Tag: freedom of speech

Born This Way

Monday and we survived Weekend One of Carnival Parades. *whew*. I am exhausted, though, which is never a good thing for a Monday morning of a new work week. Heavy heaving sigh.

Now I know what ‘bone tired’ means. And speaking of ‘bone tired’….

As Constant Reader knows, I taught a session on writing LGBTQ characters at the SinC into Great Writing workshop at Bouchercon this past September in New Orleans. It was an amazing experience, and it was enormously flattering to be asked to do so in the first place. I was also asked to write something for the Sisters newsletter, pretty much given carte blanche to write whatever I wanted to, and since I had an essay about being a gay writer on the backburner (I’ve been toying with it for almost a year) which I was calling “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” I said sure. As I was wrapping up deadlines and looking ahead to the glory days of NOT HAVING ANY DEADLINES, I started writing the essay again, whittling away things from the original unfinished draft that no longer fit my thesis and…I got about halfway through and stopped.

The reason why I stopped? Because it is next to impossible to write about the challenges of being a gay crime writer writing about gay characters without sounding like the biggest whiner in the world, and I don’t want to be that guy.

Then, a question posted on a list-serve I belong to for crime writers triggered some answers that were so horrific, so thoughtless, and so ignorant that I suddenly knew how to write the essay–or at least how to address it with a starting place.

One of the current ‘boiling points’, if you will, in our current society is the question of ‘cultural appropriation’ as well as ‘cultural insensitivity’, and how these questions apply in a broader sense with the American guarantee of First Amendment rights under the Constitution (without getting into the reality–which most people either don’t understand, or chose to ignore– that ‘freedom of speech’ is actually only guaranteed as a protection from persecution and prosecution from the state; not from other people, and certainly not from consequences. The example I always use is, “Well, when I worked at the ticket counter I couldn’t tell a passenger to go fuck himself, could I, without getting fired?”) Recently–I don’t remember where I saw this, but it was on Facebook; I don’t know if it was from an industry publication or a newspaper or something–I read a piece about the major publishers hiring what were called ‘sensitivity readers’ to read manuscripts dealing with characters who were out of the author’s experience to make sure the characters weren’t offensive. I am of two minds about this, and I can certainly understand why people would find this alarming/concerning; how much control/power would these ‘sensitivity readers’ have over the author’s work? Not to mention the fact that no one can speak for an entire community; what one gay man finds offensive the next three you ask may not.

So, yes, I do have a bit of a problem with the concept of sensitivity readers. However, if I were writing a character from a culture not my own; say, a New Orleanian of Vietnamese descent, wouldn’t I want to talk to a New Orleanian or two of Vietnamese descent? Wouldn’t I want my character to be as authentic and realistic as I can possibly make him or her? I’ve talked to cops, private eyes, and FBI agents to make my characters are grounded in reality as I can. So, why wouldn’t a heterosexual writer creating a gay character want to get some insight from a gay person? And so on, and so on, and so on. I don’t see a problem here, but again, that is the work that should be done before the manuscript is turned into the editor and publisher, and I’m not sure how comfortable I would be with that for myself.

Of course, there are those who, because of this, have pulled out the ‘censorship’ battleflag, thoroughly missing the point. The First Amendment does not guarantee anyone a publishing contract, nor does it guarantee a platform; if it does I’d like to be booked on both The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert when my next book comes out, thank you very much. Oh, wait, it doesn’t mean that, after all?

Blimey.

Which is my roundabout way of getting to the latest provocateur, Milo. People were rightly outraged when the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster gave him a book deal; people were rightly outraged when he started getting invitations to speak at colleges and universities; people were outraged when he got invited to go on Real Time with Bill Maher (whom I also have problems with, but we’re talking about Milo now). As loathsome as the things he says are, I will defend his right to say them against any attempt by the state to silence him. Simon & Schuster is a business; they have a right to give a book deal to anyone they think will make them money (although I seriously doubt this book will make them any money; I see it going onto the remainder table pretty damned quickly, and not even being released in paperback; unless, of course, conservative clubs and organizations buy it in bulk at a deep discount as giveaways for fundraising drives and so forth–which is often how people like Ann Coulter wind up on the bestseller lists), and likewise, college/university groups have a right to invite anyone they want to come speak to them…but rescinding those invitations (and promise of payments and expenses) when said invitations blow up in their faces is not censorship as defined by the law and the Constitution. The same law that gives Milo the right to say what he does also applies to those who oppose the things he says.

That’s um, kind of how our country works.

Being utterly uninterested in anything he has to say (I’ve never enjoyed listening to transphobia or racism), I didn’t watch Real Time with Bill Maher, only watching the clips of Larry Wilmore telling him to go fuck himself, which I will also admit to enjoying immensely. (Of course, now that clips of him talking approvingly of sex between children and adults have turned up–and really, who didn’t think something like this was going to come up; it was just a matter of time–he won’t be getting invited to speak anywhere anymore, and I suspect S&S will be cancelling their book contract.) But Milo–like Ann Coulter before him–fascinates me. (And for the record, I use ‘fascinate’ with the old meaning of like how a snake fascinates its prey; I do think he is kind of dangerous, and snake-like.) I always wonder how people like him come to be. I wrote eighty pages of a Paige novel in which the victim was a Coulter-like character, attempting to peel back the layers and see what could create someone like her/him (that manuscript is in a drawer, as no one had the slightest interest in publishing it). Coulter apparently sees herself as a comedian/performance artist; I sadly know people who know her, and they state she doesn’t really believe what she says but it makes her money; I suspect Milo is kind of similar to her in that regard, yet at the same time…

Take, for example, his appearance on Bill Maher. Milo is precisely the kind of gay stereotype that triggers homophobic reactions from the right, and even from some gay men: he isn’t particularly masculine, and wore enormous faux pearls around his neck on the show, which he played with as he spoke (damn it, I am going to have to watch); he is an effeminate gay man (think a conservative Jack from Will & Grace, or Emmett from Queer as Folk: the kind of gay man that ‘straight-acting’ gay men loathe and despise). The loathing of homophobes for effeminate gay men (and, let’s be honest, a number of GAY MEN as well) has everything to do with the culture of masculinity and the fear of ‘not being a man’; which, really, is where homophobia and sexism and transphobia comes from.

