Some thoughts on marriage

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Reflecting on Washington State’s recent marriage law, Eric Andrews-Katz writes about the absurd position of longtime gay committed couples (“Marriage: 4th Time The Charm, Bold Strokes Books Authors’ Blog).

His story really resonated with me. Like Andrews-Katz, me and my partner got “married” in a commitment ceremony, many years before any state recognized the legal status of gay couples (2001). Our union was solemnized by the atheist leader of our local Ethical Humanist society.

Though the ceremony conferred no rights, that first marriage held much more meaning for us than our subsequent legal wedding at a New York City clerk’s office. When friends and colleagues ask me, doe-eyed and with enormous grins, “What was it like to finally get married?” I tell them: “It was kind of like applying for food stamps.”

That’s not to say that getting a marriage certificate hasn’t changed our relationship in positive ways. It was a re-commitment to our relationship. It allowed us–with greater certainty and pride–to check off that married box on government and work-related forms. We got a frame for our marriage certificate and hung it up in our bedroom.

But our 2001 commitment ceremony will always be the day we remember. It was the day of jitters: “Are we really doing this?” The day of tears. The day of dancing with friends and drinking champagne in a limo. The best day of our lives.

I guess it’s a generational thing, and I think it’s great that younger gay couples can now go through all of that in one, fully legalized fanfare.

It’s about frickin’ time. And Andrews-Katz tells a wonderful, personal story on the subject.

Study of Book Reading Preferences of LGBT People

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I’m plugging a new study by Lambda Literary Foundation and St. Cloud State University. They’re surveying LGBT people about their book reading preferences (i.e. print books vs. e-books) in order to find out how to best reach LGBT readers.

I included the full press release below, and you can do the survey here.

I did it. It was fun. 🙂

The study caught my eye as an upcoming author who is batting around different ideas for marketing my work. As I filled out the survey, I realized how much my reading and book-finding habits have changed, in a really short span of time actually.

If you asked me two years ago, 100 percent of the books I read would be print. If you asked me one year ago, I’d say about sixty percent of the books I read were print. Today, that percentage has dwindled to about ten percent. I read books on my Nook almost exclusively.

And as a result, I’ve become a much different book-buyer and browser. I used to go to bookstores about once a month. Now, the last time I went to a book store was three months ago; and the last time before that was probably another three months back.

It’s sad on one hand, I think, for those of us Gen Xers who used to love browsing a bookshop, getting pulled in by an interesting book cover, and feeling like we were supporting Literature and independent booksellers with our purchases. Those shops are few and far between.

On the other hand, there’s something really encouraging about the growth of e-books and on-line bookselling. On-line booksellers offer sooo much more variety, and inventory.  I’m often looking to read something specific, like ancient world fiction or gay fantasy. Searching on-line, I can usually pull up dozens of those kind of titles pretty quickly, and there are published reviews and reader reviews and sample chapters to help me decide which ones to buy.

I think the great thing is that readers can find “niche” literature like LGBT fiction much easier than they could five or ten years ago.

Here’s the press release from Lambda:

Lambda Literary Foundation and St. Cloud State University
Conducting International Study
of Book Reading Preferences of LGBT People  

St. Cloud, Minnesota – What type of books do LGBT people like to read? How and where do they find the books that they like to read? Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) and St Cloud State University Collection Management Librarian Rachel Wexelbaum are conducting an international study on the book reading preferences of 21st century LGBT people to help answer these questions.

This is the first large-scale study of LGBT book readership conducted in the age of EBooks and mobile devices. Librarians, writers, publishers, educators, counselors, and others are often operating on assumptions of what types of books LGBT readers prefer, how they find those books, and how they read them, based on pre-Internet reading habits. The results of this survey will help determine how best to reach LGBT book readers.

To take the survey now, click here. 

For more information about this study, please contact Rachel Wexelbaum atrswexelbaum@stcloudstate.edu.

 

Sighted in the Blogosphere

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I thought I’d share some interesting stuff I landed upon recently while bouncing around the blogosphere.

