February's San Diego Queer Sci-Fi Book Club
Last Saturday we discussed
Keith Hartman's novel
The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse at the
San Diego Queer Sci-Fi Book Club. I first read the novel several years ago, and it was fun re-reading it for the group; there were a lot of cool details I had forgotten. It's a satirically dystopic near-future; among other targets, Hartman skewers politically ambitious fundamentalist Christians, pretentious shock-the-bourgeois artists, and fluffy New Age types. One of the more disturbing elements he explores is the discovery of the "gay gene" and the subsequent social fallout; an entire generation of gay boys grew up in "camps" because their parents threw them out when they tested positive, and now the only young gay men you see are Catholic, because the other sects of Christianity hate homosexuality more than they hate abortion, and when amniocentesis reveals the gay gene in a fetus, it gets aborted. "The Pope may be a reactionary old cow," one character comments, "but at least she's consistent." So gay guys go cruising with big flashy symbols of Catholicism: glitzy rosaries and t-shirts with lovingly detailed crucifixions.
The discussion was lively and entertaining. I was particularly amused by one participant's statement that she found it
much more believable for a devout Baptist character to deliberately and with malice of forethought try to murder her fiance on discovering that he was gay than it was for said woman to be pregnant before marriage.
The next meeting is on Sunday, February 27, at 4pm at David's Coffee House (3766 5th Ave, just south of Robinson). We'll be discussing
The Breeds of Man by
F.M. Busby (
bibliography here).
crossposted to 
sandiegofandom, san_diego, cityofsandiego, and my journal 
