Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of Baffling Magazine.

What makes a story “baffling”? Perhaps it’s when a story defies neat categorization. Neither fish nor fowl, it exists in the regions between literary fabulism, science fiction, horror and fantasy. A “baffling” story also has a queer point of view—one with a voice that centers gay, lesbian, bi, trans, ace and nonbinary lives. 

We love a “baffling” story that is both unapologetically queer and unashamedly weird, and are particularly fond of the Queer Weird aesthetic that exists in the fiction of Samuel R Delany and the late Randal Kenan, the works of Jeanette Winterson and the British playwright Joe Orton. The work in Baffling is very much in conversation with these master practitioners of interstitial fiction. Introducing more diverse and queer voices in speculative fiction is one of the major reasons why Baffling was created, contributing in the vein of small publishers like Lethe Press, or the Richmond-based publisher Valancourt Books, who has brought the queer magical realist novels of the filmmaker Philip Ridley back into print.

Here you will read stories that put the flash in flash fiction, each story a strange glittering jewel:

• Jewelle Gomez gives us a tale of her beloved Black lesbian vampire, Gilda, this time sending her into the near future.

• Izzy Wasserstein weaves a siren song in an extraterrestrial ocean.

• Maxwell Ian Gold’s prose poem is a cosmic horror take on coming out.

• And Nino Cipri spins a tale of existential dread that has just the whisper of the supernatural.

And that’s just the first issue! dave and I have found some real gems in our submissions, and we are eager to share them with you. Stick around to be bewitched, disturbed and baffled. 

Craig L. Gidney

Co-Editor, Baffling Magazine