Known Forms

If you’re queer, you are never home; you are always coming home.

Her sister and my brother who are married (not to each other) and have kids, are home when they are at the houses they bought (with help from parents), the houses they live in every day with their children. But we are never home. We are always ‘the girls’ and no matter how old we get, we are just away temporarily. Our apartment, full of our things, where our cats and dog live with us, is just another place we occupy like a dorm room or a flophouse. Our homes are our parents’ homes which we are expected to return to (separately, alone) eventually. My mother’s house where I didn’t grow up is what they mean when they use that word for me. Her mother’s house, where we are not a couple, where we are barely even people, is what they mean for her. They mean separate. Because we are only not alone when we are with them.

We are never home. We are always coming home.

The Order of Things (After Borges’“The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”)

The current ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies in American political discourse concerning the problematic descriptor ‘young woman’ remind us of those attributed to an obscure yet influential encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which concerns itself with the categorization and classification of All Things Known and/or About to Be Known. In its remote pages it is written that ‘girls’ are divided into the following categories:
(a) belonging to their fathers,
(b) dead,
(c) feral,
(d) wives,
(e) librarians,
(f) sluts,
(g) cats,
(h) included in this classification,
(i) trembling in fear or anger,
(j) on the internet,
(k) photoshopped,
(l) et cetera,
(m) just broke your heart,
(n) look from a distance like young men.

Chez Melissa, we have adopted a term for a particularly sexist and ubiquitous trope, The Magical Peen: When a competent, intelligent, strong female character is magically rendered incompetent, weepy, dumb, and uninteresting after an ‘intimate’ encounter with the Magical Peen of the Romantic Interest/Peen Bearer. See: Homeland (Carrie), Fringe (Olivia Dunham), and way too much SF/F, paranormal romance and/or urban fantasy and pretty much all litfic. The Magical Peen has also been known to turn lesbians straight (Chasing Amy, The Kids Are Alright, and, let’s face it, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).
Romantic Interest often uses his Magical Peen powers to cloak his nefarious plans (also known as the Cloak of Peenvisibility).

Over at the always hilarious, always angry, Requires Only That You Hate, acrackedmoon asks the question: lesbians, where are the lesbians?

This is a question that has been bothering me for a while, particularly since the #yesgayYA discussion veered almost immediately into being all about the (usually white, cis) boys. I’m so used to this inevitable turn that every LGBT discussion seems to take that I barely even notice it anymore. It’s like gravity: inevitable, invisible and always pulling me down. Acrackedmoon shines a spotlight on SF/F and genre for its near complete lack of lesbians and the truly nauseating tropes we do get when lesbians show up on the page and she does it in usual hilarious and furious style. Also author Cat Valente shows up in the comments to say very smart, funny things.

Despite having two cats in the apartment, we have a mouse ‘problem’. This is how our neighbors (we live in a duplex) and my Mom see it. It’s a problem. We’ve done things like relocate a breakfast nook chair to the kitchen to make it easier for our cats (one fat, the other 18 yrs old) to get access to the counter in the hopes of scaring this mouse back over to our neighbor’s. No luck.

Yesterday the OM came racing into my office nook and told me the mouse was in the kitchen. I was sure it would be gone by the time I made it to the kitchen (broad daylight, washing machine running, humans and cats scurrying about), but it just stood in the middle of the linoleum with its back to me like I wasn’t a giant potential predator who could squash it with one well-placed foot. This mouse finally looked over its left shoulder at me (a long, slow look) then back to the cabinets in front of it and sat down. When I responded with the universal “WTF?!” the OM informed me that it had been sitting like that in the middle of the floor when she first saw it. Finally it looked over its shoulder at us again, ‘stood’ up and walked slowly to the ugly thing we have holding the toaster oven up. It crawled under leaving its naked tail sticking out in a way that seemed obscene and was probably the mouse equivalent of the middle finger.

When I told my mother about it (my mother dealt with her ‘rat problem’ by trapping them and relocating them to the woods behind the local IRS headquarters — no, I’m not kidding), she responded with the same WTF. We have collectively reached the following conclusion. The mouse is one or more of the following:
1) a BADASS
2) infected with toxoplasmosis and thus sexually attracted to predators like the cats and humans. This has the bonus of explaining the come hither look over the shoulder and the slow, sexy saunter to the back alley of the under toaster oven monstrosity. Probably hoping to hook up with one of the monkeys in the room or possibly I am overestimating my cross-species attractiveness.
3) dying. It’s very possible that the mouse has been poisoned by the neighbors and was in the throes of pre-death, hallucinatory walkabout, and it has now crawled back into the walls where it will die and stink up the apartment for the next month.
4) really old and doesn’t give a fuck (see number 1)
5) a weremouse. In its human form, this mouse obviously knows me and feels nothing but contempt and pity for me…which means it could be anyone.

