Writing Queer Fiction, by David C Dawson

Did you know that Bram Stoker’s Dracula has homoerotic aspects? Count Dracula, for example, warns off the female vampires and claims Jonathan Harker, saying, “This man belongs to me!” Stoker was influenced by Sheridan le Fanu, whose novella Carmilla invented lesbian vampires.

It was pretty tricky to write queer fiction in the 19th Century. In fact, right up to the 1950s, British authors could be prosecuted for writing openly about homosexuality. Queer references were written in a kind of code, using allusions and discreet subtext. Oscar Wilde was very daring when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. Reviewers at the time said he merited prosecution for offending public morality.

Fortunately in the 20th century, public prudery steadily dissipated, and writers became bolder. From Thomas Mann’s delicious Death in Venice, and Proust’s complex A la recherche du temps perdu, through to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and Bret Easton Ellis’ amazing American Psycho, queer characters increasingly took centre stage.

Which brings us to this century. And my ventures into writing queer fiction.

As a commuter on the Metropolitan line into London for many years, I wrote short stories to amuse myself. I’m a life long fan of detective novels, and finally I plucked up the courage to write one for myself.

It was a form of therapy. I was late coming out, very late. Writing helped me come to terms with myself. I wanted to write a book where the central characters, plus the majority of supporting characters, just happened to be gay. The book would be the opposite of most detective fiction. I didn’t want the gay characters to be oddities. When I was immersing myself in queer fiction, I found too many novels had queer characters that were full of angst. Victims. I wanted my characters to be positive.

So that’s how Dominic Delingpole and his partner Jonathan McFadden were born, in the Dominic Delingpole Mystery series. Neither of them is modelled on a single individual. They are a rich mixture of gay men I have encountered over the years.

The writing process was long; a little over three years. After the first draft, I was lucky enough to go on a five-day Queer Fiction course run annually by the admirable writers’ education organisation called Arvon. There were nine of us, plus two tutors, in a beautiful old house in the wilds of Yorkshire. We had no internet connection and no mobile phone signal. But we had great company and spectacular views.

The tutors, very politely, ripped my book apart. So when I got home, I stuffed it in a drawer and got on with everyday life. It was my boyfriend who nudged me, cajoled me and nagged me into taking it out of the drawer, and having another go.

So I did.

I went through three redrafts, and I was still unhappy with it. But this time, it was my son who asked the question: “What’s the point if you never send it to a publisher?”

When I looked around for a publisher, I wanted one who actively promoted gay literature. I was very lucky to find an American house called DSP Publications, part of DreamSpinner Press. That’s when I found out just how rich the queer genre is.

There are thousands of books published each year with strong, queer characters at the heart of them. There are romances, thrillers, horror, science fiction, westerns. There are so many sub-genres to this wonderful genre.

DreamSpinner Press was set up ten years ago, just as eBooks and internet distribution was gaining in popularity. Its founder, Elizabeth North, saw a gap in the market for gay romances. A few years later, she set up DSP Publications to serve other queer genres.

The internet has revolutionised queer fiction. Historically, very few bookshops would stock queer books. It took a demonstration at Barnes & Noble in the 1980s to force them to devote a shelf to queer culture. In the UK, you would have to travel to London and the amazing Gay’s the Word bookshop near King’s Cross to buy a book on a gay or lesbian theme.

Today, there are thousands of queer fiction titles online. Not just on Amazon, but the Apple bookstore, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and so many more.

My novel, The Necessary Deaths, is a gay mystery thriller. This is a rich sub-genre. There is a thriving Facebook group devoted to it, and I am honoured to be a member of the International Thriller Writers’ Association, where I have met several other writers of gay thrillers.

Just before The Necessary Deaths was published, I was a guest speaker at a queer writing conference and book festival called UK Meet, held in Southampton. I was fortunate to meet other novelists from around the world, who were all very welcoming. I was also able to meet a number of enthusiastic readers of queer fiction. That was a great privilege. Suddenly, my writing was no longer my personal therapy. I met people who felt a great sense of belonging, as a result of queer fiction, when in the past they had felt isolated.

I’m now part of a worldwide community of queer fiction writers and readers, who are giving me wonderful support as I work to complete the next book in the series.

You can read Catriona Troth's review of The Necessary Deaths on Book Muse UK here.

Large Fears

Myles Johnson, author of the self-published children's book, Large Fears - a book for queer black boys and anyone else who's ever been scared - talks to Catriona Troth about phobias, dreams and intersectionality

Hi, Myles. Could you start by telling our readers about Large Fears?

Large Fears is a children's book I wrote centered around Jeremiah Nebula, the black boy that loves pink. It began as a kind of reconciliation with phobias and traumas I acquired while being a young black queer boy in the world. I wanted to create something that turned the ugly things that I faced as a child into something beautiful and inspiring.

This is a very personal book for you. Tell us something about what it means to you.

To sort of expand on it, it really is me having a conversation with my childhood and with every child that feels ostracized. Since creating this book and coinciding projects, I've felt like the dark things that I have gone through in my childhood and early adulthood have been for a purpose now that I am able to see how many people resonate with the story.

You also run workshops for children based around the book. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

The Large Fears Workshop is a workshop we conceptualized around helping children, and adults, conquer and discuss their fears. We used art projects and literature to help kids describe their fears, used concepts of community to help discuss ways to conquer their fears and ultimately reach their dreams. The idea is to help kids know through honesty, art, community, and belief there is not a fear large enough to stop them from their dream.

