Where Are All the Queer Men in Sci-Fi?

In most other contexts, wondering “where are the dudes?” would be, at best, silly. If you want examples of SFF with straight, male protagonists written by straight, male (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) writers, you’re spoiled for choice. Alec Nevala-Lee’s recent (and essential) biography of John W. Campbell, the long-time editor of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine (later Analog) digs into the personalities who shaped (and constrained) our sense of what science fiction should be. Though Campbell was just one voice during the so-called golden age of the genre (though I’d happily make the case that we’re living in another one), he was one of the preeminent tastemakers, going to great lengths to popularize many of the common traits that we’ve come to associate with the genre. And though his influence is undeniable, and he certainly introduced or boosted the careers of some of the most important names in the field, his interest in voices that weren’t male (and straight, and white) was severely limited.

For all his very positive contributions, Campbell’s narrow mindset put binders on the popular conception of science fiction that took decades to shake off. (A particularly damning anecdote: when introduced to the work of Samuel R. Delany, one of the most innovative voices in the genre, the famed editor responded with indifference.)

In more recent years, the staggering and undeniable success of female-identifying SFF writers , many of whom identify as something other than straight, has been a blessing for queer readers. Books like Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion and The Light Brigade, Ellen Klages’s Passing Strange, R.E. Stearns’ Barbary Station, Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension, and Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet are just a few prominent, recent, and highly recommended books with diverse casts in which queer women are at the forefront.

Still, it’s honestly quite a bit harder to come up with books lead by queer male-identified characters, particularly when we’re talking about science fiction. (Somehow, queer men slide into fantasy worlds rather more easily than they make it onto spaceships.) It’s not just an issue in vintage works: the recent mainstreaming of the Queer SF movement is definitively lacking in gay male rep.

Openly gay sci-fi author David Gerrold has included gay characters in his space opera sagas, but not without a fight: early editions of two books in his War Against the Chtorr series, A Matter for Men and A Day for Damnation, were edited by the publisher to remove homosexual content that was only restored when he signed a new contract with a different publisher (both are currently out of print). It wasn’t the only time the author received such pushback: one of his scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation that had gay themes and was intended as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic was canned by the producers; he later rewrote it as the novel Blood and Fire. Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself also includes some homosexual sex scenes, but since the character in question is technically only having sex with himself thanks to the mysterious machinations of time travel, I’ll let you decide where it falls on the representation scale.

One of the most prominent recent examples in fantasy is Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf (the first of a trilogy), in which lead character Tracker and his band of mercenaries hunt through an imagined, but not entirely made up, ancient Africa in pursuit of the mysterious child they’ve been hired to find. James’ writing is somehow both elegant and visceral, capturing the blood and filth of the mercenaries’ lives. That’s the main draw here, but he also captures a sweaty, muscular brand of M/M sexuality that dodges stereotypes of gay and black men alike. In this there are hints of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, particularly as he was often depicted by artists like Franz Frazetta as the quintessential muscle daddy-type of many a gay adolescent fantasy—if mysteriously marketed to straight men. Tracker’s relationship with the shape-shifter Leopard defies easy categorization, given the more openly fluid world in which they live, but its naked emotion and sexuality are among the book’s most impressive aspects.

Kai Ashante Wilson does something similar with his novella The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, another work that makes no apologies whatsoever for black, queer, male sexuality. An earthbound demigod named Demane is part of the mercenary band of a man known only as the Captain, himself a descendant of gods who left Earth for Heaven in the distant past. The contrast between their mythic, almost angelic origins and the gritty “reality” of their world of dangerous jungle and dark magic is at the story’s center, as is the physical and emotional connection between the two men. Wilson followed Wildeeps up with the very different but similarly impressive A Taste of Honey—set in the same world, but focusing on a privileged courtier Aqib bgm Sadiqi and his love for the soldier Lucrio. Differences in status provide the obstacles to their romance, though it all works as a metaphor for the real-world forces (class included, of course) that would keep two men apart.

Richard K. Morgan (best known for Altered Carbon, both the book and the resultant Netflix series) also produced a grimdark science fantasy series with a gay male protagonist: Ringil Eskiath, a war hero nonetheless shunned for his sexuality. In spite of his family’s disapproval, Gil’s mother enlists him to help free a cousin sold into slavery—a quest that soon puts him in the path of dark magic and sees the fulfillment of a prophecy. The first in the series, The Steel Remains, came out in 2008—not that long ago, really, but in a very different landscape. Making it all the more impressive: his sword-and-sorcery world admits not just graphic violence, but lots of fairly explicit man-on-man action. Which is not the point… but it’s kinda the point.

Three excellent recent science fiction-adjacent novels are among the few with queer male leads: Sarah Gailey’s alt-history duology River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow (collected in American Hippo) follows the alternate outcome of a real-life plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana as a food source. In real life, it didn’t happen, but Gailey’s book imagines a bayou full of savage, fast-moving, well-adapted hippos and the people who try to control them, and one of the protagonists is a bisexual man in a relationship with a genderqueer person. Meanwhile, Nicky Drayden’s gonzo South Africa-set sci-fi/fantasy hybrid The Prey of Gods sees several leads facing multiple threats—an AI uprising, a hallucinogenic new drug, an out-of-control plague of genetically engineered livestock, plus, oh, an ancient goddess hungry for blood), and one of them is Muzi, a queer teen boy  in love with his best friend, Ellkin. Ian McDonald’s Time Was is a temporal romance in which two men find each other amid the strife of the Great War, and later across the gulf of time.

One forthcoming work of note in this regard—out in early 2020—is Docile, by the queer, trans author K.M. Szpara. In it, he explores a dark future America in which hyperinflation and an economic collapse have birthed a new capitalist dystopia in which the easiest way for someone to pay off their creditors is to become a Docile—an indentured servant of sorts, given drugs to be made pliable and willing to perform work for those with the wealth to buy their debt. The lead character, Elisha, hopes to do just that, but swears he’ll never take the Dociline that turned his mother into a hollowed out shell of the woman she used to be—a decision made more complicated when his contract is purchased by ultra-rich aristocrat Alexander Bishop III, whose family is the brains behind the drug. Troubled at the accusation against his family legacy, Alex determines to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without the help of the drug; what follows is a complex take on the intersection of capitalism and consent, dominance and submission, and love and obligation.