In celebration of the book’s release Miller contributed essays to My Favorite Bit and Big Idea, participated in a Reddit r/Books AMA, and was interviewed by Dominic Loise for F(r)iction.

“Angel, Monster, Man” took shape in my mind while reading gay fiction and poetry of the 1980’s.*  You can’t help but be struck by the staggering volume of young, fresh, powerful, innovative artists whose voices were silenced by HIV/AIDS before they’d had a chance to change the world like they clearly would have. 

And not just writers – the editors, agents, critics, audiences who supported and built these voices… it’s hard not to come away feeling like fiction was in the middle of a real revolution in terms of storytelling and voice and content and attitude, which was strangled in its crib by a deadly disease and a toxic homophobic patriarchy. 

But I started thinking: what could have happened, if all that rage and talent and fire hadn’t been snuffed out? What if it came to life and changed everything? All the powerful words that went unwritten, or were written and lost because there was no one left to get them out into the world – what if they all added up to something real – and terrifying?

My Favorite Bit

Thinking about this monster hiding in a hostile world got me thinking about queer people forced to pass for straight in order to stay alive, and how passing privilege can be a tool for dismantling oppressive infrastructures—which got combined with the fact that 1982 was the year an invisible murderous invasion DID take place (that’s when the CDC identified a new, fatal, sexually-transmitted immune system disorder and gave it the name AIDS)—and that the early 1980’s saw a significant uptick in the NYC movement against racist police violence—and before I knew it I had a solid piece of fanfic on my hands: “Things With Beards,” about a closeted MacReady returning from Antarctica to his home in Harlem, all his memories of bloody shapeshifting aliens erased, hooking up with old flames but possibly turning them into Things, supporting Black resistance to NYPD brutality. 

Big Idea

joeatsfood
What are your top 3 monsters (in any media)? Now, sort them into f*ck, marry, kill

Sam_J_Miller AMA Author

that is INSANELY TOUGH

probably:

1. Frankenstein’s Monster
2. King Kong
3. The Thing

Marry Kong, he’s very sweet. F the Monster, he’s probably got a lot of pent up aggression and is pretty wild in the sack. Kill the Thing, because, I’m just not about that getting dissolved and eaten alive by acid spaghetti tentacle life.

Reddit r/Books AMA

A draw for me for your work was how you write about masculinity. Tell us about your new book BOYS, BEASTS & MEN from Tachyon.

I’ve always wanted to do a short story collection. I love short stories and I love writing them. They’re so special and different from novels. I realized as I was working on this collection and gathering these stories together that it really emerged as the idea of masculinity as this constant obsession of mine. What does it mean to be a male person in a patriarchal world and in a world where toxic masculinity is a reality? This is the iteration that I came up against again and again. If you’re a male person, whether you’re cis or trans or anything, how do you inhabit that identity in a way that’s not violent, oppressive, or toxic? That’s a constant work in progress. There’s always going to be things popping up. Socialization is so deep and our exposure to problematic aspects of maleness and male relationships is always evolving and changing. Even if you are really good in some ways, you might be really terrible in others. This collection is constantly reevaluating that. It’s not that I’m only interested in male characters—many of the stories in the collection are narrated by women—but that complicated thing of monstrosity and how easily toxic masculinity can make people monsters.  

F(r)iction