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But I know that I'm different and they're not quite me
I was reminded again this afternoon that as far as I can tell, I encountered my first non-binary character in Jean M. Auel's The Valley of Horses (1982), which I read for the first time, partly under my desk in social studies class, in seventh grade.
When they were gone, Jondalar scooped the last dregs of the fermented bilberry juice into two cups and gave one to the enigmatic figure waiting in the quiet dark. The Shamud took it, tacitly understanding they had more to say to each other. The young man scraped the last few coals together near the edge of the blackened circle and added wood until a small fire was glowing. They sat for a while, silently sipping wine, huddled over the flickering warmth.
When Jondalar looked up, the eyes, whose indefinable color was merely dark in the firelight, were scrutinizing him. He felt power in them, and intelligence, but he appraised with equal intensity. The crackling, hissing flames cast moving shadows across the old face, blurring the features, but even in daylight Jondalar had been unable to define any specific characteristics, other than age. Even that was a mystery.
There was strength in the wrinkled face, which lent it youthfulness though the long mane of hair was shocking white. And while the figure beneath the loose clothing was spare and frail, the step had spring. The hands alone spoke unequivocally of great age, but for all their arthritic knobs and blue-veined parchment skin, no palsied flutter shook the cup that was lifted to the mouth.
The movement broke eye contact. Jondalar wondered if the Shamud had done it deliberately to relieve a tension that was growing. He took a sip. "The Shamud good healer, has skill," he said.
"It is a gift of Mudo."
Jondalar strained to hear some quality of timbre or tone that would shade the androgynous healer in one direction or the other, only to satisfy his nagging curiosity. He had not yet discerned whether the Shamud was female or male, but he did have an impression that in spite of the neutrality of gender, the healer had not led a celibate life. The satirical quips were too often accompanied by knowing looks. He wanted to ask, but he didn't know how to phrase his question tactfully.
"Shamud life not easy, must give up much," Jondalar tried. "Did healer ever want mate?"
For an instant the inscrutable eyes widened; then the Shamud broke into sardonic laughter. Jondalar felt a hot flash of embarrassment.
"Whom would you have had me mate, Jondalar? Now, if you had come along in my younger years, I might have been tempted. Ah, but would you have succumbed to my charms? If I had given the Blessing Tree a string of beads, could I have wished you to my bed?" the Shamud said with a slight, demure bend of the head. For a moment, Jondalar was convinced it was a young woman who spoke.
"Or would I have needed to be more circumspect? Your appetites are well developed; could I have aroused your curiosity to a new pleasure?"
Jondalar flushed, sure he had been mistaken, yet strangely drawn to the look of sensuous lechery and the catlike sinuous grace the Shamud projected with a body shift. Of course, the healer was a man, but with a woman's tastes in his pleasures. Many healers drew from both the male and female principle; it gave them stronger powers. Again he heard the sardonic laugh.
"But if the life of a healer is difficult, it's worse for the mate of one. A mate should be a man's first consideration. It would be hard to leave someone like Serenio, for instance, in the middle of the night to take care of someone who was sick, and there are long periods of abstinence required . . ."
The Shamud was leaning forward, talking to him man to man, with a gleam in his eye at the thought of a woman as lovely as Serenio. Jondalar shook his head with puzzlement. Then, with a movement of the shoulders, the masculinity had a different character. One that excluded him.
". . . and I'm not sure I'd want to leave her alone with a lot of rapacious men around."
The Shamud was a woman, but not one that would ever be attracted to him, or he to her, as anything more than a friend. It was true, the healer's power came from the principle of both sexes but was that of a woman with a man's tastes.
The Shamud laughed again, and the voice had no shading of gender. With a level look of person to person that asked human understanding, the old healer continued.
"Tell me, which one am I, Jondalar? Which one would you mate? Some try to find a relationship, one way or another, but it seldom lasts long. Gifts are not an unmixed blessing. A healer has no identity, except in the larger sense. One's personal name is given back, the Shamud effaces self to take on the essence of all. There are benefits, but mating is not usually among them.
"When one is young, being born to a destiny is not necessarily desirable. It is not easy to be different. You may not want to lose your identity. But it doesn't matter—the destiny is yours. There is no other place for one who carries the essence of both man and woman in one body."
In the fire's dying light, the Shamud looked as ancient as the Earth Herself, staring at the coals with unfocused eyes as though seeing another time and place. Jondalar got up to get a few more sticks of wood, then nursed the fire back to life. As the flames took hold, the healer straightened, and the look of irony returned. "That was long ago, and there have been . . . compensations. Not the least is discovering one's talent and gaining knowledge. When the Mother calls one to Her service, it isn't all sacrifice."
I read the first four books of Earth's Children (1980–2011) in middle school and do not regret not returning decades later for the final two; it became much more obvious to me as an adult that the id-engine of the series was problematic on top of problematic with a side order of herbal medicine, heroic engineering, and deep time, which is of course what I noticed and cared about at the time. There's some of that here, with the idea of the character who belongs nowhere except where the magic of their marginalization places them. I still love them and their shape-shifting, truthful trolling of the co-protagonist, especially when Auel's matriarchal Paleolithic is otherwise so heavily cishet. I love that the question of their physical sex is never answered even for the reader. I remembered them when most of the rest of my memories of that book had reduced to a cave lion cub, river travel, and lots of porny euphemisms for the tab-a-slot-b of m/f sex. And now the book at the top of the stack at my bedside has a non-binary protagonist, so.
When they were gone, Jondalar scooped the last dregs of the fermented bilberry juice into two cups and gave one to the enigmatic figure waiting in the quiet dark. The Shamud took it, tacitly understanding they had more to say to each other. The young man scraped the last few coals together near the edge of the blackened circle and added wood until a small fire was glowing. They sat for a while, silently sipping wine, huddled over the flickering warmth.
