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marythefan and I have had this running argument over the relative queerness of slash, and here's the thing. I was entirely wrong, and she was entirely right. Now, with the fervor of the convert (the very lazy, conflict-avoidant, cognitively muddled convert...), I want to try to make this idea clear to people like me, who think it sounds like bullshit at first. Hopefully it will take somewhat less effort than moving in with each one of you individually and talking for five years. *g*
There's this thing, this community and tradition, that is slash fandom. But there's also this thing, this somewhat less organized but no less creative and articulate and engaged group of people who are queer media fans. (By this you may wonder whether I mean "queer fans of media" or "fans of queer media." That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try to get back to it in a second, okay? Stick with me for the moment.) It's a big Venn Diagram: there's slash space and queer space, and then a whole lot of people (like myself) who identify as both, who are entrenched in both perspectives and both communities. And many (most?) of us discovered and entered both communities simultaneously, which is why I think it's so easy for us to assume that the two groups are identical. They aren't.
It's easy to see from one direction, really. The world is FULL of queer people who are science fiction geeks and comic book geeks and pop culture junkies, but who don't give a hot damn about slash fandom. We all know that -- I mean, surely we all know that! Some of them just think it's kind of an oddball thing to be into, some think it's fine and dandy but not their cup of tea, and some of them are pretty suspicious of slash for a multitude of reasons. But they are definitely NOT slashers, and they more often than not don't really understand or appreciate what slash is. They are outsiders to what we do as slashers. They know that, and we know that.
What's harder, it seems like, for some slashers to recognize is that it's exactly the same from the other angle. Being a slasher doesn't mean you necessarily have the slightest insight into, or interest in, the queer community. The acafan and meta-heavy wing of slash fandom has been saying this for some time: that slashers don't necessarily write about queerness, they write about things that relate largely to straight femaleness. Actually, I added in the "necessarily" -- that's often left out of the position statement, which I think is vastly more correct if you include that one word. There ARE slashers who write about queerness -- both straight and queer slashers who do so. Some slash does that. Just not *all* slash.
So, if a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) has been spilled over what slash is -- what does it mean, separate from that, to have queer fandom? Essentially, I would say it's a space within Fandom that looks at texts for what they say about what it means to be queer. Sometimes that means queer subtext -- sometimes it means queer characters -- sometimes it means texts that challenge social norms about sex and gender in ways that are relevant to queer experience. But in order to do any of this, to participate in a legitimately queer fandom...I'm not going to be the border police and say, yes, you have to be queer -- but you have to have some legitimate, real sense of what "queer experience" could mean. In the majority of cases, yes, that's going to come about because you identify as queer yourself; it's normally going to be lived experience, not the vicarious experience of the ally.
I can already feel the objections some people are going to make to this. Queer people disagree with each other all the time! Gay men have experiences and concerns that are different from those of lesbians! Bisexual people have experiences that are different from both! Bisexual people who live within the queer community have a different perspective than bisexual people in heterosexual marriages! Transgendered people are a whole separate thing! Race! Class! Nationality! Religion! Individual difference! Okay -- yes. "Queer experience" is a false singular; the reality is, of course, "queer experiences." And that's what makes queer fandom fun and exciting -- if we all agreed on what images and media and positions spoke most clearly to us, there'd be no point in talking about it at all. Diversity, huzzah!
However, for the most part, what you can say is that people who identify as queer do so because they feel like their lives are different than they would be if they were straight. People who *don't* believe that are very unlikely to take on the label of queer or be very interested in queer analysis. How different? In what way? How should we use that difference as consumers and producers of media? What are the political uses and limits of the idea of difference? Those are the conversations that go on in queer fandom. That's what we talk about.
Those are not questions that are about slash. Slashers, on an individual level, may participate in queer fandom, and they may bring what's going on over there back into slash. In fact, I think that's been happening at a good clip for the last ten years, leading to an immense surge in fresh, interesting voices in slash that largely weren't there Back In the Day.
