The book reading at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco this past Thursday featured a lineup of contributors who wrote about the gaming and fantasy side of the geek realm, along with editors Annalee and Charlie. (It’s funny how the split happened that way—initially I had thought it would be cool to read at City Lights, what with its place in literary history, but it wound up that it made more sense for me to read at Modern Times on Feb. 1, which is more weighted towards the science geeks anyway.)

Even though I wasn’t reading, I decided to go anyway because I thought it would be cool to meet as many of the other contributors as possible and get them to sign my copy of the book—which is an appropriately geeky impulse, is it not? Besides, my husband was off on Easter Island and I had some serious procrastinating to do on some writing. So off to North Beach I went.

The cozy poetry room upstairs filled up with a crowd of nearly 100 people (I’m guessing) split pretty evenly between male and female. For some reason, my initial reaction was to be surprised by that—I guess I was expecting a more exclusively female turnout—but it just shows how I need to realize that there are more and more people who realize that feminism is not just a women’s issue but a human issue. So it was great to see the broad range of support.

Dressed in trousers, shirtsleeves, tie, and fedora, Annalee introduced the book and the first speaker. When lead-off reader and comic book writer Devin Grayson took the microphone she deadpanned, “All I can say is, gaming at my house afterward.” Devin then read from her essay “Sidekicks” about how as a kid playing pretend Star Wars she insisted on being Han Solo even though that meant a boy would have to play Leia, and she went on to analyze the characteristics of sidekicks in comics.

Whereas Grayson is a veteran of comic book conventions, Michelle Villanueva took the microphone to read before an audience for her first time. She shared passages from her essay “Neville-mania” about writing a blog in the persona of a character from the Harry Potter books, and she gave us the most dramatic moment of the evening when she read the words, “Although I haven’t told my boyfriend that I role-play a male character…” Then she interrupted herself to point out that he was there, so the secret was out—but he took it all in stride among all the laughter. Afterward, Annalee commented, “We had a fan fiction outing tonight!” You can read Michelle’s take on this, too.

Charlie read next from her essay, “I Am Wonk, Hear Me Analyze,” which begins, “I became a wonk about the same time I became a woman, so the two transitions have always been inseparable to me.” She described some of the cultural differences between working as a “just the facts” macho reporter versus getting into the minutia of healthcare policy, and after her piece commented, “This is like the gender fuck reading tonight!” (Indeed—could a SSAG production of Twelfth Night be next?)

In her introduction of journalist and gamer Quinn Norton, Annalee said, “We seem to be veering a little more towards…hobbies.” Quinn began to read partway through her essay, “Dreaming in Unison,” about being a rare woman in the computer gaming world:
The things I learned in gaming turn out to apply beautifully to real life. Here is a helpful checklist:

• Expect fights in bars and taverns.
• Go on, check the door. It’s unlocked more often than you’d think it would be.
• When all else fails and all hope is lost, it never hurts to choose to disbelieve.
• Sometimes in life, narrative trumps all other rules.
• The dice favor style.
• When you’re hopelessly lost, the right-hand rule will get you out.

But what resonated with me, a non-gamer, was this: “Boys get better fantasy lives. Go steal them.” I was right there with Annalee when she commented afterward, “Quinn is my dungeonmaster.”

By chance, Morgan Romine had wound up sitting next to me, and she was up to read next from her piece, “Fantasy to Frag Doll: The Story of a Gamer Princess.” She told about how—and this is so different from my former neck of the woods in physics, where I downplayed my femininity—she used her feminine wiles in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, for short) to become queen and then empress in their fictional worlds. (Morgan made me feel old—when we chatted before the reading, she was telling me about how the first computer that she played on when she was six years old was a Mac SE. Yep, and that was the first computer my then-boyfriend-now-husband had, too—in college! I couldn’t restrain myself from crying out, “Ohmigod, you’re a babe!”)

Finally, Annalee read from her essay, “When Diana Prince Takes Off Her Glasses.” For the one or two people in the audience not properly educated in ’70s pop culture, Annalee added: “Diana Prince is the secret identity of Wonder Woman.” “DUHHH!” Devin called out, to which Annalee responded, “I love you guys!” Annalee talked about how Wonder Woman in the TV series fascinated her as a girl because of the transformation from geek to fantasy when those glasses came off, and how these issues of image, gender, and geekiness became a thread in her life from hanging out with hackers in high school to becoming a writer navigating the worlds of science and technology.

In the Q & A (and Annalee invited me to come up, too), most of the questions were about pop culture and gaming, about which I have not a clue, though I did answer one question about the significance of blogging in the female geek dialogue (I think all of the anonymous female scientists and engineers out there describing their experiences is invaluable, because sometimes they are telling truths that could be dangerous for them to admit with known identities, because the culture of science has not been as fair or as self-examining as it is ready to admit to itself).

Lots of books got passed around and signed—it kind of felt like the last day of school that way—and it was really cool to chat with some of the longtime geek women who came, including a woman who started out in hardware engineering years ago and switched to writing when she got replaced by a computer to do her job. I’m hoping that with the even greater publicity for the Feb. 1 reading it can be an even larger female geek lovefest!

All good stuff, and I hope these tidbits may have stimulated an appetite for the book out there! There’s more good stuff to come at the February 1st reading, which includes yours truly.

This entry was posted by Kristin A. on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Sex & gender, Inspiring women, Accolades, Games and play, True confessions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.