The OM has already gendered (female) and named this mouse (Sir Harry), which means that it is now hovering somewhere beneath pet status but above vermin. She has even brought up the possible purchase of a hamster cage with habitrails. This will not end well. For anyone. Problem.

ETA: It was #3. Ewwwww. Our apartment now smells like Jeffrey Dahmer lives next door. Yes, I know he’s dead.

It was the year the Pearl River flooded the trailer park and the worms rose to the surface in writhing masses of bubblegum pink. The man from the bait shop paid us a dollar for each bucket full. I didn’t think to ask why until it was night and he was gone and I had to cry myself to sleep alone because I didn’t want anyone knowing I was so sorry about a bunch of worms.

We hadn’t been in the trailer park more than three months when the water started to rise. It was the first placed we’d lived in years that had a real shower and heat instead of just a bathtub and cold that never stopped even when you were in bed. If we had been there as long as Mrs. Gilruth or the Pinkneys we would have expected its slow wet creep up and over the thin asphalt, cracked with weeds, of what passed for streets. It smelled like dead fish and moss.

“Every four years, like clockwork,” is what Mrs. Gilruth told my mother, nodding like she knew everything about everything and we should all just agree already. But if she knew so much, why was she still living here where the water could get her?

At first we made a game of it, hopping from dry spot to dry spot, laughing at those who got trapped on shrinking desert islands. By the third day there were no more dry spots and we had to navigate the thin strips and canals between moored, anchored barges like a trashy trailer park Venice.

When the water got as high as the first back step, the adults began to whisper about leaving. ‘Evacuating’ was the word they used that I had to look up. I heard her on the phone with my grandmother whispering about money, clothes, and our dog Lulu. I was used to leaving, but this was too soon. This was the first place in years that wasn’t someone else’s farm far from everyone with frozen pipes in the winter. There were other kids here and one of them was in accelerated classes like I was, but she was even smarter. Or that’s what she told me.

It was her idea to set sail. I would have never thought of it, so scared of being left behind during one of my mother’s spontaneous moves that I had nightmares every night of running after a pickup truck loaded with my furniture and family. My brother holding his hand out for me to grab onto, always just out of reach. Jenny pointed out that it was different if I was the one doing the leaving and besides, we probably wouldn’t get very far.

We knew we wouldn’t have much time. The parents were already talking about evacuating as if it was a real thing and the water wasn’t high enough yet.

“The third step,” is all she said and we watched the water, keeping another eye on our restless mothers who had already brought in the dog and the lawn furniture.

It would be her trailer because her Dad was a trucker and a survival freak. He’d waterproofed everything with plastic and silicone even if it wasn’t to keep the water out.

“He thinks they’ll attack us with nerve gas,” she said as if this were simultaneously the most normal and stupid thing she’d ever heard.

“Who?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

We gathered supplies: flashlights, a tent, sleeping bags, water and food. I already had a pocket knife with a can opener that I carried around everywhere I went. We didn’t bother with clothes or underwear.

“We can wash them in the river,” she said and I thought that was the most brilliant idea ever. “Just go for a swim and, boom, they’re washed!”

“We could fish for our food!” I said and her eyes went wide like they always did when she was surprised. When someone thought of something she hadn’t, which hardly ever happened.

But getting the fishing rods wasn’t easy. My brother wanted to know what I was doing with them and then decided I was going fishing without him, which made him so mad he looked like he might start crying. I thought about lying to him because I didn’t want to share this with anyone, but I remembered the dream and his hands reaching for me from the back of the truck.

“If you say a word to anyone, you’re out,” I said in my meanest voice through clenched teeth. His eyes were wide as he nodded.

I was worried that Jenny would be mad, but she acted like she’d been expecting it. Like she’d planned from the beginning on it not being just the two of us and that made me angry for no good reason. I threw the fishing rods down and stomped off, brown water splashing around my rubber boots.

“What?” she called after me and I smiled at least at the surprise in her voice. She wasn’t expecting that.

By the time the water reached the third step we’d made up. We’d also spent a lot of time convincing my mother to stay long enough.

When we cut the trailer loose to drift with the floodwater, it didn’t feel much different than standing still. It rocked a little, but not much more than a strong wind at night. It moved so slow: no one noticed until it was too late and we were already on our lazy, swaying way to somewhere else.

Untitled by Melissa Moorer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.knownforms.com.

There has been a lot of great discussion around Say Yes To Gay YA By Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith and rightly so. I’m shocked at the number of writers and readers (and agents and editors) who were shocked by Brown and Smith’s article. Then again, this is something I deal with on a daily basis. I don’t have the privilege of being shocked by homophobia in publishing, both as a reader and as a writer. Anyone who has tried (and failed) to find characters in YA that reflect at least some of their own (gay) experience will discover quickly just how limited publishing is.

