The Pen and the Sword

This is probably going to sound strange in a culture so steeped in fear and misogyny that a woman walking alone at midnight is seen as asking for trouble, but I’m going to say it anyway.

I am a female-bodied person and I feel safer at night than I do during the day.

And this isn’t because I feel unsafe during the daytime. I am quite happy, and feel perfectly secure, when going outside during the daylight hours. So it’s not the product of insecurity–no, this is because I, quite genuinely, feel safe at night. This is, most likely, in part because I have been privileged to have grown up in fairly safe, upper middle class neighbourhoods–overall, there’s no reason for me to be scared at night because there’s nothing to be scared of. But it’s more than that. It is most definitely more.

So here’s the question: why?

To start off, some background. I’m a writer–not a published or a professional writer, but a writer nonetheless–and I have spent a fair amount of my time honing my craft. As such, I am very aware of the power of words. I am easily able to take an innocent thing, something concrete and measurable (the absence of light) and twist it into something abstract, or symbolic–something frightening or horrifying, disgusting or sinful, dangerous or malevolent or just plain bad. It’s easy. It’s all about word choice. I add some suffocating shadows here, some crawling blackness there, a touch of chill night air and a bit of darkness lurking between the street lamps and you’re already dancing to my tune. A few adjectives, and the atmosphere is tangible–it’s a symbol, and it’s something I can manipulate.

So why not manipulate it?

What if I said the shadows were not suffocating, but dancing? What if I told you there was a soft blanket of darkness over everything, and the night air was sweet instead of chill? What if you walked out into the freedom of the night to see the purple shadows and the soaring blackness of the sky? What if the gathering dark smiled at you?

When I reach for descriptions of darkness, these are the ones that spring to mind.

Much of this, I imagine, originated with my love affair of epic fantasy when I was a child. I remember reading The Sword of Shannara at eight or nine and being fascinated with the way the protagonists crept through the dark. I’ve read the Belgariad and the Malloreon series more than once, and it didn’t escape my notice how so often the journeys would start in secrecy, in the dead of the night. And as for my ultimate childhood favourite, The Hobbit, wherein the main character is consistently described as “the burglar” and is sent sneaking off through the darkness more times than I can count–well, I’ve owned my copy of the book since I was six years old and I’ve started to wear out the pages. From a young age, I have associated darkness and night time with adventure, freedom, secrecy, and concealment that I could use to my advantage. Like the protagonists of my old favourites, darkness keeps me safe from the enemies who are hunting me.

It does not escape my notice that a lot of the reasons I cite for loving darkness are the same ones given for why more crimes are carried out at night. The dark is concealment. The dark is safety. In the dark, no one can see you to stop you from doing what you want. And while I don’t intend to become a criminal anytime soon, I cannot deny that the fact that I can fall back on that same security is appealing to me. Because, here’s the thing–in a lot of ways, I can identify with those criminals. Or, to put a better spin on the metaphor, with the protagonists of epic fantasy.

Look at it this way. While the details of the stories I mentioned vary by the tale, the core of the plot is essentially the same: a group of protagonists set out a dangerous quest to obtain something valuable and vanquish their enemies, pursued by villains at every turn, demonized by the governments that surround them, and forced to rely on each other, their wits, and the individual talents and idiosyncrasies of each group member.

Can any feminist or queer rights advocate or anti-racist or anti-ableist or any other activist out there look at that and tell me it doesn’t sound familiar?

In a lot of ways, we’re a lot more like those protagonists than we think we are (even if they are most often male, straight, cis, white, and abled). We’re fighting for something that the dominant culture doesn’t want us to have. We’re attacked at every turn by people who don’t want to upset the status quo, forced to go into hiding and be subversive and adopt guerrilla tactics, told to shut up and to stop “flaunting” our differences. We’re pushed into groups of people we may not get along with, simply because there is no other alternative–these are the people who want the same things as we do, and while our methods may not always be compatible, it’s better than setting up camp with the other side. To be an activist, you have to be clever and crafty and supportive–and yes, sometimes you have to sneak around in the dark where they won’t notice you until you’re already gone.

