Queer for Me, not Gay for You: Alexis Hall's LOOKING FOR GROUP

Last week, I attended a panel at MIT on "The Turn to Tween," a panel discussion about the roots of the word, its connection to consumerism and marketing, and the way "tweens" are depicted in popular culture. During the Q & A period after the discussion, the issue of tweens and social media came up. One of the speakers, Tyler Bickford of the University of Pittsburgh, mentioned that most academic studies of kids' use of of social media indicate that they are typically not using these new technologies to meet and interact with strangers, but far more often with people they already know.

Even as I found myself shaking my head, wanting to disagree, or at least qualify, Bickford's statement, a student sitting beside me said the same thing that I was thinking: "That's not true for queer kids."

My doubt arose not from personal experience, but from having recently read Alexis Hall's loving tribute to online gamers and queerness, Looking for Group. As Hall himself notes on his blog, Group is a far cry from his RITA-award winning erotic romance For Real; no kink, not much sex, and lots of gaming jokes. Its narrator, college student Drew, is an avid player of the MMO (massively multiplayer online) game Heroes of Legend (loosely based on Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft). He's a bit burnt out though, both with his "guild," or group with whom he typically plays, and with the style of his own playing—methodical, aggressive, competitive, and, increasingly, joyless. And so after a major disagreement with his guild ("he pretty much admitted he ragequit his last guild over loot drama" [Kindle Loc 103]), Drew decides to apply for membership in a different one.

The book opens, in fact, with the post that draws Drew's attention:

<Same Crit Different Day> is Recruiting

SCDD is a tight-knit raiding guild (heroic and normal difficulty), currently looking for a main tank to join our mature, dedicated, and frankly fabulous team. Founded in 2011 by a group of friends with no fecking clue how to run a Heroes of Legend guild, but definite ideas about the right way to treat people—fairly, without harassment, and with equal opportunity to participate—SCDD roared past the traditional guild life expectancy of six months and has been getting awesomer ever since.

Following this post, the members of SCDD debate (online, of course) Drew's application, and ultimately decide to accept him and his game persona, Orcarella (Dread Knight tank) into the guild. During the days and nights of game play that follows, Drew finds himself increasingly drawn to the unusual ways of SCDD, "the most progressed casual guild on the server" (150). Not only do his fellow members praise him, and one another ("in Anni he'd only ever been told when he screwed up, and he wasn't sure how to handle having someone say he'd done well" [971]), but they also tackle their fights in entirely different ways than he is used to, making what was once routine for Drew into a challenge.

And Drew finds himself increasingly drawn to one member of the guild in particular: Solace, a healer elf who not only enjoys the fighting aspects of the game, but also loves wandering into unseen corners of the world just to see what they look and feel like. As Drew (as Orcarella) and Solace start hanging out in the game together, separate from the rest of the guild, they end up talking, not just about the game, but about where they go to school and what they hope to do with their lives after uni. And Drew begins to wonder: is Solace a girl in real life? Or is she, like he, female online but male offline?

Drew's upset when he finds out the answer. His fellow uni mates, Sanee and Tinuviel, have very different takes on Drew's response:

     "Man," sighed Sanee. "I know I totally told you this was going to happen, but I'm really sorry for you."
     Tinuviel pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. "Well, yes and no. I mean, I think what you need to ask yourself is how much this changes things."
     Drew gaped at her. "Um, it completely changes things?"
     "Why?"
     Sanee sat forward on the chair. "T, are you being deliberately dense?"
     'That's a very strange question. The way I see it, Drew's met somebody he likes. He's clearly sad at the thought of losing him. So the question is: why should he?"
     "How about: because he's not gay?"
     "Well, neither am I, but I've still had sexual relationships with people who defined as female."
     "Yes, but you're a girl."
     "Tinuviel sighed deeply. "If our friend wasn't in the middle of a crisis, I'd be quite cross with you now." (1905)

Cisgender heterosexual male Sanee thinks of gender and sexuality in a binary way: you are either a girl or a boy, and you're either attracted to members of the same sex, or to those of the opposite sex. Tinuviel, who identifies as female and pansexual, has a very different take on what is possible, both sexually and romantically, and tries to encourage Drew to think about the situation in a radically different way:

"Maybe I'm wrong, but your problem doesn't seem to be that you're not interested in this person, but that you still are."
     While Drew was sorting through that, Sanee steepled his fingers like a supervillain. "Dude, are you gay?" There was a pause. "Like, it's okay if you are."
     Drew glared at him. "I think I'd have noticed."
     Tinuviel raised a hand. "I suspect you'll think this is a weird question, but what would you have noticed?"
     "Well...." Drew hated it when T did this. She'd ask you something to which the answer was so screamingly obvious that you'd immediately start second-guessing yourself. And, right now, that was the last thing he needed. "Fancying guys for a start?"
     "Maybe you just haven't met any guys you fancy. I mean, I'm pretty sure you're not attracted to Sanee..."
     Sanee made a valiant attempt not to look horrified. "You're not, right?"
     Drew made no such attempt. "I'm really not."
     "Okay," Tinuviel went on. "And you don't fancy me either."
     "Jesus, just because I don't fancy every girl I meet, that doesn't make me gay."
     She looked smug. "And by the same argument, not fancying every boy you meet doesn't make you straight."
     There was a really long silence.
     "Holy shit," gasped Sanee. "That's a really scary thought."
     "I can imagine it would be to a lot of people, but actually there's nothing scary about rejecting heteronormative notions of binary sexuality."
     "So you're saying," said Drew slowly, "I could be gay and not know it? Because that sort of sounds like bollocks."
     Tinuviel pushed her hair out of her eyes. "No, I'm not saying that, Andrew. I'm saying that, for many people, sexuality is more fluid and less clear-cut than they're taught to assume. You might, in fact, be completely straight, but it's also possible that you're not. And, even if you aren't, you might have gone your whole life completely happy an not caring and not knowing. And that's fine. But it seems to me that right now you have an opportunity to have something with somebody, and it might work or it might not, but if your only reason for not trying is that you're scared of the idea of being gay, then that's probably quite silly and a little bit sad." (1956)

Drew spends hours going round and round in his head after Sanee and Tinuviel leave him to sleep away his sorrows, and really wishes he had someone else to talk to about it all. Someone like Solace. And once he realizes that the only thing he isn't confused about is that he really misses her (or him), Drew knows what he has to do.

And it turns out that gender and sexuality aren't really the issue, not once Drew and Solace meet in person. What does turn out to be a problem is the issue with which this post started: are the relationships you have with people online somehow different from, or lesser than, those with people you know and interact with in person? Are online gamers, who are often different in age from you, and may even live in different countries, somehow not really your friends? Should the people with whom you interact in person matter more than the ones you interact with online?

And if you're gay, or bi, or pan, or genderqueer, and looking for your own "group," do the answers to those questions matter more?


Illustration credits;
World of Warcraft orc: MMO Champion Forum
Dark Elf: DeviantArt Vmbui

Alexis Hall

Looking for Group

Riptide, 2016

Dystopian Feminism: Alaya Dawn Johnson's THE SUMMER PRINCE

Since the 1915 serial publication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, writers have often turned to the trope of the female-governed society to explore issues of gender and power . Gilman's novel suggests that excluding men from a culture would inevitably lead to a utopian state, one blessedly free from the violence, war, and drive to domination that Perkins found characterized the masculinity of her day.* Many writers who deployed the trope after Gilman have taken a less sanguine view, however, using the female-headed society to point out women's, as well as men's, drive for power and supremacy. Alaya Dawn Johnson's young adult novel The Summer Prince has ties to this second, more dystopian strand, but its far from traditional depiction of sexuality, as well as its emphasis on the powers and responsibilities of art and the artist, offer no easy answers about gender. Instead, it leads readers to keep asking questions about the power structures that govern not only the futuristic city-state of Palmeres Três—structures of class, skin color, age, access to technology, as well as gender—but also those that govern their own worlds.