Slash is largely about pleasure. That's not to denigrate it as merely porn or merely entertainment: pleasure, particularly female pleasure, is a powerful and politically-charged concept. We still live in a society that is profoundly ambivalent about female sexual pleasure: we're fascinated by it and we resent and fear it as well. For women to take full responsibility for who they are as sexual beings is not unimportant, and for women to insist on varieties of romantic fantasy and erotic stimulation that speak to *them,* not to the people they've been informed they should be -- that matter. Slash matters.
But queerness isn't about female pleasure and female pleasure isn't about queerness. It's just that there are a lot of us for whom the two are related in various ways, and a lot of those very people have been hugely influental in shaping *both* the slash community and the queer fannish community, so that there's a constant flow of ideas and dialogue between the two that can even obscure the fact that it's a conversation *between* rather than a conversation *among* or *within.*
Hopefully this provides some context for some of the things I've said lately, both here and incathexys's journal, about my discomfort with the way the slash community often deals with gayness -- the OMG, THAT'S SO GAY! discourse. Because, look, here's the thing: slashers invented slashiness. Not y'all personally, but the current generation of slashers inherited a tradition and shaped it and refined it and evolved it, and we who are slashers, who are within that community, are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of what "slashy" means. Not that we always agree with each other -- again, half the fun! But it would be flatly ridiculous for someone to come in from outside the slash community and tell us what's slashy and what's not. We know slash. That's our turf as slashers.
Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Doesn't that just make sense? I mean, I have Jewish friends and have studied Judaism and truly admire the religion and the culture in many ways -- but as much as an ally as I consider myself, I would never in a bazillion years blithely assume I could announce what was a so very Jewish way to think, act, be, believe. And if I did, if I wrote in my livejournal about how X character's actions were just, my God! SO JEWISH, you know?!? -- particularly when the character isn't canonically Jewish, but just pings my shiksa sense of what "Jewishness" means...I would expect my Jewish readers to look askance at me. It would be, at best, a weird thing to say, and at worst, an immensely insensitive thing to say. Even if they agreed with me that there was something Jewishy about that moment, I think they'd be justified in wondering wtf I was thinking when I said that.
That's how I often feel when I see people who are entrenched in the slash community but not in the queer fan community making similar statements about queerness. I get that slash fans are generally natural allies; I adore many of my straight sisters in slash fandom, and I believe that most of them truly are innocent of homophobia. But it makes me feel weird to listen to people who are allies, who are interested, but who are outsiders who possess privilege in this situation, pretend to operate from a position of insiderness. It's kind of patronizing, just like it would be if I charged around having all the answers about what, say, Asian-Americans were really like. I might be right in many cases, or I might be dead wrong -- more likely, it's oversimplifying to say yes, I got it right or no, I got it wrong. But whatever, the point is, I wouldn't do it because it's an inappropriate position for me as a white American to take. If I want to talk about Asian-Americanness -- say, because I'm writing a CSI story about Archie or a Buffy/Satsu epic -- I would listen a lot more than I talked. I would try to be faithful to what I heard people whose experience it actually was saying.
That so many slash fans believe that advice can't possibly apply to them -- freaks me out, actually. Being a slasher is not a Gay Ghetto Pass. It's one thing to say, you know, for the purposes of my stories, I don't need to know about queerness, because these characters aren't "really" queer, they're "really" reflections of my experience, on which I am an expert. I have mixed feelings about that statment, but I can appreciate the intellectual honesty of it.
