Gay Historical Fiction FAQ
Q: Why gay historical fiction?
A: Because there’s so little of it, and it wasn’t until I started making A LIST of it that I found just how little there was.
When you think of how many thousands of heterosexual historical books there are, it’s about time that the gay stories throughout history were told.
Q: What do you review?
A: Gay Historical fiction.
Q: What don’t you review?
A: We do not - at this time - review anything with a fantasy theme, such as AU earth, steampunk, or with things that don’t exist such as shapeshifters even if the setting is historical.
Q: Why?
Because this is a very small genre. We want to encourage people to write more gay historical fiction and to get as passionate as we are about it, getting the details right. There are many other review sites where stories involving vampires and shapeshifters can be reviewed. We make an exception for ghost stories, however.
Q: Will you be critical of OKHOMO?
A: Yes. We personally think that OK HOMO is not a true releflection of the gay struggle. It is possible to still write a story about a gay man without loading a book down with homophobia whilst still remaining true to the era. Making everyone gay, and or making everyone fine about it insults the journey that gay men have had throughout the ages.
Current banner by cynbaby with grateful thanks
4 Comments
January 5, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Ooooh, can I comment on that OKHomo thing as a Gay Man?
I would rather have an exploration of Gay Male relationships by Straight Women writers in a fantasy like setting using “everyone Gay, and or making everyone fine about it” than having the writer try to describe my personal journey and mess up badly. My problems with such stories tend not to focus on that aspect but many others.
Now critically speaking these trappings can make for stale and boring stories with no realistic character development or motivation but “insulting to me?”
Nah, to insult me personally would be to over generalize about my personal journey which may or may not be different than any other Gay Man’s journey in dealing with his particular sexuality.
I believe there are other personal journeys that have less to do with being Gay but may also include the problems of race or culture that I respect as being even harsher than the problems I have faced just being a Gay Man.
I expect more from real Gay Male authors and find they frequently do much worse in being insulting. Mostly by insulting my intelligence.
January 6, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Of course! I welcome all comments!
I do agree - I’ve read some male writers who write just as okhomo as any straight female, and I’m all for “in a fantasy setting” - I’ve read many a fantasy setting and have written them myself. I don’t want to see the OK Homo in a supposedly “real” Victorian London drama for example.
I’m reading one at the moment The Journeyer by J P Bowie which does have elements of OKHomo, in as much as all the shipmates are OK with it, and then later all the Chocktaw Indians are too - but the actual relationships are not the emphasis of the book, the adventure is and hurrah for that - more of them too.
March 5, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I think there’s a big difference between ‘okhomo’ (where the wind comes sweeping down the plain) in a sci-fi setting such as Bujold’s ‘Beta colony’ that has saner attitudes toward sexuality than those on planet Earth, and stories that claim to be historical but are actually fantasies because they portray an unrealistic setting that pretends to be an earlier era of this planet’s history. One might as well write of out gay lovers in a place like Iran, where fundamentalism is still legally murdering people in the name of religion.
The world lost what Oscar Wilde might have done if his health had not been destroyed in prison. Alan Turing, called the father of modern computing, was hounded to death instead of being knighted for his work in cracking Enigma. And England had its closeted spies who were blackmailed into treason because they were more afraid of being persecuted for their sexuality than prosecuted for espionage. This is historical fact. The willingness to do research has nothing to do with a writer’s personal gender or sexuality. And I think it’s respectful toward the people of an era–and the reader–to try for a reasonable degree of accuracy.
When some of the ManLove writers did a book signing at the late lamented Lambda Rising in Virginia Beach, the shop manager remarked that much of the best gay romance was written by women. His observation, not mine. I don’t know if other female writers have a gay beta, but I do have a friend who vets my stuff for physical and emotional impossibilities, and the feedback I’ve had from gay men suggests that I haven’t made any egregious errors.
Some men won’t read anything written by a woman. {shrug} We all have our preferences; I’m not partial to ‘Christian’ inspirationals. But my wife would laugh if I tried to pretend I was a het woman.
Every one of us has a different journey. I think it’s only respectful–of the people in an era and of the reader’s intelligence–to try to at least approximate a realistic setting for a historical story. Teddy, you are a 21st-century man. Your journey is contemporary, as opposed to historical, and nobody can write it but you. If you do, I’d like to read it.
March 17, 2008 at 6:01 am
Hmm, I don’t think that writing a solidly researched historical story that portrays accurate social attitudes about homosexuality with specific fictional gay and straight characters is generalizing about any modern gay man’s personal experience. Likewise, neither is OKHOMO in a nominally historical book, but it’s doing a disservice, I think, to the real people (dead as they are) who definitely didn’t live in an OKHOMO world. OKHOMO in SF or fantasy = great, have at.
But I also don’t think that any specific gay character should be taken as a generalization of all gay people (unless the author suggests so), since members of a group always have a range of experiences. I certainly haven’t yet found any bisexual female characters with experiences similar to mine, but that doesn’t mean they’re not plausible or that I can’t enjoy reading about them. As long as characters ring true to their settings and fictional experiences and are interesting to read about, I’m happy.
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