We live in a culture (the U.S.A.) centered around the myth of the American Dream. That somehow, if we’re simply talented enough (or worse, want it ‘with all our heart’) we will be successful. No matter the structural obstacles in place because we’re not white or straight or we’re poor or female or not Christian, etc. the only thing that matters is our own talents and drive. The self-help industry is booming because it keeps telling us that we will succeed if we just do this one thing differently. But what it’s really telling us (all the time from all media) is that we’re doing something wrong. It’s not that we’re the wrong _________ and that the entire culture is positioned to privilege people who were born in a different place or with different gender or that there is actual prejudice out there, it’s that we’re just not positive enough or good enough or strong enough or whatever. This is crippling if you’re not one of the right group. Especially when we’re trained from birth to believe that it’s really our fault. If we’d just try harder, work harder, be better, we’d be successful. It’s our own damn fault if we’re not.

This current kerfuffle in YA does, at least, get at some of the built-in industry prejudice. One of the most difficult things for me about publishing has been the issue of my characters’ sexuality, gender, and race. Because my characters are typically female, bi or gay, and very often not white, I have the constant worry that agents are not biting because of these issues rather than the writing. But at the same time, I live in a culture that tells me that these concerns are ridiculous. Not to mention that I am hyper critical of my own work so it feeds into my own existing insecurities and gives them more power. There are YA books (very few, but still) out there featuring gay protags so it must be me! It’s me that’s the problem! It’s the writing (which, let’s face it, can always be ‘better’). It’s not the gay. Or the girl germs.

When I began the terrifying and painful process of sending out my first YA novel years ago, I received glowing, page long rejections from two MAJOR agents, who honestly told me that coming-of-age lesbian novels just wouldn’t sell (at the time). And many others from agents who took issue with my writing style, storyline, etc. I took them at face value. But now, as I try to sell a second novel with a POC, lesbian protagonist, I can’t help but wonder if the sexuality (and gender, race, etc.) is at least, partially a factor. I go back and forth between thinking I should do massive rewrites (of content, not the characters and their sexualities, skin color, etc.) and resigning myself to the fact that the book is too gay and too strange (stylistically) for YA and publishing in general. This is absolutely destructive for a writer. Because on the one hand, I know that the writing can always be better, but on the other, I’m not sure it would make any difference at all. And I’ll never really know, will I?

It’s probably not surprising that the pieces I’m working on now are short fiction and a novel with an adult (still female, still gay) protagonist. I’ve put aside two other projects with teenage main characters (one of is a novel-length version of The Third Kind of Darkness, whose main character’s gender is…fluid).

I’ve delayed posting on this because I have friends in the UK. Friends who are afraid and terrified, for good reason. And I know from my own experiences (directly w/LA riots and 9/11 NYC) that it’s difficult to think big picture when you’re hunkered down, preparing for the worst. But I think it’s critical that we all look at other voices in this. Voices that aren’t funded by Big Money. Voices that aren’t there to sell you more fear so you keep watching their coverage, so you believe government and everything they say when they may very well be the source of the problem. Too many people have said it all better than I could:

Here, David Harvey (Geographer!) An open letter to those who condemn looting (Part one) is a bit more academic than the other two (he IS an academic after all), but still very readable.

Penny Red’s Panic On the Streets of London: “The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain.”

Russell Brand being smart about the riot. Even if his last paragraph is a bit of a stylistic overreach: Big Brother Isn’t Watching You

One of the things Brand and Red remind me of is that poverty is about being powerless, about having no control. You are acted upon. The vast majority of those commenting on the riots have never been poor, have never been powerless.

Even Scientific American weighs in: Rabble with a Cause: Were the London Riots a Spontaneous Mass Reaction or a Rational Response? Contrary to popular wisdom, mobs are not mindless. In fact, they act rationally—a characteristic that suggests ways to prevent riots

And, on a related note, new research indicates Narcissists Look Like Good Leaders, but They Aren’t Could we please translate this into easy-to-grasp infographics so that these dangerous tools/narcissists stop getting elected to power?!