Bold Strokes Books Authors’ Blog has the prolific and multi-awarded mystery and romance author Radclyffe talking about her latest release Crossroads (Bold Strokes Books, November 2012).

I’m a big fan of gay mysteries, and Drewey Wayne Gunn’s weekly GunnShots column at Lambda Literary picks out Gunn’s Ten Favorite Gay Mystery Series and Ten Favorite Stand-Alones.

The titles span six decades, and the list includes my all time favorite: Michael Nava’s Henry Rios series, as well as R.D. Zimmerman’s Todd Mills series, which I enjoyed a lot.

Finally, writer Melissa Deluca is recounting her travels and her work with girls forced into sex trafficking in Kolcata, India through her blog: “Finding my ‘I’ in India.”  She shares beautiful and profound photography and journal-entry style posts.

Best Movies of 2012

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Here we go with my self-proclaimed Best Movies of 2012.

My typical disclaimer: I rarely, very rarely, recommend Hollywood blockbusters. It happens even more rarely the older I get. So as much as I love big epic fantasy as a genre, those titles tend to be underrepresented on my list. Instead, I usually go with quieter films – fantasy or not – with a strong narrative pull, real emotionality, and that highly subjective quality of resonance.

Another disclaimer: you may ask yourself, where are the queer films? Well, I didn’t see many of them, and I have no idea if that’s a reflection of the lower output (or quality) of queer cinema in 2012 or a random quirk of my movie-going behavior this year. I’ve included one film with a gay supporting character in my Honorable Mentions. Feel free to tell me what I should have seen.

What I do have is a list of great films featuring young adult characters.

I braced myself to see this ultra-heavy movie about an emotionally disturbed boy who grows up to do horrific things, and his embattled mother’s attempts to stop him. WNTTAK showcased the best acting of the year IMHO, with Tilda Swinton as the helpless, deeply-scarred mom, and Ezra Miller as the relentlessly destructive son. To boot, the story comes with an ending that leaves things quite reasonably unfinished yet with just a sliver of hope. My favorite film of the year.

Life of Pi was an unabashedly sentimental film. But give me an unabashedly sentimental film with an underdog hero I can get behind, like shipwrecked Suraj Sharma in the title role, and I’m a happy camper.

I thought the story was ridiculously imaginative and totally believable, due to Ang Lee’s direction and the tremendous special effects. It works whether you believe a boy survives on a life raft with a wild tiger, or the alternative version of the story revealed at the end.

I used the film’s French poster because I like it better.

Chronicle is one of the few 2012 fantasy movies I loved. Three teenage boys discover a mysterious object in the woods that gives them telekinetic abilities. Hand-held filming and capable, unknown actors give the movie an authentic feel – the antithesis to typical Hollywood superhero-storytelling. The movie left me thinking: this is what would really happen if a teenage boy unlocked supernatural abilities.

 

 

 

Honorable Mentions

I can’t fully recommend Snow White and the Huntsman because too many things bugged me about the storyline. It felt to me there was a missed opportunity to develop Charlize Theron’s Evil Queen further, taking her beyond the misogynistic bent of the source material. And the Huntsman seemed like a throwaway character, existing solely to create the possibility of a happy heterosexual ending for Snow White (who was played excellently by Kristin Stewart).

But the film had outstanding artistry and great world-building, along with lots of good intentions, just narrowly missing the mark for me.

Films about troubled suburban white kids have come a long way. I grew up on John Hughes’ movies in the 1980’s, and though I loved their comic moments of adolescent calamity (rendered most successfully in Sixteen Candles, I think), they always felt too safe and sanitized.

Nowadays, filmmakers can delve much deeper into the hardest problems facing teens. Perks of Being a Wallflower, based on Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 novel, does a commendable job in this regard. There’s a touch of familiarity to the film’s band of quirky, alienated characters, but they are beautifully brought to life by terrific casting (Ezra Miller shows once again that he is expertly suited as a teen anti-hero). What I liked the most about the film was the subtlety with which the main character Charlie’s (Logan Lerman) psychic wounds are revealed.

