Outer Alliance Pride Day

“As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.”

This is the Pride statement of a recently formed group called the Outer Alliance. Today is our version of Pride Day, and all supporters of the group, including Circlet Press, are posting this statement on their web sites followed by a bit of their own work.

Circlet Press has always included a melting-pot vision of sexuality. I was told again and again by gay and lesbian bookstore owners, writers, and activists that I was asking for trouble by mixing gay and lesbian stories together in books. Do you remember the days when gay bookstores were divided like The Gap, all the men’s books on one side, the women’s books on the other? “Gap” indeed. “But where will we put YOUR books,” they would complain.

My answer would usually be “Look, this is an anthology about vampires that happens to have both gay and lesbian vampires in it. Do you have a section for fantasy and science fiction?” “Well, yes.” “And you don’t have two separate sections for that, do you? One on the men’s side and one on the women’s side?” “Well, no. It’s all one section.” “Well, then shelve it there! Duh!”

From the very beginning, then, science fiction and fantasy trumped the gap between lesbian and gay, which was fortunate for us since our books also contained (and still do), bisexual characters, characters who change gender, and yes, even heterosexual characters! Radical!

At this point, since our founding in 1992, we’ve publishing something like … 70 books? Enough that I’ve lost count. There are only two I can think of in that time which I would consider to be 100% heterosexual, and both were single-author collections. One, Earthly Pleasures by Red Manning, is out of print. The other, Virtual Girls, by Evan Hollander, is still around. Both included stories that were written for “men’s magazines” (remember those?) “Selling Venus” came close, too, with some mention of female bisexuality, but otherwise not much. The rest are a happy confluence of sexualities, and the only books we’ve done that are specifically aimed at one segment of sexuality or another have been for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans spokes of the wheel. Back in the day we were the publisher of Best Bisexual Erotica, and Best Transgender Erotica. We recently released a trans-themed anthology, Up For Grabs, and the fourth volume in our ongoing books of gay-male themed erotic science fiction, Wired Hard 4, is coming in a few weeks.

One thing that has changed in recent years–we’ve decided not to participate in the forced use of pseudonyms. The plain truth is that much of the erotica enjoyed by men (gay and straight) is written by women, and vice versa. I was finding it more and more ludicrous to ask men to adopt female names for lesbian books and women to adopt male names for gay male books under the fear that some reader will contract “cooties” from finding out that a story they enjoyed was written by someone other than the single gender that they personally approve of the existence of. Nope. Won’t be doing that any more.

Something tells me those readers were already steering clear of the Circlet Press multi-culti-gender-bending party boat. The only people who were still putting pressure on us to keep up the charade were the bookstores. Sadly, the majority of the great gay/lesbian bookstores we used to depend on in the 1990s are gone. However, it means I no longer have to listen to them gripe at me about getting chocolate in their peanut butter. Both of our new books, Like a Queen: Lesbian Erotic Fairy Tales and the companion volume Like a Prince: Gay Erotic Fairy Tales have authors of varying genders (I don’t really support the notion that everyone has to be male or female either…) writing under whatever names they wanted to. Wow, it feels good to say that.

In closing, let me also make a shout-out to another GLBTQ publishing phenomenon on the Internet, if you haven’t found it already, The GLBT Bookshelf. This is a giant Wiki of all things queer BOOKS. Have a look over at: http://bookworld.editme.com/.

And thank you for all your support over the years. Circlet Press will be 19 in March 2010. Yes, I can now hire interns who were NOT BORN YET when we published our first book. This is proof the world continues to change for the better, and more and more into the GLBTQ-friendly future that so much of our forward-looking science fiction hopes for.

–Cecilia Tan, Publisher & Editorial Director, Circlet Press, Inc.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under News & Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.