The Queerverse

Much like outer space, queerness is vast, constantly expanding, impossible to fully discover—and maybe we’re not meant to? There’s something strangely comforting about the acceptance of the unknown, recognizing the possibilities of other life across the universe and being content with not knowing who they are. To be queer is to live in the spaces in between, recognizing that there’s not a place for you everywhere but embracing the ones meant for you with open tendrils. To be queer is to make a home in the corners of rooms, take holes in the walls and transform them into vibrant worlds. To be queer is to read a story about lesbian aliens in drag or watch a movie about transsexuals from Transylvania and say “yes…I know this deeply.” 

Science fiction provides a refuge for the strange and otherworldly, allowing a space for those who feel they fit outside of the norm to imagine themselves in alternate universes. It’s a genre where the rules of the world as we know it can be broken, twisted or altogether thrown away. The weird rules of gender binaries and nuclear families that we’ve created in this part of Earth, confinements brewed by colonizers and violently imposed on many more parts of Earth, don’t have to exist in the pages of a science fiction story. Alternative systems can be built that defy capitalism and patriarchy, reminding us of our collective power for change. Furthermore, we can take our grievances with our current world and imagine potential futures, possibilities well within our grasp depending on the actions we make (or don’t make) in the present. 

I recall the scene in The Matrix (1999) where Morpheus presents Neo with a choice between the blue pill, which would allow him to stay in the simulation that is life as he knows it, or be awakened by the red pill and see reality for what it truly is. This is easy to identify with as a queer viewer; we are given the choice between remaining closeted in a cisheteronormative society or recognizing the gender binary as a construct and allowing every social norm to subsequently fall apart in a domino effect. Unsurprisingly, the makers of The Matrix, Lily and Lana Wachowski, both came out as trans women a bit over a decade after the release of the first movie (Smith 2016). This affirms the validation that this movie gave to trans audiences and reifies it as a story for people who see the world for what it is and choose to live beyond it. One of the many people who saw The Matrix as a kid before they knew they were trans was Taj M. Smith, a trans man who studied at Harvard Divinity School. Smith, a Christian, recognizes the potential for alternative worlds that science fiction creates as a sort of god; “Sci-fi arises from that liminal space as the result of the already/not yet. It unsettles what we know to make room for what’s possible.” (Smith 2016). As queer people, we’re pushed to create our own worlds and possibilities, especially when the world we live in doesn’t make space for us. We find these spaces in the cyberpunk worlds and alien planets, spacecrafts and parallel universes. Science fiction gives us a space for play and imagination: a crucial skill that we lose as we age, loosening our grip on the potential for radical futures. 

I remember how I felt when I first discovered The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) at the arts camp I went to growing up. The camp was called “Centauri”, named after the constellation Centaurus, a fitting name for an otherworldly haven in the unlikely venue of an unoccupied military school base in Wellington, Ontario. We would deem anything outside of camp as “the real world,” where most campers felt excluded or like they had to hide a part of themselves to fit in. In this little bubble, we did live role-plays of board games for evening programs and day-long festivals where we stepped into a storyline inspired by Harry Potter or Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away. Campers and staff alike would go all-in, embodying characters and embarking on quests. Anything typically deemed abnormal was celebrated at Centauri, and the passion for arts and fantasy was potent.

An 11-year-old me during a themed dinner at camp in July 2014. Photo courtesy of Centauri Arts. 

It was a long-standing tradition during lunch and dinner for people to get up on their chairs to dance and sing to the camp classics, which ranged anywhere from “Bohemian Rhapsody” to the Pokémon theme song. I must have been about nine or ten years old when I was in the dining hall and “The Time Warp” came on. A troupe of artsy misfits congregated on the tiled floor to complete the sacred ritual of the Time Warp dance, jumping to the left and stepping to right, putting their hands on their hips and turning their knees in tight. They knew every word like a national anthem, a rallying cry for queer kids to assemble in the fantasy of Frank-N-Furter’s castle and do the Time Warp again, and again, and again. Everyone was so deeply engrossed in this world of Transylvanians, and I couldn’t help but jump in. I needed to be a part of this cult, even before I understood what it meant to be queer. 

