something something the deeply ingrained instinct to respond when someone offers you a handshake fundamental need for humans to connect and the extension of hands as a peace gesture something something in this essay
…So once again it’s the time of year when I return to this piece of digital art in its most recent version, tweak it a little in the attempt to get closer to what I see in my head, and repost it for Pride. (ETA, 1 June 2026: this year's version of the image is rerendered with warmer interior colors and some other minor tweaks. In other news, I'm now convinced that I will continue tweaking this art once a year for the rest of my natural life, because I will not fucking rest until it's perfect, and that day... is not today.) 😅
...Meanwhile:
At the moment I’m looking yet again at These Two Idiots (because honestly, in some ways they are...) and considering, once again with the usual bemusement, how long I’ve been working with them. Of all the characters I’ve worked with in print, the only ones I’ve known longer would be the crew of NCC-1701—and (as of a couple of years back in 2024) for the first time in paid writing, a couple of gentlemen named Holmes and Watson.
I first “met” the two characters above in late 1970 in the form of two fellow college students on whom they’d be loosely based: a couple of gents—not gay, as it happens—who were friends to me when I badly needed some. They were a tall dark-haired guy and a short blond one with a mustache that came and went… so that, not even knowing the word “trope” at the time, I'd fallen sideways into at least one.
(Adding a break here, because (shrug) whatever. More story below. CAUTION: contains Star Trek, Tolkien, character backstory, tradpub book history, bedtime stories that were finally forced to become better than the originals, first-book trauma [it got better...], and yet another year of refusing to allow this early(-ish) version of queer representation in fantasy to be erased.)
...So. Less than a year after I met those guys, I changed schools and educational tracks, and we all drifted apart. But something about those two stuck with me. The nature and depth of their friendship was unusual. So was one way it manifested itself: in ruthless snark that had no meanness or cruelty about it whatsoever—just (sometimes slightly rueful and eye-rolling) affection.
In the late sixties I’d pivoted from the Star Trek fanfic I'd been writing practially since the series premiered, to start in on writing some very derivative epic-fantasy fic strongly influenced by Tolkien. Rather to my surprise, though, as I started nursing school in 1971, the nature of that fiction started to change, and began rearranging itself around two characters who had a friendship like that of my college friends. With them at its core, a rather different and subversive kind of medieval-flavored fantasy world started knitting itself together from various scraps of themes and imagery lying around in the back of my brain.
Even so early in the construction phases of this world, something the characters quickly made plain to me in the writing was that their relationships with one another were not what mainstream 1970s culture would consider conventional. They were unquestionably what we'd now think of as queer… but that was a background issue,* and not at all the most important thing in their lives. They had far more important business to deal with—as became clear as their personalities and priorities started filling themselves out in the foreground.
One of them turned out to be the deliberate, analytical, methodical son of a provincial nobleman, all too aware of the expectations of those around him: that he was eventually likely to wind up running that province himself. Yet at the same time he also became aware that he had other more serious problems—chief among them the discovery that he possessed a nascent power that would kill him young if he failed to master it. And in the last thousand years, no one of his gender ever had.
The other presented himself more and more clearly as a difficult case: someone who wanted very much to be good at the family business, but wasn’t… and knew it. Kind of a screw-up, full of romanticized and unrealistic takes on the world and his relationship with it: repeatedly doing the wrong things for what he was sure were the right reasons. Yet no matter how often he screwed up, he was also the kind of person who keeps picking himself up and trying again, because he’s been told over and over that that’s what people like him have to do: otherwise they’re no use to anybody.
Imagine my shock when I realized that these two men—initially canonically enemies in their adolescence, then best friends as they grew, and eventually much more—were the (incomplete) answer to the question I’d once asked my Mom at the end of the bedtime reading of some fairy tale or other: “Why can’t a prince rescue another prince?”§ Because one of them got himself more than once into situations where he really needed one kind or another of rescuing. The other one obliged him, while once or twice getting rescued (in different modes) himself. Those interlocking patterns started to solidify out of concept and into character detail and plot, while their world grew and proliferated into its own detail around them.
Then, without warning, in 1978 both world and characters decided they were ready to get real. I was abruptly dragged gasping and flailing under the surface of a novel that would begin the tale of what those two characters had yet to become. The period it took to produce that first draft was possibly the most interesting six weeks of my life… and that includes the six weeks during which I first scrubbed in on brain surgery. Day and night, for days at a time, I barely even existed except as something for a novel to come out of. When it was done with me, it just as abruptly dumped me back into my life and wandered away, leaving me staring around, blinking and wondering if anybody’d got the number of that truck. Nothing like it has ever happened to me since, which may be just as well. I’m none too sure that these days I could handle the strain.
The book—which sold within a couple of weeks of its manuscript landing on its first publisher’s desk—kicked off my career as novelist and screenwriter, and in its way proved that the world was at least slightly ready for epic fantasy in which the basic culture was pansexual, polyamorous, and inclusive in ways that hadn’t been attempted before.
So I owe them a debt, those two gentlemen up there: the tall dark curly-haired guy with the amateur strategist’s mind, the blacksmith’s shoulders, and the peculiar sword, his background thought always nibbling away at the question of how to heal the world’s wounds: and the short fair gent who if he could would stay at home, live quietly in town, and work in the local library… except for when saving the world (or his found family) requires him to subsume his work-in-progress kingship and his being into that of his ancestral demigod. Due to the success of the book in which they made their debut, these two became, in their way, the fairy† godfathers of the Young Wizards—and additionally enabled all that Star Trek fanfic I’d started writing a decade before to proceed to its logical conclusion.
More to the point, though, a lot of people in the 1980s and ‘90s who’d never seen queer representation in a fantasy novel, found it first (or at last) while following Herewiss and Freelorn down their shared road. It’s been my pleasure to hold that space for new readers, and to keep adding to it… because—if you ask me—it’s needed more now than ever.
So, to the readership of the Middle Kingdoms works (now pushing half a century old) and everybody else who (with me and Dusty and Lorn and [in other universes, Tom and Carl and the rest]) are celebrating the season: happy Pride!
ETA: Just noting here for those who might be interested that, as usual, the LGBTQ Pride Bundle at Ebooks Direct is discounted more deeply than usual for Pride Month. With the usual warning to UK readers: friends, our apologies, but due to Brexit we can no longer sell ebooks to you directly. However, most of these works are currently available to UK readers through Amazon.com.
*Not least because everybody else in their world is (at least potentially) some shade of queer, including God.
§ For certain values of "prince". See here for more detail.
[image 1: a tweet by KatysCartoons, whose profile picture is a stick figure whose head is colored in with the trans pride flag. the tweet reads, "Atoms are binary. They are either intended to be hydrogen or helium. We can't just scrap this worldview just because of a handful of exceptions". embedded in the tweet is a pie chart entitled "Types of atom in the universe": seventy-four percent hydrogen, twenty-five percent helium, and, in tiny font, one percent other.]
[image 2: the periodic table of the elements, except that hydrogen and helium are in their own box labeled "Real elements", and elements 3 (lithium) through 118 (oganesson) are labeled "Mental illness".]
.
incidentally this periodic table must've been drawn in the past nine years, since it doesn't deadname oganesson
By the way, when I say "Mephisto being gay for the angels of the Lord," it makes it sound like I'm using standard tumblr hyperbole to describe a scene that is only potentially homoerotic. I am not. Snippet of Mephistopheles's speech from the last scene of Faust Part 2, translated by Walter Kaufmann:
"...Is this indeed love's element?
The entire body is aflame,
I scarcely feel how my poor neck is rent.—
You hover there, come down: I feel a passion;
Please move your lovely limbs in a more worldly fashion!
There's merit in your serious style;
But just for once I'd like to see you smile!
That would put me in an eternal trance.
I mean the way that human lovers glance;
Just move your lips, that's all—not in disgust!
You, tall one, are the fairest boy I've ever seen;
But what is unbecoming is your popish mean:
Do look at me with just a little lust!
You might be nude and still of decent mind,
The flowing shroud is much too moralizing;
They turn around—I see them from behind!
The little rogues are all-too-appetizing!"
I think you will find that with their inherent understanding of three dimensional space from living in a truly three dimensional environment mermaids make the best astronomers.
...Have to snicker a little when, in order to fit the fifth member of the core marriage into the shot, I have to stick him half a mile away...
Anyway. This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.
...From the product page:
This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms material—some of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universe—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple.
The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady. The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms novelette Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.
All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt. So please go validate my mental state and go buy the package. ...And happy Pride!
(Meanwhile, a project for the course of the month is to put all the queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. That bridge should be a little more crowded by the time I'm done...) 😏
(And the usual sorrowful reminder: With regret, we must remind any UK viewers of this product that, due to Brexit, we can no longer sell ebooks directly into the UK. Our apologies.)
today in "making up ways to help kids decompress on the fly": i had kids cup their hands in front of them and for 1 silent minute, picture a small mouse in their hand. afterwards they got to tell me, one at a time, what their mice did
after seeing that poll about whether usamericans will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of their country, I have to ask: are they aware they are hosting the football world cup this summer
blakekathryn
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