Taking stock of my writing post 2, the reason why I need to break this up into multiple posts

[olivermoss]

Part 3 - Axes to Grind

I have two fic projects I need to do, because of old drama.

I've seen Mercedes Lackey's The Last Herald Mage trilogy cited as the first example of canonical gay male protag in fantasy fiction. I don't think this is right, but when I've asked around I have yet to have anyone answer with anything earlier. So, while it may not strictly true - sci fi books that some today might classify as closer to fantasy were earlier, Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner isn't really fantasy and is tricky for a number of reasons... but even if we count Swordspoint it was barely earlier and didn't have wide distribution until years later - it's still a big deal. Functionally, for most people, Last Herald Mage was it. I think these books and some other Mercedes Lackey books have had a very big impact that isn't well understood because genre fiction got away with a lot by flying under the radar. What was going on in genre fic wasn't well documented and it didn't want to be well documented.

The fact that sci fi has a lot of earlier gay but not fantasy is utterly baffling to me, but here we are.

The axe I have to grind isn't with this or any Valdemar book, I am just establishing a bit of context. The first book in that trilogy with poor, oppressed, uber-woobie Vanyel Ashkevron came out in 1989. Him being gay all through his life and death and afterlife is never questioned, never erased, never walked back. Foreshadowing is a narrative device that-

Between the publication of the first Woobie Vanyel and the last, Knight of Ghosts and Shadows by Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon came out. In this book Eric, our hero, is in love with Beth. He thinks she's out of his league, but as the book events progress and they have more reason to interact, he realizes that she likes him more than he thought and in general he is more liked and appreciated than he thought. Basically, her take on Eric is very 'if you just get your life a little more together, boyo'

But, his life is complicated by an elf named Korendil. He doesn't know what to do with this elf and he thinks he'll have what he wants in life if he pushes the elf away, but he can't. He feels things about Korendil and is unsettled by those feelings, and that's getting in the way of chasing Beth (again, or so he thinks)

Then, Eric finds Beth and Korendil got together and he is just broken by it. He feels intense things for both of them and he's suddenly sharply cut off from both of them. But they explain that they both want him. He is very confused but eventually realizes he's being invited into the relationship.

Bi men and poly rep? In 1990 fantasy lit? Well, no because it gets retconned with a sledgehammer.

The series was later continued as a collab between Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill. I was also a big fan of Rosemary Edghill and had spent significant amounts of time tracking down her urban fantasy books. To say I was hype about my two favorite authors continuing the story of Eric, Korendil and Beth is an understatement. So, imagine my reaction when he is described as distant from them, that him being close to them would be inappropriate and that they never were close. I forget how the narrational voice puts it's exactly, but this wasn't a smooth retconning. They didn't go with a hand-wavy 'they were close once but realized blah blah blah'. They went in with a machete, they left a scar. I am not the only person for whom this is a sore point.

Bringing up KoGaS in certain fandom spaces and watching them turn into a major bitch session is something I enjoy indulging in. It's not just me, there are dozens of us! But I mean, think of all the drama over rep just in the past few years, even though we have tons more rep these days. These Mercedes Lackey books were A Big Deal to a lot of people and it's easy to see why.

So, I feel a deep need to write Korendil definitely, explicitly taking Eric. It might sound like spitefic, but it's not. It's a writing exercise. I want to write urban fantasy and this book is one that has stayed with me. Okay, it's a little bit spite fic but also it's breaking down this feeling into something useful.

Explaining this is why I am breaking up my 'taking stock' post into 3 parts. I will feel better if I write some absolute smut that no one is probably going to read in the year of our lord twenty thirteen. Wait, it's a new year, it's twenty fourteen now.

* Second (and final) Axe!

I could go on at length about this, but I will try to be brief. I need to post at least one more slash fic for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. It had a big slash fandom back in the day, but this was before Ao3 and all the archives got harassed offline and to this day just... the way the people still in fandom talk about fanfic... Passing around explicit torture porn of Penny Priddy was 'all in good, healthy fun'. But boys kissing? Disrespectful, to the writer and to the actors and to everyone! Gross!

