I should write a very long blog post, but it is gone midnight and checking the audio recordings is more important so I’m just going do describe the event thus: mostly awesome, with a side of sore feet and mild sunburn.
Special thanks to:
This week is going to be a bit mad.
To start with I have two days in Bristol. I have the radio show as usual on Wednesday, but I will also be in the studio tomorrow. That’s because of this book. Yes, someone has written a crime novel set in the Afro-Caribbean community of Bristol. The book is being launched at Bristol Foyles tomorrow night, and the author, Mark Wright, has a busy day of interviews before then. He’ll be on BBC Radio Bristol tomorrow afternoon, and at lunch time he’s popping into the Ujima studios to record something with me.
It is also the end of the month, so I have a whole lot of business housekeeping to do, most importantly sending out the accounts for Wizard’s Tower. That’s otherwise known as the Make Authors Happy process.
And finally, because I’ll be heading off to Finland next week, I need to get as much day job work done as possible before I go.
So blogging will be a bit limited, but there is some audio in process. Also I have a little surprise for you coming up tomorrow. It may involve monsters.
Last night I met up with Alan Moore’s daughter, Leah. She and her husband, John Reppion, have been at many of the same conventions as me over the years, but we hadn’t seen each other much since they acquired a pile of sprogs. John kindly babysat for the evening so that Leah and I could have a girls’ night out on the town. We avoided the town center, which would have been packed with gloriously painted Liver Birds in their regulation 8″ heels and military grade perfume, plus hordes of soccer fans getting tanked in anticipation of another glorious defeat for the English team. Instead Leah took me on a pub crawl around some of the better watering holes of the city.
There’s not much to report on that, though I did grab a quick interview with Leah about Electricomics which I will podcast in due course. I note that while her dad is the figurehead for the project, Leah is the project manager. Also she and John have written a science fiction series, Sway, for the project which will be illustrated by Nicola Scott.
The only other thing I want to mention is that we did, inevitably, talk about LGBT history. Leah reminisced about when her dad was involved in AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), the anti-Section 28 campaign. On a London march she and her sister, Amber, got to carry the banner, and met a tall and glamorous lady called Roz Kaveney who made a striking impression on the girls. Small world, comics.
This morning I’m planning to leave my suitcase in Left Luggage at Lime Street (yes, they have one) and take a look around the Walker Gallery, in particular the Grayson Perry exhibition. After that it is off home and back to audio editing.
Well, that was a roller-coaster of a day.
The conference thus far as been excellent. I tweeted a lot (the official hashtag is #UnStraightConference if you want to see what other people are saying about it. Also several major sessions are being webcast here. Here’s a quick run-down of what went on today.
We began with Nicholas Hasselqvist from the actual Unstraight Museum, which is based in Sweden. He talked quite a bit about how even Sweden fails dismally when it comes to things like helping LGBT asylum seekers or standing up to the International Olympic Committee. He also talked about some of the amazing outreach work he and his colleagues do around the world. One of the key stats he mentioned is that there are around 55,000 museums in the world; of them 312 are dedicated to Elvis Presley, but only two (his and the Schwules in Berlin) are dedicated to LGBT lives.
During the Q&A on Nicholas’s talk we chatted briefly about the difficulty of assigning identities to people from history. He mentioned the case of Queen Christina of Sweden, whom many Swedes believe to have been a lesbian or even trans.
After the break Nicholas has us all participate in the creation of a museum exhibit. We had all been asked to bring an artifact that had personal importance to us. We then had to write a brief blurb for it, do a short video talking about it, and have our photos taken with it. Each personal entry was put together to form an exhibit item. In under an hour we had created a really great little exhibition. There were some very moving stories being told, and a few extraordinary exhibits. Several people mentioned pop stars as having been inspirations. One exhibit was a pair of sunglasses that were once owned by David Bowie. (Lauren, I am so jealous!) Being utterly shameless, I gave them a photo of me with a Hugo trophy. That should infuriate a few people in fandom.
