Not actually a spy

As I may have mentioned, my family visited last weekend. Monday I got a series of messages saying that a member of my family had 1) left a laptop at their hotel, and 2) arranged for me to collect it and ship it to them.

This resulted in me driving up to a hotel in the middle of yesterday afternoon, approaching the front desk, and asking for The Item that Dolores was holding for me. Dolores came from the back. I examined the package. Signed for it. I then turned to the front desk and used their shipping services to send the package on to its destination.

I tweeted, during this, that my errands made me feel like Natasha Romonov, aka The Black Widow.

I did not tweet that I felt like James Bond. Fifteen, twenty years ago, I might have. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the only super-spy my brain might have been able to come up with on short notice might well have been 007. I don’t read or watch a ton of spy genre stuff; I only really know what the general culture knows.

Yesterday, I thought of Natasha. Because our general popular culture now has at the very least one badass female super-spy for me to pretend to be while I’m filling out a FedEx form in the middle of the afternoon.

.
.

Author photos, gender identity, and Bomb Girls

Warning!

The following post contains profanity, navel-gazing, discussions of body image and gender identity, and SPOILERS for seasons 1 and 2 of Bomb Girls.

I recently read Mary Robinette Kowal’s Debut Author Lesson #13, The Author Photo. I read it and thought out loud in my own head, “I’m so glad I don’t need to do that.”

And then a book I co-edited was nominated for a Hugo Award.

And then a venue I wrote something for asked for an author photo.

Soooooo. Perhaps I need an author photo.

I do not spend a great deal of time pondering how I look. Or, rather, I spend a great deal of time deliberately and consciously setting aside the endlessly-sounding messages of my culture on gender performance, weight, size, sexual availability, and age. My general conscious thinking amounts to “well fuck you you fucking fuckers.”

I used to spend an enormous amount of time devoted to thinking about my appearance. I was younger and I had just figured out that I liked girls more the way Katchoo did and less the way Ilyana and Kitty were friends. Okay, maybe the way Rachel and Kitty were friends, and a pox on Mr. Clarement and Mr. Davis for the comic book Excalibur. (No, wait, a thank-you to them for that comic.) I wanted to let girls know I liked them. I wanted to let boys know I did NOT like them the way they liked my boobs. And I wanted to do all of this in a way that did not result in my being assaulted in any way.

I am watching the tv series Bomb Girls. It’s a Canadian series about women who work in a munitions factory in Canada during WWII. One of these women, Betty McRae, spends the first season very clearly telling everyone that she knows she is not like the rest of them. It was perfectly obvious to me that Betty was lesbian. And I started wondering — how were they doing it? On the show, I mean. How were the writers, directors, and the actress, Ali Liebert, portraying the covert queer identity appropriate for Betty McRae?

Part of it is her clothes — Betty wears pants. But so does Gladys, and Gladys is as straight as they come. Betty swaggers and slouches and cocks her hips. So does Vera, and when Vera does it she is attracting men. Betty doesn’t wear much makeup. Neither does Lorna, and Lorna is heterosexual and married. Betty is a cocky leader, telling others what to do. So are Gladys and Lorna. Betty is bad at flirting. So is Kate, who is unimpeachably straight. It’s almost impossible to point to the One Thing Betty Does that codes her as gay — and that, my friends, is the entire point.

Betty must maintain plausible deniability. She cannot be caught being gay. Her gay identity is spiderweb, it is fog, it is rumor and misapprehension.

In season two of Bomb Girls we see Betty flirt with and start a sexual relationship with a woman, Teresa. Their flirting is composed entirely of things that could be taken two ways. Until they are alone together, when the ultimate risk of physical contact is taken, and the truth must be told. Everything, absolutely everything in public is in code.

When I came out in 1992-1993, I was attending Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. This was probably one of the MOST forgiving environments to come out in, in the entire country at the time. Maybe, maybe there were a dozen equally openly queer communities in the U.S. at the time. Macalester was queer, St. Paul was liberal, and it was perfectly safe to hold your girlfriend’s hand as you walked across campus.

Until you got to the bus stop on the corner. Then you were back in the real world.

