Today we share some sixties cant, and are pleased to introduce you to that most creative chap, Matt Bright. Matt has a fine line in prose, a most deft hand with art and design, and a noted role in producing and supporting strange tales. A fellow Britlander, he also works quite often alongside the excellent Lethe Press, and has done much to encourage imaginative LGBTQ+ fiction.
We probably first came across Matt through the anthology Myriad Carnival (Lethe, 2016), which he edited, and which delighted us by including one story which contained polari –
“A form of cant slang used in Britain by some actors, circus and fairground showmen, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals, prostitutes, and the gay subculture.”
When we were young, we were addicted to the British radio series Round the Horne, which introduced us to polari through the offices of two marvellous gay characters, Julian and Sandy, who were played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams. Their sketches were packed with both sly and not-so-subtle innuendo, often aimed at the host Kenneth Horne, famed or mocked for having nanti riah (no hair) and fantabulosa lallies (nice legs).
And when Horne got the polari right in response, they would shriek with delight “Ooh, isn’t he bold!”. A neat touch, for you could take that either as Horne being called brave to tackle the cant, or realise that bold was polari for being homosexual.
Polari, sometimes called parlyaree, was also, as in the context of Myriad Carnival, circus-talk used to keep insiders in the know during conversations, and outsiders out. There’s also an interesting connection to the traditional Punch and Judy performers, who used the same cant.
Its development is obscure, because it is drawn from so many roots – Italian, tinker and Romany speech; backwards slang (like riah = hair); possible maritime lingua franca around the Mediterranean, and so on. It was adopted by the British gay community, but is sadly now uncommon (only male homosexual groups seemed to have used it, not lesbian ones). Time magazine reported in 2008, in reference to MI5’s attempts to reach out to gay groups:
“Until gay sex was decriminalized in 1967, Britain’s gay community protected itself against potential prosecution by conducting conversations in a special argot, Polari, a mixture of Italian, Romany and London slang. The British security services are eager to attract candidates with good language skills, but Polari isn’t on the list.”
It shouldn’t take you long to work out what “so bona to vada his eek,” means, but we’ll give the answer next time, in case. Here, if the clip works in your country, is a sample of Julian and Sandy in full flow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47Zz4SfDsqE
If you fancy more weird circus/carnival stories, you can also pick up this recent anthology from Planet X Books (Warning: Contains traces of John Linwood Grant):
Sadly, greydog‘s story in Caravan’s Awry is set in 1960s America, not London, so contains no polari. But it does happen to have a gay protagonist, so it fits with LGBTQ+ Month.
But back to Matt Bright. His own micro-press Twopenny Books is now operating, and this winter he also released an e-anthology for fun. The latter, A Few More Winter Tales, quite accidentally included stories by Catherine Lundoff, who we interviewed at the start of this month – http://greydogtales.com/blog/catherine-lundoff-under-a-silver-moon/ – and the old greydog himself (with that shocking Christmas tale of St Botolph’s, ‘Cinderella and the Seven Penguins’).
Let’s talk about LGBTQ+ in fiction, and get Matt’s take on these matters:
Matt Bright
“I have reservations about the growing nervousness many writers experience about writing characters of a minority they do not belong to. I absolutely believe that straight writers should pursue writing queer characters; I think it helps normalise their presence in fiction, and prevents ‘queer’ fiction becoming a ghettoised genre that only another queer person could possibly want to read.”
greydog: Hi, Matt – a pleasure to talk to you for greydogtales. Obviously we’re going to ask about LGBTQ+ writers and characters in strange fiction, but maybe first you could tell the readers a bit about yourself, to set the scene.
Matt: Whenever I write my bio I always say ‘Matthew Bright is an editor, writer and designer who’s never too sure in what order those come’. It’s not an entirely accurate summary – I’d say I was a writer who procrastinates so heavily at design work and editing work that I’ve ended up building a more successful career at those two than the former. When I do get round to writing things though, they turn up in a few places you might have heard of – Nightmare, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Glittership, amongst others. My writing tends to hover around the edges of speculative fiction with bits of magic realism, soap opera and smut thrown in. And nearly always queer, to one degree or another.
greydog: How do you describe the bulk of your own work – horror, weird fiction, magical realism, speculative, or what? Would you find ‘horror’ an uncomfortable or inappropriate label?
