A shitty day for the m/m community

So I woke up this morning to two blog posts from Aleks Voinov, which have seriously affected my productivity today. Good thing that I am teleworking this afternoon. I've been talking to myself all morning about if I want to weigh in officially on the events that have led up to these posts or not and decided that I just couldn't stay silent on the issue. Plus, every 30 minutes or so when I go back to read Aleks' most recent post I get more and more emotional.

I guess I need to address my relationship with the m/m community a little first. I am a typical lurker. I am extremely introverted (unless alcohol is involved), and so I join groups that I find online and lurk. Sure, I comment from time to time, or join group events, vote in polls, but rarely do I ever engage that much. It is not because I have nothing to say, but that over time I have been worn down by people's expectations of me, by angry or hurtful behavior from previous online groups, etc. So when I first started reading m/m, and discovered that on Goodreads there was such a vibrant, welcoming community, I was so excited. But, as these things go, I found that I still was not engaging on a regular basis. Don't get me wrong, I read the book of the month, I did the various challenges, posted sporadic reviews, chatted occasionally to people who commented on my reviews or vice versa, but overall, I was still pretty hands off. This blog was actually one of the ways I was going to become more connected, but as anyone can see, a few random posts and reviews later I am still struggling to become fully active. Then came Gay Rom Lit in New Orleans. I had such reasonable expectations for my attendance. I was going to go, listen to some of my favorite authors read, and generally stay on the fringes. Imagine my surprise when I met some really wonderful and incredible people and even found myself actively engaging with everyone around me. The author/reader dynamic was incredible, we were talking about the progress the genre has made in getting more attention over the years, and I spent time with some people who I hope to be able to count as friends for a long time. And the crux of the matter is that I think most people who attended felt similarly about the retreat; that overall, no matter how cheesy this sounds, we all felt like a large group of friends who were getting together for the first time, or that we were even closer, like family.

Fast forward a month and the community has been rocked by a schism that has been building over the past couple of weeks. I am not going to go into the minute details here, but I will say that on the night that I found out, I spent some time on various blogs, I went to AJ's site and generally tried discern how I felt about the entire matter. Were some things about his early career handled poorly? Yes. Did I think that a couple of weeks later the community would still be embroiled in a clash over the idea of how writers represent themselves and their sexuality? No. I guess I was being naive since so many people writing in our genre write under pseudonyms. There have been a number of incidents over the years where presumably male writers were found to be female so I figured that this would blow over quickly.

I know people will take me to task and say that it is not the pseudonym that bothers them but the idea of an author claiming an authenticity of experience in order to have a higher sense of legitimacy. I get that, I do. But for me, I have never bothered myself obsessing over someone's gender or sexual preferences before I bought an author's book. Again, I know I not addressing what I know people think is the core issue, but I just wanted to state my own preferences. I know that many will think that I am just an apologist, or that I am one of AJ's more loyal fans, but in reality I am not. I've probably only read a couple of his books total.

What has become more troubling to me over the last couple of weeks is that how a community that should be so inclusive has proven to be anything but. In the situation regarding AJ, it is clear that it has now become a he said/she said fight, where certain camps claim that AJ is living a transgendered life and others say that he is not. Okay. Nothing is going to come of this, we can all argue until we are blue in the face. It won't be resolved in an easy way. But the idea that a community that celebrates diversity and equality has been rather hateful towards those among us who are transgendered or gender queer makes me quite feel quite ill. I consider myself to have a fair amount of fluidity in regards to my sexuality; I definitely don't fit into a nice predefined box. And suddenly, the community that I found so warm and welcoming a few years ago now seems quite distasteful to me. The sad thing is that after GRL, I was finally able to open up to many of my more recent friends about my writing and reading habits, about aspects of my personality that are a bit different, because I had such a positive experience in New Orleans. Am I happier now that more of my friends "get" the "real me"? Yes. But do I feel confident becoming more invested in a community that has proven to be so vicious? No.

This brings me back around to the beginning of this post. Aleks Voinov is one of my favorite authors, hands down. And not one of my favorite m/m authors, but one of my favorite authors period. I want to clarify that I don't know Aleks personally. I've commented on some of his reviews and he has done the same to some of mine. I link to his blog on mine because I think that everyone needs to read at least one of his books (preferably Counterpunch, but that's just my humble opinion) because each one is just that good. I might not always be comfortable when reading one of his works, but in the end, I am always grateful to have read it. I was ecstatic when I first read that Rachel H. and Aleks were going to join forces to work on their own publishing company. I pre-ordered almost everything Riptide had available so that I would get the books early. So it is no surprise that I feel very strongly about Aleks as an author. And so today, to hear that he is giving up the genre, and possibly writing for any public consumption altogether, was devastating. I know I am just one slightly crazy fan, but to me, this feels like the m/m community is losing one of its most original and intriguing voices. I totally understand his decision. Why would someone want to write for a community that has been so unwelcome to transgendered authors? I know I wouldn't.

I was thinking about some of the conversations that I had with another reader at GRL who was pre-op and we discussed the fact that there is definitely a dearth of books that featured transgendered characters. He had even mentioned to me that at one of the sessions he felt quite hurt because of a writer's comments about not wanting to take on a transgendered character. At the time, I chalked it up to the author probably being more worried about getting it wrong, than just not wanting to deal with the issue. Now I am not so sure. I would like to think that this writing/reading community will rise above this issue; that at some point some of the more angry voices will realize how much they have hurt other readers and authors. Right now, however, that doesn't seem possible. In the meantime the community is losing some voices that shouldn't be silenced, Aleks among them. And I for one, am very sorry and devastated to see this happen.