Literary Celebrations
by David Seitz
May is a month for celebrations: graduation, weddings, May Day, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day. It’s also a big month for handing out awards. Once everyone’s survived the winter, it’s time to dole out some appreciation.
Among the big publishing awards handed out in May are the Lambda Literary Awards (also known as the “Lammies”) and the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award.
First emerging out of Washington, DC’s Lambda Rising Bookstore as a literary review, the Lambda Literary Award was introduced in 1988 to recognize exceptional writing reflective of the lives of people experiencing marginal sexual and/or gender identities. The Lambda Literary Foundation officially became a nonprofit organization in 1996.
The Lambda Awards have included a category recognizing literature for children and youth from the beginning, says poet and Lambda Literary Foundation executive director Charles Flowers. Past recipients in the children’s and young adult category include The Full Spectrum edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell, Letters in the Attic by Bonnie Shimko, and Telling Tales Out of School by Kevin Jennings. The category has seen dramatic changes in content and target audience.
“It’s gone from Heather Has Two Mommies and other early controversial books to also publishing work for LGBT and questioning youth—not just about LGBT parents, but LGBT teens themselves,” Flowers says.
Publishing for, about, and by LGBT people has likewise exploded in breadth and depth.
“For the awards this year, we had 463 books submitted by 193 publishers,” Flowers says. “There are a lot of publishers publishing gay and lesbian material. Categories that didn’t exist ten years ago are pretty lively in terms of the number of people getting published.”
This year’s Lammie award finalists were named in March. Recipients will be announced May 29.
At the same time as literature spreads like wildfire, Flower says, the proliferation of internet book markets has made it difficult for independent bookstores in general—and feminist/LGBT bookstores in particular—to stay open, while also creating new paths and connections for LGBT people.
“When gay and lesbian bookstores were first founded, we didn’t have community centers or social service agencies,” Flowers says. “Bookstores themselves operated as community centers. Now we order books online, which also helps people in rural areas who don’t have access to a bookstore or a Barnes and Noble with a gay-friendly section.”
Flowers continues, “It’s a negative consequence of technology in some ways. The positive consequence is that it’s easier for gays and lesbians to connect online, whether it’s relationships, or the isolated teenager who can talk to someone somewhere, or books.”
One community-building center that has endured the transition to the digital age is WisCon, an important annual feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin. In many ways, WisCon is the birthplace of the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award, a prize created by award-winning feminist science fiction writers Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy to recognize high-quality science fiction writing that critically engages gender issues. The first round of Tiptree winners was announced at WisCon in 1991. (James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name of science fiction writer Alice Sheldon, who died in 1987.)
“Back in the '80s, sci fi was still regarded as a boys’ game,” Murphy says. “Karen Fowler and I both wrote sci fi, and it struck us at one point that all the major awards in the field—Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and the rest—were named after men. We thought, wouldn’t it piss people off if there was an award that was kind of a girl’s award?”
The two soon moved on to a concept that recognized sci fi challenging gender conformity and achievements by writers of all genders.
“Trying to figure out how to change society requires you to re-imagine society,” Murphy says. “That’s what sci fi writers are good at. We wanted to reward the sci fi writers who were really challenging themselves, and deeply re-imagining society in the area of gender.”
Murphy said she realized the need for a feminist approach to sci fi at the age of twelve, while reading the work of prolific sci fi author Robert Heinlein. While Heinlein’s work usually made use of traditional gender roles, one book, Podkayne of Mars, features an assertive, ambitious female character who suddenly reverts to traditional, gendered, domestic life goals.
“I was so mad,” Murphy says. “I hadn’t questioned it until it was rubbed in my face. That made me realize I was being sold a bill of goods.”
“For me, founding the Tiptree award is a way of addressing what I had realized when I was a kid: that when you’re reading fiction, often you’re unconsciously accepting what’s going on in the fiction as true, and you have to sort of learn to question it,” says Murphy.
The award celebrates work that critiques and manipulates gender as socially constructed in some ways and persistent in others. Perhaps in keeping with that playful mix of critique and manipulation, each author who receives the award (click here for a full list) is presented with a tiara, usually on the first evening of a weekend sci fi convention. The Tiptree Award is publicly given out at a different convention every year and comes back to WisCon regularly.
“What’s interesting is that every winner has looked great in the tiara, men and women. Most wear the tiara the whole weekend,” Murphy said.