I was in an indie band for years. Because the OM has/had a constant struggle with stage fright, I ended up the lead singer (and guitarist – not lead guitarist, that was the OM). Mainly because I don’t care (if you screw up and sound like crap live, odds are good none of the drunks in the audience will remember). I’ve tried to write about being in a band, but it’s hard to write about something that really isn’t that glamorous when you get down to nuts and bolts (like pretty much everything else). What people really want is the glamour and fame, when really it’s about lugging your guitar and all your crap (cords, pedals, etc.) through the subway to your crappy yet expensive rehearsal space or the gig in that crappy bar with the sexist sound guy and the terrible sound system. It’s about spending all your cash on equipment, recording time, and rehearsal space and getting to gigs and…pretty much everything. It’s about ‘touring’, which is another word for ‘stuck in a van, sleeping on nasty floors, eating crap and getting sick because of it, something irreplaceable broke again, I’m too tired to even swallow, fighting with grumpy bandmates, why do I always have to drive?’ misery. I love performing live, but the stress and general badness of touring (not to mention the expense, which is greater when you’re a female-centric band because you get paid much less — yes, really) turned it into something I began to hate. Not to mention the shows where no one shows up (because the venue didn’t advertise, another more popular, local band was playing at another club simultaneously, etc.) and you’re playing your heart out to four people and the snotty bartender. Plus, you don’t get paid much because no one showed. This is where shit is real, where the sausage gets made -people don’t want to see it or read about it. They just want to sit back, have a drink, and watch the show. Or listen to the songs we recorded so they can decide which ones suck and why (then they can email us about it!).

Then there are the reasons to keep doing it: the fans who love you, who tell you how your music changed their lives, how they wouldn’t have survived college and or high school without it. The shows where everything goes golden, the kids are dancing, and everything clicks into place. It’s better than drugs and the high lasts for days. Hearing your song on a college radio station and blasting it through your crap car speakers. The indescribable joy of hearing your recording come together into actual songs that sound like actual songs. And yes, you will get many, many ‘offers’ (somehow being in any band, even an obscure one, makes you more attractive to certain humans) if you’re the type who likes that sort of thing.

Being in a band is wonderful, unbelievably addictive and fulfilling, and an experience I think everyone should have. As long as you don’t measure your ‘success’ in money and/or fame. This is what will kill you because you’re more likely to be hit by one of those big chunks of airplane sewage ice than make a living at music. Trufax. The music world is a pyramid scheme. Those few recognizable stars at the top (even indie ‘stars’) are standing on the backs of us poor schmucks bent over and aching at the unpaid, unpopular bottom of the pile. As long as you’re willing to spend money and time on what is really a hobby like scrapbooking, cosplay, or tornado chasing, you’ll have (mainly) the time of your life (when you’re not wishing you were dead).

I read Kameron Hurley’s God’s War a couple of months ago and enjoyed the hell out of it. For many reasons. The first and most important was that I had never read this book before. You know what I mean. At a certain point in your reading life (when you read as much as I do) you begin to realize that you’ve read pretty much every book before. Obviously, I don’t mean this literally, but there is a point at which storylines are recycled and regurgitated so many times (and it’s worse in ‘genre’ books) that you know what to expect with some minor differences. God’s War isn’t like that. Yes, it’s a ripping, brutal sf adventure on a colonized world some time in the far future. We’ve seen that. But you’ve never seen a lead character like Nyx. She’s brutal. She’s brutalized. She’s unapologetic and pig-headed and does spectacularly stupid things for totally believable ‘reasons’ (like all of us). She’s a classic anti-hero, an assassin trying to do the right thing whatever that is.

Then there’s the world and its people. This planet is brutal. Hurley gives us just enough hints to understand that this world was colonized thousands of years ago by predominantly muslim colonists, which gives this world a different feel from the standard Christian derived default we’ve come to expect for the future. Even better, successive waves of refugees have brought ‘others’ (other descendants of different Abrahamic religions) to the world to complicate matters further. A ‘centuries-old holy war’ between two of the most powerful ‘countries’ has shaped culture and religion in this world even further. Nothing is easy or simple here and it shouldn’t be. Nothing is easy on our planet and it’s much more hospitable. Hurley gives us a world full of brutality, merciless greed and ambition, endless war, religious rationalization and re-interpretation, gender wars, constant violence, class struggle, and moments of sweetness stolen. These people feel real because they feel shaped by the interaction of competing cultures and all of the rest of what makes culture culture – the messy stuff, the stuff no one wants to talk about. Nothing feels arbitrary or ‘made up’. It feels like something evolved. In other words, it’s just like our world except that it isn’t. Ironically, this is one of the best investigations/examinations (not the right word(s), but I can’t seem to find a word that fits) of Islam, particularly as it (and more importantly, Islam’s many iterations, sects, and interpretations) intersects with gender, that I’ve read. I’m even considering assigning it to my class next semester.

The ‘magic’ in these books is just as ingenious and just as Hurley: bugs and the magicians who can control them (through pheromones, the chemical language of insects). They’ve even coined a new phrase just for this book: bugpunk. Insects aren’t known for their cuddliness. Then there’s the way the world is working magic on the uninocculated population, turning them into shapeshifters (who are the subjects of open and usually violent discrimination).

I recently recommended this book to my father when he was looking for something ‘new and different’ to read. He emailed me yesterday to say, “Lordy, that is one kickass woman! And the world is even tougher than she is. Never read anything like this before. Thanks!” Yeah. This.