The purity of fear, prejudice, and intolerance (the m/m rainbow has only one colour: gay)

I should be telling you guys about my Dark Soul blog tour. Or write a post about my lecturer at university who, I've learned today, died last August, way too young, a man I kept thinking of as "I want to be him when I grow up". RIP, Mr. Werth. You were (and still are) an inspiration.

Those will have to wait, however. What's been eating my brain (and you guys know it's bad when something is eating my brain, because then I brood and later come up with a lot of weird ideas) is this discussion on Dear Author, about fanfiction, slash and m/m and other things, but the discussion in the comments soon moved on to misogyny in m/m. The whole thing is interesting, and I'm not going to attempt a re-cap.

I believe the m/m genre is in a very large part, hostile to (fictional) women.

Back in the days - before November 2011, and boy, will I remember that date forever, even if those who "made it so memorable for me" - I'm trying very hard to stay civil here - have moved on and are pretending it never really happened - back in those days, the genre I write in was "gay only".

Not "gay gay", mind you, but "m/m", because the genre usually doesn't give a toss about depicting real life gay men. It's about the fantasy, stupid. Women in m/m writing are hated and loathed and reduced to the stereotypes of whore, bitch, fag hag, and disposable womb for the two men to get a child they can coo over without resorting to what fandom calls "assbabies" (a somewhat vulgar term for the concept of "m-preg" - or male pregnancy). Now, even the most gay scene gay guy I've met in my life has very strong female relationships; mothers, sisters, nieces, friends, friends and family of his partner.

Only gay men in m/m are stripped of female friends and family. The received wisdom is that "readers don't want to read about it". I've seen people loathe Jean, but I'd say Katya in Special Forces gets even more hate (this number is subjective).

It gets worse. Many gay men used to have sexual relationships with women in real life. Some were married to women. Fathered children. Oh wow, don't you dare write about that in m/m - people will not review you. The biggest, most important m/m blog out there will not review you if there's even one sexual encounter with a woman.

This abhorrence of what's called "girly bits" or "girl parts", or "vay jay" (the last expression makes me laugh; to my non-native ear, it's as bad as "her womanly molten core" from some horrendous m/f romance) is wide-spread.

They call it purity.

It's probably my cultural reflex, but using a word like "purity" for, in essence, erasing women, erasing bisexual men, and, if you think further, erasing trans* people (some of whom are men with "girl bits"), really gets my goat. Like it's something positive.

The hostility to trans* books is quite clear, too. I mean, here is a reviewer who reviews a book by a trans* guy ABOUT a trans* guy and says that it's not authentic.

And if a trans*/genderqueer book is written by an author who is too big (and way too good) to be ignored (you know, and wrote an award-winning book), they review it, but the comments immediately put the world back on its axis. It was a lapse, and it won't be a regular occurrence, Gods forbid we could actually include genderqueer and trans* characters in our oh-so-tolerant genre.

No, that's against the idea of purity.

Now, in my book, everybody can review on their blog what they want. People can post about how disgusting "vay jays" are and how authors are misleading readers, and how one m/f or m/m/f sex scene invalidates the whole book.

So, because there are three pages of m/m/f sex in Dark Soul, the other 306 pages are "sneak menage" and Dark Soul is no real m/m book (damn, and I thought Silvio being definitely coded as genderfluid in the third part would have given my game away).

According to some reactions, by not getting rid of Donata in Dark Soul, I've cheated, lied, misled my readers and I'm a liar, cheater and force my bisexuality down people's throats. The whole relationship between Silvio and Stefano is invalidated because they dare have fun with Stefano's wife for a night. It's a "let-down" and Silvio deserves better (yeah, destroying Stefano's marriage is clearly much better than his anonymous quick fucks that he normally goes for, TOTALLY agree).

I'm being told that I've misled people about this being an m/m romance, because, apparently, that's something that CANNOT happen in m/m romances, so I'm lying.

Funny, I didn't get the memo where a) I defined this book as an m/m romance, and b) where somebody defined those rules and every single m/m author and publisher actually signed this definition and defined penalties in case of breach.