My sense of compromise grinds to a halt when slash fandom claims the authority to parse not what is slashy, but what is gay. If you care about queer experience, do what other power majorities do when they want to learn about and be involved with a minority group: listen, listen some more, and when you speak, speak from a position of someone who is a guest in other peoples' reality, not from a false sense of insiderness or queer credibility. If you don't care about queer experience, that's okay, too. Just don't say that you do. Don't pronounce about gayness as a lark if the reality is that gayness is irrelevant to what you care about as a slasher -- which is slashiness.
marythefan and I have had this running argument over the relative queerness of slash, and here's the thing. I was entirely wrong, and she was entirely right. Now, with the fervor of the convert (the very lazy, conflict-avoidant, cognitively muddled convert...), I want to try to make this idea clear to people like me, who think it sounds like bullshit at first. Hopefully it will take somewhat less effort than moving in with each one of you individually and talking for five years. *g*There's this thing, this community and tradition, that is slash fandom. But there's also this thing, this somewhat less organized but no less creative and articulate and engaged group of people who are queer media fans. (By this you may wonder whether I mean "queer fans of media" or "fans of queer media." That's not an easy question to answer, but I'll try to get back to it in a second, okay? Stick with me for the moment.) It's a big Venn Diagram: there's slash space and queer space, and then a whole lot of people (like myself) who identify as both, who are entrenched in both perspectives and both communities. And many (most?) of us discovered and entered both communities simultaneously, which is why I think it's so easy for us to assume that the two groups are identical. They aren't.
It's easy to see from one direction, really. The world is FULL of queer people who are science fiction geeks and comic book geeks and pop culture junkies, but who don't give a hot damn about slash fandom. We all know that -- I mean, surely we all know that! Some of them just think it's kind of an oddball thing to be into, some think it's fine and dandy but not their cup of tea, and some of them are pretty suspicious of slash for a multitude of reasons. But they are definitely NOT slashers, and they more often than not don't really understand or appreciate what slash is. They are outsiders to what we do as slashers. They know that, and we know that.
What's harder, it seems like, for some slashers to recognize is that it's exactly the same from the other angle. Being a slasher doesn't mean you necessarily have the slightest insight into, or interest in, the queer community. The acafan and meta-heavy wing of slash fandom has been saying this for some time: that slashers don't necessarily write about queerness, they write about things that relate largely to straight femaleness. Actually, I added in the "necessarily" -- that's often left out of the position statement, which I think is vastly more correct if you include that one word. There ARE slashers who write about queerness -- both straight and queer slashers who do so. Some slash does that. Just not *all* slash.
So, if a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) has been spilled over what slash is -- what does it mean, separate from that, to have queer fandom? Essentially, I would say it's a space within Fandom that looks at texts for what they say about what it means to be queer. Sometimes that means queer subtext -- sometimes it means queer characters -- sometimes it means texts that challenge social norms about sex and gender in ways that are relevant to queer experience. But in order to do any of this, to participate in a legitimately queer fandom...I'm not going to be the border police and say, yes, you have to be queer -- but you have to have some legitimate, real sense of what "queer experience" could mean. In the majority of cases, yes, that's going to come about because you identify as queer yourself; it's normally going to be lived experience, not the vicarious experience of the ally.
I can already feel the objections some people are going to make to this. Queer people disagree with each other all the time! Gay men have experiences and concerns that are different from those of lesbians! Bisexual people have experiences that are different from both! Bisexual people who live within the queer community have a different perspective than bisexual people in heterosexual marriages! Transgendered people are a whole separate thing! Race! Class! Nationality! Religion! Individual difference! Okay -- yes. "Queer experience" is a false singular; the reality is, of course, "queer experiences." And that's what makes queer fandom fun and exciting -- if we all agreed on what images and media and positions spoke most clearly to us, there'd be no point in talking about it at all. Diversity, huzzah!
However, for the most part, what you can say is that people who identify as queer do so because they feel like their lives are different than they would be if they were straight. People who *don't* believe that are very unlikely to take on the label of queer or be very interested in queer analysis. How different? In what way? How should we use that difference as consumers and producers of media? What are the political uses and limits of the idea of difference? Those are the conversations that go on in queer fandom. That's what we talk about.
