Transgender Awareness Week: Catching up with Ridley Harker
Ridley Harker is a gay, transgender author and editor from St. Louis, Missouri. His debut queer body horror novel, Parasite, is available now from Ninestar Press and Amazon. Ridley lives in the Middle of Nowhere with his two dogs, a grumpy old snake, and a host of pet tarantulas. He is currently working on his MFA in Creative Writing. Visit his website at www.ridleyharker.com, and follow him on Twitter @RidleyHarker.
What is the latest in your world as a writer? Do you have any new writing news, upcoming projects, or other exciting professional news you’d like to share with our audiences at the HWA?
It’s been a big year for me. I went to my first StokerCon, my debut novel, Parasite, was published, and my short story “Kill Your Darlings” was featured in Listen: The Sound of Fear. I also started my MFA and a teaching assistantship. I’m crazy busy!
As for what I’m working on now, I’ve almost finished a collection of short horror stories revolving around queer transgender and cisgender men. So far tales include feuding conjoined twins, a resurrected witch, a librarian discovering a vampiric grimoire, a hive-minded creature that reanimates the dead, the fountain of youth underneath a moldering Colorado sanitarium, and a corrupted youth minister who gets more than he bargained for after picking up a cultist. I’m looking for a publisher, so if anyone is interested, hit me up!
For my MFA I’ve just started on a dark fantasy about a transgender thief named Six who accidentally steals the wrong key and reignites a war between kingdoms. It has necromancers, an intersex race of elves, and LGBTQIA+ main characters. The book starts off with Six finding a corpse in a wine barrel, and it only gets worse for him from that point on.
Are there any other transgender horror/speculative fiction authors, or transgender authors in general for that matter, that you’d like to recommend to our readers?
I will always recommend Billy Martin (Poppy Z Brite). He first introduced me to LGBTQ horror with Lost Souls and I am forever grateful for that. Then of course there’s Hailey Piper who recently won the Bram Stoker award for Queen of Teeth. Eric LaRocca’s You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood was fantastic, and I can’t wait to get my hands on more stuff from them. Then there’s Jordan L Hawk, who wrote the Widdershins series and whose latest work The Forgotten Dead features a trans protagonist. Last but not least is Gretchen Felker-Martin, whose post-apocalyptic novel Manhunt will be on its billionth printing by the time this interview is released. We trans authors are a talented bunch!
Transgender Awareness Week is an opportunity for the transgender community and its allies to share our stories and let the world know who we are. In that spirit, is there anything you’d like to share with our readers?
Right now, it’s a terrifying time to be transgender in the United States. Our community is being demonized and used as a scapegoat for every problem under the sun. I mean, on one hand its flattering to have so many people obsessed with what’s in my pants, but on the other, they’re trying to take away my right to exist.
Last year I had a horrible few months after my endocrinologist (the doctor in charge of my HRT, or hormone replacement therapy) suddenly moved away. The remaining doctors in his office refused to prescribe me testosterone while I searched for a new endocrinologist because they “don’t work with trans people.” I’ve had a hysterectomy due to health issues, so my body can’t make its own sex hormones. (Fun fact: without testosterone or estrogen, you get extremely tired and your bones break. I have to inject myself with testosterone once a week. Needle phobia anyone?) Luckily for me, I live near a big city and found another doctor that was accepting new patients. After a miserable three months of rationing my remaining testosterone, I was able to get a new prescription, but I live in fear of that happening again.
That said, being transgender isn’t all fear and dealing with transphobia. I used to have a lot of body dysmorphia and anger issues, and being able to transition has cleared all that up. My family have noticed the difference and have supported me 100% of the way. Transitioning has also given me the courage to write queer horror, which led to me publishing Parasite and being accepted into my MFA program. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.
Check Out Ridley’s Interview from Pride Month
What inspired you to start writing?
I wrote my first ‘book’ in pre-kindergarten. It was about an unseen monster living in my swimming pool that ate unsuspecting swimmers. The final page was a picture of the pool filled with blood and skulls. They called my parents about it. But I really started writing in the 5th grade. Like many other queer writers, I started out with gay fanfics about my favorite straight characters, and then began branching out to original works by middle school. Growing up in Missouri, I didn’t discover the amazing world of LGBTQIA+ literature until my senior year of high school when a friend loaned me their Billy Martin (formerly Poppy Z. Brite) collection.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
Horror is transgressive and fun. I’ve also been obsessed with villains since I was young. (I fully blame Disney for queer-coding their bad guys.) Horror is one of the few genres where villains can be celebrated. I mean, how many love letters do Hannibal Lecter and Pinhead get a year?
Do you make a conscious effort to include LGBTQ material in your writing and if so, what do you want to portray?
