The history of James Tiptree, Jr. is fairly well documented in our field. There are biographies, posthumous collections, an award named for her, as well as the long memory of letters, fanzines, and the people still living who knew Tiptree and, later, knew Alice Sheldon, the woman behind him. Tiptree/Sheldon won every major genre award, some more than once; she is now being inducted, as of 2012, into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
However, the discussion of Tiptree/Sheldon as a queer writer is often glossed over—I was, until reading a letter from her that Joanna Russ reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen, unaware of her sexuality. In fact, the complicated nature of her expression of sexuality and the boundaries of her world often seem to prevent folks from talking about herself-identification as a lesbian. Not only was Tiptree/Sheldon a major writer of speculative fiction that dealt with complex ideas about gender and identity expression, she was also herself a queer—and potentially genderqueer, in today’s parlance—writer. As Julie Phillips says in her biography of Tiptree/Sheldon, “Alice never had an affair with a woman; she was always drawn to girls and women who didn’t return her love. She loved men, slept with them, married them, depended on them, sought their interest and attention. But loving women is one of her stories, a submerged plot within the public plot of her two marriages, another secret identity” (61).
During the Pride Month Extravaganza, I want to honor those who have gone before—and James Tiptree, Jr., or Alice Sheldon, or Raccoona Sheldon, is one of the greatest who have paved the way.
[Read on.]