After lunch various people from Liverpool museums and Homotopia, the arts foundation that did most of the work creating both the April Ashley exhibition and this conference, talked about their work and how they managed to create such a high profile event. I was seriously impressed at how much commitment and buy-in the diversity project had from senior management in Liverpool’s museums. Nor were they content with just exhibiting stuff, they wanted to change people’s minds through doing so.
Of particular interest was Ann Bukantas from the Walker Gallery, which has put on a lot of LGBT-themed art exhibits of late. (They had a David Hockney exhibition recently, and now have Grayson Perry). From her I learned about the transvestite artist, Phil Sayers, whose specialty is appearing as a woman in his own art, often recreating famous works of art with female subjects. Sayers is the only artist in the over 100-year history of the Walker whose art has been attacked by an irate member of the public.
Finally we came on to the creation of the April Ashley exhibition itself. I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now here’s the official trailer for it.
The bit at the end where April talks about finally getting official confirmation of her identity after over 45 years (thanks to the passage of the Gender Recognition Act) totally tore me up. I very nearly sobbed out loud, which would have been very embarrassing.
The rest of the day was given over to breakout sessions. I attended two. The first was about an exhibition viewing punk history from a queer perspective (with particular focus on Poly Styrene). The second was about the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, which exists to preserve the work of the great Finnish gay artist.
One of the more interesting questions we addressed during the day was what level of openness about LGBT issues straight people are prepared to tolerate. Val Stevenson of Liverpool John Moores University, who gave the presentation about the punk exhibition, noted that the shopping mall where she was exhibiting was very prudish about sexualized images, despite its shops being covered in advertizing featuring highly sexualized pictures of near-naked women. Durk Dehner from the Tom of Finland Foundation said he and his colleagues are very reluctant to let any of their collection out of their control because so much of Tom’s art is deeply sexual and they fear other organizations would want to sanitize it before putting it on display.
Back, then, to April. I had a look around the exhibit, and I must say that it is beautifully done. It looks great (though April is so beautiful it is hard not to have her looking great), and the content is good too. Some younger trans activists are likely to be outraged by it because it does include the whole man-into-woman narrative, but sadly such things are still necessary when reaching out to the general public. Bev Ayre, the Project Director, said that April was initially reluctant to have her pre-transition life mentioned at all. However, taking it out would have erased both her connection to Liverpool (where she was born and grew up) and her suicide attempt.
I should note that Bev and her colleagues put in a huge amount of work to get the local trans community involved with the project, and to have them tell their stories alongside April’s. Credit here should go to local trans activist, Jenny-Anne Bishop, who worked tirelessly to get the local trans community on board. Several local trans people have been working as volunteers at the conference.
The final event of the day was also trans-themed. It was the opening of a small exhibition titled, “Ken: To Be Destroyed”. Some of you may remember this Guardian article from late last year about a woman called Sara Davidman who discovered that an uncle of hers had been trans. Sara has created a small museum exhibit about her relative (K, as Sara now calls her) which is now installed alongside the April Ashley exhibition. In many ways it is a very sad story, because of the way in which K had been forced to live in the closet all of her life, and how even now members of Sara’s family don’t want to be associated in any way with what they perceive to be the shame of K’s existence.
I was expecting this trip to be fairly emotional, but I didn’t realize quite how bad it would be until I started looking around April’s exhibition and I was reminded of how much she had inspired me as a teenager. Of course there was no way I’d ever have been that glamorous but she was, as Laverne Cox has it, a Possibility Model. She showed me that life was possible. Sadly April is currently very ill and her planned appearance at the conference tomorrow has been cancelled, so I will not have a chance to thank her personally. I am doing so here instead.
April, I would not be me without having had your help.
As I’ve said many times before, I’m crap at writing obituaries. That goes double for Jay because I have this stuff in my eyes that is preventing me from focusing on the screen and keyboard. Jay was a friend.