Those are not questions that are about slash. Slashers, on an individual level, may participate in queer fandom, and they may bring what's going on over there back into slash. In fact, I think that's been happening at a good clip for the last ten years, leading to an immense surge in fresh, interesting voices in slash that largely weren't there Back In the Day.
Slash is largely about pleasure. That's not to denigrate it as merely porn or merely entertainment: pleasure, particularly female pleasure, is a powerful and politically-charged concept. We still live in a society that is profoundly ambivalent about female sexual pleasure: we're fascinated by it and we resent and fear it as well. For women to take full responsibility for who they are as sexual beings is not unimportant, and for women to insist on varieties of romantic fantasy and erotic stimulation that speak to *them,* not to the people they've been informed they should be -- that matter. Slash matters.
But queerness isn't about female pleasure and female pleasure isn't about queerness. It's just that there are a lot of us for whom the two are related in various ways, and a lot of those very people have been hugely influental in shaping *both* the slash community and the queer fannish community, so that there's a constant flow of ideas and dialogue between the two that can even obscure the fact that it's a conversation *between* rather than a conversation *among* or *within.*
Hopefully this provides some context for some of the things I've said lately, both here and in
cathexys's journal, about my discomfort with the way the slash community often deals with gayness -- the OMG, THAT'S SO GAY! discourse. Because, look, here's the thing: slashers invented slashiness. Not y'all personally, but the current generation of slashers inherited a tradition and shaped it and refined it and evolved it, and we who are slashers, who are within that community, are the sole and unequivocal arbiters of what "slashy" means. Not that we always agree with each other -- again, half the fun! But it would be flatly ridiculous for someone to come in from outside the slash community and tell us what's slashy and what's not. We know slash. That's our turf as slashers.Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.
Doesn't that just make sense? I mean, I have Jewish friends and have studied Judaism and truly admire the religion and the culture in many ways -- but as much as an ally as I consider myself, I would never in a bazillion years blithely assume I could announce what was a so very Jewish way to think, act, be, believe. And if I did, if I wrote in my livejournal about how X character's actions were just, my God! SO JEWISH, you know?!? -- particularly when the character isn't canonically Jewish, but just pings my shiksa sense of what "Jewishness" means...I would expect my Jewish readers to look askance at me. It would be, at best, a weird thing to say, and at worst, an immensely insensitive thing to say. Even if they agreed with me that there was something Jewishy about that moment, I think they'd be justified in wondering wtf I was thinking when I said that.
That's how I often feel when I see people who are entrenched in the slash community but not in the queer fan community making similar statements about queerness. I get that slash fans are generally natural allies; I adore many of my straight sisters in slash fandom, and I believe that most of them truly are innocent of homophobia. But it makes me feel weird to listen to people who are allies, who are interested, but who are outsiders who possess privilege in this situation, pretend to operate from a position of insiderness. It's kind of patronizing, just like it would be if I charged around having all the answers about what, say, Asian-Americans were really like. I might be right in many cases, or I might be dead wrong -- more likely, it's oversimplifying to say yes, I got it right or no, I got it wrong. But whatever, the point is, I wouldn't do it because it's an inappropriate position for me as a white American to take. If I want to talk about Asian-Americanness -- say, because I'm writing a CSI story about Archie or a Buffy/Satsu epic -- I would listen a lot more than I talked. I would try to be faithful to what I heard people whose experience it actually was saying.
That so many slash fans believe that advice can't possibly apply to them -- freaks me out, actually. Being a slasher is not a Gay Ghetto Pass. It's one thing to say, you know, for the purposes of my stories, I don't need to know about queerness, because these characters aren't "really" queer, they're "really" reflections of my experience, on which I am an expert. I have mixed feelings about that statment, but I can appreciate the intellectual honesty of it.
