Double Trouble at the Fox Den

Double release day! 

Today we are delighted to announce we have unleashed a mass of femme fatales on the unsuspecting public. Available now from Fox Spirit Books are two exciting volumes of high heels and deadly doings!

The third in our Noir series of anthologies edited by K.A.Laity is ‘Drag Noir‘ where the drag scene meets the seedy world of Chandler and Hammett, where glamour meets grit, where everyone wears a disguise.

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

And from Alchemy Press editors Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber we are delighted to bring you ‘Wicked Women‘! Women who write their own rules, skate along the edge of the law and generally aim to misbehave.

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

So join us for double trouble!

If you would like review copies or to interview the editors please contact adele@foxspirit.co.uk

Drag Noir: Redfern Jon Barrett

RedfernJonBarrettDisability as Drag
Redfern Jon Barrett

Regardless of the social progress made in recent years, our world is still not yet kind to the subversive: women who love women remain the target of stares and lewd comments; men who love men have blood which is considered unclean by the majority of the planet’s health authorities (because ‘AIDS was invented by homos’); whilst men who dress as women are still victim to physical and verbal abuse. Public acceptance may be on the increase, but as every queer person and drag queen knows, we have a long way to go.

Meanwhile, a different yet parallel rights movement is fighting for its own social and legal equality: rights for the disabled. Those with cerebral palsy are still the target of stares and verbal abuse; those with mobility needs are still denied access to the majority of the planet’s public transportation (back of the bus? You’re not even getting on!); whilst closed-circuit hearing loops are still absent from most public spaces. Progress has been made, but as every blind or autistic person knows, we have a long way to go.

Of course there are more similarities between disability and gender nonconformity than my structuring two similar paragraphs on each. Firstly, each has the ability to make the public uncomfortable, as each causes us to question our own identities: whether the shaky and often-transitional nature of our perceived gender, or our immortal able-bodiedness. Each presents us with  a deviation from the norm which a great number of people still feel uncomfortable with, and which presents this difficult truth: that the privilege one receives for cis-heterosexuality or able-bodiedness is a result of random chaotic chance.

The second similarity is that both gender nonconformity and disability have been heavily medicalised by both public discourse and institutions. The very term ‘homosexuality’ was coined in an attempt to diagnose a mental condition; trans people are subject to intense physical and mental scrutiny by medical professionals who pass ultimate judgement on their personal identities; the disabled are also still viewed through this same medical lens. Are deaf people merely a medical condition, or a culture with its own language and social groupings? The nonconformists share a history of dehumanising medical discourse. Both groupings have been the target of eugenics programs. It is this similarity which prompted me to write my sci-fi short story ‘Straight Baby’.

It is this shared discourse lies at the heart of the story. In a world in which parents have (or believe they have) genetically engineered every aspect of their children, the disabled and the queer face the same threat of marginalisation and persecution. This shared struggle is embodied in Thomas, a disabled homosexual who faces intense persecution because of the random chaotic chance of his birth – a deviance which can never be truly eradicated, regardless of technological advancement.

Yet the story also examines the interplay between his identities as a gay, disabled man. Whilst other gay men are beaten and arrested when caught with other men, Thomas’ physical disability has, thus far, allowed him to escape the clutches of the heterosexist legal system. In this future, as in our own time, the disabled are frequently viewed as asexual. Thomas’ physical state covers his deviance as a homosexual: his disability is his drag.

Yet Thomas’ drag is not merely external. He manages his position in society via an internal drag, mentally conceiving of himself as a female femme-fatale – a perspective which allows him to navigate his affairs with married men. In short, Thomas is a sexual being in the ‘asexual’ drag of disability, perceiving himself in female terms. Each ‘deviance’ contradicts and reinforces the other. He is a threat masquerading as harmless.

At its root, the story is based in the fact that every struggle is a shared struggle. Gay men and wheelchair users, lesbians and the blind, drag queens and the autistic have all been marginalised by social and medical discourse. Without solidarity and recognition of our shared fight, we risk a future in which society once again uses technology in an attempt to eradicate the nonconformists – a future in which no drag can save us.

DRAG NOIR is out tomorrow!

