ꙮ tatybara ꙮ

As Pride comes to a close, I want to celebrate Lunar Boy and talk about what including explicit queer terms in a middle grade graphic novel means.

This was really difficult to summarize in comic essay form haha. I had done extensive research while I was in school over how middle grade comics often avoid saying words like "gay" "lesbian" or "trans" and its connection with bans and censorship. While I was at school, it felt like Raina Telgemeier's "Drama" was the last time I saw a character say "bi" in a middle grade graphic novel, and that was published in 2012! Why haven't we built more from that bravery since then? So I vowed to make sure Lunar Boy wasn't going to be a kids book that talked around queerness,

As I continued to develop Lunar Boy, I realized how this would affect the larger intersectional context of honoring Indonesian history. And that led to another rabbit hole of pressures! Inter-cultural discourse, the way so many Indonesians don't have access to broader knowledge about our history, it's a lot!

Happy Pride, be nice to each other 🌈

I love this a lot.

I have a tendency to get heated about traditional writing advice for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons for me is that traditional writing rules don't account for queer experiences.

"Show don't tell" discourages talking about feelings--but in healthy real-life relationships, talking about your feelings is a good thing, because everyone experiences emotions differently and it's hard to know if someone actually feels the same way in response to something that you do unless they bluntly state the things they're feeling.

Stuff like "be concise" or "don't use filler" or "stay focused on the plot" ignores that a majority of life experiences, themselves, are unfocused or meandering, and that these feelings are as worth exploring as any other--but in particular, it limits the means with which one can explore queerness, because a big part of queerness is in exploring the in-betweens, the lack of conclusions, the lack of definitions.

These are just a couple examples that come to mind immediately. More generally, I always try to emphasize that a lot of writing advice comes from capitalistic interests, from the assumption that everyone's end goal is, or should be, to write to sell as many copies as possible. Or more specifically, to catch the interest of people who have the money to spend on it, i.e. the people in power, i.e. mostly white cishet people. (At least, this is what I've seen in English-speaking communities, but I always have to wonder how much pressure the English-speaking colonial powers have put on the cultural priorities of other regions, as well.)

This is unfortunate, not only because it's appeasing the powers that be and reinforcing their beliefs ever further, but because I think it also creates the impression among a lot of writers that if someone writes in a way that's more honest to their own personal identity, it's not recognized as writing to their identity, it's looked at as "bad writing" because it doesn't fit conventional writing guidelines that were always formed with an entirely different cultural identity in mind.

We all have to make money some way, but I ask writers to hold onto their sincerity in whatever ways they're able to. And I ask readers to please, please be open to anything unfamiliar to you. You don't have to like it, but at least try to think through the author's perspective of why they might be doing something a certain way, or try to think of the kind of person who would enjoy something for being written a certain way, and why.

Part of why I brought up "show not tell" being at odds with queer storytelling is because I wish there was more criticism over why we keep seeing stories in the mainstream where:

• cis character walks into a trans character changing clothes/ being naked so that the cis audience can be shown not told, that "a trans person is a person with body parts you weren't expecting them to have". Rather than having a trans character just tell their audience-surrogate-cis-friend what their deal is.
• I mention this in the comic but bi and pan characters being mandated to date characters of different genders, instead of just taking their words for it when they tell us who they are. But show not tell requires proof, so proof people make.
• literally the whole process of coming out is telling someone who they are. And some closeted people are really good at keeping to themselves, so you won't always see "foreshadowing" that they were gay the whole time.
• related to my last point, but I think this is the reason why so many queer characters in the mainstream are often robbed of their agency to come out on their own terms. We have to show that x character is gay, so have their audience-surrogate friend walk into him kissing another guy.
• I said it in the comic but it bears repeating, aro ace characters having to reject romantic advances. Please, I'd like any other story!!
• a general reliance on external signifiers of queerness. I talked about this previously but this leads to very limited notions about gender especially. X character knows she's trans because she likes pink and playing with barbies. Y character is non-binary because androgyny and they/them pronouns

Everything is aimed to coddle and teach the non-queer audience. Queer characters are subjects to be gawked at and studied, they're not people who can speak for themselves. Because that would be tell not show! It's that capitalist/ appealing to the privileged mindset you mentioned.

