E. Robert Dunn: From Bullied to Books

I met E Robert Dunn just a few days ago at Stellar Fest. My first thought was, "I bet that dude takes a really nice author photo." (To be fair, I was correct. Just look to the right.) But, then I got to talk with him and share the floor on a few panels, and I learned that he had a lot to say about the art and craft of writing. 

E Robert Dunn is an American author born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Born Eston Robert Dunn, he began his career writing spec for The original 1970s Battlestar Galactica television series. As a teen, he also wrote for the British television series Space 1999.  

Tell us a bit about your most recent work. 

My most recent work is a play book entitled: Monologues From The Like Minded. It is a play consisting of a series of monologues that explore life experiences, body image, and several other topics through the eyes of psychiatric patients with various ages, races, sexualities, and other differences.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work? 

Morality themes/subjects. Hoping that whoever reads any of my (play) books 'walks away' thinking and/or learning something about themselves and/or others. 

What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer? 

Bullying led to journaling which led to my craft in writing to become proficient and catching the eye of an English teacher who made a telephone call to a friend in NYC who knew a literary agent. 

What inspires you to write? 

There's so much more humanity needs to do to reach its fullest potential.

What of your works has meant the most to you? 

Well, my first novel: Echelon's End, Book 1: Last Generation.

Morgan Dante: Queer, Sensuous, Moody, and Melancholy (And Especially Angst)

Morgan, a lover of Gothic lit and vampires, writes about love, tenderness, body horror, and hunger. ​I met them this past weekend at the Atlanta Sci-Fi Expo and was immediately drawn to her covers. The first pages I read didn't disappoint either. Their specialties are romance, horror, and fantasy, and their work blends Gothic romance with eroticism and dark and devastating religious motifs. They enjoy writing queer, sensuous, moody, and melancholy stories with complicated characters, and they especially like angst and hurt/comfort.

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

My most recent book, Sacrament, is an M/M/M dark vampire romance that takes place in 1898 Paris and features a complicated, bisexual polycule between three men. The main character deals with the dark, somewhat clandestine world of vampires. It was released on Valentine's Day.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

Because I am a trans, queer author who always writes queer characters, I tend to explore themes about identity and being accepted for who you are, no matter how the rest of the world perceives you. Characters who would usually be marginalized or deemed monstrous are portrayed sympathetically. They contend with trauma and find comfort and acceptance, although the road isn't always easy or straightforward.

What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer? 

I have always written. I think I wrote my first (very short) story when I was in first grade. I remember writing an adventure for a fourth grade creative writing assignment and the teacher recognizing that I was good at writing, and I've always had the desire to keep creating stories and sharing them with others.

[Link] Let Them Be Morally Flawed: In Defense of Queer Villains in Stories

John Copenhaver on Conflating Queerness with Evil

by John Copenhaver

Queerness and villainy have a long history of being conflated by mainstream entertainment, from Peter Lorre’s effeminate and threatening Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon to the obsessed and manipulative Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to, more humorously, the violent Lord Humungus from Mad Max, decked out in leather fetish gear, to the many queer-coded Disney villains, such as the Evil (Drag) Queen in Snow White to the preening Jafar in Aladdin.

Originally, these queer-coded antagonists were molded to contrast mainstream heteronormativity; the straight cis-gendered heroes of these stories embody traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. On the surface, the villains aren’t explicitly queer, but they wear a cloak of queerness to imply a harmful false equivalency that being LGBTQ+ is morally dubious or, from another angle, that transgressing gender and sexuality norms indicates innate corruption or, perhaps, a moral weakness leading to greater evil.

If you grew up in the eighties and early nineties, as I did, it was difficult to find any positive queer role models in popular entertainment or books; few of these stories were within easy reach. So hungry were we for queer characters, we zeroed in on the flamboyant queer-coded villains, which despite the intention behind these characters, we embraced long before Disney seized the opportunity to capitalize on their beloved baddies and began franchising their origin stories. In doing so, they filed down their villains’ horns for mass consumption.

At first glance, transforming queer-coded villains into protagonists with rich backstories seems well-intentioned and progressive. This revision of villainy seems to challenge conflating queerness with corruption: “Those vicious villains weren’t evil after all, just misunderstood.”

In truth, Disney is just nudging these queer-coded characters into the circle of conventional morality, not widening the circle. The original vampy evil fairy Maleficent becomes a scorned and brutalized lover and later a protective mother figure. Vicious and glamorous fashionista Cruella becomes a Dickensian goth orphan girl-cum-fashion designer. While these films are entertaining, they don’t embody progress as much as they want us to believe they do.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/let-them-be-morally-flawed-in-defense-of-queer-villains-in-stories/