NO H8 Dept.

Courtesy of Jim Hines:

...last month, Library of the Living Dead Press put out a call for an LGBT zombie anthology (which sounds like a very cool project, actually).  Yesterday, the publisher pulled the plug on the anthology.  From the editor:

“It is with deep regret that I must inform you that the publisher has pulled the plug on this anthology. It seems that homophobia had reared its ugly head..NOT from the publisher, but with some authors that are contributers to the publisher.”

In other words, it sounds like some of the authors who publish with LLD found out that their publisher was doing an anthology that had teh gay in it, and complained.

Without speculating as to who complained or to what end (or how much of a roadblock that created), I'll add my 2¢ by saying I've met a remarkable number of people who have what I could call a "patchwork open-mindedness". Dead bodies eating each other? Great! Same-sex romance? NO SIRREE.

It sounds like a brain-breaker at first — why would someone get all squicky about one and not the other? — until you realize that not everyone can be uniformly open-minded about transgressive subjects.

My take, based on what little I've seen, is that some people cannot give homosexuality the OK without feeling like that means they somehow should consent to it. Some folks don't understand on a gut level that there's nothing that says you have to be the subject of homosexuality as part of being okay with its existence — that if you say yes to it in a broader social context, that you are somehow saying yes to it in a personal context.

Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's juvenile. The problem is, people's minds do work like this.

I once had a friend — note the past tense — who was easily one of the smartest and most open-minded folks I'd ever known. He also had a bizarre streak of homophobia, so much so that he wouldn't even allow his openly-gay first cousin to sleep in the same house as him because he was worried the guy might sneak into his bedroom and do Naughty Things to him while he slept. Any attempt to discuss this with him — or even just flat-out ridicule his paranoia as exactly that, paranoia — bounced off him like bullets off Superman's tuchis. It wasn't a state of mind he had been argued into, and so there was no point in arguing him out of it.

I had — and still have — friends of pretty much every sexual orientation you could think of. A couple of them have hit on me, and I've always responded the same way: thank you, the attention is flattering, but I'm sorry, I don't swing that way and I'm married and monogamous besides. The least I can do on my own is not fuel further dischord. I'd like to think we're, as a culture, past the point where such things should be grounds for a beating or a shoot-out, but then I run into something like this and get a hard reminder that no, we're not.