Now, I’ve made it. I sit beside my dearly beloved community theatre friends in the cinema room of a condo and shout “ASSHOLE!” and “SLUT!” at Brad and Janet on the screen. We scream crude sex jokes all night long, aping misogynistic tropes and getting up intermittently to grab chips and gyrate hips. Most of us are clad in corsets and fishnets just to sit in the theatre seats, content to bear discomfort for the sake of looking hot in the strange, scary kind of way that Rocky Horror thrives on. I’m dressed up as Eddie, of course, with a leather vest and a gash across my forehead that I crafted with scar wax and fake blood. I headbang along to “Hot Patootie” and have the best time. There’s no better place than amongst these freaks, indulging in our cultish adoration of this batshit B-movie. I became entranced at the sight of Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter floating in a pool atop a lifebuoy, singing “Rose Tint My World” and reminiscing about yearning to dress like the actress Fay Wray; 

“Give yourself over to absolute pleasure. Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh - erotic nightmares beyond any measure, and sensual daydreams to treasure forever. Can't you just see it? Don't dream it, be it.” (Rocky Horror 1:20:27-21:22) 

This is exactly what science fiction allows us to do: devote ourselves entirely to a euphoric fantasy, the dark, sexy, dreamy worlds. To not just imagine but become it, allow these tales to inspire the way we move around our own planet.

Science fiction has always been a space for not only its readers, but its writers to express repressed desires, act out fantasies and realize queer characters. Particularly so at a time when being openly queer was not a safe option. Samuel R. Delany, a Black gay writer who wrote mainly in the 1960s, was an influential contributor of these quietly queer declarations. His 1967 story “Aye, and Gomorrah…” was an accidental coming-out, as any writer who wrote gay stories pre-Stonewall in 1969 was assumed to be gay themselves (Fitzgerald 2017). Though he became openly gay at this time, the story became a vessel to express a part of himself without having to go through the grueling process of announcing it. Delany grew up writing to express his sexual desires, writing erotica that he learned would be accepted as long as it masqueraded as heterosexual fantasy (Fitzgerald 2017). For him, “the erotic is a matter of what is forbidden” (Fitzgerald 2017), leading him to find pleasure in these covert and scandalous stories. For many queer writers and readers, a sexual response like this makes sense. These desires, often repressed in the real world, can comfortably find a home in the genre of science fiction, where typically forbidden territories like transness and alien-human relations, are explored and celebrated. 

Even for writers who aren’t queer, or not openly so at least, writing queer stories in the 1960s and 70s was rebellious. As Ursula K. LeGuin warns in her 1975 essay, “American SF and the Other,” the science fiction genre is dominated by straight white men and their lust for conquest (and womanly sex-aliens). LeGuin claims that women were shown as “squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters” or “loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes” (LeGuin 1975). Writing queer stories in this context is not just about throwing a lesbian in there but subverting the sexist tropes that have commanded the science fiction world, holding a mirror to its complacent audience and THEN having the lesbians make love in outer space. Lisa Tuttle takes the trope of “loyal little wives” and turns it on its head. Her short story, “Wives” (1979), is set in a universe not much different than our own, where men have embarked on a violent conquest to kill everything in sight. A group of womanly aliens have been saved on the condition that they will get into human “wife” drag and serve the men’s every need and desire. Again, much like our world, their own needs and desires are not considered, but can only be explored and indulged in when the men go off to war. When the main character, who we know as Susie, goes to meet up with another wife, Doris, they voraciously liberate themselves from the restrictive bindings of their forced feminine form and devour each other in “a feast, an orgy of life after a season of death” (Tuttle, 694). Though the story is set in the trope of the obedient wives that LeGuin notes as a classic feature of misogynistic sci-fi at the time, the action comes from the disempowered characters taking back their freedom and swimming in the “warm waters of sins of the flesh” as Frank-N-Furter sings. This was a power move on Tuttle’s part, queering the male fantasy into what would become a delicious nightmare for the Heinleins of the world. Though the story ends with Susie being killed by her community of “wives” for suggesting they rebel against the men (spoiler alert, sorry), the violence is not seen as a heroic defeat of a villain or a cautionary tale. Instead, it acts as a reflection of the way the patriarchy has pitted women against each other, demonizing solidarity and relationships—be they sexual, romantic, or platonic—to keep them divided and complacent. Though it isn’t a feel-good story in the end, I personally felt a thrill in reading this one; knowing the queer readers of the time, they were probably also excited to see this fantasy pursued, even if for a fleeting moment.

