News — own voices

We spend a lot of time talking about #OwnVoices and how that specifically affects the LGBTQIA+ community. Outside of queer lit, the two most prominent discussions are often about race and disability.

There are many different views on this within both reader and writer circles (and the overlap between the two). Even though I’m usually pretty firmly on the side of primarily supporting writers engaging with their (our) own experiences, I readily concede that #OwnVoices is not equivalent to “better written.”

The reason this came up again is that I’m taking...

Over the past week, I’ve shared multiple articles about the problems with J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans ranting. The most recent was this one, about a politician quoting Rowling’s vile kick at trans people in order to support his own hateful views.

It isn’t too surprising these posts were met with some degree of anti-trans sentiment, even in queer-friendly spaces. I have found, on the whole, that sharing things that are of interest or concern to the trans/nonbinary and/or bisexual communities are more likely to result in negativity...

The first LGBTQIA+ book I read wasn’t gay literature or MM romance.

That might come as a surprise to people. Most of my books thus far have had relationships between men (and occasionally between men and nonbinary folks). My publishing career started with a book that included a romance between two men.

MM Romance and other gay fiction are pretty prominent in LGBTQIA+ publishing. One might assume the reason I wrote my first novel was an extensive history of reading and writing about men.

One would be wrong.

All of my firsts have been books about...

Recently, I shared the above meme. The text of the main point reads:

Some people took this to mean hetero-washing or...

I’ve come under fire before for speaking about allosexual/alloromantic (i.e., not asexual/aromantic), cisgender, heterosexual people writing about LGBTQIA+ people. So I’m prefacing this with a couple of important points:

1. I’m speaking specifically about those who identify themselves as not being part of the LGBTQIA+ community, not “people we think must be allocishetero"
2. I’m not calling for any kind of limit or ban on what people can read or write or publish
3. I’m not in any way suggesting that #OwnVoices books are inherently better written or better quality, only...