Tag: Crime Hits Home

Shame

I have really come to love Bouchercon, and it’s always a highlight of my year.

Things have seriously changed for the better.

Queer Crime Writers after a dinner out in San Diego, with Marco’s lovely husband Mark Gutkowski

Bouchercon last week was a marvelous, marvelous experience. I had such an amazing time, saw some people I’ve not seen in quite some time (and quickly remembered why I love them so much), and stayed up way later every night than I should have–one of my many neuroses is FOMO, of course; I still regret not going to Dallas in 2019–but I laughed a lot, had some great panels, and made some new friends, too. I ate great meals, had some marvelous cocktails, and I really liked the hotel (once I figured out the shortcuts to the meeting spaces). It also made me think about my own history with the event, how things have changed for the better, and how I hope it keeps changing for the better. There were so few of us queer writers who used to go back in the day; now we have enough of us to have a happy hour where we get together and drink and chat about writing and the business and oh, how we all laugh. It’s wonderful.

When I first got started in this business, publishing was different. I had to explain this recently to someone I am hiring to do the ebook for Jackson Square Jazz for me; why I didn’t have a pdf file, because back then there were no ebooks and you got your page proofs in the mail, as well as your marked up manuscript for the editing process. So all I have on hand is the unedited version of the book I turned in. But what also was nice back then was there was a support system for queer writers that we no longer have–there were queer newspapers, queer magazines, and queer bookstores. We had a queer book of the month club–Insightoutbooks–and their influence in shaping and developing my career cannot be underestimated. After Hurricane Katrina and the six months spent touring for Mardi Gras Mambo, I kind of withdrew back into myself. I don’t remember much of 2006-2008, to be perfectly honest; I just know that I went back to work full time in 2008 and after adjusting my writing/editing schedule to that, it was around 2009 or 2010 that I resurfaced and started thinking about promotion and marketing again.

And what I found was that during those lost years (I call it the Hibernation) everything had changed. The queer newspapers and bookstores were mostly gone. ISO shut down. And I realized, with a sinking heart, that I was going to have to start going to mainstream conferences to promote myself. After working so hard in the mid to late 1990’s ensuring I could exist in almost entirely queer or queer-friendly places, I found myself having to essentially start over. Queer writers never mattered to the mainstream crime organizations and conferences, and I braced myself, knowing I was going to encounter homophobia yet again.

It didn’t take very long–although in retrospect, I’m actually surprised it took as long as it did.

I joined Mystery Writers of America, and later, Sisters in Crime. I also went to Bouchercon in Indianapolis and San Francisco. I didn’t know more than a handful of people and tended to glom onto the people I did know (sorry about that, guys; social interactions at events where I don’t know anyone ramps up my anxiety, so I glom onto the people I know). Indianapolis I wasn’t in the host hotel, I was across the street–and it was cold. It was the weekend of the Ohio State-Purdue game, I can remember that because my hotel was full of OSU fans, so I found myself mostly hanging out in my hotel room and reading, while braving the cold to go across the street for my panels and events. It was nice, and decided to go to San Francisco for it the next year. There I was in the host hotel and realized oh you really need to stay in the host hotel in the future, because it made everything easier. I was starstruck most of that weekend–I rode in the elevator with S. J. Rozan once and another time with Laurie R. King, which was incredible. I only had one panel, at 4 pm on Friday afternoon that no one came to, but I had a really good time—and even decided to put together a bid to host it in New Orleans (and that is a whole other story), before yet another person decided that it was time for a Bouchercon programmer to put the fag back in his place, letting me know that I and my books weren’t important enough (the exact wording was “surely you have to understand that someone who’s edited a couple of anthologies doesn’t really deserve to be on panels”–despite the fact that my tenth novel had just been released…and of course, the greatest irony of this was that I went on to edit three of their anthologies) to grace any panel, and that any panel I’d been given in the previous two years should be considered a gift.

Should be considered a gift.

A fucking GIFT.