I recognize that having a platform in traditional publishing always means some kind of compromise is being made, but I wound up very lucky to have a team that backed me up and understood/respected the goals of Lunar Boy. I hope it encourages more books that pushes against the conventions of the medium's place in publishing. ❤️

I am only being slightly hyperbolic.

I'm drawing here on a book called Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett (2015), largely a critique of Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, building on The Program Era by Mark McGurl (2009). It's been a while since I read either, but the gist goes something like this:

• When the consensus began to emerge in the US that the USSR would be the main enemy after WWII (which happened well before the end of the war - and maybe even in some ways before it started), the association of Stalinism with infiltration and subversion including through cultural exports/soft power/'propaganda' led to a neurosis among American capitalists that the US needed a clear 'individualist' or 'democratic' literary tradition (contra, for example, the socialist associations of Steinbeck).

• As part of a broader strategy of selectively funding the arts and (broadly) conservative artists, the Rockefeller Foundation undertook to create training programs for American writers, based at universities starting with the University of Iowa.

• The CIA was involved in decisions about who should lead these programs.

(Full disclosure: I can't remember whether Bennett manages to prove in his book that the Foundation formally sought CIA participation in the decision-making process (I think I remember coming away from the book feeling that he hadn't quite found a smoking gun), but it's at least better than plausible that anti-communist intelligence factored into background checks and that sort of thing.)

'Show don't tell' was one of the major principles advocated by the writers' workshops (others include 'write what you know' and... there's a third one in McGurl but I can't remember it off the top of my head). From the writers' workshops it passed into other domains of American soft power (I first encountered it in Hollywood-oriented screenwriting classes and podcasts about writing genre fiction), achieving the status of a profound truism, the kind of thing that gets reproduced without any historical consciousness.

(Like many young writers, I found it a frustrating principle to try to apply - after all, all 'showing' is also 'telling', and especially for worldbuilding-heavy genre writing like what I do, good 'telling' often 'shows' a lot too).

Why is 'show don't tell' fundamentally reactionary? Well, McGurl and Bennett both position it in opposition to the very idea of polemic fiction - of fiction, like Steinbeck, or the movies of Ken Loach or all sorts of socialist realism (broadly speaking) that is intended to draw attention to the political conditions of a narrative. It's individualising; it shrinks the scope of a story to a scale at which the showing, the small picture, can't encompass the issues of the big picture that can only be told. Essentially, they argue, it is a form of the 'keep politics out of art' line that we've all heard way too much in the intervening 75 years.

There's a particularly pernicious aspect to this history when it comes to specifically advice for marginalised writers. One very successful project of the Iowa Writers' Workshop was its international program, which aimed to bring writers from outside America to learn the techniques of American writing, which they could then take back to their home countries in a hope of sort of immunising their cultures to communist influence. As the PRC came fully within the 'Communist bloc', Taiwan and southeast Asia became a particular focus.

(I want to be a little bit careful here: the IWW's International Writers' Program undoubtedly did some very important work, particularly in creating opportunities for writers from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong to encounter each other's work, and insinuating that the whole thing was -just- western propaganda is a bit condescending to the significant number of east Asian writers who contributed to the program).

When we tell marginalised writers to 'show don't tell', to avoid naming their oppression and to avoid describing it as such, to 'write what they know', it produces a kind of commodification, a presentation of an exotic other for consumption by the imperial core without any thought for the exoticising power dynamic. It eliminates for the privileged reader the discomfort of having to acknowledge complicity in what is shown (Bennett and McGurl's history is far from the only route to get to this point; it's laid out clearly in the opening chapter's of Edward Said's Orientalism, for example).

I think there's also an extent to which providing formal rules for making art is a strategy optimised to foster infighting; give a group of artists an arbitrary rule and they can nitpick each other's work over it, rather than questioning the rule itself. This has bedevilled at least white progressive movements for a long time with quibbling over definitions, and as OP's comic shows, that also manifests in those heated disputes over which terms for queerness are and are not good to use in what contexts.

(Sidebar: like any proposed writing rule, show don't tell and write what you know have their uses - where possible, show your truth, show your experience, write versions of yourself that you know you need to express)

All of which is to say that all the posts above are entirely correct about the problems that the comic raises, and that this didn't happen organically; there was a deliberate effort made to create an effect, and at least some elements of that effect were achieved, as part of a broad strategy to establish and maintain American/Western cultural hegemony.