Reteaching Gender and Sexuality

Via Cheryl Morgan, a group of Seattle kids who're seriously kick-ass, tackling the whole shithouse of issues surrounding gender & sexuality head-on. I love their whole "identity can't be summed up in letters" attitude. As far as I'm concerned this is what being queer is all about. This is what New Sodom is all about; these kids are fricking building it:

Reteaching Gender and Sexuality from PUT THIS ON THE MAP on Vimeo.

Nec Spe, Nec Metu

Having created a YouTube account for the It Gets Better video, I thought I might as well use it. So, here's me reading a wee poem I did as a riff on Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est," picking up on some of the themes addressed in the previous vid. It's called "Nec Spe, Nec Metu," in reference to the motto inscribed on the knife of one of history's greatest fags, the artist Caravaggio -- "nec spe, nec metu" meaning "no hope, no fear":

It Gets Better

So, you may or may not have heard of the recent spate of teen suicides in the US, by kids who were suffering homophobic bullying, day in and day out, in high school. You may or may not have heard of Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project. Me, I think it's a damn fine idea and as THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! I could hardly not join my voice to the chorus.

So here's my entry -- with the colourful language I think is entirely fucking apt here:



All signal boostage will be much appreciated.

The Lucifer Cantos

With The Cosmic Dead:

My Mind, Melded

... answers the question, "What fantasy book or series is just as good, if not better, than The Lord of the Rings?"

... Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet, the short story collections of Jeff Ford or Kelly Link, if you allow them under the general term "books" -- these are my benchmarks of fantasy at its best. Ackroyd, Bulgakov, Carter, Delany -- there's a whole alphabetised library of writers whose books or series -- Hawksmoor, The Master and Margarita, Nights at the Circus, the Nevèrÿon books -- I think are ultimately better than The Lord of the Rings as works of literature. They just leave him in the dust in terms of general literary craft, I'd say... unless, of course, you're trying to fit them into this particular mould set by Tolkien, unless you're asking them to match Tolkien at his quite idiosyncratic game of subcreation.