“why queer?”
some months ago, my friend linda shared with me part of the story of her wife, jo, defending her dissertation. jo had studied and written extensively on queerness in detective fiction. at last, the time came for her to before the committee, which included a straight white guy.
his first question:
“why queer?”
this question gets at an issue marginalized people face that people outside those communities cannot fully feel: seeing yourself in media matters.
i am white. i will never, no matter how hard i fight for black people, fully feel how they feel when they see black spiderman or whatever else. similarly, straight black people will never fully feel how i feel when i see queer thor.
i bring this up because of the suggestion that people from marginalized communities pitch their books by emphasizing how many readers outside of those communities will like it. this is problematic for four reasons:
- if i’m writing something competitively gay, and i usually am, i’m not trying to make it appeal to heterosexuals. so why would i pitch it to them?
- suggesting that i cannot or should not market my book to the people i wrote it for suggests that the people who market books either think that community isn’t monetizable or aren’t trying to monetize it.
- the reason this is being suggested is that there are a ton more books about e.g. heterosexuals than about queer people, which makes comping queer books harder because they don’t necessarily exist. but the more we hew to the heterosexual literary tradition, the more we suggest we don’t need a queer one and the less we struggle within a queer one we are still attempting to build, recover, etc.
- there are phenomena in the queer world that do not exist in the straight world.
let us tackle these issues one at a time:
first, there are plot points in a queer book that straight people cannot care as much about because that’s not their world. marketing a book that includes a queer wedding is phenomenally easier if your audience is queer. will straight people still care? allies, sure. but queer people will care more because we’ve had marriage rights for all of about eight years. straight, nonmarginalized people have had marriage as a regular ol’ right for actual eons.
second, if your view of queerdom is so limited that you think there isn’t a market for a book about queer whatever, or you think some stakeholder with a limited view of queerness will gatekeep and your response is to not push that person, thank you so much for telling on yourself.
third, the solution to the problem of “nothing like this thing exists” isn’t to pretend it does by stripping part of the thing’s existence away. it’s to acknowledge that the system has hardcore problems and you need to challenge the system.
fourth, please show me the thousands of years of straight history that have been hidden because they are heterosexual. see, i can point you to queer history we’ve had to recover from homophobes, but there is no heterophobia hiding e.g. julius caesar because omg he screwed women instead of men. as such, any book whose premise is to expose that hidden history can have no heterosexual parallel. comps are a nonstarter.
books about coming out have no exact parallel to heterowhatever. books in which coming out isn’t the plot have no exact parallel. queernorm books have no exact parallel. but if you cannot capture the concept, is the solution to give a bad fit? “it’s sort of like this if this were a huge concern to straight people, except it isn’t” … isn’t great.
i am writing a queer treasure hunt book. but it’s about more than finding treasure. it’s about undoing straightwashing. and the “why queer?” voices in the room — and they are still there and still in charge — don’t see a need for things that are very gay and very in feelings and anger about oppression and forced silence.
a few years ago, i went looking for gay books in which coming out wasn’t the plot. where the characters were already out and their queerness went unchallenged.
i looked at seventy-two titles, and i found six queernorm ones.
six.
so it’s not just that there aren’t that many gay books. it’s that the ones we have are so focused on our suffering. etc.
but we can do more than suffer. that’s why my books feature zero homophobia.
publishing is becoming less hostile to those, but the oligarchy is still what it is.
in conclusion: fuck comps.
<3