Guest Post: Raising Money for LGBTQ Health Care, the Progress We've Made

Here's a thing I would've put on my blog at nkjemisin.com, but since it's ideal for people who are already familiar with Patreon, I thought it might be better to put it here. Hope you don't mind! From Rachel Swirsky, Nebula winner and fellow skiffysta, who's trying to raise money for a good cause.

-N

Thanks to Nora for letting me guest post here today.

I’m here writing about the fundraiser I’m doing through my Patreon for Lyon-Martin health services, a provider which specializes in serving the LGBTQ community, particularly poor and homeless lesbian, bisexual, and trans women.

The short version of why I’m running the fundraiser: a bigot is using the Hugo Awards to harass me and LGBTQ people. I’d rather take that negative energy and pay it back with positive. If you want to hear the long version, check it out here. People who contribute will get some silly, spoofy things, that I hope they'll enjoy, including an erotica parody called "If You Were a Butt, My Butt," and a round robin short story about dinosaurs by me, Brooke Bolander, Adam-Troy-Castro, John Chu, Alexandra Erin, Ann Leckie, Ken Liu, Juliette Wade and Alyssa Wong. I hope you'll consider chipping in some money for LGBTQ health care.

On Ann Leckie's blog, I talked about why the common advice to ignore trolls isn't enough. On Mary Robinette Kowal's, I wrote about some of the threads of oppression that make solidarity personally important to me. On Jim Hines', I wrote about coping with harassment as a vulnerable person.

It's true that there are a lot of dark places in the world, places where harassment and oppression flourish, where things stay the same or get worse or just don't get better fast enough. You don't have to look far to find examples, and I've written about enough this week.

Today, I wanted to write a little about the places where the light is increasing.

When I started selling my writing in 2005, if I wrote a story with queer characters, I had to think about where I could send it. Not all markets would publish things that pushed those boundaries. Even editors who had no problem with queer content might have to deal with things like school library distribution, where some librarians (more than do today) believed that "gay" = "sex" = "inappropriate for children."

These days? I don't even think about it.

These days, when a young trans writer asks me whether there are people with non-normative genders in the industry, I have instant access to an array of publicly known names like my former student, An Owomoyela, one of the fiction editors of the Hugo-winning Strange Horizons, Keffy Kehrli, a brilliant writer who is also running his own queer-themed podcast, and Charlie Jane Anders, whose beautiful writing has been acknowledged with well-earned awards.

In 2005, a venerated old, male writer grabbed a woman's breast without her permission, on stage, in front of thousands. The science fiction community was befuddled, tripped over its own feet in confusion, and nothing decisive proceeded.

Now large numbers of pro writers have signed pledges not to attend conventions without harassment policies. Activists like Elise Mathesen, Genevieve Valentine, and Rose Fox, among so, so many others, have stood up to make those policies mean something.

And yet more activists, like Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael and Lynne Thomas, and Mari Ness, have come up with a similar pledge about accessibility policies, to try to extend that energy and protection to disabled congoers.

In 2008, fans of color stood up to be counted, because white people didn't even really believe they were there.

I hope most white people know better now. It's been a long time since I saw someone suggest everyone who said they were brown was a sock puppet.

Con or Bust did that. Tempest Bradford did that. The Carl Brandon Society did that. Smart, dedicated, writers activists and fans, did that, by raising their hands.

When I came into the field, I knew a little about post-colonial and Indian diasporic science fiction because of my anthropology classes, and I'd been reading some Japanese fiction in translation. But it's only been in the past several years -- thanks to the efforts of American translators like Ken Liu, and international critics and writers like Charles Tan and Lavie Tidhar -- that non-anglophone speculative fiction is being widely read and heard in the United States, leading to the recognition of powerful, non-Western writers like Liu Cixin.

Every single moment of progress has had its backlash, of course. When Nora Jemisin came to deserved prominence as one of this century's most important, emerging voices, jealous graspers tried to put her back in her "place." Elise Mathesen and Genevieve Valentine are still subjected to victim blaming.

But they made a difference. They're still making a difference.

If my post on Mary Robinette Kowal's blog was about why people still need to stand together, then this post is the light side of that. When we push hard, and when we bear the costs of pushing, we can make progress. We have.