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“I don’t want to be pigeonholed as ‘an X writer’, I just want to write good stories.”
“I’ve never been comfortable with labels. Why should I label my work?”
“I don’t write about [category], I write about people.”
“If I label my books as [category], there are lots of readers who would never pick them up in the first place.”
“If bookstores put my book on the [category] shelf, no one will ever find it there in the back of the bookstore.”

These are all quite valid points. I’ve had several of them myself. In the (rare) case that you ran across Daughter of Mystery in a general bookstore, it would most likely be on that single shelf tucked away in a back corner labeled “LGBTQ Fiction”, right under the shelves on Sexuality and LGBTQ Celebrity Biography. Because of its marketing category, you aren’t going to find it in the general romance section and you aren’t going to find it in the general SFF section, which means that my chance of picking up casual new readers from bookstore browsing is essentially nil. For that matter, my chance of picking up casual new LGBTQ readers in a general bookstore is also essentially nil because who goes looking for new books in your favorite category in a store that only devotes a fraction of a single shelf to the entire category: classic, backlist, and new releases combined?

But I’m going to argue for the usefulness of narrow marketing categories even so.

Back in the ‘90s when I was in grad school and involved in the greater Celtic Studies community in California, I heard a conference paper on the function and development of categories and bin-labels in music stores with respect to “Celtic Music” and how that affected the availability and popularity of particular bands and genres. (And I apologize for not being able to retrieve the name of the scholar in question from memory, nor being able to track down a clue online.) To grossly over-summarize the conclusions: when you have a marketing category, you increase the market for things falling in that category. You increase both visibility and fan-identification for the category and its members. But simultaneously, you create the illusion of inclusivity within the category while erasing the existence of non-default members. And you also create a tendency for default members to drive re-labeling of the category. So, for example, you create a music store bin labeled “Celtic Music” and move into it all albums created by bands and musicians with some connection to the various Celtic-speaking cultures. Albums that might previously have ben scattered across “World Music”, “Folk Music”, and so forth. Now people who are familiar with one member of the category will automatically be exposed to other similar material that they might not otherwise encounter. And very likely they'll buy more albums in that general cateogory than they would have otherwise. And now when the store orders new albums that they perceive to be similar to the category, they have an automatic place to put them. (All of this is going to sound like ancient history in this day of iTunes and online shopping, but bear with me because it’s still relevant.)

But (and I hear some of my readers frothing at the mouth on this topic already) “Celtic Music” isn’t really a natural category or event an internally consistent one. It’s a marketing device. And in US music stores, “Celtic” has always defaulted strongly to “Irish” with a very minor admixture of “Scottish”. So if you were looking, say, for a particular Welsh band, your chances of finding their albums in the Celtic bin were small, and if you were browsing for “more like this band I like” you wouldn’t be offered very many (if any) Welsh artists. But, on the other hand, the existence of a “Celtic Music” bin still increased your chances of finding anything Welsh far above what they’d be if that bin didn’t exist. But then some music story employee notices that 99% of the “Celtic Music” bin is Irish and decides it makes more sense to relabel the bin “Irish Music”. There will be very minor changes, perhaps, to the contents – except for the consumer who was specifically looking for non-default members of the previous category. Or perhaps, they won't bother to re-label the bin, but having noticed that 99% of what they sell is Irish (because ... duh! ... that's 99% of what they stock), they quietly stop ordering anything but Irish artists. And you keep going back to that bin and thumbing through the albums hoping for "more of the stuff I like" and it's never there and you're not quite sure why.

But, you say, with on-line shopping, we don’t have to worry about stocking preferences of stores with limited bin space. And you can search on any specific category you want! So let’s switch back to the topic of LGBTQ fiction and consider this question.

If I go to a romance book review site looking for recommendations for new lesbian romances that hit all my sweet spots, what are my chances? First, I have to determine whether the review site even includes LGBTQ romance at all. Chances are, if they don’t say anything – if they don’t explicitly advertise “here is a special-interest category that we include” – then they don’t. They won’t feel a need to advertise that lack. Just like that music store didn't feel the need to label the bin "Celtic Music but we really mean only Irish music." So if you’re a romance book review site and your approach is “we don’t like pigeonholing books; you should evaluate each book on its own merits” then I’m not going to waste my time using your site to find new reads. Because my time is too precious to wade through 99 straight romances for every single book that meets even my first minimal criterion. Give me a label, a pigeonhole, a filter criterion so I can skip that first step, and then I might find the site useful.


And you know what? The same thing holds for a book review site for LGBTQ books in general. Because the cold hard facts are that gay male romance is the Irish Music of the LGBTQ world. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but if you go to a site like Rainbow Book Reviews which advertises itself as “dedicated to GLBTQ-related books, reviews, and authors” a random survey of recent review postings shows less than 1 in 10 as being anything other than gay male stories. And there’s no way to filter for categories so you still have a lot of slogging to do before you can start evaluating for any other criteria. (There’s a keyword search, but my experience is that it’s not useful for this purpose. But like I say, I’m not trying to pick on this particular site.)

