As many of you know, I’m on the steering committee of The Carl Brandon Society, an organization dedicated to increasing representation of people of color in the speculative genres. We’ve polled our members and come up with a recommended reading list of speculative fiction books by black authors for Black History Month.

The idea is for you to read these books this month, forward this list around to your friends, take this list into your local bookstores and ask them to display these books this month, post the list on your blogs and websites, etc. I hope you’ll all strongly consider at least picking up one of these books and falling into it. It’s a wonderful list, and your February will be improved!

So, without further ado:

THE CARL BRANDON SOCIETY
recommends the following books for BLACK HISTORY MONTH:

• So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
• My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
• The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust
• Mindscape by Andrea Hairston
• Wind Follower by Carole McDonnell
• Futureland by Walter Mosley
• The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
• Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

And the 2005 CARL BRANDON SOCIETY AWARD Winners:

• PARALLAX AWARD given to works of speculative fiction created by a person of color:
47 by Walter Mosley

• KINDRED AWARD given to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity; nominees may be of any racial or ethnic group:
Stormwitch by Susan Vaught

(cross-posted at my personal blog, SeeLight.)

I once went to Australia to speak at a conference. (This is in a previous life, when I jetted all over the place talking about independent media.)

The organizers put me in the same room as comic-book artist Madison Clell, who is now a good friend. At this time, however, she was a complete stranger. Apparently they thought “Madison” was a guy and didn’t think much of sticking us in beds a few feet apart.

“Should we get a new room for you?” our female handler asked Madison.

Madison and I had met only an hour before. She looked me over with a cool and penetrating gaze. Then she turned back to our handler.

“Nah,” she said with a smile. “He’s harmless.”

Harmless…Madison meant that she didn’t think I would, er, take advantage of the situation, and I suppose her remark could be taken as a compliment.

But, of course, no guy wants to be told he’s “harmless.” Instead, in our beastly heart of hearts, we all want to be James Bond… you know, sexy and dangerous. Tempting to the ladies. Good with flying cars and machine guns disguised as umbrellas.

Not…harmless.

I thought of this incident when I received my contributor’s copy of the new anthology, Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant. I would be blogging about this anthology even if I weren’t a contributor. Consisting of essays by pro-feminist guys on many dimensions of the male experience—I wrote about fatherhood—Men Speak Out is unique in covering issues near and dear to my (otherwise quite beastly) heart.

I felt a little flutter of anxiety as I opened the covers. You see, I have a special angst about antisexist, pro-feminist writing by guys. I worry about the possibility it could be deemed “harmless”—that is to say, bland, pious, wimpy. I want male pro-feminist writing to be muscular, confrontational, and courageous—not in a flashy superficial sense, but in a way that shows the writer has really dived into the heart of his own experience.

I can’t stand antisexist writing in which the writer portrays himself as a hero in the struggle against a sexist world—I want to see the writer lose as well as win, because that’s what’s going to happen when you pit yourself against centuries of traditions that live on inside of you as well as outside. I don’t want to see the antisexist guy frame it as someone else’s struggle—I want to hear about his struggle, with himself as well as both men and women.

I don’t want the antisexist guy to reflexively agree with everything a woman and “feminism” says. I want to see him battle for understanding and stand up for his own ideas and tell the truth about his life. The purpose of antisexist male writing is not to curry favor with feminists. Its purpose to hold up a mirror to individual men and ask them to change their lives–and better yet, show them how to change their lives, and to be proud of progress when it happens.

I am relieved to report that most of the essays in Men Speak Out do that, and much more besides. The best essays helped me to see my own experience and ideas in a new light, and that’s the most you can ask writing to do. You can buy it here.

Okay. This is a good one. According to a British researcher JOKE article in a humorous year-end issue of the British Medical Journal, men are funnier than women because of testosterone, and this explains why there are fewer female stand-up comics. I’ll wait until you stop laughing, because that’s not even the best part: the “study” was conducted by riding around on a unicycle and keeping track of who yelled things at him:

“Very few of the women made comic or snide remarks, while 75% of the men attempted comedy - mostly shouting out “Lost your wheel?”, for example.”

I saw the BBC article, which treats it like real science, before I saw that Feministing had posted on the same article and the highly intelligent commenters sussed out that it was a nerd joke. Written by a dermatologist.

had I witnessed the study, I would have been classified as one of the humorless women, because I would have said nothing till he passed.

Then I would have said said to my friends: “check out the douchebag on the unicycle”.

It’s been literal years since I posted anything on this here blog, but since both Annalee and Charlie have been hellaciously busy with all kinds of exciting top-secret life stuff, I offered to resurrect my beloved persona here (ha) and mention that Other 13, the Dead Magazines Issue, is finally available online and at all your favorite indie bookstores here in SF and probably elsewhere as well. City Lights and Dog Eared Books and Modern Times all have stacks ready to go!

