The reason I read fantasy is not escapism, which is the motive that I think many non-fantasy readers would be quick to assign. To people whose only information about fantasy comes from seeing Lord of the Rings movie posters (or seeing the movies, for that matter) or a brief glance at D&D cards, it seems like fantasy is all about the flashy surface elements. Pointy-eared elves, furry-footed hobbits, and barbarian queens riding on white tigers. The entire genre gets stereotyped as being cartoonish and juvenile and probably poorly written, and people who otherwise know a lot about books don't even think to question that assumption. Accordingly, every single mainstream review of George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series can't help being insultingly impressed that they don't suck.

(The worst offender, in my opinion: "A fantasy series for hip, smart people, even those who don't read fantasy." -Detroit Free Press... Yeah, unlike the rest of us pimple-faced dumbasses who do read fantasy, way to insult your target audience and p.s., I hope you die in a fire.)

In any case, I like fantasy and sci-fi because they allow you to explore situations that simply aren't possible otherwise. If you're writing historical fiction, the process goes like so: "If I have this character (say, a black general who is a fundamentally good man but prone to jealousy) in this place and time period (primarily white, 16th century Venice), then what would he think/feel/do in this situation?" And while there is plenty to be done with that, fantasy allows you to take it one step further and engineer the world itself, giving your characters questions and issues undreamt-of outside speculative fiction.

Take the issue of racism, for example, which is already explosive enough, and now imagine it applied to relations between different species. Might the presence of a different species finally give humans the impetus to overcome our intra-species racism? Like, now that we think about it, black skin vs. white skin isn't really that big a deal compared to the need for a united front against FURRY SIX-LEGGED ALIENS. And you know that someone would want to fuck them. What's society going to think of that? Is it disapproved of? Illegal? Is it okay so long as the aliens have intelligence on par with humans? Do most people not believe that the aliens are as smart as humans, because they don't look it, and how kindly would the aliens take to that? Are the people who dig them going to get shit for it, the way furries do? Would an interspecies relationship be able to meet our expectations of romance? Would it meet theirs? What if the social position of the people involved puts an added strain on the relationship? What if sex with these critters causes cyanide poisoning in humans?

(Yes, this is what I ponder. And that's barely scratching the surface.)

In essence, fantasy isn't about the trappings, the magic fireballs and telepathically bonded unicorns/dragons/whatever, it's about that great, open-ended "if-then." If [this world], then... what? Sky's the limit.

----
This is actually the precursor to a longer piece I'm writing, about world-building a society's attitudes toward homosexuality.

The thing about fiction is that we expect coherent themes.

"I read a good book the other day," you say to a friend.

"Oh?" they will invariably reply. "What was it about?"

Which isn't an unreasonable question, but it's proof -- if anything is -- that fiction bears no resemblance to reality. Quick, in ten words or fewer: your life, what's it about?

( Mine? "The trannie thing": a mash-up of recent developments and random musings and something cool I read the other day )

The rec is Khaos Komic, a webcomic that explores how the various permutations of queer affect different types of people. It starts off with a cute story about two gay boys, but branches out into all different flavors, including an FTM whose story really resonated with my own in parts.

** Edit: I think some of my writer friends took this post as criticism, like, "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING TRANNIES, BY GOD, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!" but I didn't intend it as such. I meant that it was irresponsible for me (and I guess other FTM writers) to pretend like it doesn't exist, when we of all people know better.

So the gaijin smash guy once said that the reason why Japanese women are consistently more popular among foreigners than Japanese men is because if you sleep with a Japanese woman, you wake up to find that she's cooked you breakfast and cleaned your house. If you sleep with a Japanese man, you wake up to find that he's used all your hairspray.

( This is not entirely true... )

Fuckin' finally. Got a handful of Poppy Z. Brite books that were unexpectedly good, Songmaster by Orson Scott Card, the latest in the Nightrunner series, and (tacky gay press, ahoy!) Wicked Gentlemen.

I also finally read Left Hand of Darkness and liked it much much more than I was expecting to. (Critically acclaimed classic sci-fi doesn't usually agree with me.) Which means you can expect a review of it sometime around 2010. >_>

THE GAY FICTION BOOKLIST THAT DOESN'T SUCK

Really, though, I've found that I much prefer China Mieville and Neal Stephenson. I finished Snow Crash going, "WHY AREN'T GAY BOOKS EVER THIS AWESOME??" For serious.

So apparently the word for "vowel" (母音) and the word for "big tits" (ボイン) are homophones in Japanese. This distresses me.