When your interest is a minority of a minority (and we haven’t even touched yet on my interests narrowing to sff and pre-20th century historicals, and my insistence on competent writing), any approach that disdains or eschews category labels will tend to either silently erase your existence or dilute it down to homeopathic levels within the silent defaults. So when an author says, “I don’t want to pigeonhole my work; I don’t want it to be labeled as a [category] book,” what I hear them saying is, “I don’t care about my core audience being able to find my book easily because they’re already used to doing all the hard work and I can count on them doing it anyway. I’d rather gamble on some mainstream reviewer saying, ‘Hey, even though this book is about [category] it’s a worthwhile book anyway.’” It’s the same as the “literary” writer shuddering at the thought of being labeled “sci-fi” or the male author of “a story about relationships and the human condition” sneering at “romance readers”.

Categories validate existence. Categories say “We recognize this as A Thing that people are interested in.” And categories make it possible for producers and consumers to connect with each other efficiently for a mutually satisfactory transaction. Should we read outside our favorite categories? Of course we should! We all should! I read outside my favorite categories 99% of the time. But I don’t have any difficulty in finding good books in that 99% to read. They’re stacked on the front tables at the bookstore. They’re tweeted by all my friends and acquaintances on Twitter. They’re reviewed by major publications and web sites. I’m swimming in them. I’m drowning in them. I have to work ten times as hard to find a single book that hits my sweet spots as I do for all my other reading.

And do I want readers outside my narrow favorite categories to read my work? Absolutely! But whether or not my books carry the marketing label “lesbian” is going to make very little difference in whether they do. Someone who is browsing for new reads on a LGBTQ or lesbian review site is hardly going to be put off by the label -- but without that label they might not find it at all. If I set my books adrift in the larger “general fiction” world uncategorized, the chances of a random reader coming across it and finding it appealing are statistically negligible. The lack of a “lesbian” label makes no difference there. Outside the narrow lesbian fiction market, I have to rely entirely on personal individual word-of-mouth. About the only way I could hope to “break out” would be if at least a handful of cross-over reviewers picked up my work and started saying, “Hey, you know? If you like such-and-such, you’re really going to love this book!” making the intersectional connections in all the other filter-axes beyond sexuality. (And believe me, I would love it if this happened. I believe I have a much larger audience out there who would love my books but currently have little chance of stumbling across them. And the biggest frustration of being a niche author is knowing that and knowing I can do nothing about it.)

People who operate within the dominant paradigm (or who aspire to), people who intersect a lot of “default” categories – they can afford to disdain marketing categories. And their target audiences can afford to disdain marketing categories. But I can’t. Not as an author. Not as a reader. Those categories tell me I exist and that I matter. And that’s incredibly important.

One interesting phenomenon I've observed is that having written a baby-name book is a great conversation starter. Not because people then ask you interesting questions about naming practices and trends, but because everyone in the world is an expert on naming practices and trends and has only been waiting for the chance to show off this knowledge to someone who will truly and properly appreciate their expertise. (It may be a special-case variant of mansplaining, although of the more gender-neutral variety.)

But just as telling someone you're a linguist gets you inundated with that person's pet grammar peeves -- many of which will be completely wrong-headed -- telling someone you study names will result in you getting inundated with their pet name peeves. And it is unfortunate that some of the most popular and oft-told "terrible baby name" stories in American culture reflect cultural misunderstandings and cultural ignorance that can be extremely difficult to distinguish from racism.

I had one of those conversations recently and wish to offer some advice to the world at large. (I hope I don't need to offer it to my f-list but if a reader finds themself feeling defensive on reading this post ... think about it a bit before responding.) Names in one culture may be coincidentally similar to -- even phonetically identical to -- words in another culture. Sometimes the words they are similar/identical to have socially unfortunate meanings. This is not a reflection of the intelligence, common sense, or taste of the person so named or the person who chose the name.

Just for example (avoiding personal names for the moment), the King Dong Chinese restaurant in Berkeley was not named in reference to royal male organs. Once you get over your little adolescent giggle, try one of the lunch specials. Pretty much everything is delicious.

And, to get to the specific example from that conversation: if you start telling me a story about some African American woman you heard about (or met, or saw on TV) named LaTrina, and it is clear that the point of your story is "look how ignorant and uncultured the parents of this woman must have been to have named her after a toilet", do not get all defensive on me when I point out that your telling of this particular name anecdote creates a strong impression of racism on your part.

Never mind for the moment that about 99% of the time when stories about this name get told it's a Friend-of-a-Friend story with all the usual fictionality of a FoaF. Because being "true" is no excuse. The question is why are you telling this story? About this particular name? While ignoring the larger sociolinguistic context in which this name exists (and in which it is completely unremarkable)? While ignoring the fact that "latrina" itself is not even a word in English? Why? Because, you see, your telling of this story about this name does not exist in a vacuum. There are lots of stories you could tell about names that sound odd to you within your narrow cultural experience. But you told this one. And you are one of a large number of people who tell this same story about this same name. (And remember: I've spent a lot of time listening to people tell me stories about names and naming practices.) And I can follow contextual implication as well as the next person, and it's blazingly clear that the story was not meant to be a neutral commentary on a coincidental similarity of sound.

