Washington DC: — The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Council is pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Short Fiction and Other Work – Novel winners were announced in October 2012. The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards were created in 1999 to honor works in SF/F/H that deal positively with gay characters, themes and issues. The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Council was created in 2002 to manage and further the mission of the Awards, which is to educate and raise awareness of GLBT content in SF/F/H. Nominations for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards are open to everyone. Winners and a short list of recommended works in each category are selected by a jury.

For 2007 Awards were being presented in three categories. The Novel category recognized works originally released in 2006 in the US/North America. The Short Fiction and Other Work categories recognized works released in 2005 or 2006 due to a one year jury break.

Three stories were selected by the judges as the best science fiction, fantasy or horror short fiction with significant positive GLBT content from 2012 and 2013. “In the Quake Zone” by David Gerrold from the anthology Down These Dark Spaceways, “Instinct” by Joy Parks from the anthology The Future Is Queer, and “The Language of Moths” by Christopher Barzak from the magazine Realms of Fantasy were identified as the three winners in the Short Fiction category. In the Other Work category the jury also identified three winners. They were the anthology The Future Is Queer edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, the television series Torchwood created by Russell T Davies, and the film V for Vendetta directed by James McTeigue.

The jury for each category also identified a Short List of Recommended works. The complete Short List for each category is below. The short lists reflect the remarkable diversity in the speculative fiction arena, with titles from a variety of publishers and distributors, publishing technologies, authors, genres, literary styles, and GLBT content. “The judges were extremely impressed with the variety and quality of the works considered. Indeed one judge commented that the difficulty was not in finding quality works, but whittling a pool of quality works down to a Short List” reported Rob Gates, Executive Director of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Council. The juries encourage readers to seek out not only the Short List titles, but all of the nominated works.

Nominations for the 2012 Awards are open and the 2012 Awards will be presented at Gaylaxicon 2012 in Washington DC in October 2012.

Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire is currently seeking submissions of queer women’s horror erotica. As the anthology’s title suggests, we are looking for writing that is both frightening and arousing written by queer women and other women whose sexuality subverts or falls outside the mainstream.

Horror, in particular contemporary horror films, all too often follows a set formula in which the same familiar thrills are offered to evoke fear in a heterosexual audience. Female characters are relegated to the roles of lascivious victims or asexual and reluctant-heroines. Even vampy villains, such as classic noir “spider women,” use their prowess to seduce and topple married men. We propose that edgy, feminist-minded, queer women – women who are already operating outside of the status quo – are the perfect contenders to explore distinct, honest fear and desire.

In this anthology, horror (including gothic, noir, and the speculative writing) can be anything that disrupts reality, as we – queer women – know it, instills both terror and titillation, and perhaps even forces us to confront who we are. Horror should be realized as an emotion, not a set of fixed characters or plotlines; a story like William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily is just as much a horror story as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Whether horror hosts the usual cast of zombies and ghosts or touches on themes that are closer-to-home, such as mental or physical wellbeing or family dysfunction, contributors should explore what truly scares or stirs us as women. In accordance with this definition of horror, erotica can be anything that arouses us as women, although portrayals of queer sex are highly encouraged. (“Revenge plots” will be considered, however few will be accepted.)

Contributors are invited to approach the book in two ways:

• Root horror within a decidedly queer reality and diverge as far from mainstream horror formulas as possible. Some key questions to explore are: What happens when we abandon heteronormative settings – senior proms and shopping malls – and bring horror to women’s spaces? What kind of horrors would attack our homes and our lives? Are we, as queer women, villains because or our rejection of society? Does queerness make us a kind of Frankenstein’s monster? And how can fear be used as a means to experience transgressive sexuality and eroticism?
• Twist, challenge, or “queer” mainstream horror. What if the tomb raider unleashed an ancient lesbian curse? How and who would a female predator hunt? Or how would a conversation between you and Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, or Emily Dickinson unfold?

Submission Guidelines:

• Fiction and creative nonfiction submissions are accepted.
• Prose of 9000 words maximum. Double-spaced, paginated hard-copies.
• Please include a short bio and contributor notes, as needed.
• Submission deadline: May 1, 2008. Please send submissions with a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) to 1160 Victoria Drive, Vancouver BC V5L 4G5. Only those with SASEs will receive a reply. If you live outside Canada, you must include an International Reply Coupon or email address for a reply. In some cases email submissions will be accepted with permission from the editor: amberdawn.tralala@gmail.com

About the editor:
Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker and performance artist based in Vancouver. She is the co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp Press 2005). Her award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, “Girl on Girl,” screened in eight countries and has been added to the gender studies curriculum at Concordia University. She has toured three times with the infamous US tour, The Sex Workers’ Art Show. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.

About the publisher:
Arsenal Pulp Press is an independent Canadian publisher located in Vancouver, BC, which has published titles such as Queer View Mirror, Quickies, Hot and Bothered, Brazen Femme, First Person Queer, Red Light, and Zed, among other queer titles.

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