That whole LGBT thing... (addendum)
I've read enough of the LambdaFail by now to have made up my mind. To wit: I think that they certainly had the right to do it, that from my corner it looks like it was a good decision to make, that a huge amount of people are behaving like absurdly privileged assholes *and* that the way the LLF communicated their decision was a massive pile of communication fail. Also, it has been pointed out that this is actually not necessarily a case of "Lambda has welcomed LGBT fiction from all authors for over twenty years but now suddenly changed their minds and slammed the doors in the faces of all the non-LGBT authors!!!", as the Lambda Awards have *always* been for "LGBT literature", and "X literature" is usually taken to mean "literature about and by members of group X". This could very easily simply be a clarification of their previous rules, which got blown up into a massive pile of fail in part because they utterly screwed up communicating this.
(ETA: I would also like to echo
kaigou in that - there is a difference between a work about X written by a member of X group and one that is not written by a member of X group, and it ain't the words on the page. At this point, I would just about kill for a book about asexuality, because there is NONE. But if that book were written by a sexual person? No matter how good it was, it wouldn't be right. Because it would be someone else writing our stories, and that is all fine and good but it cannot be the only story we have.)
One thing that bugs me, and that expands on my previous rant, is basically: what rm said. Awards for LGBT people only actually exclude a lot of people who are not cis heterosexual; there are maaaany more categories than just "hetero-", "homo-" and "bisexual" - and what about intersexed or genderqueer people when we talk about "cis" and "trans"? Adding on a Q for Queer would have made things sooooo much more helpful, even if still not entirely perfect. (People make all these disparaging remarks about alphabet soup - LGBTQQIA+ and all - but I suspect most of them don't realise how very painful it can be to not have any letter that contains you.)
And people are going around pointing out that the LLF has actually given a statement on who "counts" as LGBT for them, and that this is actually incredibly inclusive, and that this means all our fuss is about nothing:
"As to what defines LGBT? That is not up to anyone at Lambda Literary Foundation to decide. The writers and publishers are the ones who will be doing the self-identifying. Sexuality today is fluid and we welcome and cherish this freedom. We take the nomination of any book at face value: if the book is nominated as LGBT, then the author is self-identifying as part of our LGBT family of writers, and that is all that is required. There are many permutations of LGBT and they're all welcome as that LGBT term we've all adopted makes clear.
The problem? I still don't identify as LGBT. And my mathematical soul would like to point out that a permutation would actually only be an automorphism of the set {L,G,B,T} a mixing-up of the letters LGBT, *not* an embedding into a larger set LGBT with any letters tacked on. Which is in large part because I don't feel particularly *welcome* in the LGBT movement, seeing as, you know, large swathes of it will not hesitate to tell me I don't belong. Example? I'd been considering doing the e-mail equivalent of knocking on the door of my uni's LGBT society, although I was quite nervous about whether or not I'd be immediately shown the door. Then I remembered "hey! I remember hearing something about petitioning the NUS LGBT society about asexual membership! Whatever happened to that?"
And it turns out I'm not invited. To any LGBT society at any university in the UK. (I am only invited if I am an "LGBT asexual", which I take to mean either trans or homo- or biromantic and although I'm leaning towards homoromanticism I still feel too aromantic to really take that identity. They did include queer people, but given the specific exclusion of non-LGBT asexuals...)
ETA: Looking at the thread, it looks as if I'd got that wrong and that particular motion did not pass. However, asexuality still did not get included, and you can probably understand that I'm not too keen to wander innocently into a space where the people *might* be among those who were campaigning for ace inclusion but *might* be the ones who nixed it, were for outright exclusion of non-LGBT asexuality or defined it as "lack of a sexuality" in the conference notes.
This is the kind of thing I have to negotiate every time I enter an LGBT space. Do the people here consider me part of the movement, an ally, a sadly repressed excuse for a human being, a privileged person trying to wedge myself in where I'm not wanted? (I still remember one gay blogging activist reacting with complete fury at the thought that asexuals might liken themselves to LGBT people. Not want to become part of the movement, simply think there are similarities.) Can I slip through as just "queer", or will that part of my identity get called into question or dismissed as appropriation? Am I welcome? Am I welcome unless I dare to venture an unpopular remark?
This may be the reason I do not tend to actively seek out LGBT spaces even though the heteronormativity of my RL surroundings often feels nothing short of suffocating. This is definitely the reason I am probably not going to be identifying as LGBT unless something drastically changes, either in LGBT organisations' recognition of asexuality or my own perception of my affectional orientation.
And this is why "anyone who identifies as LGBT is welcome" still doesn't only exclude people identifying as cis heterosexual.
But, Kaz, I hear you say. But, if you don't identify as LGBT you shouldn't be winning awards for LGBT literature, right? I mean, if you're saying you're not LGBT should a book about a character like you be eligible, even if you're not straight?