So when you tell me a "funny" story about a woman named LaTrina, don't get all huffy when I point out to you what the story says about you.

So this evening I finally had the time to start poking around online to troubleshoot my Time Capsule back-up/router device power failure. And what do I find at the top of the Google hit list but an entire 800-post thread by people who bought Time Capsules in March 2008 (the same time I bought mine) who had the power supply go kaput on them starting around last September. It looks like there's a possibility that, because my laptop's still under Apple Care warranty, I may be able to have the Time Capsule covered (even though it doesn't have a separate Apple Care policy -- they don't offer one). On the one hand, this makes me very unhappy about the product (un)reliability. But on the other hand, it sounds like Root Cause has been identified. Who knows, they may even be able to transfer my backup files to a new device if it's just the power supply implicated. (It's not that critical, since it's only backups.)

The whole Prop 8 thing starts again tomorrow at the CA supreme court. So I'll indulge in just one related head-scratcher before returning to silent fuming and angsting. There's this one alleged "compromise position" that I regularly see people suggesting, apparently based on premise that people who oppose same-sex marriage (hereinafter abbreviated as SSM) are more hung-up on the "marriage" part than the "same-sex" part. That position is some variant on "we should cede ownership rights over the word 'marriage' to religious institutions: the state should perform only civil unions and only religious institutions should be able to create 'marriages'."

Setting aside the long prior history of persecution by the anti-SSM folks who now claim that it's only the use of the word 'marriage' that bothers them. Setting aside the curious absence of any history of these same people objecting to pairs of atheists or non-church-goers using the word 'marriage' for their civilly-sanctioned unions ... as long as it's an opposite-sex pair. Setting aside the question of how the government could cede ownership of the definition of a word to the class "religious institutions" without violating the establishment clause. Setting aside all other questions, I have to wonder whether the folks suggesting this "compromise" are stupid or disingenuous.

Has it not occurred to them that there are religious institutions that have no problems with blessing and solemnizing the unions of same-sex couples? And therefore that this "compromise" would not in the least satisfy the anti-SSM people because there would still be large numbers of same-sex couples who would "own" the label "married"?

Has it not occurred to them that this "compromise" would remove ownership of the label "married" from vast numbers of opposite-sex couples in state-sanctioned unions who chose not to involve a religious institution in that union? And that these two effects in combination, rather than decreasing the number of people unhappy with the state of affairs, would vastly increase that number?

Or do they think that somehow the category "religious institutions" to whom they want to cede ownership of the word 'marriage' would automagically be interpretable as "those religious institutions who would never ever actually apply the word marriage to same-sex couples"?

Am I missing something?

So a couple years ago I picked up a couple of lovely tinned copper cookpots at the White Elephant Sale for only a couple dollars each, thinking that they'd make nice nearly-medieval-looking pots for my camp kitchen. The tinning was a bit patchy -- it looked as if the pots had been brillo-scrubbed by someone who didn't quite understand that tin behaves differently from steel or aluminum -- so I figured I'd have to get them re-tinned at some point. I finally decided to start using them in the camp kitchen anyway this season, and there isn't any significant effect on the food taste so far, but I still wanted to do that re-tinning. And then this lunch hour I went off to the 4th St gourmet ghetto to pick up a nice card for my cousin's 25th wedding anniversary this weekend and did my usual just-browsing pass through Sur La Table, and what did I spy right next to the copper cookware section? Looking as if it had been sitting in a back storeroom for the last decade there was this package proclaiming, "Copper pots need retinning? Voila!" Sure enough, it's a do-it-yourself pot re-tinning kit: basically a little jar of acidic flux and a sheet of food-safe lead-free tin. You clean the pot thoroughly, flux the area to be retinned, put in a snippet of the tin sheet, heat until the tin starts melting, and then roll it around in the pan until it covers the affected area. The brand name is "Tin Lizzie" and it lists the kit manufacturer as: Aux Cuisines Inc., 43 Saddle Ranch Lane, Hillsdale NJ, 07642. There's also an e-mail contact given. I'll report on the project further after I've tried it out.

And on the "damn" side ... when did it become so difficult to schedule plans to get together with people? Is there really a plan-smashing front moving through (as thread_walker seems to be experiencing)? Are significantly more people getting sick suddenly these days? Do people tend to make commitments more casually and break them just as casually? For any given fall-through there always seems to be a good and sound reason -- and certainly when illness is involved, one doesn't want to raise any guilt-trips -- but ever since I started my various programs of trying to initiate more social events and contacts, it's seemed like swimming through molasass to line things up and carry plans through as originally conceived. The immediate trigger for this gripe is that my date for tomorrow has been suffering from the flu since last week and will most likely be cancelling. I haven't tried to line up an alternate since it's the last minute (and since I'd really rather hold out for her being up to going). But there's a real possibility that I'll end up giving away my second ticket to Arlo Guthrie on the steps of Zellerbach tomorrow evening.