Being a genre geek, I’ve been to many fan conventions that run the gamut from little, tiny Millenicon to big and mighty Dragon*Con (I’ve never braved any of the insanely large comic conventions). I’ve experienced many…wild things while at these conventions including (but not limited to): old man in leather diaper being led by dominatrix, three couples making out on one king sized bed (at my own party, no less), a game of Twister that should have never occurred and never spoken about, blue liquor in a plastic jug being carried by a large, scary bearded man (free advice: don’t drink the blue liquor), a ‘Big Boy Dance Off’, and a near riot by Sherrilyn Kenyon fans (most dressed in character) when a signing closed early. And then there’s the Mo*Con experience.

Not all conventions have such shenanigans. Many are quieter, professional affairs with room parties that are clean, harmless fun. And then there’s Mo*Con.

Some conventions have a whole slate of mind-bending literary panels with respected ladies and gentlemen from the world of speculative fiction. Workshops. Pitch sessions. Coffee with editors. And then there’s Mo*Con.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that Mo*Con is one tricky bastard to categorize. It’s not out-and-out wild, but the revelry can toe the line (ambulances are a common year-to-year theme). There are no on-the-fringe-of-fandom activities, though the con is far from restrained. There is a level of professionalism to the convention, but editors and publishers are generally free from the work/fun of typical conventions.

Let’s just say that Mo*Con is a fun time with friends of like-minded interests where responsible, yet plentiful drinking and partying occurs. It’s about being Maurice Broaddus. Also, it just so happens that Mo*Con is held in the basement of a fairly large church.

This year’s guests of honor included horror icons Brian Keene, Wrath James White, and Gary A. Braunbeck. Each go around the convention includes one special guest who is in charge of programming. This year that guest was Kelli Owen (formerly Kelli Dunlap). The theme of this year’s convention was sex. For those who know Kelli you can imagine the sort of programming she would create. Kelli did not disappoint.

Friday night included a convention hosted dinner (served up by Sara Larson). Best consuite offering ever. After dinner was Open Mic time. I’d estimate that nearly twenty people participated, including one creepy person in a cow suit who read from the journal of an anorexic zombie and seems to follow Nicole Cushing everywhere she goes. She really should call the FBI about it. Brian Keene read his story “I Sing a New Psalm” from DARK FAITH (that produced more than a few teary eyes). Alethea Kontis read a delightful story involving a precocious queen that kills Brian Keene. I don’t remember so much of “Killing Keene” as I was transfixed by the delightful striped leggings Alethea wore and that were part of the performance.

After the readings, it was time to haul ourselves to Maurice’s house (yes, Maurice Broaddus doesn’t have a room party, he has a HOUSE PARTY). I drank a bit too much. Kept harassing a couple of ladies with a bottle of Menage-a-Trois wine (shh, don’t tell my wife!), and woke up somewhere south of Indianapolis with a massive migraine and a note taped to my forehead that read “Thanks for the fun. I hope the rash gets better.”

I hiked my way back north to the church, just in time for the first of three panels hosted by Kelli. The first was rather traditional (yet informative) that had to do with blogging and being a writer. The second panel…I don’t remember the second panel. I was in the audience, but by this point the caffeine had started to wear off. We were served another fabulous meal by the convention and then were ordered back into the basement for the third panel, invigorated and ready to rock.

Turns out this was the sex panel.

The panel turned into a wild and raucous couple of hours of debasement and debauchery. From the start, Kelli grabs one of Wrath James White’s recent Leisure novels and pulls Bob Ford to the stage and orders him to read an explicit sex scene from the book. Bob handled it like a champ. He never stuttered, didn’t crack a smile, or beg to be let off the hook. He took it like a man and gave a professional reading of…I’m no prude but even this stuff was making me blush…graphic sex. After awhile I’d heard enough and decided to check out the art room. Unfortunately, the convention organizers had placed the artists’ area way in the back of the church. This led to many people missing some fantastic artwork by the likes of Steven Gilberts and Alethea Kontis.

I meandered outside and listened to Brian Keene and Gary Braunbeck talk about recent movies I haven’t seen (I have two young children, that means Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakal for me) so I didn’t have anything meaningful to add to the discussion.

I went back inside just after the sex panel had finished. People were walking out wearing dazed expressions and…looks of fear. Many sweated, most blushed, hair was tousled, and everyone wanted water. I’m not sure what happened in that basement Saturday evening. Perhaps the world should not know.

Saturday night Maurice had ANOTHER house party. Thirty people enjoyed a liquor bar flush with beer and booze. I absconded with a bottle of white wine and started to drink. I remember most of the evening…thinking “Wow, Wrath really IS a handsome man” and “Why isn’t Debbie Kuhn more amused with my charm and amazing personality” and “Maurice must have paid off the cops or we’d all be arrested for disorderly conduct.”

I awoke the next day face down behind a beat up Chevy Nova by the entrance of a trailer park. A note taped to my forehead read “Thanks for the fun. BTW, that’s a nasty rash. Try some cream.”

Turns out I had to miss the Sunday festivities. Overnight, my throat had swollen and I could barely talk. I decided to head back to Lexington. Despite the terrible rainfall (this was the Sunday of the awful flooding in Nashville), I made it home safe and sound.