I just saw on Twitter that Milo may lose his job at Breitbart over the pedophilia comments; I am not holding my breath, nor will I hold my breath about losing the contract with S&S. He has, always, positioned himself as a spokesperson for the First Amendment; all of this should give him more material to work with, and of course, I am sure it’s the fault of the ‘politically correct’ who ‘want to silence him.’

So, I doubt he will go gently into that good night, and he will undoubtedly continue to fascinate me the way cobras fascinate their prey before they kill and eat them.

I always am curious at to what made these types of people what they are.

One More Try

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…I used to post my opinions about hot-button topics, both here and on social media. In some ways, this blog began for two reasons, thirteen years ago (!): first, to get me writing again and second, so I could talk, here, about things no one else would let me, or pay me, to write about. It was the midst of the Bush administration, and the 2004 election, in which homophobia and fear of the gays was used to get people out to vote–and to vote against the queer community’s rights and realities and humanity, if you want to boil it down to its ugliest truth–and having just lived through the brutality of a hate crime, I needed a place to vent. And vent I did, for many years. I did realize that there was a bit of the “preaching to the choir” element to this; no one who would actually learn anything from something I posted was likely to read it, and I finally realized a few years ago that arguing with someone on social media rarely, if ever, did anything besides raise my blood pressure and ruin my day. And my time is so precious that I hated wasted it in any way when I could be productive with that time instead. I also realized that I am a gay man and an author; if you know those two things about me you pretty much should be able to figure out what my positions are on social and political issues. (I still love the one-star review I got on Amazon for one of my Chanse books, where the complaint was about how I “used my book to promote my liberal agenda.” Because of course a novel by a gay man with a gay main character is your usual go-to for a conservative point of view?)

Occasionally, I will post when something is so egregious it cannot be ignored; the Trayvon Martin murder was one of those. But I am digressing. The point of today’s entry in Short Story Month is to talk about freedom of speech; which is also apparently a hot button topic. I personally have grown incredibly weary of people arguing about censorship and freedom of speech when they don’t know what the hell they are talking about; in the United States, yes, we do have freedom of speech, but that only pertains to the government. To wit, here is the actual language of the First Amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, the government is prohibited from censoring speech, or abridging free speech in any way. There have been rulings by the Supreme Court that have inhibited free speech in some way; but please note that nowhere does that amendment guarantee anyone a platform, or freedom from the consequences of their free speech; only that the government itself cannot stop someone from having a platform, nor punish anyone for using their right to free speech.

It is astonishing how people will bleat about their right to free speech, or scream censorship, while trying to tamp down on someone else’s right to free speech. If I say something homophobic or sexist or racist, there are consequences from the free market I would have to face as an author; boycotts, attacks on social media, and so forth–and I would never try to stop anyone from doing so; as long as the government is not involved everyone has that right to protest me for things I’ve said or done, or boycott me, or whatever as long as they don’t threaten to harm me or my loved ones physically. (And for the record, this HAS happened to me.)

Do I find Ann Coulter and Milo whatever his name is reprehensible? Yes, they are vile people, and the things they write and the things they say in the public forum revolt me. Do I think they should be banned? No, I don’t. But cutting off Milo or whatever his name is’ Twitter account for violating their terms of service is NOT censorship or inhibiting his freedom of speech. Twitter is not a public utility, and he agreed to those terms of service when he signed up for a Twitter account. He violated those terms, and thus was banned from the site.

Which brings me to today’s story, “Knox”, by Harlan Ellison, which I read in his collection Approaching Oblivion.

“Knox” is…well, it’s Ellison at his most provocative, his most thought-provoking, and his most subversive. The story was originally published in Crawdaddy magazine in 1974 (is Crawdaddy still around?), and while that was definitely a different time, the language used in the story is kind of raw in the present day–and yet it is precisely the kind of story that people need to read.

I am not going to quote from the story because the language is so raw and racist and prejudiced and bigoted; yet the story itself is powerful because of the language Ellison uses. He uses every word that has ever been used as a pejorative for any racial or ethic minority, including the n word (IN THE FIRST SENTENCE). It’s a bit jarring, because I can’t even use the word as a quote; but they are all here in the story. Knox, the title character, works in a factory under a Fascist type government but also is part of a ‘neighborhood watch’, whose focus is to ferret out anti-government sentiment, treason, and those who aren’t basically of white European descent. Knox at the beginning of the story is a part of the watch, hoping to become a member of the “Party” so he can advance at work…and over the course of the story, as Knox becomes more and more a member of the party and a tool of the government, no longer thinking, loyalty to the party more important than friends and family…well, it’s very chilling.

And sadly, I don’t think such a story–because of the language–would get published today.

But that’s a part of why I love Ellison so much; even as he writes about inhumanity, there is so much humanity there. Knox becomes a horrible, horrible person…but you also see it happening and you also understand how it happens…and that makes it even more powerful, and awful. This, you see, is how normal, every day lovely German people became Nazis.

And now, back to the spice mines. Here’s a hunk: