Gay storytelling
‘Best Gay Stories 2011’ edited by Peter Dubé
This fourth edition of Lethe Press’ Best Gay Stories is an excellent addition to the series. Edited by Peter Dubé, taking over for previous series editor Steve Berman (Dube’s function appeared in the first collection in 2008), the anthology includes a real diversity of voices. The mix of male and female authors and writing in various genres is an expression of Dubé’s stated intent to complicate our notions of lgbtq+ life with “proliferating images and accounts and possibilities.” As the title of the excerpt of Michael Alenyikov’s award-winning novel Ivan and Misha included here says, “It takes all kinds.”
The diversity of the stories ranges across various genres and styles from “experimental” writing to erotica. Sandra McDonald provides what can be considered a speculative western (much superior than the film Cowboys vs. Aliens) in her “Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy.” Wayne Lee Gay provides a womxn loving womxn and gay twist to a traditional folktale with “Ondine.” Both Kevin Killian and Aaron Hamburger delve beneath the fleshy surface of gay porn, but with very different results in “Repetition Island” and “Finders Keepers
Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved the intimacy of experiencing a story. Whether that be books, films, TV shows or games, there’s something exciting about cracking open a story, and letting it rush through you, your control personality and perspective colouring the tale. For me, that meant reading things like Jane Eyre and through a queer lens, something which also shaped my time with Storyteller.
Storyteller is a marvel of a game that combines puzzles with interactive fiction, tasking players with writing a story by giving them a title, characters, and their very own backdrop setting. This could be something as similar as a wedding chapel or as morbid as a graveyard, and each one will ask you to be creative as you could possibly be in decree to solve the puzzle and advance onto the next chapter.
The purpose of Storyteller is for players to see the title of the story they’ve been given – for example, ‘Story of a Tragedy’ – and make it fit with the tools you’ve been given. Considering that I’m as straight as cooked spaghetti though, I saw the chance of creating something that’d resonate with not just Gayming M
Roxane Gay on the importance of storytelling
- Name
- Roxane Gay
- Vocation
- Author
- Fact
- Roxane Gay is the author of the best-selling essay collection, Bad Feminist, along with the multi-genre collection Ayiti, and the novel An Untamed State (which is being adapted for film). Her short story collection, Difficult Women, and the memoir, Hunger, are out in 2017. She’s the author of the comic World of Wakanda, which is part of Marvel’s Black Panther series. (Ta-Nehisi Coates, who oversaw the Inky Panther relaunch suggested her to Marvel.) It's a comic written by a bisexual black feminist about two jet, bisexual, feminist women. She’s also a contributing opinion journalist at the Recent York Times and an associate professor of English at Purdue University. She says she can’t talk about her newest book yet, but notes that “it’s going to be about television.”
Bonus Fact: I asked Gay about the potential audience she'd reach with World of Wakanda, which focuses on Ayo and Aneka, two former members of the Jet Panther’s female security force. "For me it was the opportunity to contact new readers, certainly," she said. "I didn't really lightAs I watch, and sometimes participate, in what happens with the current protests, I wonder what is being sparked in me; what stories or deeper currents of feeling are being stirred? I connect with Black Lives Matter in many ways, but most essentially through my struggles as a gay man: struggles for rights, for recognition, and for meaning. This struggle was always twofold for me: the revolution that is televised (AIDS, marriage, etc.) and the internal revolution that is not televised (who am I, where acquire I come from, where am I going?).
What, then, is our gay story and struggle all about? What are our vital myth(s), the dominant themes or values or essences that we bring, not so much as over-the-top personalities but as gifts: the inborn talents or presence that each individual gives to the whole? What is our unique contribution to the planet that make us (or anyone) valuable? What is the strife for rights and recognition truly about?
Turning to Western cultural history, we can go back as far as the ancient Greeks, to the start of it all. Plato’s Symposium speaks openly of same-sex love as a higher form of love, a devotion to the ideal of Love itself. Present at the sy