I recall a night when I was out with friends, walking either to a party or back from a party, I can’t recall which. Said friends and I were perfectly well drunk, progressing somewhat loudly down the sidewalk. A car drove up, full of men. One shouted a sexual invitation. One of my friends replied in obscene refusal. The phrase “fucking dykes” was lobbed back from the car. My friend picked up a beer bottle and threw it at the departing car. We then fled the scene, fearful of reprisal.

Fucking dyke.

No matter how welcoming and accepting Macalester was, it was four square blocks in the center of a city. When my date and I took the bus to the New Riv to see Gallowglass perform, we held hands at the bus stop with the largest, most aggressive FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKERS force-field we could project. It may not have been our wisest course of action, but it was the course we took. We were in lust, and maybe in love, and we were angry and we were afraid.

The first time I kissed a lover, pressed against my car in a parking lot, I was shaking from the sheer audacious defiance of our actions.

I dressed for anger and visibility, in those days. I called myself butch, a statement of gender identity and sexual proclivity. I dressed butch, writing “I am not like you; I am like those other people over there” as loudly as I could — while trying to not actively offend. I relate to Betty McRae’s attempts to show the people like her that, well, she was like them, while not causing everyone else to want to punch her in the face.

Of course, this was the 90s in St. Paul, not a munitions factory in WWII. I shaved half my head and braided electronics parts into the rest because I wanted to live a Shadowrun 2050 life. I wanted to “be a hero, with the ax about to fall / fight for the love and for the glory / for it all” as Emma Bull sang for the band Cats Laughing. I wore combat boots that hurt my feet, and button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled just so, and I had the regulation black leather jacket that was nowhere near warm enough for a Minnesota winter. When I went to the bar for dancing I wore a tie, which my partner would minutely adjust to the perfect angle.

I thought about my appearance a lot in those days. I wanted to tell the world who I was interested in and who I was not, in the hopes that the desired minority would find me appealing.

I … I care a lot less about how I look these days. I understand, more, these days how butch identity can be unthinkingly intertwined with misogyny. I understand, more, these days how butch can be use as a defense against internalized body-hatred. I don’t have the time or attention for dating anyone, so I am far less invested in attracting the romantic attentions of smart, funny, angry, determined women. I spend a lot of time cooking, working out, and cleaning up after dogs and children. I wear sweatpants a lot.

I care far less these days about how I look to others. Or I thought I did, until I was asked to provide a photo that would represent me to hundreds of strangers.

The author photo, as Kowal and other smart, in-the-know people have mentioned, is one’s presentation of self to people who one will never have the chance to impress in person. You have your photo, and if you are LUCKY that stranger will actually read your work. And from that an opinion is formed.

What do I want to say to all of those people? What do I want to say to YOU?

When I was a kid and teenager (until I came out, honestly) my entire wardrobe concept was “please for the love of god please please do not notice me or look at me in any way.” That is not a sartorial aesthetic appropriate to the author photo. When I was a young adult, well, as discussed at length above, my clothes were a compelling contradiction of “please flirt with me if you fall into one of the following narrowly defined categories, the rest of you fuck off in the most polite and inoffensive way possible.” My wardrobe for the last five years has been jeans, a t-shirt, and hiking boots, with variations for weather. That is not really the look I want to promote for myself, though it is the TRUTH.

I’m thinking the slightly nicer version of the truth is applicable here. Something a little bit dressier, maybe. But … but my slightly-nicer clothes are 1) old and scruffy and 2) don’t really fit due to two years of eating healthy and working out. So they are not, in fact, slightly-nicer clothes.

What I want … what I want my author photo to say is what I want my appearance to say to everyone I meet for the first time at conventions and the like. I want to look calm, and cheerful, and vaguely butch-dyke-queer without being defensive about it. I want to look like I care, but not like I care too much. I want to look relaxed, but not diffident. I want to look engaged and happy but not desperate.

I strongly, strongly suspect that the result of all this wanting will result in a vaguely paralyzed, neurotic, rabbit-in-headlights sort of photo. I am actually resigned to this being my fate. But that still doesn’t answer the question which I am now worrying at with obsessive intensity:

What the ever-loving FUCK am I going to WEAR?

What does a forty-year-old, never-was-actually-punk-rock-though-I-did-see-Dead-Milkmen-in-concert, fat, geeky, butch-genderqueer-do-I-really-have-to-pick-a-label, too-busy-for-a-haircut, parent-air-traffic-controller-writer-editor wear in order to say “I’m really a perfectly nice person, I hope you enjoy this work”?