(For the record, Paul is an event planner by trade. He is executive director of both the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival as well as Saints & Sinner, a queer litfest. Just to be certain I wasn’t overreacting and being a diva-bitch, I let him read the email. His response? “If one of my staff, interns or volunteers wrote an email like that to an attending author I would fire them on the spot.” And before anyone starts up with the “programming a Bouchercon is hard” I will remind you that Margery Flax and I wrote over one half of the program for Dallas in three fucking days and contacted everyone with their assignments and then reorganized and redid the program to accommodate schedules and wrong panel assignments for about two weeks before it was done–with the local chair constantly throwing things at us that made us start pulling threads and weaving it back together again….nothing like “oh, sorry, I forgot that I promised these people a panel for this” after you’ve redone it for the fourth time. That happened a lot. And the entire time, we were incredibly polite and friendly and did whatever we could to accommodate people; apologizing and fixing it repeatedly. NOT ONE PERSON RECEIVED A FUCKING EMAIL TELLING THEM TO CONSIDER ANY PANEL THEY GOT AS A GIFT.

But then, I’m not an unprofessional piece of shit whose pathetic ego sees programming as power to abuse, either.

I wasn’t saying (and was very respectful) oh I am such a big deal how could you not give me an assignment, all I asked was hey, I know how hard your job is, but I don’t understand how you get on a panel and what can I do differently in the future to get one? What am I doing wrong? I approached them with kindness and respect for the work they were doing and got bitch-slapped, demeaned, and insulted in response. No author who is paying their own way to a conference and essentially providing the event with free entertainment for its audience should ever be treated so contemptuously by event organizers, period. The fact that when I expressed these concerns to the national board all I got back was mealy-mouthed excuses and “we’re sorry you’re offended” told me everything I needed to know about the organization and its board; the way they were treating me about the New Orleans bid (I had planned on having Susan Larsen–former chair of the National Books Critic Circle, chair of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, long time programmer for the TW Fest and a nationally respected book reviewer–help out along with Pat Brady, long time publications chair of the Historic New Orleans Collection, huge mystery fan, and also a long time programmer for TWFest only to be told their vast knowledge and experience wasn’t “good enough” and I needed to get the homophobic trash who told me I was nothing to program New Orleans–yeah, like that was ever going to happen) was also egregiously horrible, condescending, insulting, and unprofessional.

Needless to say I cancelled my trip to St. Louis and never considered attending Cleveland; I tend to not go where I am not welcome. I am not taking my hard-earned money from my “nothing career” and giving it to a homophobic organization, where I then get to beg for scraps and get treated like shit. I have better ways to spend my money, thank you. (And yes, I know who the programmers were and yes, I will carry that grudge to the grave.)

I withdrew my bid to host for New Orleans, and I washed my hands of the mainstream mystery community. Who needs it? They were never going to accept me or my work, they were never going to read my work, they didn’t give a shit about me, and it was pretty clear they never would. I was kind of at sea for a few years, there. There were no more queer newspapers, no more queer bookstores, no more gay Insightoutbooks.com book club, nothing. Outside of the TWFest and Saints & Sinners, I had no conference outlets to promote myself and my work. The mainstream mystery world clearly wanted no part of me, so what was I supposed to do? So, I just kept writing. I operated my social media pages as a promotional outlet for my work, and I kept writing this blog. I did finally return to Bouchercon when it went to Albany; friends convinced me to go, and one powerful friend requested me for a panel she assembled–and it came through. Having friends made a huge difference, really, and through my friends I met and made more friends, and Bouchercon slowly became a must-go event for me every year…eventually reaching the point where I never had to be concerned about getting on a panel, while at the same time no longer caring whether I did or not. It became more about seeing my friends and being around other writers than a work/promotional thing for me. Ironically, once I no longer cared or worried so much about being on things…I started getting put on more and more things, with bigger and increasingly more important co-panelists (I still can’t get over the fact that I was on a panel with ATTICA LOCKE in Minneapolis. I was too nervous to say anything to her; I spent that entire panel looking at my co-panelists and listening to them speak and wondering why the fuck I was on that panel).

And now, of course, we have a group: the Queer Crime Writers, and a core group of us have been showing up together at conferences ever since we bonded at Left Coast last year (and bonded even more with more of us at Bouchercon Minneapolis last year): John Copenhaver, Marco Carocari, Kelly J. Ford, and Robyn Gigl–who’ve all become very dear to me over the last year or so. Teresa Cain/Carsen Taite joined us in San Diego, and became my con-wife; what a great time we had!

And somehow, I am getting nominated for mainstream awards, an outcome I could have never predicted. I won the Anthony for Best Anthology for editing Blood on the Bayou, and was nominated for Best Short Story at the Dallas event for “Cold Beer No Flies” (I lost to S. A. Cosby, no disgrace there). Last year Bury Me in Shadows was nominated for Best Paperback Original (losing to Jess Lourey) and Best Children’s/Young Adult (losing to Alan Orloff); neither of those losses were devastating because Jess and Alan are also friends of mine, and I couldn’t have been happier for them both. This year I had three nominations in three categories for three different books–Best Anthology for Land of 10000 Thrills (losing to S. J. Rozan for MWA’s Crime Hits Home); Best Children’s/Young Adult (losing to Nancy Springer for the latest Enola Holmes, hello, no disgrace there); and Best Humorous for A Streetcar Named Murder (losing to Catriona McPherson for Scot in a Trap)–again, with the exception of Springer, I lost to very talented friends I like very much (I’ve not met Springer). That’s seven Anthony nominations in total, to go along with the Macavity, the Agatha, the Lefty, and the Shirley Jackson nominations. Not bad for a queer writer, wouldn’t you say? Ten mainstream award nominations? I certainly never would have dreamed all those years ago when I was told “any panel you get should be considered a gift” by Bouchercon programming.

That doesn’t mean the community is free from homophobia; it’s still there. I have mentioned before the mainstream cisgender male author who is clearly afraid to acknowledge my existence and always beats a hasty retreat whenever I walk up; I find his homophobia amusing. You’re not hurting me, bro, because I don’t want to know you, either. It doesn’t mean that I can’t be sitting in a booth in the hotel bar with a bunch of friends only to have a straight man look at me, smirk and say “faggy” in a sentence, as though daring me to call his ass out because he’s so much more important than I am; no worries, asshole, I don’t even have to repeat the story to anyone because since then you’ve shown all the big names you’re buddies with that you’re actually a piece of shit, and yes, I’ve watched it all with the same fucking smirk you had on your face when you thought you’d pull out your micro-penis and slap it down on the booth table in Toronto, and when I hear stories about you, I am delighted to pull out “Well, I’ve known he was trash since he said faggy in front of me, looking me in the face and smirking as he said it”.

Assholes will always out themselves, at least in my experience–and I’m very patient. I store the receipts and pull them out to corroborate horrific behavior when the timing is right.

I’ll save the racism, sexual harassment, and homophobia I faced in Albuquerque at Left Coast for another time.

I’m very pleased with the progress that has been made in our community over the last five or six years–I mean, the Rainbow Diversity panel about queer crime writing in Toronto was packed, when such panels in the past only drew maybe four or five audience members. Codes of conduct have been implemented to protect attendees from sexual harassment and pervy conduct, as well as racism and homophobia.

Progress is often slow, and it is easy to get impatient. I don’t know if my involvement with Bouchercon has made things better for queer writers there, but I do know the award nominations show other queer writers that such things are possible for them. Nothing says you’re welcome here than seeing members of your community nominated for the awards. The more of us that attend also means that more of us will get nominated, be on panels, and be able to talk about our work to readers who might open their minds and read our books. Being visible at these events is crucial and important.

And like water wearing down a stone, we have to keep relentlessly pushing.

(John, Marco, Kelly, and Rob Osler have all been nominated for mainstream awards over the last year, along with me. Edwin Hill and PJ Vernon have also been recognized for their brilliant work, too. This is so wonderful to see–I’d be delighted even if I weren’t with them in this grouping. And if you’ve not read any of us, there’s not a single person I’ve mentioned by name you can go wrong with. It’s also exciting seeing the new queer talent rising in writers like Margot Douaihy.)

I was torn about going to Nashville next year; their anti-trans and anti-queer laws have me not really wanting to spend my queer money there. But the point was made that going and being very present was an act of defiance…and Lord knows I love defying homophobes, so I guess I am probably going to go. I can visit Dad either before or after, so it actually makes sense for me to go. I’ve decided to write a very gay story to submit to their anthology (which means I need to get back to work on it), and so yeah…I think defiance is the way to go.

Plus….I love my Queer Crime Writers. I can’t imagine not being around them next year, and I would absolutely go nuts from FOMO.

So, in closing, thank you, Queer Crime Writers. I love you all, and thank you for letting me into your group. Let’s keep making a difference, shall we?

Guilt is a Useless Emotion

Saturday morning and all is well in the Lost Apartment. I certainly hope this day finds you contented and well, Constant Reader! I slept deeply and well last night, after watching the LSU Gymnastics team defeat Arkansas, and then watching the ladies’ figure skating finals at US Nationals. It was a lovely evening–one can never go wrong with a double feature of gymnastics and figure sating, really–and as I said, afterwards I slept like a stone.

I also spend some time polishing and revising my short story for the MWA anthology Crime Hits Home, being edited by the enormously talented S. J. Rozan (if you’ve not read her novels, start. Right. Now. Her Winter and Night is one of my all-time favorites). As always, submitting to the open call for an MWA anthology is a long shot–there are levels of blind-reads to make it through–and I have as yet to make it into one of the fiction anthologies (I do have a piece about writing dialogue in the upcoming Mystery Writer’s Handbook, edited by Lee Child and Laurie R King, and I did have a recipe in the MWA Cookbook a while back) so keep your fingers crossed for me. Inevitably everything I’ve had rejected by an MWA anthology has sold elsewhere, so making myself write a story for the submission calls has always wound up working out for me in the end…I was, however, more than a little bummed when this call came out, because my story “The Carriage House” was perfect for this one….but I had already submitted it to Mystery Tribune (who did wind up buying and publishing it). I think the story is good–although I wish I had finished the drafting sooner, so I could have spent more time on the revisions and polishing. Ah, well–if they reject it I will try to sell it somewhere else.

Today I have to make groceries, get the mail, and go to the gym. I’ve blown off the gym pretty much ever since the weather turned cold last weekend–the stress and pressure of writing the story, as well as what was going on in the country over the last wee or so has precluded any writing or gym visits, which I should have never allowed. I was coming home from work every day and immediately turning on either CNN or MSNBC, being sucked right in and then spending the rest of the evening watching them report the same news, hour after hour after hour–which also needs to stop–and I need to get my focus back again. Not that I am not gravely concerned about the future of the country, of course–that I very much still am–but I need to focus on what I need to get done while paying some attention to the current crisis.

I also need to do some cleaning around here as well…cleaning and filing never seems to have an endpoint, ever–and I also need to get back to my reread of the manuscript. I should have started revising it last week…but a thorough reread/copy edit/line edit of the manuscript in its most recent iteration is probably really the smart thing to do; it was what worked so well with Bury Me in Shadows, and definitely need to stick to the things that actually work for me.

While I was making condom packs yesterday I managed to watch three films: Farewell My Lovely with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe; The Fog with Jamie Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau; and last but not least, a revisit of Creepshow 2, with assorted stars, including George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour. The first definitely fits into the Cynical 70’s Film Festival–you don’t get more cynical than the film version of a Chandler novel–and the other two are holdovers from the Halloween Horror Film Festival, with the last also fitting into the Stephen King Film Adaptation Festival. Of the three, I had only see the third before; I actually saw it at the drive-in, and then again on what used to be the pay-cable movie channels, whether it was HBO or Cinemax or Showtime I cannot recall. Farewell My Lovely is flawed, but a very good film–very solid noir; I kept thinking it should have been filmed in black and white–and Mitchum projects the world weariness of an older Marlowe quite perfectly….I’d love to see someone like Oscar Isaac or Bill Skarsgard or Adam Driver take on the role. The entire movie was stolen, however, by Sylvia Miles in a terrific supporting performance that earned her an Oscar nomination; and Charlotte Rampling is also perfect as the femme fatale. (A very young Sylvester Stallone also has a small role as a gangster.) I did enjoy it, and I think it was released in the wake of Chinatown, when Hollywood discovered noir would still sell tickets.