My sense of compromise grinds to a halt when slash fandom claims the authority to parse not what is slashy, but what is gay. If you care about queer experience, do what other power majorities do when they want to learn about and be involved with a minority group: listen, listen some more, and when you speak, speak from a position of someone who is a guest in other peoples' reality, not from a false sense of insiderness or queer credibility. If you don't care about queer experience, that's okay, too. Just don't say that you do. Don't pronounce about gayness as a lark if the reality is that gayness is irrelevant to what you care about as a slasher -- which is slashiness.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 07:46 pm (UTC)From:-coming out
-the experience of losing friends or being ostracized for being gay
-AIDS (though less so now than ten years ago)
-gay culture—whether that be the West Village club scene or San Francisco or just the presence in the film or book of fag hags and gay bars
All of these things are features of actual gay experience. I can remember only a handful of slash stories that have ever included any of these. Gay fiction which you'd pull of the Gay/Lesbian shelf at B&N has a completely different feel from slash. Slash stories far more often (or at least, those I read, which shows my preference) follow the line of a standard heterosexual romance. Look at the popularity of all the Harlequin challenges. This, I think, is because many slash fans love the tropes of standard het romances but are put off by the often anti-woman underpinnings, so slash is a way to escape the negative associations but still preserve the enjoyed heterosexual cliches. Plus, you know, hot guys.
All this has been said before, of course, so, just, yes. I agree with you.
(Also, Dan Savage mentioned slash on his Savage Love podcast a few weeks ago, much to my glee, but in the context as a non-threatening way for a straight married woman to explore her sexual imagination. He then said he didn't get it.)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 09:49 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-13 10:10 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 05:39 am (UTC)From:I've recently been watching a lot of films and books made by and for gay men, and have found that gay works, even if they are light and fluffy and not weighty issue-driven tracts, usually include some or all of the following:
You're correct -- but what you may not be aware of is that these "conventions" of gay lit are somewhat controversial within the queer community. A lot of people feel like gay lit has become unfortunately navel-gazing in the way that it goes over this same "issues oriented" ground ceaselessly, and there's a constant rumble about when we're going to get to the point where we can just tell regular old *stories* about gay people. In that sense, I think part of why a lot of queer fans also like slash is because of the idea that you can tweak the text so that it's a *queer* character who's having all these great weekly adventures and doing all kinds of heroic and interesting things that aren't about Gay Issues.
This, I think, is because many slash fans love the tropes of standard het romances but are put off by the often anti-woman underpinnings, so slash is a way to escape the negative associations but still preserve the enjoyed heterosexual cliches. Plus, you know, hot guys.
I think that's a great way to put it. That's why I sort of gave up the idea that *all* slash was about queerness. A lot of it is kind of a salvage attempt at heterosexuality -- let's take all the good parts and junk what we don't like! Which is a pretty smart and resourceful way to deal with the screwed-up way our culture deals with heterosexuality, really! I admire the creativity of it.
(Also, Dan Savage mentioned slash on his Savage Love podcast a few weeks ago, much to my glee, but in the context as a non-threatening way for a straight married woman to explore her sexual imagination. He then said he didn't get it.)
Heh. Well, he's analyzing it the same way we are to an extent: it's a female way of being creative about how to get turned on sexually and emotionally in a world where a lot of what's packaged and offered to straight women fails them utterly on both fronts. Also, he doesn't get it. *g* But why should he? People who are outside of a community OFTEN don't get what goes on there!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 03:08 pm (UTC)From:The way I think of it is, if I'm watching a straight romantic comedy and it shows a frigid woman who just needs the love of a good rugged man to free her, it's part of a greater cultural text about women's sexuality. It's about how women are frigid and just need a good fuck to straighten them out. If the exact same story is about two men? It's not part of any greater text. It's about how that particular character is repressed and just needs a good fuck. And that's far less objectionable.
A lot of people feel like gay lit has become unfortunately navel-gazing in the way that it goes over this same "issues oriented" ground ceaselessly, and there's a constant rumble about when we're going to get to the point where we can just tell regular old *stories* about gay people.
I suspected as much. I've been looking for straight forward romantic comedies with gay characters (the closest to a movie of slash, essentially), so have been trying to avoid issue driven stuff. (Nothing brings you down like expecting a fluffy comedy and getting Edge of Seventeen, an agonizing account of coming out.) I've noticed that there are a couple of fluff pieces, but even those tend to have some issue tucked into the background (whether it be a minor character coming out or somebody dying in the third act. Seriously, somebody always dies in the third act—what the hell). After watching the movies, I looked up Roger Ebert's reviews of them, which were almost always negative. Why? Because if it's a gay film, it has to be about ISSUES to justify its existence. In his review of Trick (which I loved), he said: "Besides, what message would it send to "support" a gay film like "Trick"? The message, I suppose, would be that gays should have romantic comedies just as dim and dumb as the straight versions."
So if the movie isn't Jeffrey or Philadelphia Story it shouldn't be about gays? Isn't it really the true hallmark of the acceptance of a minority group if their films and literature can be as meaningless as that of the majority? (Sorry if this is a debate you've had a lot—it's new to me. :)
I review comic books so am in the unique position (for a straight girl) of having read a ton of underground gay comics with titles like Young Bottoms in Love. Even in these, almost every story is about coming out or the first time they had anonymous sex or the time they helped another guy come out. It's a unifying part of the gay experience, so it makes sense that it's talked about a lot. But then, losing your virginity is a universal part of the straight (and gay) experience, and not every straight story is about that.
Even setting aside issue-driven gay film and literature, all the films and books I've read have been about gay men in a way that shows how much slash is not about gay men. I can only judge the accuracy of a portrayal as an outsider (which is to say not at all—my knowledge of what it's like to be a gay man comes as much from Dan Savage as anything else), but gay literature shows gay culture in a way that slash only rarely does, and usually doesn't try to.
To digress just a little bit to Dan Savage, when he mentioned slash, he was talking about why this man's wife might not be thrilled at the prospect of looking at porn. His conclusion was that women generally don't like visual representations of sex and prefer written erotica. While this is true, I think it misses a huge reason women don't generally watch porn. Porn may show a man and a woman having sex, but it's almost always a straight male fantasy. All those things that are irksome about portrayals of women in romantic comedies? A billion times worse in porn. There is feminist porn and porn designed for women, but it's rare. Is it any wonder women don't want to watch most porn if most porn isn't showing their fantasy?
(I realize this comment went into fifteen different directions, but it's early. I've also been percolating all those thoughts about slash vs. gay lit for awhile and you just provided me with the opportunity to expound on it a little.)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:09 pm (UTC)From:Totally. There are so many factors that go into the "why women don't watch porn" question, I am not sure I can adequately parse it. From the socialization issues, to the availability issues and, finally, up through the aesthetic (inherent or learned) issues, it's no wonder that women trend toward the written word (a marketplace, I might add, where upwards of 80% of the buyers are female).
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:45 pm (UTC)From:I once had a guy offer to have me over to watch his porn collection with him. And you know, there are few things I find less appealing then the idea of hanging out with a guy I was once romantically interested in and watching his favorite porn. This is part of the reason for the "was once" and the "am no longer"--that and the fact that he couldn't stop talking about how much his ex-girlfriend loved to fuck while we were on a date or that he doesn't take down his nude drawings of female friends that he has propped up all over his apartment when he has company, or turn off the porn screensaver on his computer. So thinking I'd love to see his porn, kind of part of this guy's gestalt.
I've also had a guy (that I also dated---*sigh*) call me a liar to my face when I said I didn't watch porn. There seems to be this weird male idea that what turns them on turns us on (cause look! he's screwing a woman right there! and she really likes it!) and it just isn't so.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:51 pm (UTC)From:Women are equally capable of making stupid assumptions, especially in thinking all other women are like them (there are even some comments on this post that are going on about What Women Like as if there's some hive vagina).