I’ve been spending some time looking for a photo to use with this post. Amazingly I didn’t have a good one. So I have chosen the above photo from Locus because it shows Jay at his larger-than-life best, and wearing one of his trade-mark Hawaiian shirts.
Jay will be remembered for many things, in particular for a significant amount of very fine fiction. However, I hope that he will also be remembered for the tradition of the Campbell Tiara (which he created with Elizabeth Bear). Jay was happy to talk about gender identity issues long before it was fashionable to do so, for which I will always be grateful.
He will, of course, also be remembered for the ferocity with which he fought his illness. If people could survive cancer simply on the basis of their determination not to be beaten by it, Jay would still be with us. In addition to fighting on his own behalf, Jay did everything in his power to ensure that his own struggle would also benefit those who came after him. Because that’s the sort of person he was.
I will miss him dreadfully. So will many other members of our community.
Last week I got interviewed by Deadshirt.net, an American media website looking to run some articles about diversity issues in the X-Men for an article to be run in conjunction with the release of Days of Future Past. The article turned into two posts, which you can read here and here.
There’s a lot of good stuff there, and it covers some of the same ground as my talk on LGBT superheroes. It also highlights a few things I didn’t include because I didn’t have time to research the whole of Marvel and DC history before writing it.
As I note in my interview (which is at the end of part 2), I pretty much gave up on X-Men after the Dark Phoenix episode, so I’m not an ideal person to quiz on their history. On the other hand, I hopefully had some interesting things to say about growing up as a trans girl and being able to find role models in comics. Jean was the big sister that I never had. There was more in the original interview, but Max Robinson (who wrote the article) wisely cut the bits where I moved too far away from the brief.
Anyway, it’s out there now. Click through if you are interested.
Well, yesterday went pretty much as I expected. Many thanks to all of those who made kind comments about my post. However, please don’t be misled by the echo chamber effect. What matters is not just who comments, but who does not. It is pretty clear to me that I am mostly getting support from one side in this, and that means I have made a lot of people very angry with me.
As I have a healthy sense of self-preservation, I have cancelled my appearance at Worldcon. I may still be in London at the time, depending on what Kevin is doing, if anyone wants to catch up.
I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone who is now worried about being tarred by association with me. I certainly won’t take it against anyone who wants to sever their relationship.
The next task is to take stock of my various projects and see what damage has been done. I suspect that the bookstore may be a casualty of this. However, the biggest problem is the Translation Awards. I confess that one of the reasons things have been so slow this year is that I have been afraid to do anything for fear of accidentally provoking a shitstorm. That’s now gone up by an order of magnitude. So if there is anyone out there who thinks that they are worth preserving, please contact me privately.
Meanwhile, day job, which desperately needs attention after the past few days of distraction.
I found this on Twitter. It was made by @multikaren for the diversity group at George Brown College in Toronto (@GBCDiversity). It is a quote from Laverne Cox’s keynote speech at the Creating Change 2014 in Houston last month. I think you know why it is here.
For Kevin Standlee, with all my love, on Valentine’s Day. ♥♥♥
I have a couple more Kameron Hurley blog posts I’d like to draw your attention to. And by the way this blog onslaught is because God’s War comes out in mass market paperback in the UK today. First up there’s a great post about the bug-based magic system that Kameron invented for the series here. The main thing I want to talk about, however, is a pair of posts by Kameron and her mom, Terri, on Pornokitsch. Basically Terri explains that, while she is a devoted reader of popular fiction, she can’t get her head around SF. Meanwhile Kameron explains why she gravitated towards fiction where you could imaging making real change in the world.
I have much sympathy, of course. My mum doesn’t read fiction at all. And my dad, who was a voracious reader of genre novels of many types, died before I got to be well known for this stuff.
The thing that struck me about these posts was this brief paragraph from Terri:
Unlike real life, in popular fiction the good guys always win.