.
.

How do I cast a Hugo Award vote?

So, the Hugo Award nominations have been announced! Fantastic! Look at all those great nominees! I like some of those works, and I know you do, too — so, who votes for them? How? How are the Hugo winners picked?

Hugo Awards are voted on by members of the current year’s Worldcon. This year, Worldcon is LoneStarCon 3.

Attending and supporting members of LoneStarCon 3 can vote for the Hugos.

You do not have to ATTEND Worldcon to vote. You merely have to buy a membership.

Attending membership is $200.00 Supporting membership — which gives you Hugo voting rights — is $60.00

If you buy a membership, you receive the Hugo Voter Packet. The voter packet contains digital copies of the written works nominated. Thus you may read the nominations and cast informed votes.

For your $60.00 supporting membership, then, you get five novels, a bunch of shorter works, the related works, voting rights for this year and nominating rights for next year. It’s not a terrible arrangement.

If you can buy a supporting membership, I urge you to do so. The present we create today becomes history, it becomes precedent for tomorrow’s futures. The votes you cast this year and the works you nominate for 2014 make the world just a little bit bigger, the door a little bit wider, for everyone who comes after you.

Buy a supporting membership. Vote for the works you believe to be genuinely the best in their category. Speak, let your voice be heard. Tell the future what it is that we as fans love. Tell the future that you can see it coming, and are glad.

.
.

The 2013 Hugo Award Nominees

This Saturday the 2013 Hugo Award nominees were announced.

Tor.com has the full list.

Here is the list.

Best Novel.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Blackout by Mira Grant (Orbit)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi (Tor)
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

Best Novella.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Stars Do Not Lie by Jay Lake (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2012)

Best Novelette.

“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)
“Fade To White” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
“In Sea-Salt Tears” by Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
“Rat-Catcher” by Seanan McGuire (A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)

Best Short Story.

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012)
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“Mono no Aware” by Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

Note: category has 3 nominees due to a 5% requirement under Section 3.8.5 of the WSFS constitution.

Best Related Work.

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature Edited by Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge UP)
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Sigrid Ellis (Mad Norwegian Press)
Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who Edited by Deborah Stanish & L.M. Myles (Mad Norwegian Press)
I Have an Idea for a Book… The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg Compiled by Martin H. Greenberg, edited by John Helfers (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box)
Writing Excuses Season Seven by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Jordan Sanderson

Best Graphic Story.

Grandville Bête Noire written and illustrated by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse Comics, Jonathan Cape)
Locke & Key Volume 5: Clockworks written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Saga, Volume One written by Brian K. Vaughn, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
Schlock Mercenary: Random Access Memorabilia by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (Hypernode Media)
Saucer Country, Volume 1: Run written by Paul Cornell, illustrated by Ryan Kelly, Jimmy Broxton and Goran Sudžuka (Vertigo)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form).

The Avengers
The Cabin in the Woods
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hunger Games
Looper

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form).

Doctor Who: “The Angels Take Manhattan”
Doctor Who: “Asylum of the Daleks”
Doctor Who: “The Snowmen”
Fringe: “Letters of Transit”
Game of Thrones:“Blackwater”

Best Editor (Short Form).

John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Stanley Schmidt
Jonathan Strahan
Sheila Williams

Best Editor (Long Form).

Lou Anders
Sheila Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Toni Weisskopf

Best Professional Artist.

Vincent Chong
Julie Dillon
Dan Dos Santos
Chris McGrath
John Picacio

Best Semiprozine.

Apex Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Jason Sizemore and Michael Damian Thomas
Beneath Ceaseless Skies edited by Scott H. Andrews
Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Jason Heller, Sean Wallace and Kate Baker
Lightspeed edited by John Joseph Adams and Stefan Rudnicki
Strange Horizons edited by Niall Harrison, Jed Hartman, Brit Mandelo, An Owomoyela, Julia Rios, Abigail Nussbaum, Sonya Taaffe, Dave Nagdeman and Rebecca Cross

Best Fanzine.

Banana Wings edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
The Drink Tank edited by Chris Garcia and James Bacon
Elitist Book Reviews edited by Steven Diamond
Journey Planet edited by James Bacon, Chris Garcia, Emma J. King, Helen J. Montgomery and Pete Young
SF Signal edited by John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester

Best Fancast.

