From Queer to Eternity

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Title:	From Queer to Eternity
Creator:	Geoff Allshorn
Date(s):	8 November 2020
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Star Trek, multimedia, science fiction
Topic:	LGBT+, intersectionality, 'the other'
External Links:	From Queer to Eternity
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'Binary Takeoff' by Dick Jenssen, artwork used with permission to illustrate article

From Queer to Eternity is an essay by Geoff Allshorn.

From the intro:

My background in science fiction demonstrates my own intersections of the personal with the political.

Some Topics Discussed

• The history of the founding of Spaced Out, an LGBT+ SF club
• The club's aspirations to be activist and affirming of diversity
• The gradual change of club membership from affective to consumerist
• How science fiction failed to reflect the challenges and excitement of its real-life counterparts
• Examples of how 'otherness' is ubiquitous in science fiction
• The literary definitions and potential of science fiction
• An historic exploration of examples of queerness and 'otherness' in speculative fiction down through the milennia
• How science fiction activism contributed to the formation of LGBT+ activism
• Queer (mis)representation in media science fiction over recent decades
• Intersectionality and Queerdom
• Parallels and parallax: Afrofuturism; racism; Slipstream; feminism.
• From Praxis to Pride

From the Essay: The Queer Experience

In 1999, as the founder of a Melbourne-based LGBTI science fiction club called Spaced Out, I authored the club’s draft charter. Its goals included a recognition of diversity and a challenge to our science fictional friends and peers:

“We recognise that science fiction is a fun and popular medium and we no longer wish to be excluded from its fiction, art, cyberworlds or other creative forms…” Spaced Out, 1999.

I recall the energy and enthusiasm of the club’s early days: we published a number of newsletters and two fanzines, and our website won an Australian science fiction ‘Ditmar’ award. A professional author and other local luminaries became guests at our meetings while we, in turn, hosted panels at a Worldcon (Aussiecon 3). Our very existence, as both geeks and queers, identified us as a minority grouping within both communities; it was fun to confront double prejudice and it was interesting to see who supported us in either context.

Within a few short years, however, our creative impetus dwindled and our club focus narrowed, until the group became little more than a social locus for queer consumers of media science fiction – removing us from the stereotype of affective fans who appropriate culture and relocating us within the more commonly-held stereotype of passive consumers (Grossberg, 1992, 51 & 52). Thus we redefined our aspirations from Worldcon to Comicon.

The irony of how life can come full-circle was emphasised to me in 2012, when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned a six-part series entitled, Outland, telling the story of an imaginary ‘gay science fiction fan club’ that was curiously located within the Australian city which really did have such a club. The series was advertised as being an exploration of inclusion but it excluded its real-life counterparts: its generic disclaimer dissociated its fictional characters from any real-life role models, and its fictional ‘otherness’ was further emphasised by its predominantly white male characters displaying very little real diversity. To me, its stories lacked the excitement of our real-life exploits in Spaced Out, where we had taken ‘one small step’ into groundbreaking territory and attempted to ‘boldly go where no fan had gone before’. Ultimately, Outland inverted media science fiction subtext: whereas LGBTQIA+ SF fans had traditionally sought to interpret ‘otherness’ as metaphoric queerness; we could now interpret our queerness as comprising metaphoric ‘otherness’.

In 2016, I attended a convention in Melbourne which boasted a number of panels that examined issues relating to queer science fictions. One panel consisted almost entirely of panelists and audience swapping suggestions for the whole hour, in order to compile a necessarily incomplete list of queer SF novels. Within my experience, such a search for queerdom within SF usually tends to be a passive one – seeking out what already exists, and assigning it significance as part of our quest for validation. This may be a necessary starting point, but I see it as being insufficient for those seeking to express perspectives and voices outside of the heterosexist structure of traditional SF.

From the Essay: The Queer Perspective

This was not my first adventure into such territory: the figure of the ‘other’ was more than an academic concept to me. I recall, as a child, watching a TV series from the late 1960s, The Invaders, which combined the ‘flying saucer’ craze with anti-communist fears from the McCarthy era. Even at my young age, I somehow knew that its conspiratorial warning – that ‘they’ were among us – held a more ubiquitous meaning.

Within a few years, as a teenager coming to terms with my awakening homosexuality, I would come to understand the larger metaphor of the ‘other’ in the midst of our heteronormative culture, wherein queer identities were (at the time) subject to both moral and legal sanction – an isolation that was most empathically evoked in such tales of alienation as Ted Sturgeon’s short story, A Saucer of Loneliness. In 1975, I instinctively recognised kinship with the young man who silently and momentarily cruised Logan within the cyberspace ‘Circuit’ from the film Logan’s Run. Later in my teens, my enthusiasm for Star Trek reinforced the concept of the alien being both within and without. By then, however, I had also started to question why science fiction explored the diversity of alien life forms but somehow managed to often overlook genuinely bohemian human characters and cultures.

Broadly, the genre might be defined – according to its very title – as comprising fiction about science, or how the human condition may be redefined by such technology...

Such exploration is potentially ripe for queer issues which examine emerging concepts of what it means to be fully human, and – beyond that – to extend this recognition to incorporate what biologist Bruce Baghemi refers to as the ‘polysexual, polygendered’ biosphere which is found across planet Earth (Baghemi, 1999, 7). By extension, our galactic dreams and visions could all be equally strange, inclusive and diverse.

As far back as True Story – the satirically-named spoof written by Lucian in the second century AD, complete with queer genders and sexualities (Richardson, 2001) – science fiction has been a genre replete with alien characters and situations of chaos that echo with queer sensitivities and themes. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story detailing prejudice and alienation. We can all grok the alien within Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Isaac Asimov’s robotic character, Daneel Olivaw, and his ground-breaking female roboticist, Susan Calvin, are people reflecting the humanity of loneliness borne from difference.

We find our first example of queer agency. Joseph Hawkins identifies a link between early literary science fictional utopias and the emergent gay rights movement as can be seen in the fanzines produced by Lisa Ben and Jim Kepner during science fiction’s early era; the skills they honed and the pre-Internet social networks which they nurtured may have laid the groundwork for their later publication and dissemination of seminal gay literature. Hawkins posits: ‘I think a really great case can be made for the fact that they learned how to do their gay publishing from their involvement in science fiction’.

Ideally, science fiction should be a fertile ground for introducing people to diversity and difference. After all, if we spend time absorbing material that features interaction between humans and aliens, it will hopefully encourage people to have open minds when approaching any cultures or communities that differ from their own. Science fiction should – theoretically at least – encourage a bigot-free zone. (If only!)

From the Essay: Intersectionality

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward encourage us to be mindful of what they refer to as ‘parallax’ (borrowed from the astronomical term); that is, recognising that reality can be viewed from differing perspectives (Shawl & Ward, 2005, 21). Following their example, we should acknowledge that a science fiction story written by an affluent white gay man in Melbourne will present a different parallax from one written by an African American man in Boston – or a white lesbian in Buenos Aires, a Jewish heterosexual F2M in Beirut, a Latinx person in Orlando, an indigenous sistergirl in Alice Springs, or a gay Catholic man in Lagos. To further extend our understandings of parallax, we should also note that literary SF and media SF have their own traditions and paradigms, as do manga, graphic arts and novels, RPG and MMORP and LARP and cosplay, fanfic, and social media. Such varied formats provide opportunities for the portrayal of diverse voices and lives.

One empowered approach towards ‘queer’ agency within science fiction should be to consider its intersections with other ‘minorities’ or cohorts who have also been traditionally excluded, marginalised or stereotyped within the genre. Hawkins suggests that gay rights pioneers who were inspired by science fictional ideals also found parallels with feminism and racial equality. Conversely, Shawl suggests that a wise approach for transcultural explorers is to understand the differences between being a ‘tourist’, a ‘guest’ and an ‘invader’ of other cultures; thereby avoiding cultural appropriations (Shawl, 2005, 75 – 84). I concur that cultural appropriation of feminist, Afrofuturist or indigenous perspectives is, in itself, not appropriate within queerdom, except where these overlap within LGBTIQ identities – and they may often do so. However, we can also learn from these other examples and forge our own unique perspectives and self-empowerment.

It is time to leave behind Frankenstein’s Monster, Spock, and the aliens who are hidden in plain sight. Where once we were satisfied with the subtextual and metaphoric ‘other’, it is time for us to raise new voices and ‘come out’ with pride and celebration, helping to redefine science fiction – and humanity as a diverse collection of aliens, bohemians, and others. One such example may be David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself, a story which features homosexualities amongst its paradoxical time travel permutations:

“So this is love.

The giving. The taking.

The abandonment of rules. The opening of the self.

And the resultant sensuality of it all.” (Gerrold, 1991, 82)

Therein we might find both an invitation and a template for our human future.