For most people, I am sure that they do. But one thing that I learned very early on in life is that the “good guys” are the people who are “normal”. That is, the people who are white, straight, able-bodied and cis. Other characters can be good people too, but if they don’t fit in with social norms then, in the story, they are the people who will suffer tragically. Even when I read a real-world novel about trans people that has a happy ending, I find it hard to believe. The only way I can believe a book in which someone like me might have a happy ending is if it is very clearly set in a world that isn’t ours. And if there are no trans people in a book, I just end up identifying with the character who is the biggest social outcast, for whatever reason.
That might seem somewhat self-obsessed and selfish, coming from someone who, most of the time, has a great deal of privilege. But it is something that has got itself deeply ingrained in my psyche. And in any case, I’m always aware that the abyss is right there next to me, waiting. I’m doing my best to enjoy my life as best I can while I can, because sooner or later that tragic ending will catch up with me.
After having said that people ought to put up awards eligibility posts, I guess I should do one of my own. These days I feel way too guilty about this because I have plenty of Hugos already. I certainly don’t expect to win any more. But here are a few reasons you might consider nominating things I have done.
First up is something I won’t get any credit for: Adventure Rocketship #1. All I did with this is love it so much that I asked if I could publish an ebook edition. It is a strange beast because it contains both fiction and non-fiction. There’s also confusion as to whether it is a magazine or a book. Well, as far as I’m concerned, anything that only comes out once a year is a book. Locus is treating it as an anthology, and it does contain several very good stories, but it contains as much non-fiction. And that non-fiction is by people such as Jon Courtenay-Grimwood, N.K. Jemisin and Minister Faust. I have no idea what the Administrators will make of fit, and I don’t envy Dave McCarty having to sort it out, but I’m going to nominate it in Related Work and see what happens. You should credit Jonathan Wright as editor, and Tangent Books / Wizards Tower Press as the publishers.
Some of the individual stories might also strike your fancy, though if you are going to nominate a Tim Maughan story (and I think you should) I think that “Zero Hours” has a better chance.
Secondly we have Small Blue Planet. That would be a nomination for Karen Burnham and myself in Fancast. The reason I want to get this nominated is that it would encourage more people to listen to the podcasts, as a result of which they would find out about all of the great non-Anglo writers and translators we spoke to.
By the way, if you are wondering what has happened to the podcast, Karen and I do want to make more, but we are both stupidly busy right now and we just don’t have the time.
Finally people keep nominating me for Best Fanwriter, which is very kind of y’all. Since 2009 I have been intending to decline if nominated, because I’ve been doing perfectly OK without this. However, this year’s Worldcon is in London, and is probably the only one for at least a decade that members of my family are likely to attend. So if I do get on the ballot this time I am going to accept. I will be back to declining again next year, promise.
A separate post about all of the other people I’d like you to nominate will come soon.
One of the great things about art is that translation generally isn’t required. I love the way that Neil Clarke sources cover art from all over the world. Yesterday I got Christmas greetings on Facebook from my Greek friend, Sissy Pantelis. She used a piece of art by an Italian artist, Mirka Andolfo, which I reproduce above. Mikra is mainly a comics artist, and I believe that the girl in the picture is a character from a series called Sacro/Profano. You can see more of her work here.
I have pretty much given up on sending cards, except to aged relatives for whom such things still matter. I don’t send them through email either. I prefer opt-in card receipt to opt-out. But if you would like a card from me, the image above is the paper thing I have been sending out this year. It is by Bristol-based artist, Dru Marland. She has a number of other designs, some more religious than others, at her Etsy shop.
Manda Scott has done a paganism blog post so that I don’t have to. That post is also part of a “blog-hop” containing lots of historical stuff, some of it more academic than others (don’t look, Kari!).
For the first time since 2007 the skies were clear over Newgrange and visitors were able to see the sun light up the tomb as it was designed to do. The Irish Independent was there to see it. I wonder how much of what we have made will still be working in 5,000 years time.
Picture By David Conachy, published here
Cats 1-0 Taxes
Better late than never. Sorry Geoff, I’ll email the spreadsheet tomorrow.
Normal service will be resumed when I can see something other than spreadsheets.
Most of the time I don’t bother posting here when some high profile person goes on an anti-trans rant. It would get very boring if I did, because there is at least one a week. Besides, many of these people are folks I’ve not heard of, and don’t care about. I have little interest in video games or web comics, and consequently was only vaguely aware of Penny Arcade. I still wouldn’t have any interest, had I not found out about them from this article.
What’s so special about it? Well, it is in the National Post, which is a right-leaning newspaper from Canada. What is more, it is in the financial pages of that newspaper. Succinctly, a young geek with a successful business is being taken to task by a financial newspaper for damaging his brand by going on an online rant about trans people.
That’s amazing to me. What people regard as offensive changes with time. When I first transitioned, the mere existence of trans people was deemed offensive by many. For an employer to send me to a meeting with a client would have been seen as an insult to that client. Many people, of course, still think that way, including, apparently, lots of people in the UK’s Civil Service, and a substantial majority of the House of Lords. And yet here is a financial newspaper telling a young man that he should be more circumspect about airing his prejudices, because it will offend potential customers and cost him business. How the world has changed.
Personal issues aside, however, this is another prime example of the issue confronting SFWA. Painful as it may be for some people, the world does change. Nowadays, if you express contempt, not just for trans people, but for the whole QUILTBAG community, for people of color, for women, and so on, the Internet is liable to fall on your head. People may think that this is horribly unfair. They may decide to form pressure groups to fight for the right to be allowed to hate and despise their fellow human beings without being discriminated against for doing so. Perhaps one day the world will change again and they will be able to vent their spite more freely. But until that time, if you are running a business or a professional organization, you need to be aware that certain types of behavior can cost you dearly.
I’m sure that there will be people who find this outrageous. But you know, having spent most of my life being told that people like me are freakish, disgusting and a social embarrassment, not to mention a danger to children by our mere existence, I have very little sympathy. Boot, welcome to the other foot.
I’m visiting my mother this weekend and have been asked to sort through piles of stuff. In amongst it I found a file of papers on family history. Most of it is unremarkable, but I did find two things worth noting.
The first is an old photo album dating from not long after WWII when my parents had first met. It includes a couple of pictures of my mother at work in a local power station, where she was employed as a chemist. Girl scientists FTW!
The other is a bit of family tree, from which I note that in 1699 an ancestor of mine married a Miss Prudence Blackmore. Of course I know nothing about this lady, so I only speculate. And it is true that “moor” is an old English word for a peat bog. In Devon we have Dartmoor and Exmoor, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a Blackmoor too. But Black Moor has other connotations too, as anyone who has seen Othello should know. So it is just possible that I might have a bit of African ancestry, which would be very cool indeed.
I got to be even older this week, and my mother very kindly sent me some money. For once I have not just put it into the “books & clothes” fund, I’ve gone out and bought something relatively pricey: a Blu-ray player.
Well, relatively pricey compared to a new book anyway. And PC World did have it almost half price, which helped a lot.
Being able to play Blu-ray discs is only part of the deal. The model I bought has what they call “DVD Upscaling”, which means you get better quality on our DVDs that you would from a normal DVD player. In addition the box can act as a DLNA server. What’s that mean? Well it means it is now hooked up to my home network. It can see all of my PCs, and it can see the network drives. That means it has access to my entire music collection. Right now it is happily blasting out David Bowie. This may just be my imagination, but the sound seems much better than it did when I was using an old PC as a music server (same speakers, but run through the Blu-ray box and TV rather than a PC).
Right now I need an HDMI switch box to make it easier to swap between the Blu-ray player and satellite TV, and eventually I’d like to run them both through a proper amp and hook up 5.1 speakers, but for now this is good.