 

Drag Noir: Becky Thacker

Becky Thacker
Portrait of the author in her younger days

How I Came to Write ‘Geezer Dyke’

Becky Thacker

A port stop during a cruise disembarked us in Mexico, facing a row of tour vans and buses.  Most of these were staffed by sign-wielding native folks with weary, worldly-wise faces; obviously they did this job for the living it provided and not because they found it fun. One of the tour guides was a lesbian, white-skinned, aging none too gracefully, and it was evident from her accent that she’d begun life as a North American Midwesterner. She looked and clearly felt, however, more akin to her brown-skinned career associates than to the flocks of North American tourists who surrounded her. We wondered what, or who, had led her to this path.   And of course, romantics that we are, we wondered whom she went home to when her day of tourist-wrangling was over.

DRAG NOIR: Out this Halloween!

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

 

Foreword to Drag Noir

The original Jim West, Robert Conrad

FOREWORD to DRAG NOIR by editor K. A. Laity

I wanted to be Jim West. The hero of the television programme Wild Wild West played by Robert Conrad epitomized cool as far as I was concerned as a kid. He looked slick, fought bad guys and lived in luxurious style in a train caboose with his pal Artemus Gordon—every week a new location and a new adventure.

But more than that, the look: that snugly fitted suit, short jacket, broad shoulders and black boots. Sure he did spend a lot of time shirtless and tied up, too. Somehow at the advent the androgynous glam rock look of the 70s and the nascent punk scene, anything at all seemed possible—at least until my body betrayed me with the double-whammy of adolescent hormones and a thyroid that tipped over into overdrive, hitting my rangy frame with unexpected curves and bewildered loss of identity.

Tilda Suited by ShermanI grew up with two brothers, four baseball diamonds and a football field behind my house, so I played a lot of sports. Yet when I started school I was expected to wear dresses. I wanted to be the boy in My Side of the Mountain but it was a revelation to see Karen Carpenter play drums because it was a thing girls weren’t supposed to do. I was a guileless and mostly unaware child so it came as a bit of a shock when I realised there was a great deal of anxiety attached to who I was supposed to be. I failed so much at being a girl that I was sent to charm school, a racket run by the local department store.

It failed.

My adolescent discomfort sprang largely from being forced into a category that didn’t fit me, as much as it did with being trapped in one place when I wanted to travel the world. Academia belatedly taught me an essential term: slippage. Our brains like to categorise things into distinct pigeon-holes, but nature just bleeds into the margins. I like slipping between categories (as these noir mash-ups show). Then as now I hated to be pigeon-holed. On my website I quote Kierkegaard: “Once you label me, you negate me.”

It’s no wonder that I took to gender studies like a PI to trenchcoats; it explained the discomfort I had struggled with for so long—and proved I wasn’t the only one. It gave me so much more to think about when I considered my own childhood (not to mention two men living together in a caboose—hello!). Judith Butler showed me gender was constructed by culture, just as I’d always intuited. She instilled in me the love of playing with those conventions consciously, testing people’s reactions, and teaching students to be conscious of them as well.

But it was Ru Paul who cut to the essential: “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”

Manufacturers seem to have doubled down on building the great gender divide; all you have to do is look at the ‘girls’ aisle in any toy store—a throbbing pink ghetto. Toys that were bright primary colours a couple decades ago now receive a varnish of glutinous pink. The ‘princess’ industry is reinforced 24/7 on the Disney media empire of television and radio. Maybe it’s the last ditch backlash against a broadening culture that not only recognizes the rainbow spectrum of genders, but increasingly celebrates them. I’m all onboard with the Pink Stinks camp, but maybe princess power isn’t as monolithic as I sometimes fear (given my tomboy self). I was pleasantly surprised the other day when the Executive Toddler (3) and her brother (9) were on scooters, which he reminded her both belonged to him, when she told him imperiously that she liked ‘boy things and girl things’. I leaned over and said, ‘I’ll tell you a secret: there aren’t really “girl things” and “boy things”—there are only “things”‘.

You can spend your life trying to protect the divisions between categories, but nature bleeds through the barriers. That’s why we have parthenogenesis. Nature will find a way. Try too hard to maintain those artificial borders and you’re bound to fail.

Of course noir is all about failing, but it’s also about shadows, surfaces and a lot of grey areas. Hiding and revealing, deceptive appearances, buried truths: the stories here run the gamut. So do the writers: some I knew already, others I didn’t at all. I was disappointed to have so few drag king stories, but maybe that leaves room to revisit the topic. I had no idea what I would get, but I was pleased with the results. I hope you are too.

