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On March 15, 2025, Kasie and Rex welcomed Mark Allan Gunnells back to the studio to talk about book bans and LGBTQ+ representation in the current horror and commercial fiction markets. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

LGBTQ+ Representation in current lit

Agenda

• Quick Catch Up with special guest Mark Allan Gunnells
• Focus on the horror genre
• LGBTQ+ authors and acceptance
• LGBTQ+ characters and caricatures
• Book bans and removing queer texts from shelves

Segment 1

We’re welcoming back into the studio Mark Allan Gunnells, Upstate author in the horror genre and activist in the LGBTQ+ community. Learn more about Gunnells here. He wrote a piece for The Ginger Nuts of Horror titled “We Will Not Be Erased” that expresses his concern over recent efforts to erase queer representation from libraries and reading lists. We thought it would be a good idea to get him back on the show to talk about what’s happening.

Where is the horror genre right now? Your piece links to this piece in which critic Jim Mcleod says the genre is evolving. He says the literature is upholding a high standard of writing and also delving into uncharted territory. Would you agree?

Listeners interested in more queer horror should check out this link from the same referenced site with a list of 15 titles it recommends.

Segment 2

Queer authors are getting more recognition as their queer stories are nominated for and winning awards. This link is to an interview with James Bennett where he talks about being a queer author and winning an award for a queer story.

Are there changing expectations for authors? What are the expectations?

Is this a “write what you know” kind of scenario or is this something else?

The interviewer in the Bennett article also asked if he’d ever considered writing a “straight” story. Is that a distinction you make with your fiction?

Bennett mentions the difference between representation and having the space to “speak for ourselves.” Can we unpack that a little bit?

Segments 3 & 4

In the piece for gnofhorror.com, you mention that if the sexual orientation of the character doesn’t matter, then it should be fine for them to be hetero or queer, interchangeably. Can you unpack that a little bit? Does sexual orientation meet one of those driver’s license descriptions like hair, eyes, and height? Just a fact, not something that may help us understand the character’s motivation?

One of your blogs from last year talks about discovering old poems you’d written as a teenager and how reading them reminds you of the journey of self-discovery, coming to terms with who you are, and how there was a lack of visible role models. Can you speak to the existence now of visible role models? Can characters be those role models? 

Do you think of yourself as a role model? How important are those visible role models and how do we get more of them? Or at least make them more visible?

So South Carolina has one of the most tyrannical book banning regulations in the nation (link). It allows any parent to challenge up to five books per month for removal from the school library. Some of the titles caught in this include: 1984 by George Orwell, Romeo and Juliet, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Those were deemed appropriate and able to stay on shelves, but Sarah J. Maas’s fantasy romance novels, Colleen Hoover’s Ugly Love which is about a relationship that begins as sex-only but then develops past physical attraction into complicated or “ugly” love. The targets are typically books that contain “sexual content” which includes depictions of sexual relationships. The argument made is that young people are not ready for the depictions of these mature relationships. (link)

Here’s the thing: those relationships exist. These kids see them in their families, in their schools, and even in their own lives. Seeing them in books doesn’t make them happen – they’re already happenings. But seeing them in books might just give them a way to process them, to understand them, and maybe even to avoid or get out of them.

Book ban activists rarely read the entire book, they often fail to put the book in context, or even to think about the broader themes of the book, aside from the sexual encounters. 

It’s not just South Carolina, these are happening in other states and districts, too (link). There seems to have been a renewal of these efforts on the tail-end of COVID lockdowns. As if parents woke up and decided they couldn’t trust schools to make good decisions.

This article, by Elena K. Arnold whose book, Damsel is on the banned list, articulates the argument of pornography from the Supreme Court case Miller v. California (1973):  

1) the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; 2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and 3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

There’s a good documentary, Banned Together, about students fighting the book bans in South Carolina. The students in the film were able to get 97 books reinstated. Yeah, you read that right, Beaufort County banned 97 books. Let’s unpack that.