Within its beautiful covers, you will find the following:

Joel Schalit gives a great remembrance of Punk Planet. Legendary zinesters Lynn Peril (author of Pink Think, one of my favorite books) and John Marr (of the always thought provoking Murder Can Be Fun) both eulogize favorite magazines that have gone to the great beyond: “Bitch, The Women’s Rock Newsletter With Bite” and “True Detective”, respectively.

Suzanne Kleid (uh, me) interviews the editors of five recently and not-so-recently defunct print publications about what went right and what went wrong and who threw glass bottles at who during the release parties.

Plus you’ve got amazing art, reviews, articles about theatre and serial catalogging (sp?) and the Athenian, an 18th century magazine of reader-generated content, perhaps, dare we say, the Ur-Blog?

And how could I forget Sacha Arnold’s HYSTERICAL memoir of a career in indie bookstores? As one who toils in those trenches myself, it almost killed me. I’ve been quoting it to my coworkers for two weeks.

Soon we’ll have an image of the cover to post, but in the meantime you’ll just have to truist us when we say that it’s the prettiest and best designed issue we’ve ever done.

In closing: go and buy it. Thanks.

Harry at Hyphen asks who you want to play the new “Kung Fu” guy in an upcoming film version.

I’m annoyed that he didn’t bother to mention that the Caine character in the series is hapa. Although I wasn’t allowed to watch much tv as a kid, every time I came across “Kung Fu” I always watched it.

Caine was the first hapa I ever heard of, besides my sister and me, and getting to watch him on tv was really, really important. I completely accepted David Carradine as Caine, and thought the actor was hapa until I came to San Francisco in the late nineties and got caught up in Asian American identity politics.

In that scene, Carradine playing an Asian is considered an outrage—just one among many, like Charlie Chan being played by white actors. But secretly, I never really had as much of a problem with white actors playing hapa characters as I did with white actors playing “full” Asian characters. There just weren’t that many hapa actors back then.

(Of course Bruce Lee was hapa, too—didja know that?—and would have been a, literally, kickass Caine. But we all know that already. But Jennifer Jones as the Eurasian doc in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” did justice to the best hapa-girl line in Hollywood history.)

Basically, it would have annoyed me just as much to have a “full” Asian actor in whiteface playing a hapa*, is what I’m saying.

The character is hapa. And, even in this day and age, how many hapa characters are there out there, much less hapa men on film? I want, finally, a hapa guy to play Caine … preferably a half-Chinese hapa guy. Is Russell Wong too old? Keanu definitely is, but how cool would that be anyway? Where’s the younger generation of hot, kung-fu-fightin’ hapa mens?

*Update: I forgot to mention that when I was in Hong Kong as a kid in the 70’s I did see another Eurasian character … in a kung fu movie, of course. He was half of a pair of kung fu students who–what else?–have to avenge the death of their master. Even though Hong Kong was teeming with Eurasians in 1978 or whatever, they had a “full” Chinese actor with his hair bleached orange playing this character. Yes, Virginia, there’s whiteface too. And yes, while I was thrilled to see a hapa character, I was also annoyed that the actor was so obvy not hapa … and also orange-haired.

Don’t miss the awesome other magazine anniversary party on Sunday!

The magazine of pop culture and politics for the new outcasts is celebrating its fifth birthday. We’re also releasing issue #13, the “Dead Magazines”
issue. To celebrate both things, we’re throwing a party, featuring:

- Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven)
- Ukeapocalypse (Kelly McCubbin) featuring 5 Cent Coffee
- Hazy Loper
- DJ Joel Schalit
- Art from other magazine on display

- Beer donated by Mendocino Brewing Co.

Where: CounterPULSE Gallery, 1310 Mission St. @ 9th., San Francisco
When: Sunday, Nov. 18, from 7 PM to 11 PM How much: $7 to $10 sliding, $10 gets you new issue of other magazine. (No-one turned away for lack of funds.
All proceeds benefit other magazine.)

About the “Dead Magazines” issue of other magazine: Other magazine celebrates the great magazines that have passed on. Articles include an inside look at Punk Planet, the original Bitch magazine and several magazine editors tell how DIY publishing ruined their lives.

About other: Other magazine is for people who defy categories. We print everything from genre-busting fiction, journalism, and essays, to cartoons, artwork, and innovative graphic design. Every four months, our writers bring you challenging ideas, wild tales, rebel futurism, global media, pop criticism, and indie idealism.

I just finished a long essay for Public Eye magazine on the ideal and reality of Christian Right childrearing, which will be published sometime in the next month. I discovered that while Christian Right parenting ideals — primarily about the supremacy of fathers, subordination of mothers, and inborn wickedness of children — are simple and often frightening, the actual behavior of conservative evangelicals is pretty complex.

As I write in the article, conservative evangelical homes must confront the same problems as their nonevangelical counterparts: the erosion of real wages, the rising costs of necessities like health care and education, the ubiquity of electronic media, and the declining rights of workers, to name a few. This explains why, for example, rates of teen sex and divorce are not significantly lower in these homes. In fact, divorce is especially high in Bible Belt states, due at least in part to higher unemployment.

In an interview, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who studies the impact of conservative evangelical faith on the behavior of both men and women, urged that I distinguish “between what elite evangelicals [like James Dobson] say and what average people are doing.” While elites may rail against the social and economic changes of recent decades, Wilcox said that “your average evangelical takes all that with a grain of salt.” That’s in part because most evangelical wives work. “Part of that is a class issue,” Wilcox said. “Evangelicals are more working class, than, for example, mainline Protestants, [and] they have less economic flexibility. And so the reality on the ground, with gender issues, is more flexible than some might expect.”

I immediately thought of Wilcox’s point when I stumbled across this recent broadcast transcript from right-wing blowhard Rush Limbaugh. In it, Rush grumbles against fathers cooking for their families and parents buying toy kitchens for boys. “This is not men reshaping and rethinking their roles,” says Rush. “That’s being done for them with various sorts of pressure being applied if the behavioral model that is demanded isn’t met” — and the pressure, he says, is coming from “feminazis.”

This is all par for the course, and not really worthy of comment. But then the calls start coming in from listeners. Here’s the first:

RUSH: To the phones, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. This is Steve. Nice to have you on the program, sir.

CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. I absolutely love you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’m a stay-at-home dad. I run a small business out of my home, and my boys — I got two boys — are great cooks. Now, I haven’t bought ‘em a kitchen set, and it’s not on my short list of toys to buy, but they can make a mean batch of cookies, but they’re in wrestling, and they’ll kick somebody’s tail with a sword — playing swords with them — and I wouldn’t have a problem with them cooking at all. That’s not a… I cook every meal in our house.

RUSH: How old did you say that these two boys are?

CALLER: My boys are eight and five.

RUSH: Eight and five, and they bake cookies?

CALLER: They do. They buy a brand-name mixer and…

And so on. As he listens, Rush is obviously confused. It’s hilarious, ironic — and a perfect illustration of Wilcox’s research. It’s also a measure of the degree to which conservative ideologues are being left in the dust by their followers — who must, after all, live in the same 21st century as the rest of us.

[Crossposted with Daddy Dialectic.]

I just voted, and it took literally two minutes from start to end. Let’s just say there is no wait at the polling places right now. You can make it even faster if you skip the largely symbolic “mayor,” “district attorney” and “sherrif” portions of the ballot. The main thing is just to register your vote for Proposition A and against Proposition H. There are a few other props it’s a good idea to vote for, like E, but really A and H are the main battleground this time around. And with turnout in this election so ridiculously low, your vote counts more than ever. San Franciscans, please take a couple of minutes to make your voice heard today!

Remember those postal rate hikes you heard about last spring/summer? The ones which were going to put all the coolest magazines (Ms., The Nation, Mother Jones) out of business? The ones which Time Warner proposed, which give giant publishers a price break while punishing smaller ones?

Well, all our protests didn’t stop those rate hikes from taking effect in July. And now Congress is holding a hearing about them at last. This is your chance to make a difference — it’s time to call your member of Congress and sign this petition. Seriously, do both. Make the phone call, and sign the petition. This is a chance to make a real difference in our losing battle to save independent media.

Folks on all ends of the political spectrum tend to think of gay and lesbian families as something totally new under the sun. But my landlady, Ruthanne Lum McCunn, an award-winning author of Chinese-American historical novels, says that it’s more complicated than that.

“Gay families may be new here in America,” she told me, “but some of the 19th century independent spinsters who lived as couples in China’s Pearl River Delta adopted and raised daughters.”

That’s interesting, and I just learned of a new study by Allan A. Tulchin of Shippenburg University that argues for evidence of homosexual civic unions in 15th century France.

Turns out that Tulchin doesn’t have a smoking gun of hot man-on-man marriage, but he did discover a legal framework, called a affrèrement (”brotherment”), that allowed same-sex people (”affrèrés”) to set up households together.

“All of their goods usually became the joint property of both parties, and each commonly became the other’s legal heir,” writes Tulchin in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History. “They also frequently testified that they entered into the contract because of their affection for one another. As with all contracts, affrèrements had to be sworn before a notary and required witnesses, commonly the friends of the affrèrés.”

Most of the affrèrés were brothers, but Tulchin finds examples of single unrelated men. “I suspect that some of these relationships were sexual, while others may not have been,” he writes. “It is impossible to prove either way and probably also somewhat irrelevant to understanding their way of thinking. They loved each other, and the community accepted that.”

My verdict: Intriguing and fun, but highly speculative. Gay and lesbian families might have historical precursors, but I still think that we are witnessing a rare and very cool event: the emergence of a new family form, where same-sex parents can live their lives free of euphemism and fear–in San Francisco, anyway, and in plenty of other places.

Incidentally, Ruthanne just published a new novel, God of Luck, that is well worth a read. You can see Ruthanne read tonight, Sept. 26, at the San Francisco Main Public Library at 6:30 pm in the Latino Community Room.