M/m kerfuffle, round whoreallycares

[valarltd]

All right.
So the Offense Junkies have decided to take Offense again. This time, it's the m/m community in their sights. (we made the big time, our own --!Fail)

The argument runs that it's inappropriate and appropriation for straight women to write about gay men, because of privilege and objectification.

Fuck that noise.

"Write what you know" is mostly bullshit.

Leaving aside the more fantastic things, there's a lot I don't know and haven't done. I have never ridden in a hovercraft or a steamship or a luxury train. I have never been to the Arctic or the Moulin Rouge or Egypt or Seattle. I've never had artifical knees, been an architect, lived in a 24/7 BDSM relationship, been whipped or pierced, or done subsistance farming.

I've never been in love. I don't believe in it.

I've written all of them. I make an income off the last one, in fact. Research, research, research!

But what research can't duplicate is the emotional side. There you have to cling to your Terentius: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. I am human, so nothing human is alien to me.

A very good book, Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors, has an exercise where you imagine a fly, which leads you into more of an understanding of murder.

There's a lot of bisexual erasure happening in this, and a lot of Literature vs. Genre undercurrant.

So, I leave hunting it all down as an exercise to the reader.

Write what you want.
Read what you want.
Review what you want.
Fuck who you want.
Love who you want.
And tell the gatekeepers and censors and the rest of the world to go jump.

Now, I'm on deadline. Excuse me, but gay space pirate masquerade novellas don't write themselves, and neither do zombie-apocalypse lesbian truckers.

Comments

[firefly67.livejournal.com]

If we only wrote about 'what we know', nobody would write anything very interesting, most of the time.