Today on the site I’m delighted to share in giving readers a peek into Dudes Rock, a recently released adult anthology edited by Jay Kang Romanus “celebrating queer masculinity in speculative fiction.” Here’s the story:
What does masculinity mean to you?
Whether the answer is “toxic” or something more aspirational, speculative fiction can help you find the language to talk about it. The stories in this anthology visualize all the different ways masculinity might look in a world different than our own, for better or worse.
Imagine living in a universe where you’d feel safe telling your best friend you’ve always loved him, or where smoking hot demons exist to indulge all your worst impulses. From buff aliens to gender-affirming werewolf bites, Dudes Rock is about celebrating everything that queer masculinity can become beyond the confines of a single world, and we want you to rock with us.
Featuring stories by Chase Anderson, Johannes T. Evans, Oliver Fosten, Jonathan Freeman, Rick Hollon, Sam Inverts, S. C. Mills, Franklyn S. Newton, Jay Kang Romanus, Aubrey Shaw, Simo Srinivas, Candy Tan, and Scott Vaughn.
“Pick up this anthology for a satisfying and imaginative journey through universes of magic and super-science, with queer masculinity—in all its glorious complexity—as your guiding star.” — Trip Galey, author of A Market of Dreams and Destiny
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
And here’s a look at some of the individual contributions, thanks to their authors!
“Tom and Andy Do Magic at Midnight” by Simo Srinivas
Andy Loucks, world-famous rock climber and Tom’s estranged best friend, disappears without a trace while soloing a route in Yosemite. Tom knows Andy isn’t dead. Tom even—kind of—knows where Andy is. But is he ready to follow? Tom and Andy Do Magic at Midnight is a story about yearning, and it is a story about stories, Orpheus and Eurydice, Niúláng Zhīnǚ, Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La, the Sword in the Stone—those stories about seeking and retrieving, fighting the odds just to be able to meet again. (Mary Oliver, Postcard from Flamingo: “If you were here, / if I could touch you, / my hands would begin to sing.”) It’s also about the stories we tell ourselves, our personal myths, how we can hide from ourselves in stories, cage ourselves with stories—and storytell our way to different endings. On a less serious note, Tom and Andy is basically that meme, “Men will literally [X] except go to therapy,” but insert “scale 3000 vertical feet of granite” for X. I’m fascinated by this type of masculinity that is so insistently macho it loops around on itself and becomes queer.
“The Application of Lycanthropy as a Novel Treatment for Gender Dysphoria” by Chase Anderson
I’d already started playing with the “hey, wouldn’t it be hella gender affirming to be turned into a werewolf?” idea with a novel, but that’s both a second-world fantasy and set in a historical period, so trans people wouldn’t have many options outside of “magic.” I wanted to explore that concept for something more modern and in a much shorter piece, so that’s how this happened! I spent way too much time researching which 24 hour diners take Apple Pay for this, because I always get hung up on the most inconsequential details lol
“Cigarette Smoke from the Fires of Hell” by Jay Kang Romanus
Most of the stories in this anthology are fairly uplifting, and as the editor, I wanted to make sure that all corners of the queer masculine experience were touched upon. In this story, fatherless Jeremy spends his nights fighting with men in bars just to feel something, until he accidentally summons a crossroads demon and all his desires are suddenly made manifest in ways he never prepared for. Queer men are not free from the influence of toxic masculinity—whether perpetrated by men or women—and that results in some really interesting expressions of erotic self-loathing. Additionally, there’s an inherent homoeroticism to a macho man who only wants to spend time around other men. I thought it’d be interesting to take a look at how this type of man could get to that point and fit into that ecosystem while being extremely gay. This isn’t meant to be a cautionary tale, since many queer men are straight-presenting (for lack of a better term) without falling into toxic behavior, but the line is very easy to cross, and I wanted to explore the factors that create that societal pressure.
“Guiding Light” by Johannes T. Evans
I don’t tend to write much sci-fi as fantasy is more my bag, but especially as an exploration of different forms of masculinity, I really enjoyed writing Asaf Charmant, a Jewish character in space, in a non-specific but obviously futuristic setting, and having him engaged by and excited by a form of masculinity that at once is traditional and familiar (Hok being an alien but being perceived as and having similar characteristics to an old-fashioned Eastern European Jewish man, a proud immigrant, stern but gentle, strict about certain rules and regulations but not without care), and at the same time is counter to many people’s ideas of masculinity in our modern day. Hok’s focus on self-care is personally gentle but also is a rebellion to an overworked and over-commercial society, his affection for another man quite natural and evidently coming from a culture that’s more free with affection, not without its teasing, but many people would see a large, fat, hairy man and project an assumption of brutishness or bluntness onto him, particularly when reading him as noticeably foreign, such as in hearing an accent like Hok’s. This piece was really fun and rewarding to work on, and I hope readers enjoy it as much as I did writing it.
“Erdmann Application” by Jonathan Freeman
I personally find it really difficult to write short stories where none of the characters are god. Particularly as we live in a society where so many religious institutions are being wielded by corrupt megalomaniacs, I just feel like there’s a lot to be said about an idea like “god,” and I don’t want that conversation to be controlled by them. In my own experience, the rejection of such institutions is a divine sort of liberation—and it can leave the liberated with unanswered questions. Now that we’re free, what do we make of the identities we’ve managed to reclaim? Where can we look to find new meanings, values, and communities? How do we build places for that sort of creative exploration, if they don’t already exist? When all is said and done, whom and what can we really put our faith (whatever that even is, to us) in? In this story, Adamah Erdmann is a young man trying to figure out the right way to be a young man. When he happens to meet someone willing to teach him exactly that, he comes to learn that even the authority of a god can only go so far.
“The Depths of Friendship” by Candy Tan
“The Depths of Friendship” started out as part of a short story experiment I ran in 2022: write a queer love story on Twitter every day for Pride Month, covering as much of the queer love spectrum as I could. I wrote a lot of stories about found family, friendship, and of course romance—but realized halfway through the month that I hadn’t yet written one with explicit queer sex. Which is when I realized I finally had the opportunity to explore an idea—a conviction, really—I’ve had for a long time: if magic were real, one of the first things people would learn to do would be how to make their dildos vibrate, and hard on the heels of that would be how to retrieve those dildos from places where they shouldn’t have gone. Out of that concept came Saf, the horniest bisexual disaster to ever discover his prostate, and Kiri, his hyper-competent best friend whom Saf just, you know, decided to befriend on the first day of wizard school because he looked interesting. Like you do. I love oblivious characters, I love secret pining, and I love absurd sex comedies, and it was such a joy getting to write all three in the same story.
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