While it's still Pride month...
There are still 5 days of June left! I haven't missed it!
I realize that isn't some kind of revelation-- I'm incredibly open about my gender and sexuality online-- but it's also something I don't say outright, in those words, very often. But those labels, and that identity, are one of the foundational elements in both what I make, and how I approach making things, if in a kind of weird way.
I started figuring this stuff out pretty late. I started transitioning at 38. I'd always been sort of jealous of trans people. They knew who they were, and what they wanted, and what they didn't so clearly that they were able to start making changes to get closer to that self-image. It just... never occurred to me... that jealousy might be something I should look at a little more closely.
I very much never felt the "born in the wrong body" thing, and that was the only way I ever saw transgender people presented, so obviously I couldn't be one. After all, I didn't hate being a woman. I didn't particularly like it, and there were a lot of things about my body I felt aggressively awful about. But all women hate their bodies, right? And basically everyone is making the best of what they've got, gender-wise, aren't they? Except for people who knew for sure they weren't whatever they'd been assigned at birth, who were lucky because they were allowed to do something about it.
Turns out, uh, that is not actually how cis people think about their gender. (Nor how heterosexual people feel about their sexuality, but that's a whole other thing.)
This is a round-about way to get there, but the point is this--
I want to make media that allows people to realize that oh, yeah, this can apply to them. That maybe they haven't seen themselves in more traditional narratives, but they can in this.
I want to give people a reason to consider. To think maybe...
I want to tell stories that explore the messy, complicated ways people interact with each other, and with themselves. To use the safety I have as a white, consistently-passing man to make those stories visible.
I want to include as wide a range of human voices as I can, as a matter of course, in narratives written by as wide a range of humans as I'm able.
Which, more or less, is what Law of Names Media is for.
And, I hope, what we're doing.
(And, yeah, ok, maybe I also want to tell stories about fairies, and spacemen, and houses that want to eat you. But you know, in a lot of ways, that's just set dressing.)
