If you are reading this, let me warn you: I’m going to say some naughty things below this line. If you are cool with that, come on in. If not . . . well, you know the rules. You can always look at this video on Robosnake.
Onward.
If you are, like me, either a writer, or trying to become more of a writer, or you just like to pen fanfic about what really happened in the Sytheren Commons, then there’s a good chance you have an idea about what’s going on in the world of words. Mostly, you know about contests where you can submit your stories and get some exposure.
It’s easy to do: contests are everywhere. If you are like me, you belong to some form of social media that keeps you up to date on things, and you’ll get comments from the peanut gallery about what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s to be avoided.
Well, here’s one you don’t have to worry about any more: Romance Writers Ink’s 2012 “More Than Magic” contest. Why don’t you have to worry about it? Because the rubes at Romance Writers Ink are a bunch of crazy jackasses, that’s why.
Here’s the deal: when RWI put up the info for their rules, they were pretty eager to go all sorts of places. You could submit in just about every area you could imagine. I mean, everywhere. It was even indicated that if you wanted to write about aliens coming down and having tentacle rape sex with unwilling men and woman, hey, we’ll find someone to judge your work! Now, when I think of romance, I don’t automatically shift over to tentacle rape sex, but hey, whatever floats that boat, right?
However, there was one thing that turned their tummies more than the possibility of a story about someone coating their lover in green slime and fucking their brains out. And that was:
“Note: MTM will no longer accept same-sex entries in any category.”
You got that? Submit a romance about a couple into enema porn; submit a romance about a guy who loves his lady so much he lets her masturbate him with a cheese grater; submit a romance about a guy who’s been blinded by his mistress and loves being her bound toilet. Submit them all.
Just don’t submit a story about Steve and Marty out on a Valentine’s Day dinner discussing their future. ’Cause, my friends, that’s disturbing.
Fortunately, these rubes caught so much shit about their little “guideline”, that they decided to take their gay-hatting ball and go home. (I include this link only because I am in love with that picture of John Barrowman. Deal with it.) Yep, rather than find someone who could judge a romance story about a couple of 60 year-old lesbians who’d been together for 30 years, they said, “Fuck it; we don’t get why you people are hatin’ on us, we’re outta here.”
The last time I checked it was still near the beginning of the second decade of the 21st Century. And while I understand the RWI are based out of Oklahoma–home of High School Lesbians Looking to Turn Your Daughters Gai–I’ve seen reports of similar things. ”No more M/M, F/F.” Right. It’s okay to submit something involving M/M/M/M/M/M/M/F, but lets keep the consensual dick sucking off these pages, got it?
I’ve only been publishing for a while–if by while you mean I have one self published horror story and another story that’s soon to be published by an erotica press. That doesn’t mean I don’t write. I’ve been writing for years. I’ve written a lot of erotica fetish fiction–and within that fiction you’ll find a lot of lesbians. That’s just the way I roll.
And it’s not all about getting down and getting off; one very old story I found involved a lesbian couple working around an extremely unusual curse, but they didn’t care because they truly loved each other, and they figured out how to make it work, curse and all. My first attempted and soon to be finished novel, Transporting, is, in part, about a relationship between a lesbian who’s repressed in the worst way, and a guy who is probably the strangest transgendered person ever.
If you write about people, if you write romance and/or erotica, you’re going to, eventually, write about same-sex couples. Why? Because that’s real shit, people. Gay people are out there, they exist! And they are just like . . . everyone. Want a good job, want a good education, want love, want their kids to have a better life, want the whole fucking dream.
And you’re telling me there are people and publications out there that don’t want me to write about that? Get the fuck out.
I can tell you when I started to give less of a honey badger shit about who was and wasn’t gay. Was in a club in Illinois, late 1976, because I was still 19. Was with friends who was hanging with a couple of their friends. We got to talking about music, and I mentioned my admiration for the Queen. One of my friend’s friends screwed up his face and said, “You know Freddie Mercury’s a fag–”
My response was short and sweet. ”So? Who gives a fuck? He’s a great singer. You’re crazy.”
And that was that. I didn’t care. I like the music, I liked him, and when Freddie died I was heartbroken because he was one of my idols. It’s been like that with a lot of people I have idolized and respect. My favorite writer, Arthur C. Clark? Gay. Elton John, who I also played constantly? Gay. The great skeptic and finder of truth James “The Amazing” Randi? Gay. The aforementioned John Barrowman, who my daughter and I love as Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who and Torchwood? Ah, you haven’t figured out where this is going?
It shouldn’t be a big deal if someone loves someone else and they both have the same genitals. I mean, why should I be concerned? And if I want to write about it, I will. I should be able to do that, right?
But it seems that there are still way too many people out there who think Teh Gai is going to bring about the end of civilization as we know it, and they must be stopped. First off, civilization as we know it could stand to be improved. And second: what fucking planet are you living on? People have been the way they are, straight, gay, transgendered, whatever, for millennia. Do you think reading a passage from the Bible is going to change things more to your liking?
These hate mongers, these people who don’t want us to write tales about gay people, who would rather we just ignore it and hope it all goes away, they are the real deviants. Because they are so wrapped up in their hate they can’t see anything else. As Bill Maher has said about Rick Santorum, “He thinks more about gay people than gay people.” When it becomes that much of an obsession that you can’t see anything else, and you spend all your energy trying to make it go away–you, homophobic ladies and gentlemen, are the true deviants.
Have a little bit of history: it can be argued that World War II was won by a gay man. That man was Alan Turing, and he worked at Bletchley Park breaking the German codes, and once that was done they couldn’t take as shit without the Allies knowing about it. And then it was discovered he was a homosexual, his life was ruined, and in the end he killed himself by, it is speculated, biting into an apple loaded with cyanide. And said apple with the piece bitten out of it is, according to legend, found on every Apple Computer today.
Just remember when you power up that Mac, or turn on that iPhone, or read this on your iPad, you are honoring a gay man who would have turned 100 this year.
Enough of this shit. Let people love who they want, marry who they want. And let us write what we want.
Stop making us have to deal with your perverted outlook on life.
