I seem to be doing a land-office business in theme anthologies lately. Among these, it seems almost as a matter of course, are a number dealing with issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual identity. The most recent to cross my desk is The Future is Queer, edited by Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel.
As seems almost a requirement, stories dealing with sexuality revolve around questions of identity if they are really to be “about” anything. There are several stories that zero in on that whole complex very effectively. The first of my standouts is L. Timmel Duchamp’s “Obscure Relations,” which explores the ideas of same-sex relationships and identity itself — not to mention the ramifications of the closet — in a story about a group of clones, all of the same man. (I take liberty to point out that David Gerrold, in The Man Who Folded Himself, touched on these ideas in somewhat the same way, although his mechanism was time travel rather than cloning.) Given some of our ideas about “other” and “self” and the way they manifest themselves in same-sex attraction, it’s a story that has not only dramatic impact but much food for thought. Rachel Pollack’s “The Beatrix Gates” is a stunning study in identity and mutability. It can be read most easily as a story about transexualism or simply a powerful examination of difference and its more positive consequences, as well as a subtle investigation of exactly what makes our identities. In a world of either/or — or in this case, Red or Green — it is a major victory to realize that there are other possibilities and that what seems to be carved in stone is, in fact, not.
Coming from a slightly different angle is Candas Jane Dorsey’s “… the darkest evening of the year …” In this one, religion becomes the metaphor for difference and questions of identity are muted. It’s a complex story in which persecution is a constant but understated substrate, and, as is typical with the best stories in general, pulls into itself a wealth of association and thematic possibilities. I should also point out that these three stories also introduce, in one form or another, the idea of “outlawry” as something undertaken deliberately, rather than as something imposed from without — the antithesis of victimhood.
Hiromi Goto’s “The Sleep Clinic for Troubled Souls” and Diana Churchill’s “My Long Ago Sophia” both center on a more personal examination of identity, both working through the idea of caring as an essential component of who we are. In the first, this working through means confrontation with all the possibilities of what we could have been — a literal meeting with the possible “me’s” that existed in one woman’s past — in the second a virtual reconciliation with a lost love and a prayer for forgiveness.
My most significant problem with the anthology lies not in the stories themselves, although I found them uneven in interest, but in coeditor Lawrence Schimel’s attempt, in his introduction, to link them to contemporary movement politics. (I must add that this was not a difficulty in reading, but in writing about.) There is, if I need to state it, a distinct difference between writing about identity and writing from the position of a particular identity — although it may seem anti-intuitive, the one becomes particular, specific, individual, while the other, in this case at least, is the result of a generally uneasy consensus that may or may not have any validity. I found that those stories that departed most readily from contemporary politics were the ones that most engaged me; those that hewed most closely to the minutiae of the now were, essentially, last week’s news. I don’t really see how it could be any different.
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006)
