Beyond Binary Read online

  Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction

  edited by Brit Mandelo

  Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords.com

  Copyright © 2012 Brit Mandelo.

  all rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2012 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  isbn: 1-59021-005-0

  isbn-13: 978-1-59021-005-5

  ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-404-6

  Individual stories are copyright © their authors. Credits for original publication appear at end which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  Cover and interior design: Alex Jeffers.

  Cover image: © Sean Gladwell—Fotolia.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beyond binary : genderqueer and sexually fluid speculative fiction / edited by Brit Mandelo.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59021-005-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Gender identity--Fiction. 3. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Mandelo, Brit.

  PS648.S3B53 2012

  813’.08762083538--dc23

  2012003633

  Advance praise for Beyond Binary

  “Seventeen stories of genderqueer and sexually fluid people living, laughing, lusting and lying their way through the world. Seventeen points of light burning like beacons above the plain of “normal.” Seventeen tales written mostly in the twenty-first century about the future, the past that never was, and alternate universes that might never be (or always have been). Seventeen authors working on the bow wave of their own writing, riding a surge of inspiration.

  “These writers—the vast majority identify as female, a thrill all of its own—play with many versions of queer. The stories range from a 35-page novelette that begins at the raw edge of loneliness and ends in exuberant human connection, to a 6-page blink of quantum weirdness encompassing all possibilities. The stories teem with gay, trans, lesbian, bi, polyamorous, asexual, unspecified, and imaginary people--as well as aliens, angels, and androids. But each ends with some oh-so-human satisfaction, resolution, or glad understanding. Beyond Binary is peopled by those who are brave, who say Yes--and not only survive but thrive.

  “Some of these pieces are truly strange. Some are delicious romps. But in the end this is the rarest of anthologies: the sum is greater than its parts. Read it. Read it all.”

  —Nicola Griffith, winner of the Nebula Award,

  the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the World Fantasy Award

  and six Lambda Literary Awards

  “...chock full of strong stories that challenge your perceptions of gender identity and sexuality, but also turn your notions of reality itself upside down. Editor Brit Mandelo has done a great job of assembling some of the most provocative writers working in SF today.”

  —Charlie Jane Anders, io9.com

  Table of Contents

  Advance praise for Beyond Binary

  Table of Contents

  Introduction by Brit Mandelo

  Sea of Cortez by Sandra McDonald

  Eye of the Storm by Kelley Eskridge

  Fisherman by Nalo Hopkinson

  Pirate Solutions by Katherine Sparrow

  A Wild and a Wicked Youth by Ellen Kushner

  Prosperine When It Sizzles by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  The Faerie Cony-catcher by Delia Sherman

  Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente

  Another Coming by Sonya Taaffe

  Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female

  Production of Waiting for Godot by Claire Humphrey

  The Ghost Party by Richard Larson

  Bonehouse by Keffy R. M. Kehrli

  Sex with Ghosts by Sarah Kanning

  Spoiling Veena by Keyan Bowes

  Self-Reflection by Tobi Hill-Meyer

  The Metamorphosis Bud by Liu Wen Zhuang

  Schrödinger’s Pussy by Terra LeMay

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  Contributors

  Credits

  Introduction

  Brit Mandelo

  There are many ways to break, transcend, challenge, subvert, and fuck with strict binary ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity. Speculative writers like James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon and Samuel Delany have done it for decades; in 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness posited a world in which people are agendered for the majority of their lives, and the novel won both the Hugo and the Nebula. We still have the Tiptree Award, devoted to fiction that plays with and challenges ideas about gender, and it’s been going strong for two decades. After all, speculative fiction is the literature of questions, of challenges and imagination—and what better for us to question than the ways in which gender and sexuality have been rigidly defined, partitioned off, put in little boxes?

  The thing is, stories about genderqueer and sexually fluid identities are still hard to find, even in a field active with speculation on gender and sexuality. They tend to pop up here and there, scattered throughout magazines and collections, and in queer publications that get less attention from the SF readership. This book is an effort to collect and present some of the best of those stories in one place.

  I have a personal investment in the creation of this book, also—as a queer person whose gender expression is fluid, and whose sexual identity is moreso, I have longed for books that speak to and for people like me. Non-binary identities and expressions are often marginalized; our voices are silenced, our identities are effaced, and our stories go untold. That has begun to change with the publication of more and more genderqueer, bisexual, pansexual, and otherwise non-binary narratives, and I am overjoyed to be able to contribute. Putting together Beyond Binary has been a moving experience, and I hope that the end result can do as much for readers as it did for me.

  The people in these stories do not accept the proscribed gendering of their bodies, and their bodies may not conform to normative, restrictive expectations. They refuse to choose “one or the other” in their gender, sexuality or relationships. They redefine what the terms “man” and “woman” can mean, how “he” and “she” may be used. And—most importantly—they embrace their own selves, their own definitions, and their own needs, physical and emotional. On our world or off of it, in our past or our future, or somewhere else entirely, these are stories in which the queer and the speculative unite to explore the ways in which we can go beyond binary.

