Review - The Lavender Menace : Tales of Queer Villainy ed. by Tom Cardamone
I’m going to split this review in half and look at two different parts - one part I liked and the other I loathed.
Anthologies are consistently inconsistent I tend to judge an anthology favorably when it has more stories I really liked than more stories that were meh. As the editor explains in the introduction, this is an anthology ONLY about gay men but overall most of the stories in this collection were really well done. In this case, the weaker stories were in the front of the book but there were several in the middle that were real standouts.
You can tell most of the authors know superhero mythology and tropes extremely well. As a person who worked in a comic book store for years and currently reads a lot of mainstream superhero titles, I found most of it to be a light and fun read that twisted tropes on their heads.
I want to give particular mention to ‘The Knights Nefarious’ by Rod M. Santos which stars a motley crew of some of the cheesiest villains you’ll ever see. I would gladly read a whole book or comic about the fascinating relationship between Muse (a villain who inspires others) and El Fantasma de Sangra (“The Ghost Who Bleeds”). All the characters in this book were cis and most were white — El Fantasma was the only POC. But all the characters in this story were fantastic, up to and including Chocolate Bunny Boy, a hilarious villain who can create exploding chocolate rabbits.
Now on to the bad. I had a BIG problem with the title:
Let’s start with the phrase ‘Lavender Menace’. Historically this was a term used by Betty Friedan in the late 60’s to refer to the lesbian feminists that were accused of ‘threatening’ the women’s movement. Later a radical lesbian feminist group of the same name emerged to challenge the exclusion of lesbian issues from the women’s movement.
So to slap the title ‘Lavender Menace’ on the front of a book without A SINGLE story about queer women is somewhere between baffling and offensive. There are no women main characters and even the female secondary characters are mostly there for cheap laughs. For example, one of the briefly mentioned female characters in a story is actually named Lard Ass, the gag being that she is so fat she takes up three chairs *eyeroll*.
Likewise I’m irritated by the use of the word queer in the subtitle. This book isn’t really queer in the umbrella sense of the word. It’s just gay. Why not subtitle it “Tales of Gay Villainy”? It makes no sense to me to advertise queer content when that isn’t what is being offered here.
Even more bizarre, it was given away as a prize for supporting Anything That Loves on kickstarter. I assumed from the title that I would be getting a book that was somewhat similar in character to Anything That Loves - you know, containing a diverse look at different letters in the LGBTQQA soup, maybe even a bisexual character. Nope.
The end result of the book isn’t bad by any means, but is mis-labeled and mis-marketed. I think fans of mainstream comic book superheros will enjoy some of the creative twists and turns between these pages because some of the stories are truly enjoyable. But make no mistake, this book is Gay Only.