The Fog was also a perfectly adequate horror film, directed by John Carpenter, about a hundred-year old curse coming to wreak vengeance and havoc on the coastal California town of Antonio Bay. Jamie Lee Curtis is in the cast–in the midst of her fame as a Scream Queen–but she isn’t the star of the film (if it could be said to have one); if anything, it’s a supporting role at best. The bigger female role belongs to Adrienne Barbeau, playing dee-jay and radio station owner Stevie, who is the first to realize what is actually going on–without knowing the history, she just knows the fog is dangerous and bad. I’d also forgotten Janet Leigh was in the movie as Mrs. Williams, local get-it-done lady who is in charge of the hundred year anniversary of the town. It has all the requisite John Carpenter directorial touches–jump scares, a weird and creepy electronic soundtrack, the growing sense of doom with every scene–and I would recommend it, even if it is dated. It was remade this century–I may watch the remake at some point for a comparison/contrast.

Creepshow 2 was obviously the sequel to the original; written by Stephen King and based on his short stories (some of these may be actually original, as I don’t recall reading the stories for the first and third part of this anthology film), and both films served as an homage to the horror comics King grew up reading and loving and inevitably influenced his writing. The second film didn’t do as well as the first, but the underlying theme of all the stories is paranormal vengeance for bad behavior. The first features an old cigar store wooden Indian (I don’t think if anyone brought up that subject that anyone born after 1970 would even know what one was) that comes to life to wreak vengeance for the brutal murders of the elderly couple who own the store he stands in front of; and the third features an adulterous wealthy wife rushing home from a rendezvous with a paid escort ($25 per orgasm!) who gets distracted by dropping a cigarette in the car and runs over a hitch-hiker, whom she leaves on the side of the road but he just keeps popping up as she debates whether she can live with what she did as she continues on her drive home, trying to kill the hitch hiker as he inevitably pops back up on the road saying thanks for the ride lady–which became a running gag between me and my friends at the time. (The woman is played by Lois Chiles, who came to the TWfest one year and was an absolute delight.) Both are good and macabre; fitting right into the karmic justice theme that ran through almost all horror comics back in the day. The middle story–“The Raft”–is also one of my favorite Stephen King stories; about four college students who go for a late-in-the-season swim because it sounds like a good idea, helped along by weed and beer, and it goes horribly wrong for them. The story is different from the filmed version–it’s told from the perspective of the less-than-perfect male roommate who always lives in the shadow of his roommate who is muscular and handsome and charismatic, who loves his friend but also resents him a little because he always sucks up all the air in the room. In the film the two girls who go with them are just other girls; in the story there’s a different dynamic, in which the stud’s girlfriend senses the other girl, ostensibly the lesser roommate’s date, is making a play for the stud before the dying starts. The main character in the story, though, is a decent guy which winds up ending badly for him; in the movie, he’s more of a dick, because he realizes when the final girl is taken by whatever the thing is in the water preying on them, that he could have used that time to swim for it…but doesn’t realize it until it’s too late. In the movie, he deliberately feeds her to the creature so he can escape…and that decision is what dooms him, and you don’t really feel sorry for him the way you do in the story. The highlight of this segment is Paul Satterfield’s youthful physical beauty in a bright yellow bikini (and while I enjoyed viewing the splendor of his body in a bikini, I also kind of doubted he would have worn one; back in the 80’s the only men who wore bikinis were gay, body builders, Europeans, or guys who’d been competitive swimmers so they were used to them); and the movie is okay. I do wish anthology films would make a comeback–since they inevitably based their “episodes” on short stories (Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson had a lot of their short stories adapted for anthology films as well as for anthology television series), it would be great to see some modern horror short stories filmed.

And on that note, tis time for one Gregalicious to head back into the spice mines. I want to spend some time this morning with Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which I am loving, before it’s time to hit the errands and the gym. I am also sure there will be figure skating to watch this weekend as well, huzzah! Have a lovely Saturday of a holiday weekend, Constant Reader, and I’ll see you tomorrow.