The Second Golden Age of Queer Speculative Fiction

Abstract

I've been a part of the queer writing fiction community for more thanthirty years, starting with a queer writing group on AOL that I took over inthe early nineties and continuing up to the present. I founded and ran the Queer Sci-Fi site and Facebook Group, and have had the chance to seethe growth of Queer speculative fiction first-hand.The roots of queerspeculative fiction reach way back. Samuel Delaney, Joanna Russ, and Elizabeth A. Lynn, among others, were all writing it in the sixties andseventies, and writers like Anne McCaffrey flirted with it (see Dragons,Green) as well. But, we're unquestioningly in a golden age of queerspeculative fiction, as readers clamour for characters in which they canrecognise themselves, and writers push the existing boundaries of themarket place.