Interview with Hal Duncan

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Q: Previous depictions of homosexual characters in fantasy/scifi books have always been somewhat clumsy and didn't ring true. And yet, instead of trying to get readers to "accept" it, you just went ahead and put Jack and Puck's relationship as a central storyline throughout both volumes. Was that intentional from the beginning? INK contains graphic sex scenes between the two, and I was wondering what sort of responses those sequences generated among readers and critics?

One of my pet hates is the fetishisation you get in certain types of fantasy, particularly vampire fiction, I have to say, where gay equals frilly shirts, sensitive pouts and lingering looks with doe-eyes. Man, at least slash is subversive in applying that aesthetic to straight characters, and at least slash has the guts to get down and dirty. That stuff is just softcore boy-on-boy goth porn. Even when it's not so deeply fetishised, there still seems to be a tendency to stereotype gays as refined rather than rough, fey rather than fiery, cats rather than dogs.

The second problem with gay characters in genre fiction is that they're generally marginalised as subsidiary characters, which smacks of PC tokenism. Yeah, so your heroine has a Gay Best Friend; big deal. So your team of heroes has a tagalong queer; I'm not impressed.

The last problem is that even when you get a fully-fledged protagonist they're generally just not genre enough. By which I mean, the writer feels the need to show that it's "normal" to be gay, so the characters are rendered in a Realist mode rather than as Romantic heroes. They're intelligent, sensitive portraits of gays as "just like everyone else". Bollocks to that. The fetishised gays are annoying. The marginalised gays are frustrating. But the normalised gays are just plain dull. I want a gay character who blows shit up. I want a gay James Bond, a gay Jerry Cornelius, a gay Superman, a gay Indiana Jones, a gay Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare. Achilles wasn't normal. He was an uberfag, dragging Hector's body ten times round the gates of Troy for killing his boyfriend. Now that's what I call a hissy fit!

So Jack sort of blasted his way into existence as a result of my desire to see a genuine, bona fide, gun-toting, ball-busting genre hero, one who'd kick ass, stand up to the Man, bring down the system, do everything you'd expect a hero to, except he'd get the guy instead of the girl. Puck started off as little more than that love interest in the Jack Flash sequences, but as I started using them in other scenarios the relationship developed and, in the faery story retelling of the murder of Mathew Shepard, became a way of talking about sexuality on a far more serious level. There was never any thought of pussy-footing about the subject, never any worry about whether people would "accept" it or not. Writing Jack Flash is sort of like accessing your inner terrorist, while writing Puck is like accessing your inner faery; neither of those have much respect for conventionality.

As for reaction, I've had good reviews in the gay press, which is cool. In the SFF world, there's been a little criticism, from some of the high-brow reviewers actually, about the eroticisation of Puck -- but that seems more to have been a concern about him losing roundedness as a character and becoming too emblematic. I sort of see that as missing the point in a story so deeply invested in pulp tropes and archetypes, and besides, the whole rejection of eroticisation seems like cultural neurosis to me -- the old spirit versus flesh, mind versus body thing. Sensuality is good. But, hey ho.

Anyway, other than that, the reaction on the whole has been extremely positive, with no one I can think of actually expressing offence or distaste in a reactionary way. I think a lot of SFF readers are behind the underdogs and outsiders. And those conventional and conservative enough to be thrown by a bit of gay sex aren't likely to make it past the first 100 pages anyway, I reckon.