The narrow missing of the mark for me on this one was a heavy-handed ending. The film does such a good job of slowly unveiling complex issues – childhood sexual abuse, the loneliness of gay adolescence, dating violence – it felt unfair to wrap everything up neatly in the promise of enduring teen friendships.

My Favorite Books of 2012

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I make a concerted effort to read lots of books. I do it to support fellow authors and good-quality small presses. It also helps to keep my literary muscle in shape.

According to Pew Research Center, most American readers read 17 books annually. E-book readers read more – 24 on average.

That sounds pretty good, but not so encouragingly, Pew’s survey found that one in five Americans don’t read any books at all. And the percentage of readers and the number of books read each year has been steadily declining since the 1970’s.

This year, I’ve read 19 books. I would have to give myself a C+ as a reader based on Pew’s statistics.

Here’s a round-up of my favorites. As with last year, I try, really try to include some new releases; but with an ever-expanding reading queue, it’s hard for me to keep up with what’s current.

Top Pick

SONG OF ACHILLES (Ecco, 2012) is a true 2012 release, and a truly outstanding work of mythic fiction. At its center is a love story between Patroclus and Achilles that spans from childhood to young adulthood when the two join the Greeks to fight the Trojan War. Miller’s portrayal of young love is extraordinary, and she renders the time period and setting beautifully. You can read my full review from June 12, 2012 here.

 

 

Close Second

I have never included a short story anthology in my top picks, but this issue of sci-fi/fantasy journal Collective Fallout (Vol. 3, No. 3) was my most enjoyable read of the year. It’s theme is futuristic, and it’s filled with entertaining stories of queer love in dystopian worlds. Highly imaginative and unexpectedly romantic. Here’s my full review from March 14, 2012.

 

 

 

Pick #3

Strange Fortune came out in 2009, but I’m sneaking it in here because I felt it edged out the remaining new releases that I read this year. It’s published by a high quality, LGBT small press (Blind Eye Books).

I’ll give a little more extensive review of the book since I haven’t talked it up on my blog. The story is set in a fantasy world that is an intriguing blend of high fantasy and ancient Indian sensibilities. There’s an Indiana Jones-ish hero Valentine Strange, and a more timid Warlock-y co-hero Alleister Grimshaw. The two get thrown together on an adventure to recover a magical, ancient artifact: the diadem of the goddess Purya.

The two men’s simmering attraction pulled me through the story, but Strange Fortune is equally an engrossing fantasy adventure. The two heroes are up against it early on. Bandits, sent by a mysterious patron, for a mysterious purpose, want to kill Valentine and Grimshaw to get the diadem. A complex mystery unfolds, and between my eagerness to figure out the significance of the diadem, and whether or not Valentine and Grimshaw would get together, I rushed through to the end of the book. A really fun diversion with a fresh fantasy setting.

Honorable Mention

Allison Moon sums up her self-pubbed Lunatic Fringe in two words: “lesbian werewolves.” I took a peek, got hooked and sped through the pages.

It’s the story of Lexie, a reserved young woman raised by her widower father, who goes off to an elite liberal arts college and struggles to fit in with a more “worldly” crowd. Delightfully, she gets taken in by an otherwordly crowd, a politically-empowered group of women who secretly hunt werewolves. They call themselves “The Pack.”

Meanwhile, Lexie falls for an independent-minded townie named Archer, who Lexie discovers is a werewolf.

What worked for me so well in this story was the interwoven political commentary, and Lexie’s journey to find her political self. Things heat up on that score when there’s a rape on campus, and the threat of werewolf attacks becomes symbolic of the physical/sexual violence that maintains male power and privilege on college campuses and elsewhere.

But I didn’t find Lunatic Fringe to be a preachy book. Both feminist politics and the werewolf world are portrayed as complex, with unexpected discoveries of what constitutes “good” or “evil.” There are good guys and gals and bad guys and gals on both sides of the political and werewolf spectrums. Moon brings an interesting perspective to werewolf mythology, with a variety of factions within that are warring as much with each other as they conflict with the human world. The intriguing question becomes: where will Lexie fit in?