Roundtable: Speculative Pride

While June has come and gone, here at Speculative Chic we’re continuing Pride by bringing you the creators, creatives, and creations from the LGBTQIA+ community that we absolutely love. Just as there are many colors in the rainbow, there are many things that enrich our lives and bring us joy. Take a look!

With Jessica Crouse as Xena at Farpoint 2019.

J.L. Gribble: As a professional writer, I attend a lot of pop culture media conventions. Often I spend time at these conventions with fellow authors, which is a chance to catch up with people I might see once or twice a year. But in early 2018, I attended a local convention where I didn’t have any close friends. I had to (gasp) meet new people.

Luckily, my first panel of the weekend was on the show Supernatural and there was a lovely woman dressed as Bellatrix Lestrange sitting next to me. When the panel was over, I gathered my courage, told her she seemed pretty cool, and did she mind if I invited myself to dinner with whatever plans she’d already made?

And thus, I met the cosplayers. Not just any cosplayers, however. These lovely people were part of an organization called LGBT HQ, a group dedicated to diversity in fandom. As a proponent of this topic myself, I was pleased to have the opportunity to listen to and learn about ways LGBT HQ is supporting their mission.

With Jazmin Cosplays as Daphne at Farpoint 2019.

The lady dressed as Bellatrix, Jessica Crouse, can often be found at conventions cosplaying as Xena: Warrior Princess. I also had the pleasure to meet and befriend Jazmine Cosplays, Jay Justice, and D’Manda Martini. They run the gamut of the LGBTQ spectrum, representing this in their cosplay and showing the world that fandom and cosplay are for everybody.

Members of this organization are frequent panelists at conventions, speaking on topics such as sexuality in cosplay, representation in pop culture and comics, and even specific fandoms such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As convention organizers start to realize that diversity in their panelists is as important as diversity in their programming topics, I’m excited to run into LGBT HQ representatives at more events.

They’re fun to hang out with, happy to take goofy pictures with fans, and most importantly: showing fandom that they belong in this culture, like we all do.

Kelly McCarty: When I think about speculative fiction that celebrates LGBTQIA+ people, the incredibly diverse work of Seanan McGuire immediately comes to mind. She writes fantasy under her own name and science fiction/horror under the pseudonym Mira Grant. McGuire herself identifies as pansexual, defined as the sexual and romantic attraction to people regardless of their sex or gender identity.

Her Wayward Children series is a modern take on Alice in Wonderland that features children, mainly girls, who fall through portals into magical universes and somehow wind up exiled back into the real world. Their parents don’t believe them and can’t handle that their children want to return to their “real” homes, so the children wind up at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.  The series isn’t marketed as young adult fiction, but I would highly recommend it for teens because the books are fundamentally about the struggle to find a place in the world. The narrator of the first novella, Every Heart a Doorway, Nancy, is asexual (a person who does not experience sexual attraction). I don’t think I have ever read a book before with a narrator who was definitively described as asexual. In Every Heart a Doorway, Nancy befriends Kade, who is transgender. Kade’s story is particularly tragic because she was expelled from her world when the fairies discover that she is trans. In the second novella, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Jack is a lesbian whose girlfriend, Alexis, shows her love in a unforgiving, violent world.

I’m actually a bigger fan of Seanan McGuire’s harder-edged books under her pen name, Mira Grant. The Mira Grant series have premises that sound terrible but turn out to be awesome. The Newsflesh books are political thrillers with zombies. In 2014, scientists attempted to cure cancer and the common cold accidentally create the Kellis-Amberlee virus, which turns corpses into zombies. It’s now 2039 and adoptive siblings Georgia and Shaun Mason and their friend Buffy are a team of tech-savvy bloggers who have never lived in a world without zombies. They’re selected to cover Presidential hopeful Peter Ryman’s campaign. The diversity in McGuire’s work is so natural that I had forgotten that Buffy was bisexual.

Into the Drowning Deep and Rolling in the Deep are about killer mermaids. When I think of mermaids, I picture Ariel singing with crustaceans, but these mermaids are legitimately scary. Victoria, the main character of Into the Drowning Deep is a bisexual woman who has an unsupportive boyfriend at the start of book. She finds a new relationship with Olivia, a lesbian entertainment reporter, while they’re at sea searching for murderous mermaids.

One of the reasons that I love Seanan McGuire is that she is one of the few popular authors whose work routinely includes characters with disabilities. Jack in Down Among the Sticks and Bones has OCD.  Into the Drowning Deep’s Olivia has autism and there are also two scientists who are deaf. When I was completing my 2018 resolution to read more diverse books, the biggest challenge was finding books about disabled characters. McGuire’s work truly does not leave anyone unrepresented.