Okay, maybe I should have seen this coming, given how very not out-and-proud Japan is, but are there ANY contemporary gay novels besides trashy yaoi? All I can turn up on rec lists is a few titles from the fifties and seventies, but considering that they feel the need to include fucking Mishima on that list, clearly they aren't vetted very hard for quality. I mean, we've got Shimada, the self-hating homosexual; Mishima, whose widow maintains to this day that he was tooootally heterosexual; and Edogawa Rampo, whom some people have argued was either closeted or in denial, but there's nothing conclusive in his writing. (One of the main characters Demon of the Lonely Isle is a gay man whose crush on the protagonist is unrequited, but presented sympathetically, and his best known series features a mystery-solving duo with the Batman-and-Robin dynamic) So, anybody got any recs? Obviously good books would be nice, but I'll take what I can get.

And just for kicks, here's a promo pic from Big Bang Love, the part when Ando Masanobu is getting strip-searched.

( You better watch yourself, because he will CUT YOU, MOTHERFUCKER. )

On my way back from the gym, I just got stopped on the street by a bicycle cop and asked to show my foreigner registration card. What. the. fuck. Since I bet you dollars to donuts they don't stop Japanese-looking people for ID check (on the off chance that they might be Korean or Chinese immigrants) WAY TO BE RACIST, JAPAN.

This is why I don't intend to live here my whole life.

EDIT: Actually the highlight of that encounter was an obasan who came careening down the sidewalk, and in passing scolded the cop for leaving his bicycle where it blocked the path. He, like a chastised child, apologized. XD

So I was in class (as I tend to be for approximately seven hours a day), doing a free conversation lesson with two high level students, one of whom happened to be my regular favorite, on account of being handsome, funny, a bit quirky, talkative, and a rugby player. We'll call him Akira, not because there's any relation to the Hikaru no Go character, but because that's what I have on the brain lately.

In any case, we were talking about oddball stuff in Tokyo; I had related the anecdote of the time I almost got kidnapped, which by this point is comfortably distant enough in my memory that I toss it around casually. Then the conversation wandered over to chikan (the uniquely Japanese phenomenon of subway-groping), and while I freely acknowledged that I had no first-hand experience with trains in America, Texas not having any, my friends from NY and DC always expressed utter bafflement that Japanese women tolerated it. Too strongly trained not to kick up a fuss, even when they're the ones being victimized, that's the prevailing theory.

Then Akira launches into a story.

"So I was spending the night at this priest's house..."

Oh god, my mind is going bad places already.

"And there were the futons on the floor, side by side. And in the middle of the night he reached over and tried to take my hand."

How OLD was he when this happened?? Because Akira is the sort of tall & muscular rugby player that, in America anyway, you really don't want to make unsolicited gay overtures at, or he's likely to kick your ass. But this is Japan, so...

"I jerked my hand away and didn't say anything about it."

...so essentially he's a Japanese woman.

Then the other student, an unremarkable housewife in her mid-thirties, asks the Captain Obvious question: "But why would he try to grab your hand?"

Akira, shrugging: "I dunno. Maybe he was gay."

Woman: "Like you?"

SAY WHAT? Where do Japanese people get the idea that as a race they have a goddamned monopoly on tact and subtlety, when they always bust out shit like this?

Akira, sputtering: "I--what--no!"

Which pretty well killed the chances of anyone in that conversation admitting to being gay, even though I would like to come out to my students. "Dropping gay bombs" I call it, into conversations.

Because while in general I don't believe that my students need to know about my personal life (although they certainly think they do, and I get interrogated about it regularly, three cheers for Japanese tact and subtlety), the constant, blind assumption of heterosexuality has begun to irritate me. Gays are pretty much invisible in Japan, except for the flashy, flamboyant drag queens on TV, the hen na okama that get equated with all gays. Accordingly, there's a split between gays and "normal people," and gay rights in Japan are never going to progress until that dichotomy is overcome, which means that respectable, non-flashy gays need to come out of the closet to counter the drag queen stereotype.

All this translates to me wanting to use my Very Popular Teacher status to drop gay bombs, which really isn't as bad/dangerous an idea as it sounds, since I'm about to get transferred to a new school anyway. I've been here for six months and gotten to know the students well enough to know who might take it badly -- which is really nobody, because this is Japan and they don't really care here, thanks to the dearth of Christianity. I think that's why missionaries here make me irrationally angry, even more than they do in the states -- don't atheists deserve at least one refuge in a world that's overrun with religious crazy? Fuck all y'all. *grumbles and wanders offstage*

[Exeunt]

Having just rolled back into Tokyo after a two-week sojourn in America that OF COURSE involved buying more books than I could carry or the airline would allow me to, I wound up hauling two laden suitcases all over creation (and by that I mean from Narita back to my apartment). Par for the course, really, except then the next day I noticed that I was getting a weird twinge in my left bicep when I tried to reach certain directions. Not painful, just a little strange, like skin being pulled too tight. I ignored it, figuring it was a pulled muscle and it would go away on its own.

Today I realized I have no feeling in the skin on that portion of my arm. Huh. o_O

Now I'm wondering if it's a testosterone thing. I've read about similar things happening to other trannies -- T makes your tendons thicken, which sometimes causes weird pinching on the nerves while everything is getting settled in. Bizarre shit too, like your arm going to sleep while you're on a treadmill. Kind of makes me wonder why you never hear about this stuff happening to normal pubescent boys, cuz it's the same process.

That is, it would seem, the least of my problems.

( PART 1!! )

Me: what's myocardia?
Shelley: heart muscle tissue
Me: hmm, that doesn't help
Me: I thought it was a disease
Shelley: myocardial infarction is
Me: today my doctor told me my testosterone levels were too high and I needed vitamins or I was at a 15x higher risk of something. I wish I'd understood what he was talking about.
Shelley: but that is a heart attack caused by blockages... not sure if T would cause that
Me: he gave me three pills that I'm supposed to take twice a day
Shelley: are you sure it had myocardia in it?
Me: well he spelled it wrong, but I don't think it could have been anything else
Me: ......this gives you great faith in my doctor, I know

Well, the Russian didn't call me but Gay-Geek did, and I have -- for the first time in bloody ages -- a date for Saturday.

Him: Hey, you busy this evening?
Me: Ahhhaha... going over to a friend's house to play Warcraft, actually. >_>
Him: Warcraft! sounds cute.

----
Edit: Ah. So apparently T-chan (previously known as Gay-Geek) had the initiative to call me because he's a raging top. (And if you can believe gay gossip, a massively well-endowed one).

Well that's nice, anyway. At least one of us ought to know what we're doing.

The other day I read the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is really nowhere near as Machiavellian as it sounds. The two main points of the book are to (A) let other people talk and (B) listen (no, really listen) to what they say. Everybody in the world likes to feel that other people are genuinely interested in them, and that book is not about tricking anyone, but actually learning how to be interested in other people and draw out the best in them and yourself. For me, it's about overcoming my natural tendency toward hapless self-absorption. In any case, I highly recommend it, no matter what you intend to do with your life.

So here are my adventures with applying those principles to the Tokyo gay scene.

( How to Get Free Drinks and Woo Russians )

So I went to my favorite Indian restaurant after work, which meant I was sneaking in 10 minutes before they closed and ordering a single piece of nan. This being a classy, classy joint, they have a TV over the tables that plays a steady fare of either Nepalese pop music videos, or whatever the local stations happen to be churning out. This evening it was obviously a TV drama, two high school boys standing by a pool and doing the "fight between friends" routine.

Boy 1: ....didn't end up eating lunch until 1 o'clock.... [this was hard to hear over the kitchen noise] ...upset that you didn't show up..... ....[something about being friends]
Me: *yawn*
Boy 1: Look... I like you... a lot.
Me: *wakes up* Ara?
Boy 2: Well of course. I like you a lot too.
Me: Your 'like' isn't the same as his 'like.'
Boy 1: My 'like' isn't the same as your 'like.'
[some hemming and hawing that I couldn't hear]
Boy 2: As in... you mean you want to kiss me?
Me: Yes.
Boy 1: .........Yes.
Boy 2: Huh. Alright, let's do it.
Me and Boy 1: !!!
[possibly the most awkward kiss in TV drama history]
Boy 2: Hmm. That was odd.
Nepalese cook: Your nan is done! :D
Me: ...What channel is this?

Unfortunately he couldn't figure it out, I don't know what the show is called, and googling "gay Japanese tv drama" didn't turn up the answer. What is this????? I must know. Not that this situation was anything I hadn't seen before in a million yaoi mangas (as is evidenced by the fact that I could call all the dialogue) but being on TV makes me want it.

EDIT: While on the work computer today looking at Japanese YouTube, a familiar face appeared on the currently being watched list. Kekeke.

Note: It occurs to me that this post may seem to contain an inordinate number of references to my own hotness. What a vain bastard, you may think, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong, but it's not quite that simple. Through the turbulence of transitioning, I've come out clinging to my good looks as the one thing that I'll still have going for me, when all the other odds are stacked so long. (And in some hindbrain conviction that's difficult to shake, I have trouble believing that it's not the only thing I have going for me.) So when I get periodic reassurances that other people do still find me attractive, I tend to cling to them, possibly more than I should.

( But let's face it, I wouldn't be half so interesting if I didn't have issues. )