and poly and “queer” relationships (human/android for instance in Annalee Newitz’ Autonomous). They lean, of course, toward literary fiction versus genre fiction, and I’d say style/high concept versus action-adventure/plot-driven works.
So, my analysis was a little knottier, but based on four of the titles that feature a leading gay male oriented character (often along with other non-traditional gender constructions and lesbian characters) and based on only one of those titles being authored by a self-identified gay man, I’m saying 25% of their finalists are #OwnVoices.
This may be a good time to step back from the data and reconsider the question: why is #OwnVoices in gay SFF important? I mean, on one hand, you could say that queer representation in the genre has increased, such that readers can more easily find books by popular authors about queer people, some by household names. Rick Riordan is one example.
Furthermore, you could say SFF by definition is experimental and exploratory (speculative). SFF stories have stepped outside of gender/sexuality norms for decades, led by big name authors like Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delaney. Then, you could also say we’re happily beginning to see greater representation of non-binary, trans, poly, lesbian, queer people of color—all of which have been overlooked in SFF to a far greater extent than gay or bi male portrayals. Lambda’s choices of finalists may reflect an effort to elevate those stories and those voices, and I’d say it’s appropriate for white, gay, cis gender male authors, and our titles to step aside for the sake of cultural fairness. #OwnVoices is, after all, a movement to redress historical barriers to publication.
Related to that point, you could say, if you look at gay/bi male authorship more broadly in the fiction world, and specifically at white, cis gender, gay male authors, there’s evidence that we face less barriers to publication, recognition, and awards than other writers beneath the QuILTBAG umbrella. Take for instance this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction: Andrew Sean Green. Many of the most successful authors writing LGBT YA are white, gay, cis gender men as well: David Levithan and Bill Konigsberg, for example. Historically, white men have been privileged in the publishing industry and continue to be. White, gay, cis gender male authors benefit from that privilege, so redistributing power to female, lesbian, trans, and non-binary authors, especially those of color, is important from a social justice perspective.
For all those reasons, you could argue the #OwnVoices cause lacks relevance for gay, cis gender male titles, just as few would argue we need more hetero, cis gender male titles written by hetero, cis gender men in order to even the scales. And I do think that point-of-view is important to the discussion.
Though I also think something different has happened in queer SFF, and it’s unrelated to the publishing industry’s intentional elevation of underrepresented queer voices, which is slowly occurring in contemporary adult fiction and YA. If that were the case, we’d see a queer SFF landscape that includes a diverse range of queer authors: gay, transgender, lesbian, bi, black, Latinx, Asian, Native, etc., and while there’s some evidence of that via awards programs (and to a limited extent in ALA’s curated titles), the authorship of popular queer SFF titles, which are naturally in the broadest distribution, is not so inclusive, and has never favored gay/bi male authors, even as gay/bi characters are much more common than other queer portrayals.
Pre-1990s I’d say, with wonderful, notable exceptions like Samuel Delaney, gay/bi portayals predominantly came from best-selling, heterosexual male and female authors (Richard Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, among others), and that tradition is still a factor in whose gay/bi stories get published (Ian McDonald, C.S. Pascat, Cassandra Clare, as some more recent examples). In the late 90s and early 2000s, female-authored “M/M” romance/erotica emerged as an important market, with popular subgenres in romantic sci fi and fantasy, and nowadays M/M fantasy is the most prolific, sought-after category of queer SFF, which has implications for what kinds of titles get published, what kinds of authors get published, and even how we talk about queer literature.
It’s not just an issue for SFF. One recent example is LGBTQ advocates’ reaction to Helene Dunbar’s upcoming title.
Saw the great conversations earlier regarding own voices m/m YA and while there are certainly things I could say about that, right now I want to highlight some of the #ownvoices m/m YA that I’ve have edited (a non-exhaustive list!):
— Andy (aka Michael) (@cupcakeandy) May 9, 2018
Um, #OwnVoices M/M YA? I realize M/M has become shorthand for stories with gay male characters, but using that terminology in the #OwnVoices context is kind of absurdly problematic. M/M was created as homoeroticism “by and for women.” I’ll link in some references here:
What I fear many younger authors don’t understand is M/M was never intended to be a space for gay male authors to write about their own communities. And that before and after M/M existed, gay authors have been writing gay stories that some of us still call gay fiction, or gay romance, or gay fantasy, etc., because, well, they’re stories about gay people. The idea that gay authors need to be uplifted in the M/M fiction market, or need help ‘breaking into’ it, is a rather frightening statement on our positionality in the gay publishing industry.
All right. I’m going to very consciously set aside my personal feelings about M/M and focus instead on the story told by the data. Instead of looking at titles that are popular, win awards, and are otherwise recognized as merit-worthy, what about looking directly at the lists of titles coming out from publishers?
The biggest publishers of SFF, Tor and Gollanz for example, are unfortunately difficult to analyze because their output is so large, and at least as far as I’ve been able to determine, no one is quantifying the number of queer titles that get released on an annual basis. I spent some time on publisher websites, trying to use their search fields to call up titles with keywords like “gay” and “queer.” They’re not set up to generate the kind of information I’m looking for. For example, a search of “gay” at Tor’s webstore inexplicably brings up blog entries about “The Legend of Sleep Hollow.” So, not so useful.