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 08:32 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 03:08 am (UTC)From:In b4 f_w. Sorry, too tempting =)no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 03:39 pm (UTC)From:I think, though, that the difference between yaoi and slash shows just how much the conventions of slash are about the community and culture of slash in particular--influenced of course by feminism and queer culture and a ton of other things. But slash has evolved into its own unique animal that isn't solely the result of it being written by women about gay men.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 09:16 am (UTC)From:That sums up entirely why I read slash instead of perusing B&N's LGBT section for the hundrenth time. There is only so much Gloom and Doom "we're gay, dammit, we angst" I can take before I just want two happy LGBT people in love to go kill some vampires.
I cannot stand characters, in LGBT fiction, or on television, or anywhere, who are completely all about one thing, and when it comes to LGBT characters, the one thing they're about is that they're LGBT. The character shows up, is queer, hangs around, is queer...doesn't do much else. I believe the first book I ever read that wasn't gay lit that had a character who was gay and also did other stuff was in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It was eye-opening to see in mainstream fiction a character who was complex and well-written and open about her sexuality and it didn't define her, she wasn't The Gay Character, she was The Character Who Also Happened To Be Gay.
But that's few and far between. So mostly I read slash.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 03:20 pm (UTC)From:That said, I'm not really against stories About Being Gay, if they're well written. I'd be a fool to suggest that there's anything substandard about *At Swim, Two Boys,* for example, even though it is about sexuality. It's a fucking phenomenal piece of literature. (Of course, it's about sexuality *and* about other stuff, too. Maybe that's the key, right there -- not that it has to be about something else *instead of* queerness, but that it has to be about something else *in addition to.*)
Also, I may be a bad judge, because I tend to avoid stories about any happy people in love doing anything. Pile on the conflict! *g*
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 03:25 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 08:07 pm (UTC)From:Like Oranges are not the only fruit, which is about crazy religious fundamentalism as well as growing up lesbian in an intolerant environment. Or the superb graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, which is a coming-out/coming-of-age story and also is about the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s.
(not relevant to the main post, but...)
True story: I didn't like At Swim, Two Boys (mostly because I thought O'Neill's treatment of the Irish independence movement was mawkish and politically naive), and I ranted about my dislike at length on my blog. (My old Diaryland blog, which is now password-protected.) Some months later, it was early January and I was checking through the Christmas/New Year's backlog of email, and who had mailed me but Jamie O'Neill himself, asking in a somewhat melancholy tone if I could enlarge on my criticisms.
Well, the timestamp on the email showed it had been sent quite late on New Year's Eve, so I said to myself "I bet he's forgotten he sent this email." Nevertheless, I replied, and he replied back in a rather embarrassed tone, basically asking me to forget about it, which did not surprise me.
And then he sent back another mail saying "I found some of your stories, and you're a totally awesome writer! Seriously, you have to write! You've got real talent!"
Boy, did I feel smug...
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 06:18 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 06:25 am (UTC)From:Really? I definitely agree that's how it used to be, but I wouldn't say the same now. The majority of fic I read definitely has characters who are comfortable in their sexuality (or who are closeted/in denial, but still have an awareness that they are attracted to men). I'm surprised to hear the opposite's still common in some circles/fandoms.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 07:30 am (UTC)From:One big eyeroll I get is that I see a lot of stories where a character claims to be straight or have no gay experience at all, and then tacks on, "Oh, except that time in high school with Billy." Right, because an otherwise straight man would find a high school homosexual experience so insignificant that he nearly forgets it. It can be pulled off okay, but just the amount of times I've seen it make it seem obnoxious. It seems like the lazy cue card for, "Aha, he's just in denial!"
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 02:45 pm (UTC)From:Now that you mention it, I have seen more stories like that than where they're both surprised by being attracted to guys.
I like reading and writing about characters who are queer already (whether they're comfortable with that or closeted/in denial) rather than characters who are surprised to be suddenly attracted to someone of the same sex, so I'm glad that type of fic isn't as omnipresent as it used to be.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-15 06:29 pm (UTC)From: