Talking with the Bookshelf's Own

                                Mel Keegan

Mel Keegan is not only the fearless leader at the GLBT Bookshelf. He is a widely published writer in his own right. Mel, from South Australia, has been writing for well over two decades. His prolific list of publications includes historical, fantasy and sci-fi novels and novellas as well as collections of poetry and essays. You can view the entire list at Mel’s author page at the Bookshelf.  Here, author Lichen Craig takes a few minutes to pick Mel’s brain 

Lichen Craig: Mel, I can’t tell you what fun it is to do this interview with you. Your list of publications is so diverse – I think that your personal interests must be diverse as well. What inspires you the most in terms of what you choose to write about?

Mel Keegan: The moment of inspiration itself? Most often, a story will start as a “flash image,” or a “flash sequence” in the mind’s eye. I’ll be reading a news story, or a science article, or an anecdote in a book, and something will go “pop!” among the synapses. Vision dims, the way the lights go down in the theater, and I’ll see a scene on the big screen behind my eyes … it’s as if I’m watching the movie version, done and finished, of a book that hasn’t yet been written. If the vision is brilliant enough (some are; most aren’t) it’ll haunt me. Those characters will literally demand to be given expression. My imagination will scurry around like a ferret on steroids, weaving plots that push the characters I glimpsed into the situation in that flash image or sequence. It’s almost like being a passenger, along for the ride. In a day or three, I’ll write the whole story in note form – perhaps up to 10pp of single-spaced notes. At that point the project only needs to have the words added. Plot, characters and a lot of dialog have already taken shape.

Going back a step, what causes the moment of inspiration to spark? There’s always source material, like firewood, and a catalyst, before the fire ignites. As you know, I write in many genres – people think of me as an SF writer, but that a very restrictive label, because I’ve also done seven full-length historical novels, and am working on an eighth. There are five fantasies on my list, and two more in the planning … two vampire novels, four contemporary stories … so it does tend to chafe a bit when I’m characterized as “only” an SF writer. However, because I write in so many areas, the source material causing the moment of inspiration can be almost anything.

For instance, The Deceivers grew out me leafing through the little book packed in the box with the plastic model of the China clipper, Cutty Sark, and at the same time we were in the middle of an Australian winter with a big storm on its way in; and I was finishing the polishing work on The Rabelais Alliance when inspiration struck; and I was sorting through boxes of old photos from the far-off days of my youth, which had stirred memories of a certain part of the UK. The little Cutty Sark book tells the story of the ship in a thimble, and tells it vividly … thunder rolled over the house, while the characters of Travers and Marin were lodged in my head due to what I was editing, and the memories of the east coast of England had been brought right to the surface because I was sorting old photos. The Deceivers exploded into my imagination. If you read both historical and SF, and know both Deceivers and Rabelais … take a look at Travers and Marin in Rabelais and Ryan and Hale in Deceivers. They’re essentially the same characters, in two incarnations, the 19th century and the 26th. What’s more, these guys absolutely demanded to express themselves in both stories, both time frames – nothing I could do would steer them one degree off course, once they’d settled themselves into the story of The Deceivers. The wise choice was to “go with the flow,” and the result is a lovely book that won a Stonewall Award that year.

LC: Tell us a bit about your history. How old were you when the writing bug hit, and when did you begin writing seriously?

MK: One of the curses of having a good memory is that events stick in it forever. I can still remember writing my first story. I was five years old, and it was about a bunch of rabbits on a camping trip, in a motor home (go figure … I grew up on Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck), and these rabbits had a UFO encounter. One wants to say Keegan was already “on track” … if you just lose the bunny component. After that, I wrote more or less constantly, for the fun of it. And writing is a lot of fun, long before one takes it seriously enough to think of selling a story.

In fact, the day you start to think about being professionally, commercially published, a great deal of the pure fun goes out of it, because you start to measure and judge your work: Is it good enough? Will it be accepted? Will critics trash it? I think I was about 14 when I wrote my first longer story – about 50,000 words, a paranormal tale about apparitions close to a burial mound at the site of an iron age battle. I enjoyed writing it, but attached no importance to it. Handed it to my mother to read, and forgot about it. Turns out, she showed it to a publisher who said words along the lines of, “We see enormous talent – he’s not ready to publish yet, but don’t let him stop writing; the style is already reminiscent of Tolkien.” She told me all this, and I have to chuckle as I tell you the next part. I said, “Great. Who’s Tolkien?” At age 14, I’d never even heard of The Lord of the Rings … when I read fantasy, it was Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs … Conan, Kull, John Carter of Mars and Tarzan. When I read SF, it was Asimov and Clark.

So, when did I start to take writing seriously? Thinking back, I must have been about 21, and I did make some early submissions. I was good enough to get an agent – go ahead, kick me. But remember, this was a long, long time ago, in the days when you could actually get an agent. Nowadays? It’s about a one in a thousand shot. So, did the agent get me a publisher? No. In fact, I was agented three times, all pre-2000, and no agent ever did anything brilliant. I made a lot of sales, but no thanks to them! (So, no, I’m not a supporter of the agency system – though, having said that, I also know that literary agents are today’s gatekeepers, without whom you will absolutely, positively not be talking to a major traditional publisher. However, in the modern publication and distribution climate, why would you want to?)

LC: I am particularly interested in your several forays into futuristic and sci-fi themes. It is something we aren’t seeing often in modern gay literature – and you have raised it to a unique new level with your NARC series of books. It seems to have hit a note with your fans, who eagerly await stories of Jarrat and Stone. How do you explain the particular phenomenon and the appeal of the characters?

MK: Why do Jarrat and Stone strike a chord? Part of the appeal is the fact they’re physically drop dead gorgeous – beautiful, athletic and highly intelligent. They’re also complex human beings who’re quite literally under the gun and suffering because of it. There’s so much for the reader to grab onto, at the personal level where we all identify with people who’re under pressure, doing a damned hard job in difficult conditions, and all too often having our best work either taken for granted or criticized. The NARC books have many other levels, too. There’s the tech, which is a huge charge for folks like self. The books are a speed/power trip … the fastest cars, aircraft, high-tech weapons, all at the disposal of our heroes (and villains). The theme of “paramilitary versus drug lords and terrorists” was very topical in the late 1980s when the first book, Death’s Head, was written. It’s still -- or once again -- very topical, which gives the series a perpetual currency.

On a deep level, readers relish the relationship between these characters: they’re lovers, and in love, at the same time as living/working on the razor’s edge of danger. Either or both could be killed any day; they know it, and as the books progress from Equinox to Aphelion, we see Jarrat and Stone changing, weighing their lives and relationship against the vocation of the job. Then – don’t underrate the science fiction aspect of this universe. It’s four centuries in the future … the super-carrier NARC-Athena has a huge “love that ship” factor. Of course, the sting in the tail of these books is the empathic bond between Jarrat and Stone, which was the result of healing work done by the “queer,” the Rethan mutoid, Harry Del. You take one of the more iconic characters to be found in fiction – Jarrat – and have him left for dead; you take another iconic character, Stoney, and have him force-addicted to the lethal drug NARC was founded to fight. Both of them should be sent home in boxes. Enter Harry, who’s just as gorgeous in his own way … the “Rethan T/87 mutoid,” whose genetic mutation is the ability to heal, though often he doesn’t fully know how he does it. It’s irresistible, and over the course of five books these characters grow, morph, against the backdrop of different worlds, high-tech, and rank-rotten politics. The allure is very powerful indeed. (And yes, there’s more to come in this universe … let me get Hellgate finished first.)

LC: I am a fan of your novel An East Wind Blowing, which is a gay romance set in Anglo-Saxon Britain. As a writer, I was sighing aloud already at the opening pages, where your invocation of imagery of the life of a young Anglo-Saxon man is really beautiful and authentic. Your historical novels are such a different direction from the more sci-fi oriented books you write. Are you also a fan of history? What do you yourself enjoy in a good historical novel?

MK: The heart and soul of the historical novel has to be the fusion of the characterization and the vivid backdrop of the past ... when both those elements come together, and when they’re done right, you get a work that lives in your memory forever. Many years ago I read Edison Marshall’s The Viking (which was filmed in 1958 as The Vikings), and I was blown away by. The book was astonishingly graphic for a work written in 1951 -- but this wasn’t what impressed me. When I read the book we were already in the era of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and violence was somewhat passé. Marshall reached back 1,000 years and found characters who were so alive, you felt them, recognized them as very real human beings – but still men and women who were true to their era. And because you felt the characters your mind’s eye and your heart opened fully to the backdrop the writer painted of the time and place. I’ve read historicals where you have a hard time shifting gears and “becoming one” with the setting, because the writer seemed to just take twentieth century characters and transplant them into the historical context … modern day morality, and (gods forbid) slang and phraseology do not sit well in a story supposedly unfolding in, for example, the aftermath of the Battle of Troy!

The great historical novel – or movie, come to that – achieves the fusion of backdrop and characterization. With this in place, one can take a few liberties and get away with them. A few novels I’ve read have started out strongly and drifted off into soap opera, but if it’s very well done, you can actually enjoy it. Confession: I’m not usually a fan of soaps set in any era. To me, the great novels and films are those which also have something to say about humanity at large. For instance, I was impressed by Taylor Caldwell’s Captains and the Kings -- filmed in the late ’70s -- and from the other side of the fence, the 1980 miniseries, Masada, which recently came out on DVD, and is based on the excellent novel of the same title, by Ernest K. Gann. I read the novel decades ago; thanks to Jade for handing the DVD to me and saying, “Just stop and watch this.”

The classics are popping up lately as ebooks when they were almost forgotten before the rush began to flesh out the ebook “virtual shelves” with public domain works. Writers currently striving in the historical genre will always be working in the shadow of the great authors of the past, and there’s one thing about historical novels: they don’t go out of date. Unlike SF and contemporary works, they just don’t have a “use by date.” Write in the style of Charlotte Bronte in 2012, and your foremost competitor at market will be – Charlotte Bronte! Advice to historical novelists? Whatever you’re going to do, do it well.

History was my favorite subject in school. I lapped it up. I still read Rafael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas. Also, I grew up on the big, lush, romantic historical movies which have slithered on by now … films like Scaramouch, The Prisoner of Zenda, Ben Hur, Spartacus and, yes, The Vikings. You don’t see many such movies these days, and when big historicals do come along, they’re often used as a medium for carrying gore that’s so realistic, it can jeopardize the palatability work. This is a quite significant issue: when does realism go over the top into levels of realism that are counter productive? Get 20 people around a table, you’ll get 20 different opinions, all probably equally right and wrong. It’s not my place to pontificate! I can only tell you what I like most and least, on a purely personal basis…

What am I looking for in a historical novel? Characters that touch me, and at the same time are true to their era in their speech, behavior, beliefs; “world building” that is evocative enough to grab me by the scuff of the neck and drag me back into seventeen century Venice or nineteenth century London, whatever … make me feel the wind in my face and the sun on my back, make me see the way cloud shadows race across a hillside that’s never known a spade, much less a bulldozer! Beyond this, I do prefer a story that has something to say about humanity. Three that will be lodged in memory for life are The Eagle and the Raven (Pauline Gedge), Cry to Heaven (Anne Rice), and The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliffe), which I read in the 1970s, and can still remember in vivid detail. That’s the mark of a great book.

And if you’re wondering about specifically gay historicals I’ve loved, and will never forget Street Lavender by Chris Hunt. The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault. How far back does a book have to go before it’s counted a historical? If you’ll take something set in the 1960s, The Boy who Picked the Bullets Up by Charles Nelson. These titles leaps to mind … I’ll doubtlessly think of six others after I’ve sent off this interview.

LC: I am curious what your thoughts are about the current state of gay fiction, as well as its future. It’s something I think about a lot personally. It seems to be in a state of transition. What are your thoughts?

MK: The answer to this depends on how broad a scope you allow for the term “gay fiction.” If you mean fiction about gay characters, there’s more fiction out there now than there’s ever been, by a factor of at least 10:1. This probably won’t change much as we drive into the future…

However, much (most?) of what’s circulating is in the field of pulp romance, and as a genre, pulp romance has always been subject to criticism bordering on derision. Little pulp fiction, in any genre, stands the test of time. One book in a thousand is remembered a decade after it was written.