That is an excellent point, I say. Honestly! This is something worthy of discussion. As you may have gathered from my little diatribe above, it is far far more complicated and far far bigger than just the LLF. What I want acknowledged is that this complication exists, and that saying "anyone who identifies as part of LGBT is included" will not suddenly make the possibility of marginalising us stubborn difficult-to-categorise people go away.
(ETA: I would also like to echo
kaigou in that - there is a difference between a work about X written by a member of X group and one that is not written by a member of X group, and it ain't the words on the page. At this point, I would just about kill for a book about asexuality, because there is NONE. But if that book were written by a sexual person? No matter how good it was, it wouldn't be right. Because it would be someone else writing our stories, and that is all fine and good but it cannot be the only story we have.)
One thing that bugs me, and that expands on my previous rant, is basically: what rm said. Awards for LGBT people only actually exclude a lot of people who are not cis heterosexual; there are maaaany more categories than just "hetero-", "homo-" and "bisexual" - and what about intersexed or genderqueer people when we talk about "cis" and "trans"? Adding on a Q for Queer would have made things sooooo much more helpful, even if still not entirely perfect. (People make all these disparaging remarks about alphabet soup - LGBTQQIA+ and all - but I suspect most of them don't realise how very painful it can be to not have any letter that contains you.)
And people are going around pointing out that the LLF has actually given a statement on who "counts" as LGBT for them, and that this is actually incredibly inclusive, and that this means all our fuss is about nothing:
"As to what defines LGBT? That is not up to anyone at Lambda Literary Foundation to decide. The writers and publishers are the ones who will be doing the self-identifying. Sexuality today is fluid and we welcome and cherish this freedom. We take the nomination of any book at face value: if the book is nominated as LGBT, then the author is self-identifying as part of our LGBT family of writers, and that is all that is required. There are many permutations of LGBT and they're all welcome as that LGBT term we've all adopted makes clear.
The problem? I still don't identify as LGBT. And my mathematical soul would like to point out that a permutation would actually only be an automorphism of the set {L,G,B,T} a mixing-up of the letters LGBT, *not* an embedding into a larger set LGBT with any letters tacked on. Which is in large part because I don't feel particularly *welcome* in the LGBT movement, seeing as, you know, large swathes of it will not hesitate to tell me I don't belong. Example? I'd been considering doing the e-mail equivalent of knocking on the door of my uni's LGBT society, although I was quite nervous about whether or not I'd be immediately shown the door. Then I remembered "hey! I remember hearing something about petitioning the NUS LGBT society about asexual membership! Whatever happened to that?"
And it turns out I'm not invited. To any LGBT society at any university in the UK. (I am only invited if I am an "LGBT asexual", which I take to mean either trans or homo- or biromantic and although I'm leaning towards homoromanticism I still feel too aromantic to really take that identity. They did include queer people, but given the specific exclusion of non-LGBT asexuals...)
ETA: Looking at the thread, it looks as if I'd got that wrong and that particular motion did not pass. However, asexuality still did not get included, and you can probably understand that I'm not too keen to wander innocently into a space where the people *might* be among those who were campaigning for ace inclusion but *might* be the ones who nixed it, were for outright exclusion of non-LGBT asexuality or defined it as "lack of a sexuality" in the conference notes.
This is the kind of thing I have to negotiate every time I enter an LGBT space. Do the people here consider me part of the movement, an ally, a sadly repressed excuse for a human being, a privileged person trying to wedge myself in where I'm not wanted? (I still remember one gay blogging activist reacting with complete fury at the thought that asexuals might liken themselves to LGBT people. Not want to become part of the movement, simply think there are similarities.) Can I slip through as just "queer", or will that part of my identity get called into question or dismissed as appropriation? Am I welcome? Am I welcome unless I dare to venture an unpopular remark?
This may be the reason I do not tend to actively seek out LGBT spaces even though the heteronormativity of my RL surroundings often feels nothing short of suffocating. This is definitely the reason I am probably not going to be identifying as LGBT unless something drastically changes, either in LGBT organisations' recognition of asexuality or my own perception of my affectional orientation.
And this is why "anyone who identifies as LGBT is welcome" still doesn't only exclude people identifying as cis heterosexual.
But, Kaz, I hear you say. But, if you don't identify as LGBT you shouldn't be winning awards for LGBT literature, right? I mean, if you're saying you're not LGBT should a book about a character like you be eligible, even if you're not straight?
That is an excellent point, I say. Honestly! This is something worthy of discussion. As you may have gathered from my little diatribe above, it is far far more complicated and far far bigger than just the LLF. What I want acknowledged is that this complication exists, and that saying "anyone who identifies as part of LGBT is included" will not suddenly make the possibility of marginalising us stubborn difficult-to-categorise people go away.