  In choosing these stories, I had two major concerns. First, I wanted to put together a tapestry of positive narratives that challenged all-too-common destructive tropes about queer and trans* people. There are no tragic “big reveal” stories here; no one is shocked by anyone else, and in the stories that feature physical discoveries, the lovers in question are always pleased and open to the wholeness of their partner’s self. Second, I wanted to represent a broad range of gender and sexual identities, not only those exploring a spectrum but also those who occupy spaces outside of it. To that end, there are stories in which the protagonist is never once gendered by other characters or the author, stories with asexual protagonists, and stories in which sex is defined and enjoyed a little differently than mainstream expectations. There are a variety of relationship-structures, too; no limiting things to couples, he
re.

  Finally, the thing that strikes me most about Beyond Binary is that I could do two or three or ten books of genderqueer and sexually fluid stories without ever representing everyone, and every way in which we can live, be, and love. In these pages you will encounter all manner of people who have made a flexible grid out of a binary, an incorporated whole out of a dualism, or refused the mess of labels entirely, and yet: there are so many more stories to be told. In particular, I feel the lack of alternative pronouns and the lack of intersex folks as tellers and protagonists of their own stories; and so here I acknowledge that there is ground not covered, and there are stories not told. This is not an encyclopedia—it is an attempt to contain even a fraction of the possibilities.

  ∞

  In Beyond Binary, I hope that the reader will find freedom, acceptance, humor, love, and a wide variety of voices. I hope that the ways in which institutions, language, and clinical definitions have restricted identity will be exploded. I hope that normative ideas about bodies will be re-imagined. I hope that definitions of gender and sexuality will be broadened in a thousand ways. But, mostly, I hope that you—the person who makes these stories real as you read them—have a great time with these writers and their handsome, weird, wonderful tales.

  Enjoy.

  Brit Mandelo

  Dec. 16, 2011

  Sea of Cortez

  Sandra McDonald

  The war is the best thing that ever happened to most of the guys on your ship—a wild storm of global upheaval that flung them out of the flat dull prairies or gritty coal mines of Appalachia and dropped them right here. Stranded on a floating oasis of two thousand men in the South Pacific, a goodly amount of them shirtless at any given time. Certainly the war’s the best thing that ever happened to you. If it weren’t for the Japs, you’d be freezing your toes off back in Iowa City, working in your dad’s shoe store. Instead you’re lying on this wool blanket on this steel deck, and Robbie Coleman’s head is pillowed on your bare stomach. The sky is canary blue and cloudless, the sun smiling directly above the gun turrets.

  “What are you thinking about?” Robbie asks, his voice low and lazy.

  You’re thinking that Paradise is the dozens of men paired up around you, smoking or dozing or reading dog-eared magazines. Most are bare chested, some are stripped down to shorts, and some are casually buck-naked. Acres of skin, tight and tattooed and smooth and hairy. The blue-green sea glitters to the horizon in all directions with no trace of land. One day the war will end and all this will vanish like a mirage. All the handsome men will return to where they came from. You will measure old ladies’ feet and lace up winter boots on little kids trying to kick you. You’ll live at home, the bachelor son. Once in awhile you’ll go out of town for a secret tryst, but your parents will never meet your lovers and you will die alone, lonely, unfulfilled, longing for the pretty boys of war.

  “I’m not thinking about anything,” you say.

  Robbie arches his arm and pinches your thigh. Not hard enough to sting. “Liar, pants on fire.”

  He’s told you before that you think too much. Which is silly, since he’s the educated one. Three months of college in his home town of San Diego before he decided to drop out and enlist. He’s read every book on the ship at least twice, and that includes two plays by Shakespeare. You hated every minute of high school and never met a book you didn’t want to bury under stale gym socks at the bottom of your locker.

  It’s not that you think too much, it’s that you can peer through time. You look at the ship and can see it in the Philadelphia shipyards, a frame accumulating pipes and wires and bulkheads, a vast investment of labor and material. You also see it rusting away on the bottom of the ocean, a habitat for fish and plants and ghosts. The beginning and the end of most things is yours if you concentrate hard enough. Two ends of a pole, like the ones track athletes use for vaulting. You see Robbie, who like you is nineteen years old, and simultaneously picture him also as a baby sucking on his mother’s teat and a bald husk of a man in a hospital bed. He’s surrounded by his kids and grandkids. He dies peacefully, quietly.

  But right now he’s alive and questioning so you murmur, “I’m thinking about the movie tonight.”

  “I’m on watch,” he says. “Besides, we’ve seen it.”

  Everyone has seen it. A soldier goes to a cantina looking for love and eventually Carmen Miranda sashays around with pineapples and bananas on her head. It’s the strangest musical you’ve ever seen. You knew already Robbie would find a reason not to go. On the last movie night you sat in the back, holding hands, little kisses of soft lips and raspy stubble, with the ship’s officers just a few rows ahead, not noticing or pretending not to notice. Hands sliding beneath waistbands. Tongues between soft lips, hands grasping heat and hardness. Nothing the two of you haven’t done before.