Johnson's novel is an immersive fantasy—as readers, we're thrust immediately into the post-apocalyptic society of Palmeres Três, a glassed-in pyramid of a city with ten different tiers, built on the site of Palmeres, the community built by fugitive slaves in seventeenth-century Brazil. 400 years before the time of the novel, the "Y Plague" wiped out 70% of the planet's men; though gender balance has now been restored, Palmeres Três has maintained the female-dominated governing structure that emerged in the plague's wake. The book's narrator, seventeen-year-old June Costa, is the privileged step-daughter of one of the city's governing "Aunties," Auntie Yaha, who married June's mother shortly after the suicide death of June's father. Given the heteronormative world view of most futuristic fantasy fiction, and my own heteronormative expectations, it took me a few pages to understand the relationship between June and Auntie Yaha, and to wonder about the sexual norms of a society in which a woman may wed a husband, then later marry a wife. Are Palmerans bisexual? Pansexual? Polyamorous? Monogamous? June never stops to explain; her very lack of explanation normalizes a sexual culture far different from our own. Readers must come to their own conclusions about sexuality in Palmeres Três, but no matter what they decide, it's certain that we're not in heterosexual Kansas anymore.

June and her male friend Gil "solved our virginity problem together a few years ago," June explains, suggesting that Palmeres Três' openness to sexuality extends to teens, as well as to adults (58). Though Gil has continued to be sexually active with others, June has not. But when June and Gil catch sight of the new summer king, a dark-skinned boy from the verde, the lowest and least privileged level of the city, both are smitten. Even knowing that vibrant young Enki is slated to be sacrificed, his throat slit in a public ritual at the end of his one-year rein, does not dampen their attraction. It's male Gil, though, not female June, who first catches Enki's eye. Though "everyone knows that summer kings screw like mayflies," (49), the dance Gil and Enki share during Enki's first public appearance as king leads to a romantic relationship, a relationship that flourishes into love.

Unfortunately, Palmeres Três is not as equitable in regards to class and skin color as it is to sexuality. Enki uses both his dark-skinned body and his public platform to give subtle reminders to the privileged in Palmeres Três of the inequities of their society, inequities that their tiered geography makes it only too easy to ignore. June, a visual artist who "live[s] for spectacle, for the construction of emotional states and the evocation of suppressed feelings," begins to recognize a kindred artistic spirit in Enki (33). Knowing that "two artists can create work together that they can never imagine alone," June paints a transgressive public mural to capture Enki's attention, telling herself all the while that her desire has nothing to do with her attraction to the summer king, or her jealousy of Gil (66). Soon June and Enki are scheming to create a major public art display, one designed to capture the attention of the entire city and remind it of the injustices upon which it rests. And as they plot and plan, June finds herself falling in love not with the image of Enki, but with the rebellious, transgressive, doomed-to-die king himself.

Johnson's novel is both ambitious and frustratingly flawed. We're never entirely clear about Enki's goals; does he believe his and June's art can foment social change? Remaking the world, as did the first Queen of Palmeres Três through the establishment of the sacrifice of the king, is an act of artistry, he claims. But can art remake the world, make it better? If so, what would that better world look like? Enki gives us little idea.

Or is Enki's only real goal to point his country in a different direction by refusing his one important role as summer king: to re-anoint the current Queen at the moment of his ritual death?

June, also, proves an elusive character, as well as an often annoying one. She's an artist, but we never get a strong sense of why, of what art means to her beyond a vehicle to garner praise and prestige. The demands of plot, rather than of her character, seem to be why she makes an incredibly selfish decision mid-book, a decision likely to turn off readers just at the point where they should be rooting for a protagonist. Is she worthy of Enki's admiration? Of ours?

Perhaps, though, some books, some characters, do not need to provide us with the answers. Maybe it is enough that they, like Enki, show us what questions need to be asked. Only then can we, blind and unworthy Junes though we may be, choose whether or not to take on the painful task of finding answers, answers that do justice to the difficulties of the questions, and to the courage of those willing to ask them.


*The women of Herland have discovered a way to reproduce via parthenogenesis, so men are truly unnecessary.

Alaya Dawn Johnson,

The Summer Prince.

Arthur A. Levine/ Scholastic, 2013.