The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester, John DeNardo, and JP Frantz
SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne M. Valente (Presenters) and David McHone-Chase (Technical Producer)
StarShipSofa, Tony C. Smith

Best Fan Writer.

James Bacon
Christopher J Garcia
Mark Oshiro
Tansy Rayner Roberts
Steven H Silver

Best Fan Artist.

Galen Dara
Brad W. Foster
Spring Schoenhuth
Maurine Starkey
Steve Stiles

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2011 or 2012, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award).

Zen Cho
Max Gladstone
Mur Lafferty
Stina Leicht
Chuck Wendig

***

You will note that this is a fantastic slate of people and works. You may, like me, note that you will be hard-pressed to choose within certain categories.

You may also note that my name is buried somewhere in there.

Chicks Dig Comics has been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

I am torn, incredibly torn, between a gracious, professional response and a wildly enthusiastic profane response. Those of you who have talked to me in person may recall that my first response to excitingly good news is blank affectlessness. I have spent a great deal of time pondering the nomination with blank affect.

The nomination is a wonderful acknowledgment of the stories of the contributors to Chicks Dig Comics. Those of you who nominated the book, I thank you for noticing how fucking amazing those essays are. (I did mention enthusiastic profanity, did I not?)

The nomination is also part of a broader pattern in the Hugo nominees this year. Women. People of color. Queers. I am pleased and proud to be a part of a Hugo slate that represents in some small way the diversity of SF/F that has always been here — but is not always seen.

Fuck Yeah Hugo Nominees. My congratulations to each of you, heartfelt and sincere. Congratufuckinglations.

.
.

Age of the Geek? Age of the Fan.

I’ve been reading some things online that are all swirling around that all seem to indicate something to me about fandom, and fannish power, and fannish creators. I don’t have an actual thesis here, just some thoughts.

1. Creators of properties have frequently been fans of the genre before attempting to create in it, whichever genre “it” may be. But there’s been this new thing in the last twenty years, this internet fandom. And today’s creators are people who have grown up in internet fandom.

2. The BBC article about Jim C. Hines’ cover poses also mentions the Prismatic Art Collection and The Hawkeye Initiative. The Hawkeye Initiative is entirely a fannish thing. It’s people with no connection to creating comics trying to bring about awareness of something stupid in comics. And now it’s in a BBC article.

3. There’s a whole group of creators, in comics and in SF/F, who insist on feminism and gender equality in their work by the simple fact of putting it in their work. These are people around my age or a bit younger. Who grew up being fans of the same things I am a fan of. People who read the life-changing, awesome, and problematic books and comics of my childhood. The people making my comics now are the people who remember Tony Stark’s alcoholic crash, who remember Storm’s punk transformation, who remember Rusty and Skids and Cameron Hodge. The people writing my SF/F are people who read Seaward, The Stand, and Dragonflight. Who read The Cage and Dealing With Dragons and Alanna: The First Adventure. War for the Oaks and The Dragon Waiting and Barrayar. These creators, they put women in their work because women have always been a part of comics and SF/F. A minority part, sure, but often the best, most interesting part.

Brian Wood said, in his interview for Wired magazine, “The female X-Men are amazing characters, they always have been, everyone knows that. They’ve been the best thing about the franchise.”

This is who is writing my comics these days. People who think this.

4. The writers and creators, they are talkative. They tweet and tumbl and blog and do interviews and podcasts. This is how the world is now, yes. But a lot of them, however introverted they may be, they grew up being able to talk to the creators they loved. On message boards, on LiveJournal, at conventions, on The Well, in zines. There’s this idea that communication is a two-way thing.

None of those thoughts are really coherent. I don’t have a thesis. But I like it. I like Kieron Gillen’s Tumblr posts of music and lyrics and images and words, all trying to explain something heartfelt about characters he is gleefully privileged to write. I like Jim Hines’ send-ups of cover art and his commitment to not replicate those problems in his own work. I like that Kelly Sue DeConnick posts knitting pattern fanart of Captain Marvel to her Tumblr. I love the idea that there’s a We, here, of people who genuinely love this stuff. Who love it enough to fight for it, to be angry at it, to gently correct it. Who love it enough to celebrate it, to share it, to laud it.

I’m pleased that my people are now making the things I love.

.
.

Disney, even then

I was pondering, this weekend, how the Disney Princess phenomenon completely missed me. Part of this is due to my complete lack of identification with feminine role models as a child and young adult. But part of it has to do with my age, and what Disney was available to me. If I’d been twelve when Mulan was released, I would have been all over that, I assure you. Or Brave. Or Hercules. Or Tangled.

Looking at Wikipedia, I see that the Disney animated films of my youth were The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, and The Great Mouse Detective. All of which I watched, and all of which I loved. But none of which have super-strong, complex female characters.

I was far more into Disney’s live-action films during this time, to be honest. Escape to Witch Mountain was re-run a lot on weekend afternoons. The Watcher in the Woods showed up sometimes on basic cable. I watched Dragonslayer endlessly, and bought the tie-in book. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Return to Oz. The Journey of Natty Gann. I also watched The Wonderful World of Disney most Sunday evenings.

Disney films were there, in my youth. And they affected me. I cared a great deal about Tony and Tia, Jan, Valerian, Will, Dorothy, and Natty. But there wasn’t the … nigh-universal recognition of these characters among my peers, the way there is for the Princesses today. Part of it’s marketing, sure, yes. But part of it may also simply be that the Disney animated women are really damn good characters in awfully good films. I can’t say that Dragonslayer was actually any good, at all. I can merely say that I watched the parts about the cross-dressing girl a hella lot.

I was sixteen when The Little Mermaid hit theaters. I saw it, of course, and I liked it, of course. But I was sixteen and far, far, far more interested in staring in rapt fascination at my high school roommate as she sang “Poor Unfortunate Souls” than I was in emulating Ariel.

.
.

Most times, she just don’t want you

This article by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Raymond Chandler’s Private Dick

is unknowingly in conversation with this video of a monologue by Lindy West:

Lindy West at Back Fence PDX.

The key part, from Coates:

“It’s a kind of pornography, a humiliated boy’s idea of what manhood must be. I wish more of the art I loved, the art rendered by dudes, did not take sexual vulnerability as something to be defeated, but as an actual fact. You do not get the girl. More directly, you have no actual right to get the girl. Most times, she just don’t want you. And when she does, your reply is, very often, to pine after some other “her.”

Some of us really do go there—Ricky Gervais’s David Brent does it in the extreme. But I’m hunting for more. In the end, we don’t just hate women. We hate ourselves. There’s a lot of juice in confronting not women, not the object, but the subject; in honing in on that part of our makeup which seems bent on our humiliation.”

And the key part, from West:

“And here’s what he says. He says, ‘I’m making this vlog because I’m not happy with the direction that my life is going. I don’t. I’m not, I don’t like my career, if you can call it that, I’m unhappy with the way that I look, I’m unsatisfied with myself as a man, and not just as a man, but as a human being.’”

Read, watch. Contemplate.

My question for myself is, what do I do to make this better for the future?

.
.

Witnessing harassment at Worldcon

I witnessed one incident of harassment at Worldcon. I report it here publicly because I think that we in fandom do not always recognize harassment when we see it. I, personally, did not correctly process what I was seeing until it was too late to intervene. The event came, and went, and then I figured out that I ought to have said something. Too late to act.

I was standing in the elevator bay, waiting for an elevator. Two other people were waiting nearby, talking.

An elevator door opened. A man I recognized stepped out, one arm carrying a box of things.

I know this man. He’s a regular attendee at conventions I go to. I have seen him on panels, I have talked to him at parties. He is not a stranger to me; neither is he a friend. He is a fixture in my understanding of what fandom is.

He stepped out, talking. A voice from inside the elevator contradicted him. The man turned to finished his thought.

I was not listening closely, however, the man was explaining to the two people in the elevator that they were wrong about their opinion of the treatment of another party not present. That Other Party Not Present had not been given enough of an explanation, enough of a chance to understand, for what happened to Other Party Not Present to be appropriate.

A woman in the elevator stepped forward and began pushing the buttons. Either close door or next floor. The doors began to close.

The man talking put his hand over the door to hold the elevator and continue telling the two people that they were wrong.

At this point my attention engaged.

Sigrid, I thought. There are two people, I believe they are both women, in that elevator. The exit is blocked by a man who is telling them how wrong their opinions are, while holding the elevator and preventing them from leaving the conversation. At least one of them is jamming on the elevator buttons, trying to force the doors closed, trying to leave.