And in a couple of months time I shall buy Cloud Atlas on Blu-Ray. In the meantime, I have DVDs I can use to try it out. After all, I haven’t watched Cowboy Bebop in ages.
I suspect that I’m still light years behind many of you when it comes to audio-visual technology, but I’m quite pleased with myself. All I have to do now is avoid becoming a couch potato.
UK readers are probably sick to death of the people who phone up claiming to be from Microsoft about a virus being detected on your computer. If I have the time I tend to keep them on the phone with stupid questions, or just trying to wind them up, on the assumption that if they are talking to me then they can’t be preying on someone else. Usually that works fairly well and they hang up.
Today I had a different one. He had a new script, something to do with car accidents, and once we had established that I didn’t have a car he was quite willing to admit that he was running a scam and was out to defraud me. He was also happy to stay on the phone and swap insults. I guess they must get bored in their call center.
Still, like email and comment spam, you have to deal with this stuff. Being on a “no call” list doesn’t help, because these people are calling from outside the UK and anyway don’t care that they are ignoring your wishes. BT isn’t interested in protecting users from them. The best they seem to offer is a paid service that will allow you to reject all international calls, which is of no use to me. I may just have to settle for not answering the phone, and checking to see who leaves a message.
I spent most of yesterday in Bristol, doing radio at Ujima and then hosting a reading by Emma Newman and Jo Hall.
The radio stuff ended up being not much about books, but was fun all the same. As a women’s issues show, we devoted most of the episode to themes connected with International Women’s Day. I got the crew to discuss this story about how women have moved to the left of men in UK politics, which I found quite interesting.
There are no downloads available for this week and last week’s shows as yet. There’s been some sort of tech screw-up with the Ujima website, and no one seems to know how the system works. I’m going to try to apply my awesome hacker skills to the problem. 😉
In the evening we did the Word of Mouth reading at the Thunderbolt on Bath Road. It’s a lovely little pub, with a great live music program as well as monthly literary events. TÃr na nÓg are playing there next week, but I just can’t afford the time to go. Our reading gig went very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed MCing the event. My thanks to Dave, the landlord, Richard of Tangent Books who runs the readings series, and of course to Emma and Jo for being awesome.
And having been up early, out all day, and home stupidly late, I’m now knackered. It is becoming increasingly obvious that I have too many commitments and am not doing any of them well enough. Some sort of weeding out is necessary. I’m going to have to bail on Kiev because I can’t afford the time or effort required to organize the trip. Ã…con and Finncon are, of course, firmly nailed down, as are BristolCon and World Fantasy. I won’t be at Eastercon, and even though I bought a membership to Nine Worlds I’m not sure I’ll go. Top of my list at the moment for additional trips is the academic conference in Liverpool in June, but that’s the weekend before Finncon so I’m already dreading the exhaustion that will result.
Right now, however, I need to get back to running a publishing company and a bookstore. It is, after all, World Book Day. Stand by for book-related bloggage.
I have been reliably informed that no one under the age of 20 even knows what a blog is any more, and no one under the age of 30 would admit to having one. If I want to reach out to people who are liable to call me “grandma” I apparently need to get a tumblr account. So I have been and gone and done it. Let me know about follows and such, as I’m sure that the basic rules of social media haven’t changed that much.
While I was getting all nervous about having to interview Tim Maughan live on air, Amanda Palmer was tweeting frenetically about her forthcoming appearance at TED. Scary as Tim can be, I suspect she had the harder job. But, as usual, she carried it off brilliantly. The talk is all about the Art of Asking, that is, how to finance a career in art by asking people to pay for it. It is well worth a listen.
I guess it helps a lot to have Amanda’s amazing personality to carry this sort of thing off. It also helps not to be British, and therefore not to have been brought up believing that it is horribly wrong to promote yourself in any way.
From my point of view, the other problem with following Amanda’s advice is that, if you have grown up expecting to be discriminated against, learning to trust other people is hard. It is something I keep having to work on.