I only write queer works. The world has enough ‘straight’ books from amazing authors that I don’t need to dabble in them. One thing about me is that I’m sick of coming out tales; they’ve been done to death, and there’s so much more to queer life than just leaving the closet. Sure, coming out is a significant moment in many LGBTQ people’s lives and they’re important stories to tell, but it’s like only having novels that revolve around a person’s 21st birthday. I’m craving something different. I want to see more books with queer protagonists where the question of their sexuality/gender identity isn’t the main plot. I try to do this in my books. My debut queer body horror novel, Parasite from Ninestar Press, is being released at the end of June. The protagonist is a 17-year-old, bisexual trans boy named Jack Ives. Parasite’s two villains are also on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, being bisexual and asexual respectively. I’m currently working on a collection of horror stories revolving around gay men both cis and transgender, and what’s great about both this book and Parasite is that every character is sure of their sexuality or gender identity.
What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?
It’s interesting to see what scares people. I traveled to Nicaragua once as a student and there I learned about bot flies. For those of you lucky enough not to know, bot flies are these horrible insects that lay eggs in your skin and hatch into maggots while you’re still alive. So while I am terrified of bot flies and consider them a fate worse than death, for many people in other parts of the world bot flies are just a regular thing that they have to deal with. I try to include my fears in my writing and make them everyone else’s problem.
How have you seen the horror genre change over the years? And how do you think it will continue to evolve?
I’m so excited to see more diversity in horror. I’m going to use some movie examples, but in the early to mid 2000’s Asian horror remakes were a big thing, and no offence to those remakes, because I’ll still watch The Ring on a rainy night when I don’t feel like reading subtitles, but they just don’t capture the magic of the original films. Especially in The Grudge or Shutter, the original Asian influences are just perceived as this ‘otherness’ to scare white American audiences. Coming from a mixed-race household (I’m Italian-American, and my step-family are first generation Filipino-American) that disparity always bothered me. Now we’re getting to see the OwnVoices movement. We’re getting fantastic novels like Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, and Eve Harms’ Transmuted. Hollywood still has a long way to go, but we are killing it in literature. Recently we’ve seen a racist/sexist/homophobic backlash in America, which is terrifying in itself, but I believe that things will only get better and more inclusive in the horror genre. Like I said, horror is transgressive.
How do you feel the LGBTQ community has been represented thus far in the genre and what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?
Traditionally, LGBTQ characters were reduced to villains, or later victims of the old ‘bury your gays’ trope. Lately I’ve seen more queer sidekicks or secondary characters. The OwnVoices movement is bringing queer protagonists and sometimes completely queer casts to the front and center. But you don’t have to be an LGBTQIA+ author to feature a queer protagonist! Straight and cisgender authors can do it too; we love representation, especially from popular authors, but it’s got to be done right. (I recommend getting a queer sensitivity reader, especially for transgender characters, so that no false stereotypes accidentally get introduced into the mix. For example, did you know that not every trans person experiences body dysphoria?)
Who are some of your favorite LGBTQ characters in horror?
One of my absolute favorite queer books is Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. The child vampire Eli is quite possibly my favorite character ever. They hint at Eli’s queerness in the Swedish film, but in the American remake they remove it entirely, which is disappointing. Speaking of Swedish films, the movie Alena is fantastic. The entire cast is made up of queer women. Josefin was my favorite character in that one. I’m a big fan of Billy Martin, so most of his gay protagonists and villains would count. I especially loved Zillah from Lost Souls, creep that he was. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, I’ve always read Merricat’s obsessive love for her sister as queer. While What We Do In The Shadows the TV show is more comedy than horror, I love Nandor and Guillermo. (If they don’t end up together, I will riot.)
Who are some LGBTQ horror authors you recommend our audience check out?
I’m currently reading You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood by Eric LaRocca. According to his website, 50% of the proceeds from his ebook and paperback sales will go to Trans Lifeline. How cool is that? Of course there’s also Billy Martin (Poppy Z. Brite). I recommend Lost Souls and the short story collection Wormwood. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood is a must. I enjoyed Jordan L Hawk’s Restless Spirits series, which is a spooky historical romance. I just bought a copy of Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, which I’ve heard is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece and I can’t wait to read it. But first I have to finish Hailey Piper’s Benny Rose, the Cannibal King.
What is one piece of advice you would give horror authors today?
Keep it weird. Develop your own monsters instead of just relying on the same tired old vampires, werewolves, and demons. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I love a good vampire story, but you’ve got to make it your own. I’d also like to see some more horror-romance out there.
And to the LGBTQ writers out there who are just getting started, what advice would you give them?
Write! There is a growing demand for all kinds of LGBTQ fiction, horror especially. Write, revise, and then send your work out to as many agents and publishers as possible. We need people like you, and I can’t wait to read your work!
