Excerpt
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
When I was a kid, a book about chopping up and murdering women came out from a major literary publisher, and it got pretty good reviews, and in the year I turned fourteen, the book was turned into a large-scale theatrical release with Christian Bale! Now, the book and movie were good, but they made me think, wow, nothing is transgressive anymore. There is absolutely nothing you can do to offend people.
Now it's thirty years later, and a guy in a dress reading a story to kids is enough to put some Americans into a killing rage. It's very, very perplexing, and it's something I try not to think about too much, if I'm being honest.
Whether a story upsets people or not is immaterial. Queer people aren't better or more worthy simply because people have decided to hate us, and the barrier for offending the right-wing these days is so low that their standards are honestly a bit tedious. The presence of the right-wing anger machine has altered the environment for queer fiction, made it much more dangerous, given any story the possibility of eliciting a backlash, without necessarily improving the overall quality of queer work.
Nonetheless, I do think queer writers have a formal, aesthetic advantage when it comes to crafting our stories. From my perspective, what separates queer people from cis-het people is the role of choice. You may be born with queer desires, but society will always assume you are straight and cisgendered. One reason queer people unsettle straight people is that our desire is so naked. We cannot hide it. For a child to come out to their parent is concomitant with saying, I want this kind of sex, I want these kinds of relationships. Whereas cis-het life is designed to take boys and girls on a conveyer belt that conveniently hides the realities of desire: you date and get married and have kids not because of desires, but because it's what you're supposed to do. Queer life is always different. It's always strange. It always begins in an act of assertion: I want something different from what's expected.
This means that queer lives, by nature, contain the central elements of a good story: longing and agency.
All stories, in my opinion, should be driven by longing, but in cis-het stories, the longing is often external or inchoate—the protagonist at the beginning is asleep or doesn't know what they want or they are driven by duty. Queer writers are granted merciful relief from all this dilly-dallying. We know that every queer life, at least in its social component, begins with self-conscious action.
As guest editor, I was most drawn to stories that were about the intertwining of choice and longing. Stories like "My Dad Bought A Space Shuttle," which interrogates the male fantasy of going into space, or "The Planned Obsolesence of the Human Body," where a human woman's fear of the meaningless of digital upload becomes incarnated as the fleshly world grows thinner and less populated, or "Beginnings," about the sultry and doomed attraction between two best friends. Each of these stories felt inescapably queer, precisely because they lingered on that moment of choice which, to me, is at the heart of both every queer life and every good fiction.