At the moment my thinking got this far, the alarm began ringing in the elevator, indicating that the door was being held too long. A voice from inside the elevator said, flatly, you are setting off the alarm.

The man released the door and walked past me, still telling the other two people that they did not understand they way in which they were wrong.

The doors closed, the elevator disappeared. The man walked down the hall and was gone.

I stood there. I thought, “I should have said something. I should have said, ‘Hey [name redacted], they want to leave. Let go of the door.’” I should have let them know that someone saw it and agreed it wasn’t good. I should have let him know that his behavior was crossing a line.

***

I was talking to Elise Matheson over lunch, and she gave me permission to share a private conversation she had elsewhere that is germane to my point. She was discussing an educational poster campaign for another convention, one based on the CONvergence “Costumes are Not Consent,” “Don’t Be a Dink,” and “Don’t Harsh the Squee” campaign.

Elise said that one of the slogans under discussion was “We Don’t Do That Anymore.”

We don’t do that anymore. Think about that for a moment.

I like this as an educational poster slogan. “We.” It reminds us all that we have all been a part of a cultural of sexual harassment at conventions. We have been harassed and not reported it. We have crossed boundaries and not known. We have been told we crossed boundaries and not known how to make amends. We have witnessed and not intervened.

“Don’t Do That.” But now we know better. Now we have been educated and informed. We have strategies and plans. We have people and institutions that we can trust to help us navigate the muddy waters of harassment.

“Anymore.” We have failed in the past. We intend to fail less in the future.

I like this slogan because it captures something often missing from anti-harassment discussion. It captures the complexity and nuance of harassment. It acknowledges that sexual harassment at a convention is not always a boob grope or an offer to trade work for sex. Sometimes harassment is a flashing moment of something ambiguous. Something complicated.

Sometimes sexual harassment is an elevator door.

***

I do not know whether the two people, I think they were both women, felt sexually harassed in the incident I witnessed. I do not know whether they felt threatened. I know at leat one of them wanted to leave, urgently. Did she feel afraid? Angry? Did she really really have to pee?

I don’t know.

I am confident that the man was certain that he was not harassing or threatening anyone. I’ve talked to him at conventions. It is my observation that he habitually does not listen to what people say. I am confident that he was merely finishing his sentence, gently correcting people who do not know as much as he does.

This makes him a poor conversational partner. Does it make him a sexual harasser?

One man forced two women to stand and listen to him berate their views. He did this by physically preventing them from leaving. It this harassment? Is it threatening behavior?

I know what I think. I think it was threatening behavior. I wish, I wish, that I had processed what I was seeing faster, that I had spoken up. I wish I had intervened.

These are the incidents that create the seedy underbelly of conventions. These are the incidents we all don’t see, or let pass by, that enable the more extreme incidents of harassment to occur. When a person thinks they are entitled to trap and berate people — while I am certain he would call it “finishing the conversation” — that person is highly unlikely to see or comprehend other instances where a party is trying to get away.

These are the incidents that we must all begin to see. And on seeing them, find appropriate action to take. Violence would not be appropriate. Shouting would not be appropriate. Telling the guy that I see him, and I think he is behaving poorly, that is what I wished I had done. “Let go of the door, [name redacted], they want to leave.”

I wish I’d said it.

.
.

I like you; that doesn’t make you perfect

I have been watching the tv show Once Upon a Time. It’s a re-visioning of classic fairy tales. The story goes between a modern setting and a fairy-tale one, parceling out the back-story of each character from the stories I know. There’s a lot I like about this show.

I like, for instance, what the show did with The Huntsman. I love what it’s done with Little Red Riding Hood. I am liking the Evil Queen in both her forms, I am liking the Snow White in the past story. The adoption story is not progressive, certainly, but I find all parties sympathetic. I like the coherent fairy-tale world being built. I am, in general, a big fan of fairy tales in all their forms.

That doesn’t mean I think fairy tales are perfect stories. Nor do I think OUaT is a perfect show.

A Twitter-friend of mine gripes, after almost every episode, that for a “modern” retelling of fairy tales the show is oddly devoid of queer characters. I can explain this away — it’s set in a very small town, if the characters are all fairy tale residents the original texts are pretty much straight, etc. But then I started wondering. Are the defenses and justifications I mentally offer even true?