Reading from Large Fears at a workshop
©Devin Johnson / http://www.overdosedondope.com/photography/

The book's hero, Jeremiah Nebula, is described as a 'queer black boy.' Can you steer me, as a cis/het woman, through the rights and wrongs of the use of the word 'queer'?

Queer is a reclaimed word by the LGBTQ community that essentially ecompasses sexualities and gender expressions that deviate from the normative cishet expectation. The reason I used the term for Jeremiah Nebula is because I wanted to avoid sexualizing a child. Whereas "gay" and "homosexual" bring up ideas of romance and sex, queer is describing gender expression.

How did your partnership with the illustrator, Kendrick Daye, come about? At what stage did he come into the project? Is he involved in the workshops too?

Yes, Kendrick Daye isn't your regular illustrator that draws for the book and disappears. He's a true partner in this whole experience. He was there from the birth of the project until this very day, helping me grow the book, the products, and the workshop. I could never imagine being on this journey without him. Besides everything else, Kendrick is my best friend. He's my big brother. In a lot of way, he's the love of my life. He talks me off ledges and affirms my identity. He's a huge reason this book exists because his friendship helped me realize there was love and acceptance outside your family in the outside world.

It's a brave choice to self-publish any book - more so, I think, for a children's author. How much was it a positive choice for you, and how much a response to frustration with the trade publishing world?

It didn't feel very brave. I never saw a book like what I was writing on shelves. Beyond just the fact that he is black and queer, but the fact that text is lengthier for a children's book and the art is a kind of a homage to street culture and pop art. It was a risky creation in so many ways, but every time I got scared, I reminded myself that I created something about conquering your large fears, so succumbing to my large fears in any stage of this book would make me feel like an imposter. Now, that the book has genuine fans, those people make it much easier to be brave and keep pushing even through the difficult elements of getting this book out there. The fact that even one child has read this book has made anything I could complain about, worth it.

You crowd-funded the project through Kickstarter. That was clearly a successful move. What do you think were the keys to that success?

The key to success with getting money for any creative project, I believe, is creating something people want to see. It just so happened that what I desperately wanted to create was something that people wanted to see and were willing to skip a coffee break for. I know how hard people work for their money, so for someone to give it to me and my dream is the most humbling experience of my life, honestly. And I think everything I am doing when it comes to this book and beyond is so that person that gave me five dollars feels like it was money well spent, or better yet, money well invested.

Apart from the workshops, which we've already discussed, how have you approached marketing the book since it was published? What have been the positives and negatives of going it alone, with no publisher to either back or constrain you?

We've luckily had diverse press coverage, so that is definitely an element of marketing. From Saint Heron and Afropunk to NPR and NBC to BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, this book resonates with a lot of corners of culture which I think gives this book a quality of importance and "coolness" that you can't storyboard or predict, the public does that.

Aside from that, we've made sure the Large Fears world and Jeremiah Nebula are tangible on social media. We wanted it to feel less like just a product, and more of a world and your ticket to this world was a story. We created shirts that read "Black Boys Love Pink" accompanied with a stylized photoshoot that is an extension of the Large Fears brand, but it has had the ability to have a life of its own as a movement and a more adult "sub-brand", if you will. Also, we created short holiday-themed stories and memes with Jeremiah Nebula's mom entitled, "Mama Nebula Says". 

We made these things as a thank you to the people who support us, love Large Fears, and want to engage with Jeremiah Nebula. We also created these things as a marketing technique to make it so the Large Fears world feels like it living, evolving, and ready to be engaged with. 

The biggest obstacle about not having a publisher is being everything at once. We're not just the creators, we're the salespeople, the PR, the marketing department, the social media strategist, and accountants.

You have a separate Twitter feed for Jeremiah Nebula (@largefears). Is that aimed specifically at your young audience? Do they interact with you on there?

It is aimed at the younger audience, as well as people that prefer to just interact with the Large Fears and Jeremiah Nebula, and not necessarily myself and Kendrick. And yes, we get the cutest mentions and pictures from the young ones and adults!

This is a book for children, but it is hard not to see it in a larger context. Marlon James's recent Man Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, attacks the intolerance and hypocrisy of Jamaican society towards gay men. And there are grave concerns regarding the safety of gay men in many African countries. Do you think there are particular challenges to being both gay and black, even in outwardly more tolerant societies?

The intersection of being queer and black is a difficult one. You're carrying two oppressions and that is difficult. And yes, economically, politically, and socially, I can be oppressed by not only the cishet community, but the white community. That is a lot to put up with, but amazingly, I've been carrying the oppression for so long that I've come numb to how heavy it is, so even when asked about it like now, it's hard for me to articulate my strife because I've become so accustomed to ignoring my pain. But yes, even in progressive cultures, this intersection oppresses me.

What is your greatest hope for the book and for the audience it addresses?

My greatest hope for the audience it addresses is for a true liberation of possibility and wonder to happen inside of them. My greatest hope for this book is that it surpasses any hope that my tiny brain could ever conjure up.

Finally, I believe the book is not currently available in Europe. Any plans to launch it internationally?

We're working with a fantastic literary agent, so hopefully upon landing a publishing deal, we'll be have to offer this book internationally.

Thank you, Myles! We look forward to that. In the meantime, for those readers in the US, here's where to buy the book and those cool t-shirts:  http://largefears.com/store/