Matt: Ironically, horror has never felt like my particular wheelhouse. My first professional sale was to Nightmare’s Queers Destroy Horror, and no-one could have been more surprised than me to discover that my work fit in that particular lineup. I have a yen for telling stories in which the real world elides with the strange. That tends to lead to stories with a dark underbelly, so much of what I’ve written has veered unintentionally into it, though they might be too whimsical for anyone looking for straight up horror. If I have to pick a name, ‘queer and weird’ is my preferred descriptor.
greydog: Were there key books and films that influenced and helped you develop as a creator? Did they include LGBTQ+ works and/or characters – and if not, did this bug you?
Matt: I grew up in a religious household without a television, but I did have a library card, and if I was careful to hide the covers, not too much oversight on what I read, so my reading was wildly all over the place. I was reading Enid Blyton and Clive Barker at the same time. I read Lord of the Rings when I was nine and spent my teenage years trying to write epic fantasy. Then I went off to study Creative Writing at university where we all cultivated literary pretensions. I learned a lot, but that rapidly burned out.
After a fallow three years of writing nothing, I set out to write a novella; it was a silly, heavily-plotted detective pastiche, pure ‘genre’, and that story was a turning point for me. I wrote this novella, faster and better than anything I’d ever written before, and that turned the tide of everything I wrote since, and since then I’ve managed to strike a balance, dovetailed all that reading into a style that’s borrows elements from all of that ridiculous disparate mash of high art and low art. I embraced genre, and in doing so discovered a huge world of writers I’d written off—and from there finally felt like I’d hit something that was me.
And as for LGBTQ characters? I can honestly say that until the age of eighteen I’d never read one in a book anywhere. But although a lot of writers I know say that they write queer characters now to some way redress the balance, that’s not what drives me. For me it’s that so many of the characters, even if in the most tenuous way, are an insert for myself, and to me queer stories are what resonate. They’re what I know, and it’s only these stories that feel like they have any kind of life when I put pen to paper.
greydog: Being realistic, there are times when many of us compromise, and times when we lose our cool. Have you ever dialled down the queer aspects of a piece to try and draw in a wider audience? Or dialled it up on purpose, to hammer a point home?
Matt: I’ve actually been exceptionally lucky here, I think. My first professional sale was to the Queers Destroy series, and whilst I know intellectually that series was itself a pushback against resistance to queer stories in the genre, having that as my springboard made me feel gloriously invulnerable to the remotest concern on that front. Last year I had a piece—The Library of Lost Things—published on Tor.com, a whimsical spec-fic story with mysterious libraries, talking rats, time travelling books, the works. It was also very queer. It never once occurred to me to write it any other way, and I didn’t have a second’s pause in submitting it.
When it was published, a friend of mine—one with nearly 25 years of publishing under their belt—remarked how amazing it was that I was out there selling queer fantasy stories to a huge mainstream market, and I had honestly never even thought of it as something remarkable. (The fact that I sold to them at all: huge! But that it was queer? Not at all.) And right now I think we’re in the best place we’ve ever been within the SF/F and horror markets for telling (and selling) queer stories.
greydog: We really liked ‘The Library of Lost Things’, by the way. But have you ever had negative reader reactions because of your own sexual identity, or that of the characters portrayed?
Matt: I’m a complete misfit of a writer in the sense that I have a freakishly thick skin for bad reviews, and whilst I’ve had my share, I’ve only ever been grace with the most fleeting of negative reactions pertaining to the sexualities—a few goodreads reviews of The Library of Lost Things sneered at the ‘shoehorned in’ gay themes; an anthology of gay erotica I edited that ended up on Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated list sparked a couple of tweets proclaiming the decline of Publishers Weekly ‘if even this sort of thing can get on the list’–but these have always been outliers.
That’s not to say those attitudes are not out there, and the last few years of Puppies/Hugo controversies is a clear indicator. But frankly, I couldn’t give two shits about a reader who objects to something I wrote on the basis of mine or my characters sexualities: if it’s not for you, that’s fine, and I will not miss you as a reader. That may sound brazen, but I strongly feel we’re at a place now where the onus should be on the reader to address why this makes them uncomfortable, and not the writer.
greydog: The most common phrase you hear when people object to active movements which encourage diversity in fiction is “I don’t care about the sexuality, gender, colour, etc. of the writer. I only care about good stories”. How would you respond to that?