And, believe it or not, the church did not crumble down on the sinners and God did not send lightning down to smite the blasphemers. Phew.

Okay. There are parts of this convention report that were embellished. There’s some fact. There’s some fiction. I’m going to let the readers decide what was what.

Jason Sizemore is the owner and managing editor of Apex Publications. He’s nowhere near as wild and fun as this report makes him out to be.

A few years ago, I was speaking to a fellow black horror writer and she told me that she didn’t write characters of color in her work. She didn’t think it was important, even as a black writer, for her to write black characters (and descriptions of characters with dark hair and brown eyes were enough). It was more important for her to write for her chosen audience, who she perceived as white, and she didn’t want to in anyway alienate them.

This is how badly issues of race have infected and confused some people.

Yes, there is a current brouhaha brewing in speculative fiction that has since been dubbed RaceFail ’09. It started when Elizabeth Bear wrote a piece on writing the other which was then openly disagreed with. Hilarity ensued (catalogued here). I, too, wrote a piece on writing the other (in a response to something Jay Lake had written; mind you, both pieces came out a few YEARS ago) and have stayed out of this round of self-examination except to offer up a play-along cultural appropriation bingo card to go along with the “fantasy/science fiction no racism edition” bingo card. And yet, as Chesya Burke laments, such a discussion has largely not reared its head in the horror community. I don’t expect it to, frankly. Not to be too pointed about a race discussion in horror, but the genre largely amounts to white folks writing about white folks for the consumption of white folks. In other words, horror circumvents the issue of “writing the other” by … not.

With a few exceptions, race isn’t discussed much in the horror genre. Most folks are afraid to discuss it or admit there is a problem. With good cause: the last horror brand RaceFail discussion involved the release of Brandon Massey’s anthology series, Dark Dreams. The bulk of the discussion revolved around the series being the equivalent of reverse discrimination (because, you know, there are no all-white, even more specifically, all-white-male, horror anthology series) or writer affirmative action (because obviously writers like Tananarive Due, L.A. Banks, Wrath James White, Eric Jerome Dickey, Zane, or, I humbly submit, myself, can’t be published elsewhere).

In some ways, I can see why RaceFail has gone on within the science fiction and fantasy genre/communities. By the nature of those genres, they explore (and are allowed to explore) big ideas. Horror too often prides itself on being the “lowest common denominator” genre, not built for rigorous idea exploration. “I’m doing an analysis of man’s inhumanity to man” usually amounts to puerile masturbatory fantasies of rape and torture justified by someone getting their comeuppance in the end.

Let’s be honest, there are two kinds of writers/readers. The first don’t want to be challenged. They essentially want Stephen King redux, rearranging the deck chairs on a familiar cruise. They cling to their comfort zone of base elements, slaves to the tropes, as they await the playing out of the ensuing hilarity. Rarely is there an examination of the human condition, existence, or the exploration of a big idea. For every Gary Braunbeck there are hundreds of … pick your blood-splattered cover.

The other kind looks for a new experience. They want to go to a new place and think about things they haven’t before. Yet, when I hear horror writers talking about their craft in term of such artistic terms, there is a chorus decrying such lofty literary ideas or critical analysis. How many times have even best of the mid-list writers complained about their publisher neutering their work for the sake of reaching their market? Their lowest common denominator audience.

Right now, the genre can barely handle a discussion on women in the genre. That discussion breaks one of two ways: who are the women who write in the genre (so the discussion becomes a listing of women writers) or it centers around “can women be scary writers?” (and yes, that discussion is as ignorant as it sounds). And that’s before we talk in general about sexism in the genre or its conventions.

I was reading Kelli Dunlap’s post on diversity in the genre. Normally, when someone tells me “they don’t see race” it sets off a red flag of suspicion with me because that typically means “as long as all the people of color act and think like me, we have no race problem.” But I’m in her peer group. I look around our close circle of writer friends and I see the guests for Mo*Con, and I, too, see the diversity. I’m tempted not to engage in a discussion about women in the genre because I’m surrounded by fierce women whose talent I’d question at my own peril. But then I have to wonder if this is a chicken or egg dilemma: was there diversity in the genre to begin with or did we, The Others adrift in the sea of The Majority, simply reach out to each other?

So could horror handle a conversation involving cultural appropriation, the concept of white privilege, or even the idea of racism in the genre (much less among its writers)? The fact of the matter is that I could probably name the prominent writers of color in the horror genre and know most if not all of them. Sill, I don’t often hear them discussed in the various horror communities. What I hear is how race doesn’t matter, all readers care about is a good yarn. Though I suspect that’s true as long as that yarn doesn’t stretch them too far. And that’s the ultimate RaceFail.

Maurice Broaddus is a writer, scientist, and lay leader at The Dwelling Place Church. He’s been published in dozens of markets, including the Dark Dreams II and III anthologies, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, Horror Literature Quarterly, and Weird Tales. He is also co-author of Orgy of Souls. His sole goal is to be a big enough name to be able to snub people at conventions. In preparation for this, he often practices speaking of himself in the third person.