I guess after writing three pages of (damn hot) sex with a woman, I'll get my m/m romance writer membership card torn up now - something I haven't managed even after killing a protagonist and writing about murder, torture, brother-incest, PTSD, rape, racism, genocide - I've FINALLY accomplished the biggest crime of them all: written a mixed-gender sex scene.

Mum would be so proud.

Actually, she would be. She raised me to be able to look in the mirror every morning and look myself in the eye. And I am getting sick and tired of this blatant woman-hating that goes on in a female-dominated genre. I know amazing, kick-ass women; I'm the child of one. I'm friends with women who can mop the floor with most men out there. Human beings who had to do real battle for everything they have. Women who sacrificed everything for their children, who stood up to abusive men and told them to get the fuck lost. Women who worked harder, for less pay and less praise than a comparable man. Women who rebuilt bombed cities without heavy machinery, stone by stone, with their own hands, because the men were dead and somebody had to rebuild the country and in the hope for a better life for their children, male AND female.

But that leads far away - I'm just saying that women are awesome, and just as strong, resourceful, intelligent and kick-ass as any man. There is no difference in gifts and abilities.

But, to return to the matter at hand. The problem I'm seeing is not for my own sales (frankly, writing is a financial sideshow for me - if I wanted to make money writing, I'd have gone mainstream ten years ago). The problem I'm seeing is the biggest reviewers in our genre have decided that "vay jay" is "yuck" and writers writing about bisexual men who are sexually active on the page, and protagonists who are not in the full possession of XY chromosomes and a penis, balls and prostate (read: trans*men) are not actually part of the genre.

Make no mistake: In our genre, reviews are everything.

Publishers know this; authors know this.

What this leads to is pre-emptive self-censorship.

It reminds me of the situation in Nazi-occupied Paris (I'm currently reading a book about it). In Paris at that time, more than 8,000 books were published a year (more than in the UK or the US). Everything had to pass German censorship (the Propaganda-Staffel). At first, the German censors read everything. But reading that many books is a huge drain on resources, so what they enforced was self-censorship. The publishers knew what was forbidden, and they were "trusted" not to break those rules.

If you're a publisher and depend on the Propaganda-Staffel for getting printing paper AT ALL, you made damn sure that the censors never had reason to complain.

I'm not using this example to fulfill Godwin's Law that every internet discussion WILL bring up the Nazis. I'm using the example to show how insidious and easy self-censorship is. All you have to do is teach authors and publishers what is not desired and threaten - in so many words - to withhold the primary resource, whether it's paper, attention, or reviews, doesn't matter.

And you *will* have publishers who internalize these things. Authors will not write books that have absolutely no chance to get reviewed. They'll "tone things down". Publishers will instruct their editors accordingly. Authors will learn from their publishers that trans* or bi content is to be avoided.

The problem is when the personal taste (or: kink) of the big reviewers DETERMINES the genre, steers it and defines it. It's very often veiled, like "it's not that we don't like trans* stuff, but we won't review it", or "We'd review it, but we can't find anybody who wants to read that", "anything but "pure" m/m will be a DNF or an F or a 1-out-of-5 star review, or..."

And this is the attitude I really struggle to comprehend. If they don't have reviewers, they can find some, quite easily. If they believe that only the "fantasy version of gay", namely m/m, is worthy of reviews, then they really shouldn't display Rainbow flags on their blogs.

Because the Rainbow flag does NOT stand for exclusion. Any GLBTQQ activist I know would be ashamed to think that the Rainbow has come to mean "gay only" in ANY part of the arts; and, yes, our little corner, where we create pulpy little stories, is part of the arts and wider culture.

The Rainbow doesn't only have one colour. The alphabet soup "GLBTQQ" does NOT mean "gay only and everything else is ewwwww". It's not "gay-only voices, and everybody else shut up because you're not feeding our kinks."

Don't call your intolerance, fear and prejudice "purity".

I believe it's time to discuss this, without prejudice, fear and intolerance. We are the other colours out there, and I, for one, will never self-censor myself to just one colour. I'm way more than that.



ETA: I'm turning off approval of comments for sake of discussion, but I *will* delete abusive comments.