The main small presses that publish queer SFF have websites that are much more conducive to my purposes. You can browse titles by genre or ‘pairing,’ and see every title in their recent releases and backlist. So I looked at two of the biggest publishers of queer SFF in the small press world: Dreamspinner and Pride Publishing. There are others for sure, like Blind Eye Press, Bold Strokes Books, Less Than Three, and NineStar Press, but their collective output is dwarfed by those two big publishers with regard to SFF.
Dreamspinner published 100 gay SFF titles from October 5, 2016 – May 15, 2018, which is a pretty impressive output for a little over a year and a half period. Of those titles, I found fourteen which could be confirmed as authored by gay/bisexual male authors, and half of those were by two authors: Eric Arvin and T.J. Klune. I found four titles by authors who identified as male but whose sexuality I could not confirm. The upshot: 14-18 percent of Dreamspinner’s gay SFF titles were #OwnVoices.
Pride Publishing has a smaller output and tags their titles a little differently. I pulled up their last 100 gay fantasy/fairytales or gay sci fi titles, which covered the period of 2013-2018.
Just one author in that list appears to be male, and I could not determine that author’s sexuality. Thus, between zero and 1 percent of Pride Publishing’s gay SFF titles are #OwnVoices.
I think that data is a pretty good indicator that very few small press gay SFF titles are #OwnVoices. I didn’t take the time to analyze the content of the titles, but I’ll just say, unscientifically, based on the cover art, there is a preponderance of titles that are marketed as romance/erotica (M/M). But that would make for a good follow-up question to explore: how many gay SFF titles are first and foremost M/M romance versus SFF? Additionally: how many gay SFF titles feature characters of color and how many are written by gay/bi authors of color?
I’d love to come up with a way to analyze gay SFF in mainstream publishing, quantifying how many titles Tor and Gallanz and Penguin are putting out each year and take a look at authorship. Those publishers represent the harder, more epic, more adventure-driven edge of SFF, and it would great to say with some authority if #OwnVoices titles fare better or worse there. If anyone has any ideas that might be less tedious than analyzing their entire list of SFF titles, toss them my way!
I also think good information could be collected by doing a survey of gay/bisexual male authors as well as publishers of gay SFF. That would provide some data on racial diversity, who’s represented in publishing houses, and what concerns authors and publishers themselves have about #OwnVoices.
As a starting point, if you’re a gay/bisexual male author or a publisher of gay SFF, feel free to drop me a comment or an e-mail if you prefer.
May 12, 2018
The latest 411
Hey folks!
I’ve been neglecting my website a bit as I haven’t had any big, shiny news to share in a little while. Still, it helps to keep this place alive and breathing. I thought I’d share some of the work I’ve been doing offline, and online elsewhere, come to think of it.
First, there is big, shiny news coming up, which I’ve hinted at before. I sold a title to NineStar Press last summer, and the book is working its way through production with a scheduled release date of late August-ish.
We’ve settled on a title: The Greatest Greek Love Story Ever Told, which plays with hyperbole, literary references, and the source material–the story is a modernized, gay retelling of the first ever, extant romance novel by a 1st century AD Greek author. Over the past month, I’ve been busy working with my editor to get the manuscript polished up and ready for the copyeditor. That stage is complete now. I’m looking forward to getting together with the cover artist next and sharing an early cover reveal over the summer! Lots more to come.
I’ve also been keeping busy with my Patreon campaign. I’m posting exclusive content there and just finished releasing my first serial, which is a retold short based on “Ma’aruf, the Street Cobbler” from The Arabian Nights.
I have five fabulous patrons so far to help me work toward my goal of publishing a collection of short stories based on classical myths and folklore. You can see a few of them here. I posted “Theseus and the Minotaur,” “Telemachus and his Mother’s Suitors,” and “Nerites” earlier this year.
Next up on Patreon, I have another short that I’ll be releasing as a serial, based on the Hungarian folk story: “The Boy who Could Keep a Secret.” In case you were wondering, yes, I could definitely use more patrons. The platform is super easy to use, you can make a pledge by credit card, and the most popular pledge is just one dollar. You can see my video and sign up here.
April 13, 2018
I’m on Patreon!
For about a month I’ve been ruminating, researching, and neurotically obsessing over the idea of creating a Patreon page. I don’t have a huge following to draw from for the campaign, but in the end, I opted to take the plunge. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?
Patreon is actually a really fun platform for both creators and supporters. It’s super easy to use, has a very reasonable entry point (just $1 makes a difference), and I came up with some interesting ways to share my work with readers including interactive storytelling. My main goals are to raise money for editing, book design, and marketing for the short story collection I’ve been talking about here at my blog; plus I want to get my follow up to The City of Seven Gods out into the world.
But I’ll stop there, and let my Patreon video tell the rest of the story. This part was definitely the most terrifying aspect of setting up the page, but hopefully it came out okay.