  Later, though, you saw him clutching a photo of his girlfriend Nancy as reverently as a Catholic holds a rosary. Nancy, who is eighteen and honey-haired, her penmanship round and blue on perfumed paper. Nancy with her pert nose and bright eyes and a smile so wide you could fall right in and drown in sweetness.

  She’s cute and all, but if you were a woman—and here’s an area you definitely do not think about very often, a boarded up hurricane cellar of cobwebs, rat droppings, and rusty nails that lead to tetanus—if you’d been born a girl, you wouldn’t be sitting around in California writing love notes to your sailor boyfriend. You’d be working in a steel plant or shipyard, doing your part for the war. On weekends you would wear blouses the color of freshly churned butter, and ride a bicycle so that air flutters up under your skirt, and sleep in short cotton nightgowns with lace on the cuffs and neckline. You would keep your hope chest stocked and organized until the man of your dreams proposed with a gold ring and a long-stemmed red rose.

  In the photograph that Robbie treasures most, he and Nancy are sitting are on a beach blanket, laughing, his left arm casual around her shoulder, her head tilted toward him. Nancy’s bathing suit has wide white straps and cones that make her breasts point out like cannons. He says they were visiting the Sea of Cortez. You think that’s in Europe somewhere. Wasn’t Cortez an explorer, like Columbus? If you ask, you’ll sound like a dumb hick. You do know that Robbie thinks a lot about what Nancy would say about him kissing you, what his momma would think, what the chaplain would admonish over the rims of his square black glasses.

  What exists between you is nothing unexpected on a floating prison of men who sleep, shit, and work together twenty four hours a day for months without relief.

  Or so you tell yourself.

  It’s not love. It can’t be love. Robbie can only love women.

  ∞

  Here’s what happens: a boatswain’s mate named Williams has a fight with his buddy Lee, who is a cook, apparently because Lee has been spending time with two radiomen, Easton and DeRosa. Everyone calls them Fruit Salad or The Two Fruits, but not when officers can hear. A tolerant captain will look the other way but the fleet admiral has eyes everywhere and he won’t hesitate to discharge a man for being homosexual. You’ve heard of sailors sent to psychiatric evaluation or imprisoned in the brig. They get kicked out with what looks like an honorable rating but is coded on blue paper, so that the Veterans Administration will deny benefits. Anyway, Williams and Lee broke up over Lee’s too-obvious affinity with Fruit Salad. Williams isn’t homosexual, or so he says. He’s got a wife and two kids to prove it. But he needs a pal to blow off steam with, and he decides that pal should be you.

  He’s big in the shoulders, with anchor tattoos on both biceps and a thick corded neck. Narrow waist and dark, slick hair. Dangerous look to him. He’s the kind of man who might throw you overboard if you crossed him, or at least teach you a lesson in a filthy alley. You like that he’s fierce. He asks around and finds out that you don’t like books, so the first gift he gets you is an almost-new issue of a Hollywood tabloid.

  “I’m done reading it,” he says, brushing your fingers as he h
ands it over.

  The next gift is a little flask of whiskey that tastes vile but gives you a warm glow on an otherwise bad day of combat drills and foul weather.

  The third gift is a backrub late one night in the ammunition room, you standing upright against the bulkhead with your right cheek pressed against the cool metal and your arms splayed as if you are under arrest. His large, callused hands dig into the tight muscles of your shoulders, blossoms of pain-relief-pleasure. In the secret hurricane cellar of your brain, you imagine yourself wearing a blue silk dress, sheer silk hosiery, a lace bra, black high-heeled pumps. You’re a lady reporter come to do a Life magazine article about the war and he’s lured you down here, is moving his hands down your hips, is thumbing his way into your secret passage. If you were wearing pearls, he’d pull them cool and firm against your throat, or slip them one by one inside you like exquisite gifts.

  “Baby,” he breathes. “Baby pie.”

  Which is maybe the dumbest endearment you’ve ever heard but you take it, you will take anything you can get. You know that people see what’s happening. People always see. Robbie is a boatswain’s mate like Williams and there’s no way he can be oblivious. You want him to object, get mad, claim you, but he writes daily letters to Nancy and reads his Bible so much that the binding cracks open. You share cigarettes and go to the mess together and he slings his arm across your shoulders in the same familiar way, but if he’s bothered about Williams, he’s keeping it completely to himself.

  Meanwhile there’s a war to fight. You man the 16-inch guns. You fire at Manila, Panay, Leyte, Cebu. Places you never heard of back when you were failing geography in tenth grade. The roar of the weapons leaves your head ringing and makes your hands shake. The Japs dive out of the sky in suicide attacks. The anti-aircraft guns shoot and shoot and shoot, ships sink on the horizon, you can’t sleep, you can’t eat, and Williams is the one who pulls you into tiny spaces, gets you to your knees, tugs on your ears, stuffs your mouth. There’s no sweet kissing. This is not like cuddling on the deck under the blazing sun. He teaches you how to take him, his tattoos moving like snakes in the dim light, and he leaves you sore and addicted and craving more.