Or, to go back to that crime metaphor I mentioned earlier, a lot of us are criminals. Maybe not legally, not anymore, at least not in North America–but socially, culturally, we are criminals. We are outcasts. We are unwanted. We are the dregs of society, the undesirables, the people who are erased from the smiling ideal of the thin, fit, attractive, abled, cis, white, straight couple and their two charming, average, normally developed children, middle-class income, suburban house and family dog.

And if the quests of epic fantasy have taught me anything, it’s that night is the safest place for the people who want to upset the current order.

So there you have it. If darkness is a symbol, which it undoubtedly is, I am going to make it my symbol. I am not going to allow it to become a symbol of fear, something I should avoid if I don’t want to be raped, something that is dangerous and unsafe and too horrifying for a frail woman like me. Instead, darkness is my adventure, the siren call of my wanderlust, the start of the journey that my quest will take me on. Darkness is my freedom, the safe blanket that allows me to slink about unnoticed while I fight to upset the villain who has stolen my rights from me. Darkness is the power that allows a small group of revolutionaries to outwit armies, overcome impossible odds, take back what has been taken from them, and become a band of chosen ones. And as an activist, I am committed to this: rather than fear the demon in the darkness, I will be the demon in the darkness.

The only ones who have anything to fear are the ones so powerful that they’d never think to be afraid in the first place.

When I was nine or ten, I was really into the whole Animorphs series. My cousin had most of the books, and I borrowed a bunch from him–the ones he didn’t have, I found at the library. I read through most of the companion novels, and the whole series up to about number 40 or 41 (it was a 54-book series, not including all the extra novels). I would have finished reading the whole series, but that was where my cousin’s collection had a seven or eight book gap, and the library didn’t seem to be able to fill it in. Regretfully, I let it go.

I loved that series when I was a kid. It tackled a surprising scope of issues, for the age group it was aimed at, and the idea of the technology-induced shapeshifting (and all the limitations on it) was imaginative and interesting. The main antagonists, a race of aliens called the Yeerks, were the perfect adversary, especially on earth, where no one believed in aliens–they were something like huge slugs with the ability to flatten themselves out completely, parasites who bonded with a host by wriggling into their ear canal, wrapping around their brains, and taking complete control of their nervous system. Outside their hosts, they were vulnerable–sightless, deaf, with only minimal senses–and even when they had taken someone over, they still had to visit a “Yeerk Pool” every three days and exit the safety of the host’s body to swim in water rich with nutrients from their home planet. But once they were safely in control of their host, they had access to their memories, they could hear and communicate with them inside their own brains, they could follow their routines perfectly–there was no way to tell that they were anything other than what they appeared. It was a silent invasion, a perfect enslavement of an entire population, and it was perfect.

I had a problem with the series, though, and it wasn’t one that had occurred to most of my peers who also read the books. The Yeerks were great–brilliant antagonists and fascinating aliens–but the rest of the alien races weren’t nearly so imaginative.

And that brings me to the Alien Problem.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before. It’s that voice that asks, while you’re watching Star Trek, how likely is it that an entirely separate race would evolve that looks just like us, except for some forehead tissue? Or that wonders about the Twi’lek, those sexy blue slave girls in Star Wars, who look totally human (with costumes that revealing, we can tell) except for their skin colour and the weird flesh horns that grow out of their heads. It was the voice in my own mind that asked, why do the Andalites, of Animorphs, look just like centaurs out of human myth, with the addition of blue or violet skin and the subtraction of a mouth? And what about the Na’vi, from Avatar? Sure, there are some differences, but they still look pretty human. The Alien Problem, essentially, is that question of why, when we imagine aliens, we always seem to think of them as humanoid.

But for me, the Alien Problem is more than that. At ten years old, when my peers were asking, “why do the aliens look like humans?” I was asking, “why do they look like anything we’re familiar with, at all?”

Why do we assume aliens will have eyes, as we know them? Why do we assume they’ll understand “seeing” the same way we do? Why do we always seem to set up their faces with a pair (or pairs) of eyes, set over a nose, set over a mouth? Why do we assume they’ll have a face at all? Why do we assume they’ll have a head at all? Why do they have to have limbs as we understand them? Why do they have to have hands, feet, fingers, toes, as we understand them? Why do they have to have a heart, a brain, a stomach, a recognizably human or at least earth-like system of internal organs? Why do we assume they’ll be be classed into the same broad categories as earth animals–classes of mammals and reptiles and amphibians and birds and everything else? We have animals on our own world that don’t follow those rules–say hello to the platypus–so why would we assume that things on other worlds would follow them?

