Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice.

I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject.

Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

Prejudice validates itself as righteous abhorrence of the criminally deviant. So Christian homophobia is just a metonym of that abjection in general.

Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets.

I'm sort of exploring where pacifism and socialism come into conflict. How do you reconcile a passionate rejection of might and violence with an attitude of "nil paseran" - "none shall pass" - in the face of fascism?