Kaivenna - Just This Thing...nsfw

Frank Cho

Me this morning after a nice shower. beautyandthebondage

Do you ever read, or have you ever read any queer sf/fantasy novels. If so, do you recommend any?

I want to point out that this isn’t comprehensive, just a few that I personally happen to like and recommend:

I assume by this question you mean stories that explicitlydeal with themes like gender and sexuality, as opposed to just stories thatdeal with other themes but have LGBT characters in them? Because if you meanthe second, I can’t recommend enough the work of David Gerrold, who often hashomosexual male characters in his novels in the 70s and 80s. If you only knowof Gerrold as the writer of the Tribble episode of Star Trek, you need to readhis fascinating scifi novels. “The Man Who Folded Himself” is a great novelabout a man who time travels so much that he has essentially “folded himself,”and multiple different versions of himself exist simultaneously. At one point,he has an orgy with multiple different versions of himself, which…certainly is oneway to deal with the issue of multiple versions of yourself existing (and a great way to characterize the hero as an incredible narcissist).  

Also, I can’t recommend enough Gerrold’s War Against theChtorr series, which is maybe one of the most fascinating alien invasion novelsever as the invasion isn’t military, but ecological in nature…a hostile alienecosystem takes over and replaces our own in places, breeding insanely andwiping out native species. The Chtorr themselves seem to be based on thesandworms of Arrakis from Dune, but we discover they are very different in thatthey are not entirely animals…though not entirely sentient, either. It makessense if you read it. It also has characters who are homosexual men.

David Gerrold is one of these writers who spends all theirtime on the internet and is surprisingly accessible on social media. Word of warning, though,he’s become a bit of a cranky guy in his old age.

If you want a story that explicitly deals with themes ofhomosexuality, read Charles Beaumont’s “The Crooked Man” from 1955. Our herolives in a world where homosexuality is the norm, encouraged because it solvesoverpopulation; heterosexuals are despised and have to go into hiding in seedywindowless clubs, where they are a regular target of moralizing sanctimonious demagoguesand police raids, and worst of all, were sent to horrific torture chambers tobe “cured.”

Damn Knudson! Damn the little man! Thanks to him, to theSenator, Jesse was now a criminal. 

Before, it wasn’t so bad–not this bad, anyway. You werelaughed at and shunned and fired from your job, sometimes kids lobbed stones atyou, but at least you weren’t hunted. Now–it was a crime. A sickness.

“Vice is on the upswing in our city. In the dark corners ofevery Unit perversion blossoms like an evil flower. Our children are exposed toits stink, and they wonder–our children wonder–why nothing is done to put ahalt to this disgrace. We have ignored it long enough! The time has come foraction, not mere words. The perverts who infest our land must be fleshed out,eliminated completely, as a threat not only to public morals but to society atlarge. These sick people must be cured and made normal.

“The disease that throws men and women, together in thisdreadful abnormal relationship and leads to acts of retrogression–retrogressionthat will, unless it is stopped and stopped fast, push us inevitably back tothe status of animals–this is to be considered as any other disease. It must beconquered as heart trouble, cancer, polio, schizophrenia, paranoia, all otherdiseases have been conquered…”

The Women’s Senator had taken Knudson’s lead and issued asimilar pronunciamento and then the bill became law and the law was carriedout.

Jesse sipped at the whiskey, remembering the Hunts. How thefrenzied mobs had gone through the city at first, chanting, yelling, bearingplacards with slogans: WIPE OUT THE HETEROS! KILL THE QUEERS! MAKE OUR CITYCLEAN AGAIN! And how they’d lost interest finally after the passion had worndown and the novelty had ended. But they had killed many and they had sent manymore to the hospitals …

He remembered the nights of running and hiding, choked drybreath glued to his throat, heart rattling loose. He had been lucky. He didn’tlook like a hetero. They said you could tell one just by watching himwalk–Jesse walked correctly. He fooled them. He was lucky.

One of the most interesting things that scifi does isexplore worlds where the shoe is “on the other foot,” one of the most powerfulempathic tools. Ray Bradbury wrote a great story about race issues that wasliterally called “On the Other Foot.”

Charles Beaumont is one of the great overlooked geniuses ofSF’s past. I’d say he was the single best writer of the Twilight Zone apartfrom Rod Serling himself, and I loved his scifi short story, “The BeautifulPeople,” which was adapted into one of the best episodes of the originalTwilight Zone. He’s due for a rediscovery.

Lois McMaster Bujold did a similar story in the 1980s, Ethanof Athos. Despite the way the cover makes Dr. Ethan look hardboiled as hell,the premise of the story is that he is a homosexual fertility doctor from asingle-gender male-only planet where homosexuality is the norm, and he isforced to leave his planet on an adventure where he encounters the first womanhe ever met in his life. Dr. Ethan was raised to consider women as devils, butchanges his mind when meeting them.

Another great story that dealt with homosexuality isTheodore Sturgeon’s “The World Well Lost” from 1953. In that one, an alien race is disgusted with humans and refuses contact with us for unknown reasons. They mysteriously broke the radiosilence to request that we transport back to them a pair of lovers from theirspecies (who we assume are male and female) who have delighted the entire planet Earth. Assigned to the job of returning the alien lovers are two earthmen spacepilots with very different personalities. The more introverted earthman herodiscovers that the alien lovers have a secret: they are both male andhomosexual. You see, members of their species have extreme physical differences betweenthe sexes. This is the reason their race refuses all contact with humans: totheir eyes, all humans, with our comparatively minimal gender differences, lookto them “like an entire species of queers.” When asked how the earthman herofigured all this out, it is revealed he is homosexual himself and in love withhis fellow earth pilot.  

Bi couple sharing a dick

@pamelabiwife having fun with @sir-t-bbc