I’ll definitely be reading Solitaire. I am curious, is it lesbian sci-fi or straight sci-fi? It won’t make a difference, but I just want to know. Thank you.
Katia N. Ruiz
I’m glad for this question: I need to practice answering it, and I have so many different answers that it’s easy to get tangled up in them.
The straightforward factual answer: Jackal has a primary emotional and sexual relationship with a woman in this book. She also has (consensual) sex with a male friend.
The deeper answer is: neither. Because the only stories I’m inclined to characterize as “lesbian” fiction or “straight” fiction are those that pointedly grapple with issues of sexuality. As an example: I just finished reading a really lovely young adult book called Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson. It’s the story of a thirteen year old girl who is raped and has to deal with the psychological damage of the attack at the same time that she’s trying to cope with her first year of high school. It’s a gorgeous book that wrestles with a lot of issues, including sexual power dynamics among heterosexual adolescent people. I can’t imagine that anyone would ever characterize this as straight fiction, but for me it’s much more “straight” fiction than my book is “lesbian” fiction.
Lots of people will call Solitaire a lesbian book because of the relationship, and some people will think that the sex with a man makes it not a “real lesbian” book after all. I suspect I am going to get a certain amount of grumpiness from several directions. I’m glad that it won’t make a difference to you: I don’t see why it would to anyone, but there you go.
I can’t even really categorize Solitaire as bi-sci-fi. Sexual identification just isn’t an issue for Jackal in any way in this book. There’s sex in it but it’s not about sex or the consequences of sexual choices. And just as I resist being labeled in my private life, I resist it in my professional life. Solitaire is character sci-fi, it’s inner-landscape sci-fi. If we must put a sex-related label on it, let’s call it sexual-salad-bar sci-fi, a category that I would be happy to pioneer.
I am an identical twin, so the first person I found attractive and loved was my twin sister(virtual incest). I find women more beautiful than men, both physically and spiritually, bot I love men too. Usually gender does not matter much to me, except that women are still often treated like second class citizens. Politically and socially, gender matters. Personally, it doesn’t.
Sexual-salad-bar! I’ll have to print a t-shirt.
Last year, I attended a fiction workshop. People’s obsessions with queer vs. straight sexuality was baffling. Once, the group spent a good thirty minutes trying to determine whether one of my female characters was having sex with a woman for the first time during the framing of the story or if she’d had previous lesbian experiences. Was she exclusively lesbian? Was she bisexual? Why wasn’t her sexual choice explained in length? Thank goodness, our gay colleague came to the rescue saying, “If this was a woman having sex with a man, you people wouldn’t even be wondering if it was the first time she had a sexual encounter with men or if she’d slept with women or kittens before. Really, it’s not even the core of the story.” After the session, he asked me, “Have you noticed that whenever we bring a short story, the discussion is centered around our character’s sexuality? I’m almost tempted to just write straight characters and see what they have to say.”
Yup. It’s tempting. But I hope that by writing stereosexual people into our stories, they will eventually be read the way other tales of human exploration are read. With curiosity and sometimes fear, for the joy or pain the discoveries may bring.
@ Barbara — I find that my understanding of gender and the way I use the word is really changing. I think of it on the one hand as a purely social construct, a sometimes really wacky set of “expectations” based on our culture’s really limited definitions of biology — intersexed and transexual people are essentially “invisible” to the culture in this way, and to a lesser extent so are bisexual people and non-sexual people (who are just expected to present as if they were heterosexual according to the “rules” of their apparent biological sex). Yeeps, what a minefield.
And then I also think of gender as intensely personal, a “salad bar” of options that each of us chooses from in order to express ourselves. I danced last week in a bikini top and skirt and hiking boots, so where does that put me in the binaries of gender? (Rhetorical question…)
@ karina — Oh there you go, confusing the vanilla writers with your spumoni notions, shame on you (grin). Yep, the assumption that everyone’s straight (and white and so on) unless otherwise specified is as much a cultural blind spot in fiction as anywhere else — and still manages to surprise me when I come across it, because I expect writers to have more fucking imagination than that. It’s a shame that artists, whom we rely on for imaginative leaps, for outside-the-box thinking, sometimes just make those boxes stronger.
I think it’s fine for people to write straight characters, the same way it’s fine to write white characters. It’s just not fine to assume that such characters are the Gold Standard of fiction, and that their experiences speak to (or for) all people’s.. And it’s certainly not fine to assume that characters who don’t fit the mold have to have their “deviations” explained (by which, at least in the case of your workshop experience, really means justified).