Now, before I get any further with this, let me make something clear. I’m not talking about all aliens, or all sci-fi. There are creative stories out there where the aliens are nothing like what we know. I’ve read some of them; my father, much more of a sci-fi fan than I, has probably read many more. But these aren’t things appearing in the mainstream. These are stories that you have to go looking for, stories that you have to be interested, specifically, in sci-fi, to find. These are things that are meant for people who are already “in the know.” And meanwhile, the mainstream sci-fi, the things that the average non-geek is going to see, goes on its merry way making its aliens as “safe” as possible.

You see it, so obviously, in things like Star Wars and Star Trek–though these are in part products of their time, and it’s been pointed out so often that it has a sort of kitschy charm to it now. Aliens have been getting more creative in recent years, especially with advances in special effects technology, but you still see it. It’s present in movies I love, like The Fifth Element and Avatar and District 9; it’s present in cool games, like Spore. Some of the ideas built into the Pandoran world (particularly in the animals–things like the way they breathe and the way they produce sound) were interesting and clever, but there wasn’t enough of them. And the Na’vi themselves are a wonderful, interesting culture, but they’re more like something out of a fantasy world–something I’d expect to see alongside dark elves and dragons in my Dungeons and Dragons book rather than inhabiting another planet. District 9 took a good step forward by showing us something that was so obviously other, something unattractive in human eyes, but still the core of the issue remains–bipedal, humanoid, paired eyes over a noselike appendage over a mouthlike orifice. Spore is much the same–though it’s built so that, nominally, you can make anything you want, it still favours creatures with an earth-like construction. And as near as I can tell, the Alien Problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

I’m left to wonder, why–if we can create anything–do we seem so intent on creating things that look like us?

From what I can gather, there are a few reasons for this, or at least a few that are presented as reasons. First of all, it’s hard. It’s hard to come up with something that isn’t based on what we know here on earth. It’s hard to invent something that seems like it could never belong in our own world, when our own world is the only thing we know. There are people trying, other geeks who want to address this problem, but that’s not enough as long as it remains on the fringes. It has to move into the mainstream.

But there are more problems with that, of course. Once you move into big-budget territory, you’re not working on your own anymore. You have to contend with producers and directors and marketing executives and the networks and committees and what they think will sell. The creative types who come up with unusual, innovative ideas will often find them stifled by their superiors, who are afraid people won’t be able to identify with something that looks inhuman. That’s bullshit, of course–whether or not your audience will identify with the characters depends much more on your storytelling than whether or not the characters look like human people–but mainstream media is well-known for cutting corners on storytelling on their way to big bucks. They don’t want inhuman protagonists because then they’d actually have to work for their money instead of relying on the boost they get from characters looking human.

There could be other factors at play. It could be–it probably is–in some way related to institutionalized racism, but that’s not an area I’m especially knowledgeable in, so I don’t think I’m really qualified to comment. It could be that individual writers and artists are trying to create an escapist playground, and they want to make something they could imagine a human interacting with. It could be that they really don’t care, and are just trying to have fun. It could be any number of things–but the fact remains that the Alien Problem doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for now.

So how do we budge it? Keep trying. That seems to be the only option available to me. Support stories with creative ideas instead of just going for the eye candy. If you like something that goes more in depth with its aliens than just making them look like unusual humanoids, make sure its creators know. If you’re interested in producing sci-fi yourself, start thinking creatively about your aliens. Make something unusual, that you could never picture on earth. Take the approach so commonly used by fantasy writers–instead of starting with the components and putting it together, make up the final product and then work backwards, inventing ways for it to function. They’re aliens, after all–if you can find a way to justify it, there’s nothing to stop you from doing anything.

I, personally, have no plans to get into writing sci-fi anytime soon–but if I ever do, you can rest assured that my aliens will be as unearthly as I can possibly make them.

The Toulouse Pride Parade is tomorrow, and I’m going to be going out to that. My LGBTQ group has a float, and there will be a place on it for me to dance, most likely, or a place for me to walk beside it. I’ve never been to a Pride event before, and I’m pretty excited. But Pride is a hot topic in the never ending debate around queer rights, and a lot of people in my life seem to be unaware of the issues that lead to it, so here it is. Gay Pride 101.

A question I hear from a lot of straight people about Pride is probably one you’ve heard before, too: “why isn’t there a straight pride parade?” That question is related to another one: “why are you proud to be gay? It’s not like it’s something you had to work for.” For some people, this is asked in earnest confusion; for most, it is an aggressive gesture, a response to the feeling that one’s privilege is being threatened. And, at one point in my life, these were questions I asked, too.

You might think this an odd sort of thing to be wondering about, from a professed queer who frequently describes herself as “full of gay,” and you’d probably be right. But context is important.

When I first started thinking seriously about my own sexuality and came out as bisexual (a label I have since moved on from in favour of the delightfully invented neologism of “pan-queer”), not only was I still mainly interested in men, I was largely ignorant of the issues facing the LGBTQ community. I had been socialized, as most people are, expecting to be straight, and I’d spent my childhood without it even occurring to me to think about my own preferences. When I did come out, it was to an astonishingly accepting community: accepting parents, an accepting school, an accepting and mostly queer friend group. In a lot of ways, I was still experiencing privilege. I knew, in the vaguest sense, that homophobia was still a very serious issue in most parts of the world, but without much experience of it myself or any form of education on the issue I found it hard to reconcile with my own life experiences.

I had also grown tired of the people who I encountered on various internet forums, who used being “proud to be gay” as an excuse to tell everyone about their sexuality (regardless of the intended conversation topic), and cried homophobia when people (rightfully) told them they were being obnoxious. Sexuality, I decided, is an important part of identity, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be what ultimately defines you. This is still something I believe today.

And so I wondered–why no straight pride parade? If gay people are allowed to be proud, why aren’t straight people?

Then I grew up a bit. Then I started learning. Then I found my interest in the same sex growing, and more and more I felt excluded by the mainstream. And then I understood.

There are two things to understand about the concept of gay pride. The first is this: being proud to be gay is not an active pride. It’s not like being proud of an accomplishment, or getting an A on a project, or finishing a difficult task. It’s not something you are proud of in expectation of being congratulated for. Being proud to be gay is a basic pride, a pride in oneself, like being proud to be an individual person. It is being yourself, and being unashamed of that self in a world that so much wants you to be ashamed. Being proud to be gay is refusing to bow to shame.

And that’s where Pride events come in. The queer community is still excluded every day. People are presumed straight until proven otherwise; no straight person ever has to declare themselves so, to come out or reveal their heterosexuality to the world. But anyone who isn’t straight, if they want the same recognition of that part of themselves that their straight peers receive automatically, has to explicitly state it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work, either; all too often, someone who casually mentions their sexuality in conversation or reveals that they have a same-sex partner is told to stop flaunting their sexuality, that the other party doesn’t care if they’re gay but doesn’t want to hear about it–something that never happens to straight people. Couples in advertisements are always straight, unless the product is specifically targeting gay people; in literature and film, main characters are rarely queer unless the plot of their story centres around LGBTQ issues. Queer people become so starved for media validation that we cling to the gay characters we find, we treasure them and hold them close to our hearts, simply because we’re so used to being left out. And so the second thing is this: there is no straight pride because heterosexuality is already celebrated every day by every part of culture–except queer culture. Here, we celebrate us.

We have Pride because it gives us a place to belong. We have Pride because there, we are accepted, in a way we so rarely are anywhere else. We have Pride because it brings us together. We have Pride because it’s the one place in our lives where we can look around and for once, assume nine tenths of the people we see are queer. We have Pride because it brings attention to our cause. We have Pride because it reminds the world that we are here. We have Pride because it visibly celebrates all aspects of our culture, from drag queens and flaming twinks to dykes on bikes and stone butches to bears, leather D/s, and lipstick femmes, to androgyny, genderplay, and anything in between. We have Pride because we are fucking proud, and no one has the right to take that away from us.

One day, Pride won’t be necessary, but that day is a long way off. So tomorrow, I will be out there in eyeliner and chipped nail polish, a chest binder, and vinyl pants, and I will be making noise and wearing rainbow buttons on my shirt collar and being unapologetically fabulous, because that’s who I am and that’s never going to change. I will be out at Pride, proud to be there, and proud to make people sit up and take notice–because we’re still here, we’re still queer, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.