So, it’s Pride Month. Back when I was in college we didn’t get a whole month, we only got Pride Week.

And that was at a super liberal place. Some schools back then didn’t even get a single Pride day! Which was why queer student activists would band together at conferences, like the one that was held at my university that resulted in me marching in my first ever Pride march.

It was the Eighties. Our LGSA (Lesbian Gay Student Alliance) didn’t have any of the other letters yet. I, a bi, wasn’t really sure of my welcome in the “LG” universe. Seemed to me we were considered “half gay” so we were only half welcome.*

So I wasn’t registered for the conference. I didn’t attend any of the sessions. But I did attend the finale, a keynote speech by congressman Gerry Studds followed by a protest march through the campus.

Gerry Studds did not intend to become the first openly gay member of Congress. He got outed in 1983 for having (gay) sex (ten years earlier !!) with a 17 year old congressional page.

Yeah, I know. Not exactly a great role model. But once he was outed, Studds (yes, Studds was his real name) did his best to become one and fight for equality.

I listened to his speech, not from inside the banquet hall where he gave it, but from outside the building, through the open windows. Yeah, the “outsider” metaphors write themselves. I don’t remember most of the speech, but I do remember the big applause line. “The message of Harvey Milk was ‘come to San Francisco and be gay.’ My message to you is ‘stay where you are and be gay.’”

You shouldn’t have to leave home to feel at home.

When Studds was done speaking, the thousand-plus student activists led a protest march through the campus. It was night, and as I joined the march, so did more and more others, our chanting voices echoing off the dorms and ivy-covered buildings. The march got longer and longer, snaking through the quads, even past the frats that had tried to vandalize the Pink Triangle on the college green earlier in the week.

I went from standing outside the building, unsure if I belonged, to having the classic “Pride parade” feeling: I am not alone!

That feeling— that there are so many of us, and we are strong and fierce and beautiful—is what Pride is ultimately about.

After I graduated college, I moved to Boston, and joined** an activist group called Queer Nation, whose name sidestepped the whole alphabet soup problem. QN’s favorite chant during marches and protests:

“We’re here, We’re queer, Get used to it.”

QN was described as “militant” but that wasn’t accurate. QN was anti-assimilationist. QN was against conformity, closets, and hiding. One of the things we did was print out day-glo stickers that said things like VISIBLY QUEER or YES I’M BISEXUAL or many many other things that were meant to be hard to ignore. (Photo below is a collage of old Queer Nation stickers. Credit to QueerZines on Instagram.)

QN was about making every day Pride day. I’ve tried to live my life with that spirit. Every day is Pride day.

And for a while there in the early Aughts, Pride celebrations started to feel like nothing more than a Gay Fourth of July, a big summer holiday with a lot of parties, but very little connection to the war that had been fought.

The protest march had become a parade. The same police departments that used to raid gay bars and who fought activists for days at the Stonewall riots were by then marching in the parades. The war was over, and we won. Right?

But here we are in the 2020s, and the war is back. Cities across Florida are installing rainbows all over the place to defy a state order banning rainbow crosswalks. (The state is now claiming the crosswalks are a driving safety hazard.)

Iran and Egypt are playing a soccer match in Seattle and they asked the city to cancel Pride out of respect for their religious beliefs. Seattle said NO, but can you imagine how rainbow-colored absolutely everything would have been if they had tried to ban Pride? The same spirit that fueled Queer Nation is still alive, and paint is easy to get…

Meanwhile, here Booklandia, the war is hot. We’re here, we’re queer, but they are trying so hard not to get used to it!

They’re trying to ban queer books from schools and public libraries—the bans are being fought.

They’re firing teachers and librarians who fight the censorship—but those workers are suing for wrongful termination and they’re winning those cases.

Amaz*n took queer and kinky books out of their affiliate program—but then quietly put them back a few months later. (Update: I checked today and my affiliate links are gone again. Ugh.)

They’re not going to win this war. We’re going to keep writing, we’re going to keep publishing. We’re going to keep doing the equivalent of pasting fluorescent colored stickers on everything. Or at least, I am!

Readers, if you want to do your part: just keep reading! Keep reading the queer (and kinky, and poly, and spicy) books you love, keep asking for them, keep talking about them, and keep loving them. That’s the only way forward I know.

Happy Pride, everyone.

*The LGSA became the LGBA the year after I graduated. Of course.

**I use the word “joined” loosely. Queer Nation was an anarchist collective so there was no real “joining,” you just kind of showed up.  

WIP Report

I did it! The manuscript for the SABR Baseball Style Guide has been handed off to University of Nebraska Press, and now I can get back to my many languishing fiction projects!

I sent a short story off to Clarkesworld on Sunday night, and it hasn’t been rejected yet. Because Neil Clarke usually rejects within 1-2 days, we writers take any delay as a positive sign! (Probably he just hasn’t read it yet.) This story has planetary colonization, Cantonese food, and exorcism. I’ll let you know if it gets accepted anywhere.

Meanwhile, my agent has asked for a romantasy proposal. I have what I think is a strong idea for a book, but now I have to get the character’s voice right. The narrative stance is always what makes a book work for me. I have to know where the character is coming from, attitude-wise, and how they sound different in their heads from other characters I’ve read or written.

Voice is what always grabs me both when I’m reading and writing a book, and I suspect it’s what usually grabs an editor when they read a sample, too. You can have the best premise in the world for a book, but if the words feel flat, it may never get out of the gate. (Then again, look at Dan Brown. Hmmm.)

Once I get that proposal off my desk, it’ll be time to get back to the “Unexpected Dragon Book.” Windmark has now sat, untouched, for almost two years. (!!) While at the Nebulas conference, the latest SFWA Grandmaster, N.K. Jemisin, gave a talk on creating characters. I asked, sooo…. theoretically speaking if a side character seems to want to take over a book, what do you do? Her answer: “Go for it. Follow that. If the words you are writing are not the right words, stop writing the wrong ones.”

If I follow that advice, then the wisecracking nonbinary power bottom who waltzed in about a third of the way through the book may have to get a narrative thread of their own. We shall see. The whole book seems to be working on a law of threes, so maybe it makes sense. More on that soon, I hope.