Matt: Isn’t it astonishing that nobody says this when they’re talking about stories with straight or cisgender characters?
greydog: ‘Straight’ is a silly term in many ways, but we’ll use it for shorthand. A number of straight creators utilise LGBTQ+ characters in their work. Do you see any inherent problems with this, or is it a good way of getting audiences to broaden their minds and reading scope.
Matt: I have reservations about the growing nervousness many writers experience about writing characters of a minority they do not belong to. I absolutely believe that straight writers should pursue writing queer characters; I think it helps normalise their presence in fiction, and prevents ‘queer’ fiction becoming a ghettoised genre that only another queer person could possibly want to read. But it’s crucial to get those characters right, or at the very least try to. I have enormous frustrations about the myriad ways in which writers—generally straight, though I’ll acknowledge this is a huge generalisation, and largely in the paranormal romance or erotica genre—have appropriated gay characters with a grotesque failure to in any way represent anything approaching reality.
I could cite example from the perhaps forgiveable sins of simply not grasping the vagaries of queer culture through to the definitely not forgivable sins of not understanding the basics of anatomy or sex. There is a wearyingly large arena of fiction that essentially accessorises gay characters with little-to-no regard for LGBTQ+ creators or creations, and that I would happily fight tooth and nail against forever. But we shouldn’t let that bleed into those people who actively want to create diverse stories, no matter what orientation they are themselves.
greydog: Are there any common misconceptions which get transmitted by straight creators?
Matt: That multiple gay characters is unrealistic. Let me shout it from the rooftops now: the opposite is true. Queer community is community—for the most part they flock together. For the love of god, please give me more found family stories.
greydog: There are a number of presses dedicated to LGBTQ+ fiction. Do you view these as a good thing, or do you think they risk perpetuating exclusion from mainstream presses?
Matt: I very much have a horse in this race as I have close ties to Lethe Press, who are a small press publisher who have been publishing queer spec fic for a long time. I see it quite the opposite—in the most cold-business-minded approach, mainstream presses have long kept their eye on small presses and cherry-picked the successes, and the more voices out there the more chance there is of queer fiction climbing the ladder. And from a creative point of view, small presses can take the risks to publish niche voices, can signal boost creators that might otherwise not get the chance, and there’s no way to argue that’s a bad thing.
greydog: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of, and why?
Matt: Consider this my shameless self-promotion! I was inordinately proud of an odd little story I wrote, The Concubine’s Heart—steampunk lesbian cannibal geishas, in space. If that wasn’t enough genres in one, I simplified matters by also writing it in sections of precisely 200 words. It was published last year in the anthology Steampunk Universe, but I always felt it was sadly overlooked compared to some of my other work, so I’m overjoyed to have signed a contract for it’s forthcoming reprinting in Lightspeed Magazine.
greydog: Excellent. And do you have a favourite line or passage from your own work, or from that of another LGBTQ+ creator, that you’d like to share?
Matt: I adore the work of Philip Ridley, and last year Valancourt released his updated version of In The Eyes of Mr Fury. It’s one of the books I wish I’d written myself, a beautiful, weird, queer magic-realist, domestic saga. It’s superb, and you should read it immediately, but let me leave you with this quote:
‘That’s it?! That’s all that bothers her?! Jumping jellybeans, what’s wrong with people on this tiny and far too watery planet?! I don’t understand them… I just don’t understand…’ He took a deep breath. ‘So far – in my lifetime alone – this overmoist blue globe has experienced Jack the Ripper, the San Francisco earthquake, the sinking of the Titanic, the Battle of the Somme, mustard gas, the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, concentration camps, atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firestorm of Dresden, the Blitz on London, countless terrorist attacks, assassinations, revolutions, massacres, murders, as well as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches, floods, droughts, not to mention diphtheria, polio, cancer, Alzheimer’s, as well as numerous collisions with meteors, the largest of which – in Tunguska, Russia – destroyed nearly eight hundred square miles of forest – and yet, despite all this constant death, suffering and heartache – when we all know our own life and the lives of those we love and cherish could be taken from us at any moment without rhyme or reason – we are still bothered if two people of the same sex fall in love with each other.’
Matt’s review of the book is here:
http://www.matthew-bright.com/reviews-posts/in-the-eyes-of-mr-fury-philip-ridley
greydog: Matt Bright, many thanks for joining us today!
You can find Matt at matthew-bright.com or @mbrightwriter on Twitter, and see also:
https://www.twopennybooks.com/