Drag Noir Cover Artist: S. L. Johnson

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets — faboo artist S. L. Johnson tells us how she came up with her latest eye-catching design for the cover of Drag Noir:

When I was asked to create a cover for the “Drag Noir” antho, it was quite a challenge. “Drag” is a full-on gender-bending costumed performance role, meant to be seen and heard, while “noir” is dark and nefarious, and hidden. Resolving these two ideas in visual form led to a lot of dead-end ideas, and my desire to represent both male & female gender conventions in drag further muddied the creative waters. After several false starts, I decided I would take one face and split it down the middle, with the idea of that the face could be seen as the woman or the man in drag. I felt this was the obvious solution, but in such a graphic, flat form, it would work well. It’s shadowy, a la noir, but with bright red half-lips, and a green face that represents the very made-up faces of drag queens, yet could also be corpse-like in the pulpiest way.

It works, for sure!

Be sure to check out Johnson’s other work which runs the gamut from book and CD covers to posters and more! Including her other noir covers for us.

 

Drag Noir #FreeRead: Smallbany by Graham Wynd

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

In the run up to the release of Drag Noir, we’re featuring a few spots to drum up the excitement because, well — we’re so excited! Here’s a story from skulk member Graham Wynd to give you a sense of the flavour of the collection. Consider it a “bonus track” for the anthology.

SMALLBANY
by Graham Wynd
Content alerts: salty language, guns, drugs, sexual shenanigans

I desperately turned every door handle along the corridor while swearing a blue streak, trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. The image of Bomber’s face covered with blood still haunted my vision though I tried to push it aside long enough to think straight.

“We have to seize the means of production,” Bomber had said. I laughed at the memory of his words and gripped the handle of the French horn case even tighter. There had to be a way out of here.

At last a handle moved under my sweaty grip. I pushed through the door. A supply closet: stacks of cocktail napkins, swizzle sticks and whatnot filled the shelves. Dead end, I knew. But maybe I could hide out here while things calmed down.

I threw the case in the corner and shoved a few bigger boxes together to make a leaning tower of booze boxes, then ducked down behind it. I willed my breath to slow down, but the ragged rasp of it continued. The bellows of my lung threatened to give me away if anybody tried the door behind me.

Maybe no one had followed me down the corridor.

Bomber’s gory face swam into view again and I cursed his name. ‘Means of production,’ my aunt Fanny.

Both of them.

“What do you mean, ‘means of production’?” Moaning Murdoch had asked him. He’d had that unfortunate moniker since back in the kiddie days when we were wet enough to let girls drag us to Harry Potter films. No matter that he outgrew the round face, that the big specs were replaced by contacts and Murdoch himself landed a scholarship playing for the Danes as a fullback. He was still Moaning Murdoch.

Bomber smiled in that way he had that suggested he knew the inside track. His smugness had only grown since he switched his major to business. The original plan to be a rapper had been scuppered due to his inherent lack of talent (which we all could have told him before but never mind that, he wasn’t listening).

Continue reading “Drag Noir #FreeRead: Smallbany by Graham Wynd”

Ladies Choice

October at Fox Spirit is celebrating the Femme Fatale..after a fashion. Our anthologies ‘Wicked Women’ edited by Jenny Barber and Jan Edwards and ‘Drag Noir’ edited by K.A.Laity are coming up. These ladies are armed and dangerous.

Wicked Women 72ppi Front


From thieves and tyrants to witches and warriors, here are twelve tales of women who gleefully write their own rules, women who’ll bend or break the social norms, who’ll skate along the edge of the law and generally aim to misbehave.

Contents:
Juliet E. McKenna – Win Some, Lose Some
Christine Morgan – The Shabti-Maker
Tom Johnstone – Kravolitz
A. R. Aston –  No Place of Honour
Adrian Tchaikovsky – This Blessed Union
Sam Stone – The Book of the Gods
Chloë Yates – How to be the Perfect Housewife
Stephanie Burgis – Red Ribbons
Jonathan Ward – A Change in Leadership
Jaine Fenn – Down at the Lake
Zen Cho – The First Witch of Damansara
Gaie Sebold – A Change of Heart

Cover by S. L. Johnson
Cover by S. L. Johnson

DRAG NOIR: this is where glamour meets grit, where everyone’s wearing a disguise (whether they know it or not) and knowing the players takes a lot more than simply reading the score cards. Maybe everyone’s got something to hide, but they’ve got something to reveal, too. Scratch the surface and explore what secrets lie beneath — it’s bound to cost someone…a lot.

Contents:
Introduction by Dana Gravesen and Bryan Asbury
The Meaning of Skin – Richard Godwin
Wheel Man – Tess Makovesky
No. 21: Gabriella Merlo – Ben Solomon
Geezer Dyke – Becky Thacker
Lucky in Cards – Jack Bates
Trespassing – Michael S. Chong
Chianti – Selene MacLeod
The Changeling – Tracy Fahey
Straight Baby – Redfern Jon Barrett
Kiki Le Shade – Chloe Yates
Protect Her – Walter Conley
King Bitch – James Bennett
A Bit of a Pickle – Paul D. Brazill
Stainless Steel – Amelia Mangan
The Itch of the Iron, The Pull of the Moon – Carol Borden

Drag Noir: Creamy Contents, No Filling!

Photo via Dangerous Minds (click to see original article)
Photo via Dangerous Minds (click to see original article)

While the order of stories may be subject to change, here’s the stories you’ll be reading when Drag Noir pops out in a couple months from now with a faboo cover from S. L. Johnson:

The Meaning of Skin – Richard Godwin

Wheel Man – Tess Makovesky

No. 21: Gabriella Merlo – Ben Solomon

Geezer Dyke – Becky Thacker

Lucky in Cards – Jack Bates

Trespassing – Michael S. Chong

Chianti – Selene MacLeod

The Changeling – Tracy Fahey

Straight Baby – Redfern Jon Barrett

Kiki Le Shade – Chloe Yates

Protect Her – Walter Conley

King Bitch – James Bennett

A Bit of a Pickle – Paul D. Brazill

Stainless Steel – Amelia Mangan

The Itch of the Iron, The Pull of the Moon – Carol Borden

 

We’ve got a whole lot of interesting takes on the theme from folks around the world. I hope you will enjoy — I know I did as I sweated the choices. I was afraid I might not have enough submissions; instead, I had to make tough choices among some fine stories but the ones that made the final selection brought surprises and delights as well as that elusive noir spirit.

Doll yourself up and get ready for this one.

Live Rabbits!

White Rabbit will be hopping onto Amazon as a paperback any hour now so get your copy and burrow in with this noir tale of murder and the supernatural.

WHITE RABBIT PRINT BookCover

What is Noir?

extricate ebook 72ppiBy Graham Wynd

What is noir? You can Google the term and come up with a bunch of answers, but as librarians will ask you, are you sure you have the right one? I always say I’m a ‘duck test’ sort of person — an out-dated Americanism for recognising ‘communists’ viz. if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck (though Senator McCarthy might have been wise to have looked into more stringent methods).

Most people who like the genre of noir will point to the films with their bleak cityscapes, inky shadows and sudden gun shots. Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart frown with worry, Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame show their gams, while Farley Granger looks lost. In novels, Patricia Highsmith’s slippery Tom Rippley worms his way into people’s lives while keeping his intentions hidden, or Dashiell Hammet sends the Continental Op to a seedy location and the blood spills red down the walls.

When I think of ‘noir’ I tend to think of women who don’t see the options and men who make bad choices. The very gendered split of that thought is what led me to thinking about Drag Noir and how people might play with that divide. In the noir world, people invest in the gender divisions because it brings them some certainty in an uncertain and dangerous world.

Buddhists say desire is the beginning of suffering: noir is all about the suffering. And the desire — whether it’s for money or sex or something less certain. Fred MacMurray lusting for Barbara Stanwyck: we know the Double Indemnity story so well. But what about Lily Dillon in Jim Thompson’s The Grifters? Especially as embodied by Anjelica Huston in Frears’ film, she’s hungry and restless as a shark, but nothing really fills it for long. Sometimes there’s a hunger that can’t be fed.

Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them every step that they take

Till one day they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag ’em down…

Yeah, that’s noir.

Extricate is out now: buy it Amazon.

A writer of bleakly noirish tales with a bit of grim humour, Graham Wynd can be found in Dundee but would prefer you didn’t come looking. An English professor by day, Wynd grinds out darkly noir prose between trips to the local pub.