Science Fiction That Could Turn You Queer If Only For a Nanosecond...

[fajrdrako]

Cute (and interesting) article here about gay-friendly SF by Annalee Newitz, which is worth looking at if only for the brilliant title: Science Fiction That Could Turn You Queer If Only For a Nanosecond.

Description of Torchwood: It will not only turn you a little queer, it will make you want to go to Cardiff. Which is really perverted.

Some of my favourite gay-themed SF and fantasy isn't mentioned: Samuel R. Delaney, Elizabeth Lynn, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Vonda McIntyre.

Thinking about this led me to this list that I didn't know about: The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, "given to works of science fiction, fantasy and horror which explore gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender topics in a positive way." What a great source of reading recommendations.

Comments

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

RE: Stars In My Pocket, read it a couple of decades ago. You might like it, if you like the way Delany deals with sexuality in general ... the protag is obsessed with a woman he finds out is a lesbian, so he gets gendershifted to match her preferences, only to find out that she doesn't like him anyway. Lots more to it than that, of course, it's Chip.

As to Shkai'ra, she's quite happily and aggressively bi. You need to get hold of a set of the Fifth Millenium books by Stirling and Karen Wehrstein and Shirley Meier. You might find some or all of them at cons, on dealers' tables: Snow Brother, Shadow's Daughter, Saber and Shadow, The Sharpest Edge, The Cage, Shadow's Son, Lion's Heart, Lion's Soul. They are long out of print Baen paperbacks. If you do ebooks at all, I forget if you do or not, I have some of them on my harddrive.

The Coast Guard captain is the main protag of his Nantucket trilogy, starting with Island in the Sea of Time. She rescues a blonde Bronze Age British princess from a Fate Worser than Death, and falls for her hard.

As for male/male, well ... in Shadow's Son, Megan Whitlock's son, slave since he was an infant to the pedophilic Arkans, is an adolescent by the time his mother and her lover Shkai'ra rescue him from that slavery during the siege and fall of Arko, and quite homosexual. I don't know whether he is Steve's character or Shirley's, though.