Putting the UF into LGBTQIAP+
Blackwarren Books got its start with urban fantasy, building from the setting of the Argent City explored in several books, and welcoming new voices and authors every year. What urban fantasy actually is can be found with a simple Google search or browse on Wikipedia, but its familiarity has always been nebulous, it seems. Much like with cozy mysteries, it’s a genre that you probably have heard of, but don’t know it’s called that until you’re given a popular example, such as Murder, She Wrote in the case of cozies, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the case of urban fantasy (though its spinoff Angel was much closer to the tenets of UF). For those more familiar with traditional fantasy, they can follow along, but it becomes a matter of taste.
Traditional fantasy allows the escape. Urban fantasy burrows into the fear. It can been seen as the offspring of fantasy and horror, bringing fantastical elements into the modern day as well as primal, supernatural fears and terrors. Horror focuses on surviving the monsters, while urban fantasy heroes strive to become what the monsters fear.
In urban fantasy, vampires, werewolves, demons, zealots, monsters out of darker lore are common, the body count is smaller, oddly, and the morality is much, much grayer. If one contemplated philosophy of the genres, and the differences between them, one could posit that in a traditional fantasy values system, following the moral rigidity of Immanuel Kant would be a simple guide to determining who would be seen as the villain and who would be the hero. A villain lies, is selfish, breaks their word and considers cruelty a necessary method to accomplish goals. A hero is honest to a fault, puts their word on par with their own life, is giving and charitable, and will take up arms to engage, reluctantly, in honorable combat.
In Urban Fantasy, a philosophy like that won’t last long, the settings often lending themselves to the moral particularism of Jonathan Dancy. Values and mores are set on the fly, and those who keep their promises are an outlier to those who do what feels morally just in the moment. The hero is more often than not the protagonist, with a benevolent streak under many, many flaws, and will use tools and methods that could be considered selfish, or villainous, but always for the greater good, or at least to accomplish one’s goals in the short-term. Urban fantasy explores the consequence of actions, and the scars they leave behind physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
This, of course, leads to the question of what LGBTQIAP+ characters and themes have to do with any of this. The characters certainly aren’t strangers to traditional fantasy, where they can be heroic. Rarely, though, are they the actual heroes, and their mistreatment and phobias are placed on the side of dichotomies of absolutism, or simply good and evil. To hate queer people is bad, it’s evil, and to support them is good and just. This depends, of course, on the writer and publisher wanting to put out that message, or for readers to see through the coding where authors won’t say the quiet part out loud. Regardless, these queer characters are allowed live their lives, and maybe find romance, depending on the intended audience.
Urban fantasy, on the other hand, rarely would allow queer people on the stage, much less find them heroes unless the fantasy elements were a cloak worn by queer romance novels, where the relationship is the end-goal, and saving the world is a side-effect. Otherwise, like in the case of Jim Butcher, queer people are either a source of comedy (pretending to be a flaming stereotype), the villain (a coded transgender demon jumping genders and bodies to murder), or most commonly, existing for a brief moment to exonerate the character (and author by extension) of any implications of homophobia.
Urban fantasy is commonly intended to be a dark reflection of the world we know, where fears and anxieties are given form, clothed in mythology, and set loose on an unsuspecting public. For queer writers and readers, it can be seen as an exaggerated version of the everyday. There may not be vampires or wicked Fae lurking in the shadows, but the very real possibility of losing one’s life over an imagined sleight by a random person is all too real. So why read it at all? Because in urban fantasy, the queer person can survive, if they’re in the right book, at least. After all, Bury Your Gays is still running strong, unfortunately, and “fridging” gays (a term coined by comic writer Gail Simone to define the trope of killing a side character to motivate the heroes) to inspire their straight friends is more common than it should be.
In urban fantasy, a queer hero can commit what would be a questionable act in traditional fantasy, but is morally just to them to ensure survival, to do the “right thing”, to take down the harmful actor that endangers them, their chosen family, their community. Queer heroes are left to reluctantly save a world and society that often openly restricts and punishes them for merely existing, and showing how they make that decision is richer than following a simpler philosophy. This leaves them to work out how to live with how they’ll be seen by the greater population, that their heroics will often be done in the dark, without glory or fanfare, and good deeds not going unpunished more often than not.
With queer characters starting to gain more visibility in genre works, and moving beyond token status, they are able to explore the realities of being queer and existing in a fantastical setting, whether it be classic sword and sorcery, or an urban hellscape. Authors are able to answer world-building questions relating to the realities of being queer, and how that will factor into the setting, character interactions, and complications that would normally be hand-waved or resolved off-screen. Time can be given to the day-to-day challenges, and how queer heroes navigate the difficulties of societal shame, and the support systems that keep them going, and do so in ways that don’t relegate queer characters to the categories of token, best friend, villain, or incidentally queer protagonist.
At Blackwarren Books, we’re proud to support queer authors, and their nuanced and complicated heroes, and the journeys they take through a dark world, and hopefully, make urban fantasy a genre that will no longer need explanation.