Thinking about the communities in which I move, they all have queer people in them. By simple virtue of the fact that I am in them. But I don’t know — is it really that likely that an average small town would have not a single gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person in it? Granted, a lot of QUILTBAG folks move out of the small towns of their origin. But the people there would know them. They would come home to visit. Is it plausible for any town in the U.S. to have no queer presence?

And, my other justification — that there’s no queerness in fairy tales.

…

Well, that’s just not true. There’s little such representation in the Disney versions of such tales (though you can make it exist if you squint right) but the original stories are … not written to the currently fashionable definitions of human sexuality. The stories are malleable, and fluid, and they meet people’s needs in different ways at different times. An argument can be made for all sorts of sexual and gender representation in fairy tales. You just have to read a lot of them to find it.

And, as much as OUaT fails on queer issues, let’s not even mention the representation of people of color. Okay, no, let’s mention it. Yes, these stories are drawn largely from a Northern European – Germanic tradition. However, if you are changing the stories the way you already have, GO AHEAD and add more people of color. Besides, there’s considerable historical evidence that the cities of Northern Europe, even in the so-called Dark Ages, were cosmopolitan hubs where small communities of Jews and Moors lived. People of color; not as scarce as you might think.

Yet …

Yet I am used to living in a world where I don’t exist in fiction. I am accustomed to not seeing lesbians, or butches, or multi-ethnic familes on my television, in my comics, or in my movies. Sometimes this makes me very angry. Sometimes, I shrug and ignore it. Sometimes I walk away from a creative property over these issues. Sometimes I defend the story and can justify its flaws.

But sometimes, sometimes I can like a thing a lot for what it does, and be angry at it at the same time. Once Upon a Time is one of those latter cases. There’s a lot to like. There’s a lot that makes me grind my teeth in frustration. I don’t know, overall, how long I will keep watching.

It’s hard for me to sustain anger at every damn thing in the world that promotes messages of misogyny, queer invisibility, and white-washing. That’s most of my culture, there. I would be angry all of the time. I know of people who are like this, who sustain outrage and anger at manifest injustices, and I admire their stamina. Yet I don’t share it.

I can’t stay angry at Once Upon a Time for being what it is. I’m not even disappointed, really. And I like much of what it tries to do. But that doesn’t mean it gets a pass. It’s still screwing up some pretty important things, and I notice every time.

Friday Night Lights: The Taylors

Friday Night Lights is on its fifth season. (Full disclosure: I’ve only seen season one, part of season two, and now I am watching season five.) The show is overtly about football and small town Texas life. However, it is not-so-secretly about how you choose your adulthood. In service of this FNL provides us with the best, most honorable, forthright, honest, positive portrayal of heteronormative marriage I have ever seen on television — Eric and Tami Taylor.

I am utterly fascinated by the power and integrity these two characters possess within the complex limits of their class and gender roles. I wonder how on earth they learned to take the power, to hold the integrity..

The show occasionally makes the rules of their lives explicit, as one of them explains a concept to one of the teenagers in their spheres of influence. Coach Taylor gets to tell the young men on his team exactly how men behave. And it is always phrased that way, this is how men behave. Not like hoodlums, not abusive, not conniving, but like men. Tami doesn’t operate in such blissfully hierarchical venues — as a guidance counselor, her charges feel obligated to ignore her rather than do everything she says — but she still discusses self-esteem and how to make better decisions. And, while her words may be cast aside, her example is harder to ignore. Tami Taylor’s skill with the microdegrees of nuance available in a smiling “Hiiii, there!” is art in action. Art, I tell you.

In their marriage, the Taylors are astonishing. They argue when the disagree — yet they never attack each other. They snipe when they are tired or upset, but they never take it personally. They support each other’s goals and the jointly-agreed-upon family goals — and when they have communicated poorly about those goals, they argue and walk away mad and come back later and talk it out. Their respect for each other doesn’t seem to end. And their attraction to each other is evident in almost every episode.

Coach and Tami Taylor are up there with Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan in my list of Role Models of Marriage.

In the mid-90s, when my peers and I spent much of our free time deconstructing gender, I wish Friday Night Lights had been on the air. Coach and Tami Taylor give heteronormativity a good name.