So, people like me got run out and they held up Ernest Cline like a genius. (Note for clarity - While Cline's stuff was het, the explicit torture porn was not by him afaik. I was just wanted to show how extreme the double standard was) Fandom was very insistent that Cline was NOT a fanficcer, his TABB-based fiction was literature! And now omg A huge virtual world based on “Ready Player One,” a story set in a future where people enter into a virtual-reality simulation to escape the real world, is coming soon...

Futureverse, an AI and metaverse technology and content company... to exclusively bring the Ready Player One franchise to the metaverse across web3."

Yes, I have emotions about the TABB fandom holding up transphobe Cline's fanfic as important and rallying around everything he did while people like me where harassed out of fandom spaces, but there is nothing I can do except just finish a bit more of my own fic, stick it in the Archive and sometimes sadly say that yes, Tommy/Rawhide was the juggernaut pairing back in the day.

What TABB fic I have posted isn't very good. Having one solid story up there will make me happy even if it never gets read. And again, like with the Mercedes Lackey thing, it's also about processing a canon that was important to me, breaking it down and maybe figuring out what I want to do with my own origfic.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for this fascinating history!

[olivermoss]

Thank you for reading it! Because I started with Kushner and Lackey, I took it for granted fantasy was just like that. The idea that they were the first is still something my brain just rejects. In terms of canon gay men at all, there's a Barbara Hambly book one year before Magic's Promise that I see referred to as the first canon gay in fantasy due to a side character. I haven't read it so I don't know if it's really canon or not.

[mistressofmuses]

I never got into Knights of Ghost and Shadow (though I think I may have checked it out of the library a few times, but just never actually sat down to read it), but that would remain an ENORMOUS sore spot for me, gotta say. I would absolutely still be bitter about it!

So while it may not be spite fic, it'd still be righteous spite fic if it was, lol.

I fucking remember that "anything goes, except for the icky gross yucky disrespectful GAY", which was still a common flavor in the early 00s when I entered fandom, even if the attitude had started to relax a bit.

Also, fuck Ernest Cline.

BUT. I really like both of those conceptual projects. Even if they aren't spite fic, or have spite as only the slightest of spices on the dish of motivation (I am reaching with this metaphor, sorry), I do like the reasoning behind them.
Looking back at the things that stuck with you, exploring why they did so, or the ways in which they could have been made even better... the stories that they could have been in a different social climate, or magnifying the aspects that most appealed to you... I think that's a really good way to figure out what things you want out of your own works. Exploring what you find compelling in other stories helps you know what works for you in your own stuff.

[olivermoss]

I double checked the timeline before posting this and yeah, if there were earlier fantasy books with gay rep no one's heard of them. It really went Swordspoint (not fantasy but often shelved with it), a Barbara Hambly book with a minor character heavily implied to be gay, then the 4 Mercedes Lackey books... and the 4 ML books were over about 18 months. In context, it's brutal. Even without the compounding Bi Erasure factor, they walked back one of the earliest pieces of queer rep in fantasy, 2nd protag ever. Focus on the Bi Erasure factor and, just damn.

I think the proper category for Swordspoint would be regency pastiche? But the cover art was that sort of watercolor-art nouveau that a lot of fantasy covers at the time were so it often got lumped in.

I fully blame this for trying to find acceptance in fantasy nerd spaces when honestly, they tend to be conservative. Because there was such a 'under the radar' vibe with queer rep, I assumed that there was more out there that I just didn't know about. I assumed what I read wasn't like... landmark rep in direct contrast to everything about the scene.

It has been interesting to break down things about all of ML's urban fantasy with elves books in my head. For TABB I know what compels me about that movie, but I still want to plant my little flag in a place they can't touch it.

And yeah, fuck Ernest Cline so much, so very much.

[mistressofmuses]

I feel like that's something I've tried to look for before, too. It felt like Vanyel *couldn't* actually be the first; it feels like he must have been an early popular example, but like it should have come on the heels of less well-known stories from before.

(I haven't read Swordspoint, but looking up the cover, oh yes, I see what you mean. The internet seems to say it's a defining work of the "fantasy of manners" subgenre, which is not a subgenre I would ever have considered as a distinct thing, but appears to be what the author calls it, too. But yeah, fantasy by technicality, not the KIND of fantasy we're talking about.)

I won't categorically say there were NO gay fantasy protagonists before The Last Herald Mage, but I'm with you: at the very least, there aren't any from before that that are easy to find record of now, or that anyone really seems to remember. (Sci-fi, yes, if tending to skew metaphorical; fantasy, no.)

(At least no earlier gay male protagonists. I seem to remember an old interview or book forward or something that positioned Lackey's "Oathbreaker" books (or the short stories they'd started as), and the characters Tarma and Kethry, as sort of in opposition to alleged cliche stories about female warriors that were basically just... gender-swapped Conan and their female love interests. Yet at the time, I just remember thinking "well, where the hell are all these supposedly too-plentiful sword and sorcery lesbians??" So while that interview points to that being a THING, I don't remember ever encountering it, must less being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity! Though maybe it was just supposedly in short zine fiction that's harder to find now.)

Granted, I'm not an expert in 80s and earlier fantasy, so there could well be stuff I just don't know about... but the fact that no one else seems to have any older examples makes me feel like it isn't just that.

But seriously... to utterly retcon what may be the second real example of a non-straight male fantasy protagonist? The bi erasure, the tragic avoidance of an early example of an intentional poly relationship. I feel betrayed, and I wasn't even there!

I think that fantasy and sci-fi spaces always felt like they should be queer-friendly, because it was a genre that was largely enjoyed by outcasts. The nerds, the geeks, etc. It feels like a space that SHOULD be welcoming or affirming... and yet it really DOES have that awful conservative bent in practice, at least in many spaces. "We may be weirdos, but we aren't THAT kind of weird, gross!" Or people who just enjoy envisioning a fantasy version of the same rigid roles that exist in real life... just in a way that rewards them specifically. Idk, I don't think I'm phrasing it well, but it IS a frustrating thing to have encountered and then sort of felt chased away from. It's a lot friendlier to queer identities now, and compared to the early days, we're spoiled for non-straight/non-cis protags/characters/worlds. (And I know a lot of this applies to other marginalizations as well.) But that doesn't erase decades of encountering overt This Space Is Not For You And You Are Wrong And Bad gatekeeping.

I am fully in favor of getting out the works you want to have exist in the world!

But fuck Ernest Cline. Everything I hear about him makes him sound worse.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, when I saw Vanyel called the first in an article I immediately went to debunk it. I read through forum threads, I adjusted my search keywords, I asked in a lot of fandom spaces. Yeah, still can't find nothing. It feels wrong!

I don't know what was going on in zines, or magazines. A lot of the female fantasy authors of that era wrote a lot of fanfic and then denied it for decades. afaik it's mostly lost media. There may have been things you could get at cons that we just don't know about.

I haven't reread Oathbreakers in ages, but I don't remember getting the vibe they were together and also Kethry winds up married off to a guy? *paws through some goodreads reviews* Yeah, my memory seems to be correct. I do think there is a reference to a lesbian couple in Arrows of the Queen? I should try to re-read those at a point even though going back to books I was so obsessed with at the time would feel weird. My brain insisting on there being something in Arrows is why I specified gay male rep... but there's got to be some low key lesbians with plausible deniability somewhere in the 70s, right? Right?

A lot of fantasy tropes about rightful monarchs and lost heirs and re-establishing a half forgotten god really does lend itself to conservative viewpoints. I was so confused by certain people being tolerated at scifi/fan cons but honestly, I just though I kept running into unusually conservative nerd spaces. It's unfair that I can't explain a few things to past-me. I was so hopeful, and dumb

[mistressofmuses]

Poking around, I found ONE earlier series mentioned in a few places: The Chronicles of Tornor, by Elizabeth A Lynn. I found some mentions of it being one of the first fantasy series (it's a trilogy, but most things seem to call it a series) that had queer relationships as somewhat unremarkable, normalized, accepted things. The first two books came out in 1979, and the third in 1980, which seems pretty ahead of the curve.

However, a slightly more recent review of the first book, "Watchtower," mentions that while the lesbian characters seem to have a pretty good, reasonably open relationship, the gay male characters (does this include the protag? maybe! I don't know!) in at least that first book are less so, seeming more about repressed feelings and loss and such. It sounds like this one might be more of a "tragedy of war" book than a fantasy escape.
There are also a lot of excerpts (one in that review, a couple from amazon reviews) that make me think I wouldn't care much for the writing style, though a lot of people also say that the style grew on them and they ended up enjoying it and finding it poetic rather than choppy, ha.
I've heard of the second book, "The Dancers of Arun," but only by title, and had never realized it was a part of a trilogy or that it was apparently kinda queer. But it also sounds like the protag's queer relationship is maybe an incestuous one with his brother (and maybe also the brother's other lover?), which seems to be a polarizing element in the goodreads reviews I skimmed.
Book three ("The Northern Girl") seems to focus on a lesbian protagonist.
That same review of the first book also mentions that a lot of people don't consider it to be truly fantasy, though by description of all three it sounds more like typical fantasy than Swordspoint.
I haven't read any of the three, but those may be an earlier example? It does look like old copies can be obtained pretty cheaply, so it might not be hard to find out for posterity. Still. ONE possible example is still pretty lean pickings.

Oh yeah, Tarma and Kethry weren't ever romantically together. Tarma is asexual/aromantic (though if I recall she did that to herself somehow, as like... spiritual payment? I do not remember) and Kethry does get married to a man. But the two of them are like... platonically lifebonded, I think? (And in retrospect, I think now they might be considered a decent "queerplatonic" example.) I recall the forward or interview having more of a tone like "ha, these characters are super subversive because they AREN'T in lesbians with each other, unlike the current cliche!" which just made me wonder where this overabundance of lesbian characters was to be found, that we were having to treat het as edgy mold breaking.
There was also a mention I found (on wikipedia, so grain of salt and all) that at some point "gay mages" was considered a fantasy cliche, but then Vanyel was given as the only example. So it feels a wee bit like a reactionary "one example of a gay person exists, and that means we're being overrun!"

There is a lesbian character in Arrows! It's one of Talia's good friends at the collegium, if I recall? And I think she also mentions then that "that sort of thing" happened in her totally-not-fantasy-mormonism cult, between some of the multiple wives. 
Though if I recall, the lesbian friend is lifebonded to her partner, and then at some point the partner dies, and she's only saved from dying from the broken bond because she immediately lifebonds to one of their other friends, who'd secretly been in love with both the other women? I *swear* I remember another character remarking on her second lifebond as how he thought that ultimately if the first woman hadn't died, they would have developed a rare three-person lifebond. Which baby-me latched onto HARD as at least a hint of validation for a poly relationship, if only hypothetically... but then I also seem to remember being unable to find that particular passage when I did a reread several years ago, yet I can't imagine I made it up!
I'll also say, Arrows immediately starts with Talia daydreaming about being with Vanyel on his final stand, and then she comes out of it and acknowledges that it was really Vanyel's lover Stefan with him, not Talia in her daydream. Starting off the very first novel with "here's the greatest hero our country ever had, also he was gay" was pretty impactful for me!

Yeah... fantasy has a pretty strong bent toward the idea of bloodrights, how an heir is a rightful ruler because of their heredity, etc. That some people are just born better than others. Even just the extremely strong good vs. evil dichotomy is a fairly conservative idea, at least the way it's often presented. I don't know that I ever realized just HOW strongly conservative-white-cis-straight-dude SFF skewed, especially in its early and mid- days. I know when I was younger I really fell into the trap of assuming people who liked the things I liked must also be otherwise similar to me... and it was pretty rough to discover that is NOT the case, actually. I'm glad so much of SFF is now a lot less white and a lot less straight, but the history of the genre feels REALLY different than a lot of what's happening with it now.

(Jesus, that got long. Sorry for the novella.)

[olivermoss]

Yes, that tracks with what I remember about Arrows! My knowledge of everything in the Valdemar books used to be.... honestly scary.

Okay, I've started a spreadsheet with dates, titles, is it canon and is it fantasy? I will probably need to read them all myself to really knows. I do think that some things that aren't fantasy are notable, like Swordspoint.

I got Swordspoint because it came in as a donation at the thrift store where my Mom worked. She asked if I wanted it and I nearly said no based on the summary, but I was like 'hey, free fantasy book' because it looked like a fantasy book. Then I read it and that had an impact on me. I went to the local bookstore to see if More Of That existed, but they didn't have that book or author in their database. It was like it had dropped out of a different dimension. There is more to this story, but yeah, pre-internet a lot of people bought books based on publisher, blurbs from other authors or the vibe of the cover art. Some people would buy anything with that Baen black & copper design on the spine, I did.

Anyway, all this info needs to be organized... even if no one will ever see it.

[mistressofmuses]

I was VERY into the Valdemar books for an impressionable time in middle school and early high school, and I imprinted on them extremely hard, haha. While it wasn't an encyclopedic knowledge, I tried to keep track of a LOT. I took notes. I drew maps, lol. Particularly because I was reading them at an age where I Don't Know, I Just Find Gay Characters Very Relatable and Interesting, It's Probably Nothing, I took a lot of notice of them in her work, ha.

Lol, I may want to see this spreadsheet at some point! If I wind up with any useful data points, I'll happily share them. Is there a particular date range you're focusing on? (I mean, obviously we're talking about trying to find early examples, but tbh, I'd be interested in things from any era. As well as any and all sorts of queer rep.) I do agree that things that are fantasy-adjacent can still matter; some of those genre lines are fuzzy, and there are ones that likely had an impact on later works that fit more firmly within fantasy.
Though a lot of things I saw about the history of queer characters lump fantasy and sci-fi together completely... and then only have examples from the sci-fi side. That can also be a fuzzy dividing line, but they aren't actually the SAME genre, dammit! Sci-fi did seem to have a lot more weird gender stuff going on a lot earlier, but a lot of it was allegorical through alien species or "imagine a planet of only women!" or whatnot.
I'll probably try to keep an eye out for the Chronicles of Tornor books at thrift stores or things. Or maybe I'll hit up thriftbooks and try to get one of the cheaper copies. Seems worth reading for the potential historical value, even if I'm not sold on whether I'll *enjoy* them or not.

The old covers I saw when I looked Swordspoint up really do give off a fantasy vibe! I'm glad, since otherwise you might not have read it! Man, it's weird how stuff like that happens sometimes. Less so now through the magic of the internet, but I remember having the same thing happen with books I found secondhand, and then couldn't find any trace of otherwise.
My mom bought an omnibus copy of The Darkangel Trilogy for 10 cents at a book sale at my elementary school, and when I read it years later it rewired my pre-teen brain, but no one else had ever heard of it. (Though the library had the author's other Birth of the Firebringer trilogy, which my mom had me read much younger, so at least there was evidence that the author existed beyond that one secondhand book!)

[olivermoss]

Saaaaame with the Valdemar books. I didn't draw maps, but I did listen to the Valdemar filk CDs that I had sent away on repeat.

I will post again about the spreadsheet when I have more data... and more time. I feel like a month got pulled out from under me and yeah, I suspect you feel that even harder than I do right now.

[mistressofmuses]

I had no idea how to actually get the CDs, so I had utterly random assortments of tracks downloaded from fucking Limewire, lmao.

If I find anymore intriguing data points, I'll let you know, ha. That seems like it could be quite the undertaking to try and catalog so much, but it feels like something where there's a kind of startling gap.

But ugh, too real. This whole month has just utterly evaporated, with nothing to show for it. Between losing a pet, then a pretty major weather event that shut things down, and then getting hideously sick... yeah, this month is just gone. I'm sorry you're having a similar experience!

[olivermoss]

You probably had a better time than I did with the music having ripped copies. I just had to skip that dumb Vrondi song each time...

bluuuueeeee as the skiiiiiiessss... no mage can pass our borders and escape... the vrondi's eeeeyeeeess....

I ordered random stuff from Firebird Music having no idea what it would sound like. But I was like... okay Steven Brust and Emma Bull have a band so let's try that. Someday I am going to make myself an Urban Fantasy mood board and the lyrics for For It all will be on it. I need to write something shaped like that.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh god, the vrondi song. I think that was one of the files I did find! It was nice to just... not have to add it to playlists. I wound up with a weird mishmash of which tracks I found copies of, and a lot didn't have artist names (just Lackey's), so I didn't know the actual singers for a long time...
That was when I *did* briefly try to wade into filk fandom to find out more, but then slid off of it after catching some of the "we're loving and so friendly and accepting and everyone is welcome! (unless we arbitrarily don't like you)" mean girl vibes early on.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, having the CDs was... suboptimal. A lot of music was performed or composed by Alexander James Adams, he was the voice of Vanyel which is interesting in retrospect.

[mistressofmuses]

That *is* interesting, ha. I should dig into the tracks I have if I can find them in the unsorted hell of my itunes library, and try to actually get the correct info for a lot of them.