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Why Aren’t We Writing More Non-Romance LGBT Speculative Fiction?

gay-sci-fiThis is a topic near and dear to my own heart. I started writing more than forty years ago when I was a little kid – I always felt the need to write.

And as I grew older and realized I was gay, I wanted to include LGBT characters in my work. At first, I was really tentative about it – back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, there were very few LGBt characters in sci fi and fantasy, and I could count on one hand the books that had major protagonists who were gay.

Fast forward to now, and MM Romance has invigorated the LGBT fiction community, bringing many new voices into it, and a number of those voices have branched out into genre fiction, but more often than not with an MM romance heart.

I love a good MM romance, but I’d like to see more of us take the next step, and find a way to start telling LGBT stories that are more centered on the sci fi, fantasy and paranormal aspects than the romance.

What do y’all think? Who is doing this now? And how can we move more toward such a paradigm?

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2 thoughts on “Why Aren’t We Writing More Non-Romance LGBT Speculative Fiction?”

  1. Admittedly, I do most of my work in romance of one flavor or another; I write mm romance and mf romance and sci-fi romance and spec fic romance and fantasy/paranormal/steampunk, etc.

    That being said, I wrote a ghost story last year for a new publisher with no romance in it, and after working with them, I’ve contracted for 2015, to be published in 2016, a series of LGBT Young Adult Space Opera novelettes. They’re called The Terran Academy series and are currently titled Economics 101: The True Cost of an Empire, Computer Science 201: How to Hack your Midterm Exam and Journalism 301: Maintaining Objectivity on the Battlefield (with the potential for more in the series depending on sales.)

    These will not be romances, altho I reserve the right to have some relationships in it, I’m picturing something more like the Percy Jackson novels rather than Twilight.

    Of all the writing advice I’ve gotten over the years, the piece that’s stuck with me and not been contradicted by my experience or what doesn’t work for me is this; “write the novels you want to read.”

    Reply

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