Kristina Elyse Butke: I confess, I find I have less and less time to commit to reading than I’d like, so I’ve been seeking out more manageable pieces to work with. Door-stopper novels are common in science fiction and fantasy (with page counts so substantial you can use the book to “HOD the DOR!”), but even a standard 300-page book is hard for me to handle. So, I’ve been eating up publisher Tor.com’s novellas, and that’s how I discovered author Margaret Killjoy.

Killjoy’s book The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion is not the type of fantasy I usually seek out: it’s political, it’s punk, it’s anarchist; it’s even a bit of a manifesto. My interests lie with things tending towards the whimsical and traditional (like fairytales!), so if it wasn’t for the blurb or the gorgeous cover, I probably would’ve missed out on this work completely…and what a shame that would be, because this book (and the series protagonist Danielle Cain), is badass.

Danielle Cain is an anarchist traveler with nothing rooting her in place. She strongly believes in “No real plans, only chaos. This is how we’re meant to live.” She journeys to a utopian squatter settlement in Freedom, Iowa, to investigate the circumstances behind her friend Clay’s suicide, and discovers something both awesome and terrible: magic is real, and magic has summoned an “endless spirit” known as Uliksi to serve as protector of the town. Uliksi is the titular “lamb that slaughters the lion” — it is a blood-red, three-horned deer that hunts down predators and champions the prey…and its method of handing down justice is both gruesome and symbolic.

Actually…this entire book is gruesome and symbolic. There’s what’s occurring on the page — a story of people calling on a power they don’t understand, and the implications of using that power — and then there’s the motifs, symbolism, imagery, ideology, and commentary on top of all of that (but I don’t think any of it’s heavy-handed).

For a 125-page novella, this story packs a wollop, and I openly admit that this is a work that requires more than one reading just to catch everything that’s going on (especially if you’re like me and have had no exposure to anarcho-punk). As I read this, I’d come across a passage and interpret it as literal events happening (such as how Uliksi chooses to destroy or resurrect) and then pause and think, “There’s more to this. What else does this mean?” It’s been a while since I’ve participated in a text like this.

As an exhausted reader, I’ve tended to avoid engaging in a work this way for some time, so what really helped me plow through it besides the mythical animal spirit Uliksi is Danielle herself, who, like the author, is queer and transfeminine. She’s the protagonist and narrator of the series, and I enjoy her voice. She’s unpretentious and the type of person to readily admit “polysyllabic expression [is] sort of beyond me.”  She’s funny, matter-of-fact, and often painted as cynical, but I see spots of optimism in there, too, especially in her worldview and politics.  She, like the other diverse characters in the book, is a champion of “everything for everyone,” and believes “in a messy, imperfect world where we just, collectively or individually, figure things out.” This is the current that flows throughout the creepy horror story of The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.

I’m currently working through Killjoy’s second book in the Danielle Cain series, The Barrow Will Send What It May, which picks up one week after the events in The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion. So far there are only two works in this series, but it’s my hope we will get a third book (or more!) with this heroine and her creepy, supernatural adventures that explore the nature of power and what it does to those who possess it.

Nancy O’Toole Meservier: There’s a lot of great speculative LGBTQIA+ content out there, but one book that’s had a big impact on me recently is Dreadnought by April Daniels. Dreadnought tells the story of Danny Tozer, a transgender teen dealing with the difficulties that come with being in the closet. Then Dreadnought, the world’s most powerful superhero, dies in a freak accident. Danny happens to stumble upon him in his final moments, an encounter that results in her inheriting his powers. This action also grants Danny’s greatest wish: a female body. Unfortunately, this doesn’t solve her existing problems, including a domineering father who refuses to accept Danny as anything else than a boy, and a passive mother who always chooses her husband’s wishes over her child. As Danny struggles to keep the peace in her own household, she finds herself with another impossible challenge: finding Dreadnought’s killer.

If I had to choose one word to describe the novel Dreadnought, it would be powerful. April Daniels just does such a fantastic job of putting us in Danny’s head and getting the reader to sympathize with her struggles. There were actually moments (mainly the ones dealing with her father) when I had to pause the audiobook, as Danny’s pain was so palpable. But while Danny’s story has its fair share of difficulties, there are bright spots as well. I loved the scenes where she first experiments with her newfound powers and learns what it means to be a hero.

Dreadnought is the first book in a series, and it’s clear from the ending that there’s still plenty of story left to tell. I look forward to picking up the rest of the series and seeing where her life takes her next.

This is just a sample of some of the wonderful work from LGBTQIA+ creatives out there, and as with any list, you know we’ve left things out! So, join in our conversation! What speculative works touch your heart and fill you with pride? Please comment below!