Caitlin Kiernan Was Always Like This
I am writing this in response to Lyana’s post on the increasingly public racism of horror writer Caitlin R Kiernan (Kiernan now prefers they/them pronouns, but as they identified as a trans woman for most of their career you may see references that use she/her). Lyana’s article describes Kiernan’s frequent posts to Livejournal and Twitter in which they share white nationalist conspiracy theories, racist pseudoscience, and sometimes anti-trans content. In spite of this, they still have a presence in horror tradpub, with the support of influential editor Ellen Datlow. This is depressing as fuck, but I keep being taken aback by the general reception of surprise from critics like Lyana:
“With these findings in mind, my puzzlement started growing. Caitlin R. Kiernan is a transfemme enby. Their work, including beautiful writing and cosmic horror with marginalized protagonists, contradicts the principles I see them retweeting. Why were they retweeting this? Surely as an academic, they understood the racist falsehoods at play?”
I don’t get this. I was upset but not surprised. I keep seeing this claim that Kiernan’s work contradicts their racist views, and like...no, sorry, I wish it did, but nope. I loved them, more than I should, and that love is going to colour the whole rest of what I have to say about them, but the racism was there in the text the whole time.
I'm not a Kiernan completionist (whomst among us: Kiernan is ludicriously prolific, primarily in short fiction). I've read 7 of their novels/novellas plus 2 short fiction collections. My relationship with those books goes back a long time, and has often meant a lot to me. I read Murder of Angels on my first ever flight to the US, almost 20 years ago. It was one of the first few lesbian SFF books I read, and a brilliant dive off the edge into that state where your PTSD becomes everyone else's problem.
I spent a total of 5 years living in the South as an immigrant, and I treasured Silk in particular, with its cast of poor southern queer, weird kids. In Kiernan's portrayal, the horror in Birmingham wasn't the basement demons or the spider infestation, it was the poverty and marginalisation that defined the lives of those characters. It was the first time I'd come across a writer who could see those kids - I knew those kids, I was those kids. But at the same time, there was an obvious abscence in the book that didn't compute with my experiences of queer mingling in the South at all: Where were the black characters?
Maybe it wasn't as obvious if you weren't looking at it from a queer Southern pov, but it was a pretty clear signal to me. Kiernan was writing about the South from experience, but it was a particular version of the South. They had chosen to write about poverty and marginalisation and queerness in the south without any black presence. And that was a choice.
I am wondering if this incident is now lost to the collective memory - I don’t have a link to hand, only my own recall - but Racefail happened while I was still living in the South. Kiernan has written one notable non-white character - Nicky Ky, a Vietnamese-American bi woman who takes a major role in Silk and is the protagonist of Murder of Angels. (I love Nicky, but that is so far from the point right now). Nicky is a former strip club dancer; during Racefail, Kiernan was criticised by an Asian reader for the way they described Nicky as "exotic" (and I think for other Nicky framings as well, but I remember the response much better than the original criticism). Kiernan responded with outrage and derision.
It was familiar to me, way too familiar. I was a white immigrant then, still on a conditional resident visa. White Southern people thought that I was "safe," and quite freely shared their racist thoughts and entitled tirades about immigrants with me, because to them, my whiteness put me outside the category of "immigrant". (Kiernan is also a white immigrant). When I pushed back on those people’s racism, or explained to them what their ideas about immigrants meant to me as an immigrant, they either backpedalled or doubled down. Kiernan was, and still is, doubling down.
But I kept on reading them, after seeing their behaviour during Racefail, and after noticing the abscence of black pepole in their South. I read The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl. And then I read Daughter of Hounds. The way that book uses the words "mongrel" and "miscegenation" to convey the horror of the ghouls set my teeth on edge. More than their mysteriously white southern books, that set me mentally backing away from them.
I still treasured Silk, and Murder of Angels, and The Drowning Girl. In the South, I lived in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance. The older white people who were kind to me, who gave me chances, were mostly racists. Every single employer I ever had in GA was an openly racist white Republican, because those are the people who had the power to employ people in my area. How do you maintain your integrity when those people have absolute power over you? You don't. You either give in to them, mentally check out for 8 hours a day, or you leave. Or some combination of all of those. The nice boss who taught me so much liked to put Fox News on in the office. It was easy to push back on racism from my white coworkers, but when I heard a different boss telling racist jokes to a client, I desperately wanted to walk out the door and never come back and I didn't do it. I was very poor then; I thought I couldn't afford to walk out. I spent years in this maddening cocoon of deep-seated, petulant white racism. So yes, Kiernan's outlook was familiar to me, as was their defensiveness about it.
So I put Kiernan in that same place in my mind as that old boss, the kind one who taught me a lot but used Fox News as soothing background noise; a racist who was there for me at a tough time when I was young. But that is not who Kiernan was to Asian readers and black readers. They were not there for those readers. That much was obvious long before they embraced overt white nationalism.
So why is everyone surprised that Kiernan is now more publicly racist? It feels almost like wishful thinking. Maybe years of defensiveness about how not all Lovecraftian horror fans are racists left readers ill-equipped to recognise that Caitlin Kiernan is a racist? Or they think that if a white person is trans or queer, and can speak with real insight about marginalized white communities, they can't be a racist? Because I am begging you to listen to to queer writers of colour if you believe that.
I used to act like, emotionally, I couldn't afford to walk out on Kiernan's racism. I was wrong then, but at this point the notion would be plain ridiculous. We are not poor, as SFFH readers. Right now I'm reading Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. The main character is a Vietnamese-American trans sex worker called Katrina, and when she describes herself as ""exotic"" while performing on cam, it's in quotes, distinguishing the white outsider's viewpoint from Katrina's own interiority. Pure coincidence I’m reading this right now, but there are so many really fucking good SFFH books out there right now by writers whose insights and care aren't limited to white subjects. Kiernan’s work never met that standard. I knew it, the critic who addressed them during Racefail knew it, I am willing to bet that a lot of people knew it but, like me, didn’t really want to deal with it. The damage was done then even if most people are only waking up to it now.