If you discount the surge in the pulp romance genre, the picture is not so rosy. Romance is presently swamping everything else – and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with romance writing! Part of the swamping process is due to the way online stores use tagging to categorize books … but what else are they going to do? Books can, and should, have multiple tags. Say you’re browsing OmniLit, for example, and you search on Science Fiction. For many pages, you’re inundated with erotic romance, stories more or less focused on the awakening and/or development of a character’s sexuality, set against a futuristic or speculative backdrop. This is dandy … unless the shopper is a reader of pure SF, trying to find something along the lines of Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson (or in our context, a gay SF novel similar to Bear and Robinson, but with, uh, gay characters). You’ll sift through hundreds of romances, many of them intensely erotic, before you ever see works that aren’t fairly pulpy erotica, romance, or both.

As bookstores go online, there has to be a tagging process via which browsing visitors can find what they want. And publishers are obviously going to tag their romance titles as “science fiction” when these sizzlers are set on another world or in another time zone. The sting in the tail of the predicament is this: the catalog pages at online bookstores are set up by default to “sort by best sellers” … and which titles do you think sell best? You got it. Erotic romance sells top. If you’re a writer or publisher of fiction falling outside the genre, you have to get your head around this, deal with it. You don’t have to write romance -- erotic or otherwise -- yourself … but you do have to figure out some way to compete with it, so as to become more visible in the catalogs, where many hundreds of sizzling works edge you out, push you down onto page 10, or lower, where readers seldom browse.

For gay fiction falling outside the purely romantic (or erotica) genres to sell better, readers who’re not looking for this kind of work need to be able to find the titles they do want faster and more easily. The online stores need to offer an “exclude” button in their search parameters. This would allow shoppers to “exclude pure romance and erotica.” It would automatically drop out about 90% of all titles in the GLBT, or LGBT if you prefer, pages, and let other works percolate to the surface. If Google search result are anything close to the average, it’s the rare visitor who browses past page 1, never mind page 2 – yet romance and erotica are so dominant in the online catalogs, they fill far more than the first couple of pages. Of course, to make this work, writers and publishers would have to play fair, and not deliberately tag their titles as SF (or whatever), when in fact they’re expressly romances … and what’s going to motivate a publisher to accept a new rule which effectively hides its titles? The question of marketing is paramount to online publishers right across the spectrum from the market leaders to the self-publisher just starting out today. The problem of cataloging and tagging must be answered if other genres are going to thrive. They’ll always survive … but thriving would be better!

For decades, I’ve been waiting for gay fiction to become acceptable to the mainstream. As anyone who’s read my Hellgate series will know, these are huge, panoramic mainstream novels … with gay relationships. I write them that way deliberately, because I have a personal fantasy: by 2020, or 2025, gay relationships will be acceptable to most people – perhaps anti-gay prejudice will carry the stigma of being outmoded, terminally old fashioned. Uncool. And heaven forbid we should be uncool. When this comes about, works like Hellgate can be marketed to the widest readerships, which will be a major achievement, since these are gay books. The plots stretch from science so attenuated it’s practically philosophy to the heights of political triple-think and underhandedness. But when the story turns to human relationships, love scenes, personal issues, they’re gay.

Right now, my biggest challenge is how to properly market these books – and it’s a challenge for any gay writer producing work that’s outside the realms of more or less pure romance. You only have to look at the statistics: romance outsells everything, and readers want it sizzling. This is the trend at the moment, and I often wonder, where can the medium go in future? Erotic romance has already crossed the line into what would have been termed, a rather short time ago, ‘porn.’ Our tolerance (appetite?) for explicit sex is a lot higher than it used to be. Back in 1989, when Ice, Wind and Fire appeared, I copped hell. It’s a thriller set in the late ’80s; it’s gay; and it had the temerity to be sexy. It was reviewed by the gay papers at the time – and not well. By today’s standards it’s very tame indeed, but it was apparently too hot for 1989, and once or twice was trashed for this very reason. By 2019 or 2029, what will it take to entertain the erotic romance readership? More critically, how will writers market books falling outside this genre?

The future of gay fiction (or any kind of fiction) is uncertain for many reasons, but one of the most critical questions is whether one is writing for a living, or simply for personal gratification. If you write for fun, you can always write what you want, give it away, and reach tens of thousands of readers. Fact: freebies are downloaded about 100 times more than anything with a pricetag attached. Writing for money, one is locked into trying to figure out how to be visible in the catalogs of the online stores, and if you don’t write sizzling romance, you’ll be challenged regarding how to connect with readers who’re looking for a vast plot and a Technicolor canvas that doesn’t pivot around an exploration of sexuality. I’ll say it again here, for the sake of clarity: there’s nothing wrong with any exploration of sexuality in any form … but not every writer is a romance writer; and the existing online cataloging system makes it very hard indeed for other works to be visible.

So the future of commercial gay fiction is uncertain, because, being commercial, it exists to sell copies (earn royalties, keep publishers’ doors open). If publishers don’t sell sufficient copies, the industry will dwindle. But gay fiction will always be written, and if it has to be produced extra to the field of commercial publishing, so be it. The future of the broader scope of gay writing could mirror the music world. Consider the wealth of music produced by so-called garage bands who earn little or nothing from performances and CD sales. Think of the oceans of amazing art done by “amateur” artists whose work is dazzlingly brilliant, but who can’t get a professional sale to save their lives.

No matter what one writes, one will always find readers. Charging for what one’s work is where fiction gets iffy. You might be appalled to know how comparatively few people will pay a decent price, or any price, for fiction … and we’re in an era where you could read forever and never pay a dime. There’s some very good fiction out there, free. Sell a book, and you’ll sell a few hundred, maybe a thousand if you work hard at marketing for a long tirdquo; with the setting, because the writer seemed to just take twentieth century characters and transplant them into the historical context me. But – give it away, and you’ll have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of readers. If writers find themselves making a pittance in royalties through commercial publishing, they’ll be in the same situation as the garage band playing a fantastic gig and, at the end of the event, each performer gets $20 as a share of the meager profit left after costs are covered. How long will it be before writers decide to call fiction a hobby, give everything away and reach an audience far more vast than anything the commercial writers are reaching? In other words, how does one quantify success as a writer – in dollars earned or in readers reached, books loved, size of adoring fan following?

The future of gay fiction is harnessed to the future or all fiction in an Internet-driven marketplace where making sales is very hard, and getting harder. One of the biggest challenges is that the ocean of free reading is immense and also growing daily. My shrewd guess is, commercial publishers will find sales tougher and tougher to generate; small publishers – the genre specific presses, such as “gay publishers,” as clearly distinct from big-volume generic pulp mills – will suffer from diminishing sales…

At the same time, a handful of self-publishing writers are enjoying enormous success, which is having a ripple effect through the entire writing community. If one in a thousand writers hits it big, they can inspire the other 999 to greater efforts. The outpouring of indie works grows exponentially … so does the mass of free fiction circulating, which will almost certainly drive sales down yet again for the commercial publishers.

My prediction? By 2020, some of the most amazing gay fiction -- being well outside the erotic romance genre -- will be indie published, and either free or made available for nominal prices, possibly along the lines of a “support the author” voluntary donation. Like the amazing musicians who’re working day jobs, these writers won’t be able to earn a living at writing … but their works will be labors of love, which can only benefit the genre. If they’re content to get a few bucks here and there from donations (like the musician getting $20 after the gig), they can reach many thousands of readers with free fiction, rather than the comparative handful they’d reach via commercial publication.

So the future of fiction publishing as a whole is in a state of flux. Is it a good thing? For writers who long to give up the day job and write for a living, most probably no. For fiction itself? Almost certainly yes, because more will be written, and some of it (not all, obviously) will be sparkling. For publishers? Alas, I think that ringing sound you hear is the death knell!

LC: Mel, I want to say as a new staff member at the GLBT Bookshelf, that I am thrilled to be involved in such an important project, one that is really a labor of love for you and others. You have recently implemented some changes that will improve the site even more as a resource. Can you tell me what your hopes are for the future of the site?

MK: As it develops, matures, I hope the Bookshelf will become the resource readers turn to, when they’re looking for something to read … simple as that. I know of no other site where the entire inventory is GLBT – LGBT, if you prefer – and this is the greatest strength of the Bookshelf. On other sites, for instance Goodreads, “gay” is a whole genre in and of itself, and all gay books are shoehorned into this category. Therefore, you find SF, historical, mystery, crime, teen romance, paranormal, all jumbled in together. Across the rest of the site, books of every conceivable genre are filed separately. But just let the characters be gay, and suddenly you have vampire, cowboys and spacemen all in the same box. Heaven help you if you wanted to find specifically historicals about gay policemen, or gay sailors! Also, the tagging at Goodreads is unhelpful. Click on “gay and lesbian,” and they offer exactly 50 new releases. But what if the book was published 3 years ago, 5 years ago, longer? If you don’t know the author, title or isbn, you won’t find it. And if you simply wanted to browse, say, all known historicals about gay sailors, Goodreads won’t help at all.

The Bookshelf was designed differently from the get-go. All books on-site are gay – and I had to fight on a couple of occasions to maintain this. I had one gay writer who wanted to sell duck-and-fluffy-bunny books for toddlers, and books about religious doctrine, on the Bookshelf; his position was that because he, himself, was gay, he should be at liberty to put his whole mainstream inventory on the Bookshelf. I explained in every polite, friendly way I knew, the Bookshelf is for gay books, not straight books by gay writers, because gay writers doing straight books can showcase their work anywhere on the web, while gay books remain “quarantined,” with every sub-genre shoved into one category at Goodreads, Amazon, so forth. The correspondence deteriorated into one of the half dozen nasty encounters I’ve experienced since the Bookshelf went online, but it was worth the battle: because the site is all-gay, we have proper categories. You want a book about gay sailors? Click on Sea Stories (Maritime). You want a book about gay policemen? Click on Crime/Police. And so forth. You go right to a subject specific A-Z listing, by book title, and scan down the list of a few dozen to a few hundred items till you see something you like.

To be the ultimate tool to benefit readers, every gay and lesbian writer or publisher would have to be aboard. To date I think about a third have joined us. The site is still young – we’re only a few years old, and still growing. There’s a steady influx of new writers registering and creating pages. I could wish more of the long-established writers would join us, but they probably figure they don’t actually need us, so why invest the time and work in us? Long-established writers are playing to their own set marketplaces, it’s true. The other obstacle to members is that we’re a community wiki, where writers sign up, make their own pages, index their own books. Some writers don’t realize this, and wonder why they’re left out – why did we exclude them? I patiently explain, we’re a DIY community. There’s some talk about the wiki being “too time consuming,” or the job being too difficult, but this is absolutely not the case. The tools for building new pages and adding items to our contents lists are the same tools you find at Blogger, WordPess and LiveJournal. If you can use one of those sites, you can use the Bookshelf. If you can blog, you can wiki. How long does it take to make pages? Once you know the tools, you can make a great page in fifteen minutes. If you have a dozen books on your list, you’ll invest three hours in the wiki … but your pages are permanent. You just built a standing exhibit which will be there until you take it down, and you can link from those pages to your blogs, websites, sales pages, whatever. In fact, it’s a very good deal, time-wise. I confess, the protests about the time and skills involved leave me scratching my head. The only people who have a harder time are Mac users, because the engine driving the wiki is not really designed for Mac. This is the one area where I can’t help. I don’t have a Mac! But we do have a Help Desk, and I’ve lost count of the number of pages I’ve made for Mac users to whom the challenge was too great.

So, the future of the wiki will depend on the willingness of writers to be involved. I’d like to see up to 75% of gay writers with us, which means we still have a lot of growing to do. As we grow, readers will turn to us more and more as a source for tracking down info, contacting writers and publishers, finding rare books, discovering new writers – and so on. We can only get better as we grow.

Ultimately, we exist to connect writers with readers. That’s the whole point of the Bookshelf, and as the depth of our content grows, we’ll get the reputation of being a site where if you want it, or want to know it, this is where you’ll find it.

LC: And finally, I am wondering what your thoughts are about the place of GLBT literature in the literary marketplace, and what you see for its future. You have such a unique and thorough perspective. Can you add anything to what you’ve said already?

MK: As I said somewhere above, I live in the hopes that GLBT literature will become acceptable to mainstream readers. I suppose I’d like to think that one day a great book will simply be recognized as a great book and not be pigeonholed because the two characters in the romantic relationship are both of the same gender. I think we might be starting to see the emergence of this situation – certainly the UK is much closer to achieving a homogenized audience/readership. Popular television has, in the last decade, reached a point where Captain Jack Harkness is a cult hero well outside gay culture. I wonder if today’s 8 year old viewers might grow up with an acceptance of “gay” as just another normal human condition, like being blond or skinny, olive skinned, green eyed, or being tone deaf! It’s possible. It’s desirable. If it happens, in 15 years, when today’s 8 year olds are in their 20s, society will have taken an undeniable step toward maturity.

On the other hand, what’s acceptable – or not – to the public tends to go in cycles and phases, just as civil union rights are awarded, then taken away again. Politics is a crucible; there are decent governments and disastrous ones, and which is which depends on one’s point of view! One thing is certain: the process of human rights evolution, the war against human rights violations, never ends. Our era has greater human freedoms than the world has seen at any time in the past, which makes any ambivalence, much less prejudice, stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. We tend to be less tolerant of bigotry now than ever before, and I’d like to say we’re making progress – sometimes painfully slow, and often on the “two steps forward, one step back” principle – toward a future where the marketplace for gay literature, and the literary marketplace in general, are the same thing.

If it doesn’t happen, or else takes so darned long that the people reading this interview are too geriatric to care by the time is does come about, then gay literature (as distinct from the current tide of wider-appeal, sizzling romance) might stay pretty much where it’s been for several decades now. It’s specific to its own culture, addressing that culture’s issues, informing, educating, entertaining, but without the reach to touch the general readership. It’s been asked, why would a general reader read a gay book? And of course this suggests the next intelligent question, “What is a gay book, anyway?” To me, a gay book is “a book about gay people doing gay things.” Such a book might have extremely limited appeal for a reader who’s outside the community and has no real curiosity about it.

However, there’s also a gray zone: the book that has a fantastic story which doesn’t involve gay issues to the exclusion of all other interests, and at the same time has key gay characters but not all gay characters. Such a book might have an irresistible storyline set in an alluring time or place; it might have four gay characters and five straight ones; the characters and their relationships would be integral to, but also secondary to, the driving force of the plot. There could be a great deal in such a book to interest mainstream readers … and you guessed. This is where I went with Hellgate. The world in which I set the monster storyline is futuristic, but the theory is the same. Irresistible story, gay and straight characters side by side, working, loving, suffering, toward a common goal. This kind of book has been called the “crossover” novel.

This is the kind of fiction I’d like to see out there on the general market. To this point, I’m really not seeing it … unless I wrote it myself, which doesn’t count. To me, this would be the next big step for gay literature – once again, as distinct from the sizzling romance genre, which is wildly popular at the moment, and the subject of some cultural debate. The “crossover” book, where gay literature meets mainstream and appeals equally to both sides of the fence, would represent a “breakout” of gay literature into the general readership, and I’m sure it would also be a benchmark, marking a point where the gay community began to integrate into the greater community, and could seriously expect to see equality in terms of marriage rights, family law, employment.

Certainly, GLBT fiction has its part to play in this evolution. The onus is on us to write stories that are good enough, with “reach” that is wide enough, to touch the general reader. If we can do that, we can break through and join the mainstream … which of course cycles me back to the discussion, above, about the future of fiction as a whole. Where is it going? How will it arrive there? Will commercial publishers survive? Or will we drift into a more bohemian art form, where works are mostly free, reaching vast numbers of readers because no download fees are charged, and readers support us with a donation, if we really, seriously deliver the goods! One thing is sure: the next decade or so will be interesting.

LC: Thanks so much for your time and thoughts, Mel. You have offered so much perspective and so much food for thought. I know that our readers will be as glad to hear from you as I have been honored to chat with you.

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