When Jondalar looked up, the eyes, whose indefinable color was merely dark in the firelight, were scrutinizing him. He felt power in them, and intelligence, but he appraised with equal intensity. The crackling, hissing flames cast moving shadows across the old face, blurring the features, but even in daylight Jondalar had been unable to define any specific characteristics, other than age. Even that was a mystery.
There was strength in the wrinkled face, which lent it youthfulness though the long mane of hair was shocking white. And while the figure beneath the loose clothing was spare and frail, the step had spring. The hands alone spoke unequivocally of great age, but for all their arthritic knobs and blue-veined parchment skin, no palsied flutter shook the cup that was lifted to the mouth.
The movement broke eye contact. Jondalar wondered if the Shamud had done it deliberately to relieve a tension that was growing. He took a sip. "The Shamud good healer, has skill," he said.
"It is a gift of Mudo."
Jondalar strained to hear some quality of timbre or tone that would shade the androgynous healer in one direction or the other, only to satisfy his nagging curiosity. He had not yet discerned whether the Shamud was female or male, but he did have an impression that in spite of the neutrality of gender, the healer had not led a celibate life. The satirical quips were too often accompanied by knowing looks. He wanted to ask, but he didn't know how to phrase his question tactfully.
"Shamud life not easy, must give up much," Jondalar tried. "Did healer ever want mate?"
For an instant the inscrutable eyes widened; then the Shamud broke into sardonic laughter. Jondalar felt a hot flash of embarrassment.
"Whom would you have had me mate, Jondalar? Now, if you had come along in my younger years, I might have been tempted. Ah, but would you have succumbed to my charms? If I had given the Blessing Tree a string of beads, could I have wished you to my bed?" the Shamud said with a slight, demure bend of the head. For a moment, Jondalar was convinced it was a young woman who spoke.
"Or would I have needed to be more circumspect? Your appetites are well developed; could I have aroused your curiosity to a new pleasure?"
Jondalar flushed, sure he had been mistaken, yet strangely drawn to the look of sensuous lechery and the catlike sinuous grace the Shamud projected with a body shift. Of course, the healer was a man, but with a woman's tastes in his pleasures. Many healers drew from both the male and female principle; it gave them stronger powers. Again he heard the sardonic laugh.
"But if the life of a healer is difficult, it's worse for the mate of one. A mate should be a man's first consideration. It would be hard to leave someone like Serenio, for instance, in the middle of the night to take care of someone who was sick, and there are long periods of abstinence required . . ."
The Shamud was leaning forward, talking to him man to man, with a gleam in his eye at the thought of a woman as lovely as Serenio. Jondalar shook his head with puzzlement. Then, with a movement of the shoulders, the masculinity had a different character. One that excluded him.
". . . and I'm not sure I'd want to leave her alone with a lot of rapacious men around."
The Shamud was a woman, but not one that would ever be attracted to him, or he to her, as anything more than a friend. It was true, the healer's power came from the principle of both sexes but was that of a woman with a man's tastes.
The Shamud laughed again, and the voice had no shading of gender. With a level look of person to person that asked human understanding, the old healer continued.
"Tell me, which one am I, Jondalar? Which one would you mate? Some try to find a relationship, one way or another, but it seldom lasts long. Gifts are not an unmixed blessing. A healer has no identity, except in the larger sense. One's personal name is given back, the Shamud effaces self to take on the essence of all. There are benefits, but mating is not usually among them.
"When one is young, being born to a destiny is not necessarily desirable. It is not easy to be different. You may not want to lose your identity. But it doesn't matter—the destiny is yours. There is no other place for one who carries the essence of both man and woman in one body."
In the fire's dying light, the Shamud looked as ancient as the Earth Herself, staring at the coals with unfocused eyes as though seeing another time and place. Jondalar got up to get a few more sticks of wood, then nursed the fire back to life. As the flames took hold, the healer straightened, and the look of irony returned. "That was long ago, and there have been . . . compensations. Not the least is discovering one's talent and gaining knowledge. When the Mother calls one to Her service, it isn't all sacrifice."
I read the first four books of Earth's Children (1980–2011) in middle school and do not regret not returning decades later for the final two; it became much more obvious to me as an adult that the id-engine of the series was problematic on top of problematic with a side order of herbal medicine, heroic engineering, and deep time, which is of course what I noticed and cared about at the time. There's some of that here, with the idea of the character who belongs nowhere except where the magic of their marginalization places them. I still love them and their shape-shifting, truthful trolling of the co-protagonist, especially when Auel's matriarchal Paleolithic is otherwise so heavily cishet. I love that the question of their physical sex is never answered even for the reader. I remembered them when most of the rest of my memories of that book had reduced to a cave lion cub, river travel, and lots of porny euphemisms for the tab-a-slot-b of m/f sex. And now the book at the top of the stack at my bedside has a non-binary protagonist, so.
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It's a legitimate value!
(I remain amazed this entire series was just hanging out on the shelves of a middle school library, except that it was clearly the sort of thing that adolescents, for one reason or another, want to read.)
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Mary Renault is very much history RPF. I recall her sex scenes as oblique except for Nikeratos/Axiothea in The Mask of Apollo, adrenaline-fueled situational bisexuality for the win.
(Falcon Crest was very detailed about the winemaking history of California!)
Dick Francis novels are not so much with the sex scenes, but they are wonderful about the neepery of various professions. (I learned a lot about wine from Proof (1984).)
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Same. It gave me very high standards for productions of the Bacchae.