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

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Given a choice of male-written erotica or female-wriiten, I will almost always choose the female-written.

I've read male-written in many genres, and it tends to the mechanistic and repetitive. Which means, ultimately, it's a little dull. (You'll also never find long fake fingernails in female written lesbian erotica and I've seen them in many, many photo shoots) This is not ALWAYS true, but it tends to be the norm.

A gay male friend, who used to write erotica for the gay men's magazines explained to me that he quit because they kept wanting him to cut all the character development and plot for more sex. He writes m/m romance now and is very happy with it.

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

I'd love to know what you think of my story in "Like a Sacred Desire," if you pick that up.

I must admit, I tend not to read a lot of erotica.

Oh, and while I was moving some papers around, I found "Looking Down the Road" with the comments I never sent you. I've been struggling to find the time to do the line edits for the antho, so I may just stick the hard copy in an envelope and mail it to you with the existing handwritten comments, if that's OK.