Joanna Russ took this further in her 1972 short story, “When it Changed,” which imagines a utopia, Whileaway, where all the men have died, leaving the women alone to marry, create queer family structures and thrive. Janet and Katy, with their three children, follow in the footsteps of their female ancestors and live a pleasant life outside of patriarchal expectations and the male gaze. Their life is seemingly without issues, until the Earth men return to recolonize and reestablish “sexual equality” on their planet. The story acknowledges Earth’s realities of colonization and the incitement of patriarchy, placing it as an omen of the power imbalance to come when the men return to Whileaway; “I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into strangers” (Russ 607). “When it Changed” refuses to play in the same system that we live in, or that many sci-fi writers of the time, particularly men, seemed to replicate in their own alternate universes. Much like Tuttle’s story, a mirror is held up to society and we see the prejudice of our systems reversed; a queering of what we recognize as the norm, of what many falsely believe has always been this way. 

In contemporary science fiction, queerness no longer needs to be coyly coded into stories, nor necessarily made to be the main plot point of a story. Rather, we get more queer characters that explore the nuances of existing, exploring and falling in love as queer people in alternative universes. “Né łe!” (2016) by Darcie Little Badger is a tale of queer Indigenous futurism, starring Dr. Dottie King: a Lipan Apache veterinarian aboard the Starship Soto to Mars, along with forty-one dogs. When Cora, a Navajo pilot, wakes up Dr. King from her stasis pod because of a malfunction with the puppy stasis pods, the two spend the months-long trip together connecting and caring for their cohort of canines. Dottie eventually realizes she rushed into the Mars trip as a rebound from a tough breakup and questions her decision. Cora and Dottie fall for one another, take in an epileptic husky named Conan, and the story ends with the hope of them going to the Diné orbiter together. Cora and Dottie being queer isn’t the point of a story, but it weaves itself into the structure of the story. It’s a tale rooted in caring for one another, choosing your own life path despite what’s expected of you, and taking up rightful space as a queer, Indigenous person. The world building in “Né łe!” takes the pilot seat, dazzling its readers with virtual reality breakups interrupted by advertisements, the super-chill standard of interplanetary travel, and of course, dogs in space. The story breeds a beautifully tender love story and lets queer readers– and all readers really– swoon at the apex of the romance; “As we kissed, the last trace of gravity slipped away, and my feet escaped the metal ground. I felt—I was—weightless, unbound by anything but the memories I carried and the tender warmth against my lips.” (Little Badger 2016). Little Badger demonstrates the strides that science fiction has taken over time, from being a secret haven for the queerdos of the world to a space for them to exist at the forefront, travelling across universes and U-Hauling to Indigenous-led space orbiters together. If the spaces for queer people in the genre before were holes in the wall, the walls are now being knocked down. 

From Transsexual-Transylvania to Whileaway, queer universes find solace in the genre of science fiction. While these stories allow us to see some hidden truth about our reality on Earth, they whisk us into new realities that return our own power to us, reminding us of the life within our grasp. Embracing the queerverse of science fiction is like taking the red pill (but not in the weird incel way) and accepting that there’s more to know than what we know to be true now—and it doesn’t have to remain fiction. Little did I know as a kid at summer camp, a haven I thought I would live in forever and eventually work at as a counsellor, that a global pandemic would come and throw a wrench on those plans. The overnight camp closed down, and though it still exists as a day camp in the city, the magic of that bubble has fizzled. I realize now that that’s the beauty of the experience; these worlds in which we immerse ourselves so deeply are fantastically ephemeral. They only allow us a glimpse of what could be possible and leave us to decide what we do with that possibility. Science fiction makes us recognize that the abolishment of colonial, patriarchal rules can be brought into our own worlds if we’re brave enough to defy the norms. We can create alternative family structures and yearn over 1930s scream queens while swimming in full drag. The spaces in between will always be home to the queers, but they don’t have to be all that we have. When we get together and recognize our collective power, we can make our own vibrant worlds in dining halls, condo cinemas, and university classrooms. To be queer is to face the vast expanse of the unknown and not only accept it, but see yourself, and all your kin, in it with you.