A Follow Up to the Hysterical Buggery

[eumelia]

First of all, help_haiti!

I'm trying to figure out a way to integrate the various discussion that have risen over the past week, seeing as the broader discussion of slash and m/m romance kind of exploded over the Lambda Awards last year and it's still being talked about.

At the same time, Torchwood fandom pulse raced again with discussion (accusation?) of RTD being homophobic because of the way he wrote CoE.

Oy, the stickiness of it all.

I'll start with my second point.

RTD is a sloppy writer.

Some of his stuff pissed me off royally. I mean, the sexist tropes, the really appaling portrayal of lesbian sexuality ("Day One" was just felt like he was trying to gain a straigh male audience - "Greeks Baring Gifts" was just one bad thing after another, in many many ways - and during "Fragments" I nearly threw something at the teevee screen).

So, I'm pretty sure there's agreement in the statement above.

As a viewer and as fans we have the choice of watching his shows, hear his stories, be entertained and then pick apart what it was that we just saw on screen.

Homophobia isn't just laws that make us second class citizens. Just like sexism isn't just 75c on the 1$.
Racism isn't just a history of colonialism, enslavement and eugenics.

That's the easy stuff.


snirnoffmule in his post On Slashing While Straight and Writing While Queer wrote it best:

To suggest, as some people in fandom have, that RTD threw those lines in purely for laughs, or that he somehow didn't realise that "Hello gay boy, I hear you're taking it up the arse now!" was a homophobic remark walks a line between offensive and laughable. As a gay man, he doesn't get the luxury of not knowing what homophobia looks like. Queer writers write about being queer from the inside looking out. If you, as a straight viewer, didn't recognise that moment, maybe that's because you're on the outside looking in.

That's something I grokked from TW:CoE.

Now, you can argue that RTD perpetuates the stereotype of no happy ending for queers - as was commented here.
But then, other than for Gwen who fights tooth and nail to keep a normal life and Jack encourages her throughout the show to do just that, the whole Torchwood story is pretty damn bleak.
In Seasons 1 and 2 the crackiness of the plots and premises kind of mask the fact that every single episode deals with death, of trying to not succumb to despair (and sometimes you do).
There was equal opportunity death going on there.
Except for Gwen, but then she is the heroine of the show - she's us, on the inside, in that manner she can be compared to one of the Doctor's Companions, when they're in the TARDIS, we're in the TARDIS.

Back to a few of my points, another of which was elucidated by smirnoffmule:

It is also not the job of queer writers to be continually doing 101 basic outreach work for their straight audiences.

A small tangent if you please; I was thinking back at Brokeback Mountain and Milk movies that I consider to be "Gay Movies, for Straight People".
It's fairly obvious who is Good and who is Bad.
It's clear in Brokeback... that the fact that the two men can't be together is a tragedy and the fact that one was left, essentially, widowed is a horrible thing.
Let's feel sorry for the gay men who will never find happiness.

Milk appeared to be an extremely clean, simple and shallow way of showing a historical moments. The fact that Harvey Milk was a phenomenon and that LGBT Rights movement owe a lot to him isn't debatable.
But it was so sanitised.
"Go out and Come Out" was not a strategy readily accepted by everyone - certainly not then and not now.

Torchwood is possibly the first and only show in which characters with queer sexualities weren't punished for them per say, but for their actions.
Torchwood, especially CoE, doesn't spoon feed the issues. Class was tackled, sexuality was tackled and they were not clear cut.
I don't think this is a bad thing.
Life is muddy and sanitising the teevee is not always in the best interest of the story.

My main issue, which I've mentioned before and will now reiterate, is the fact that it would seem that LGBT issues are hijacked by fandom and queer identity and relationships are then policed.

Jack and Ianto's relationship was never normative. The "couple" moment was a perfect example of that. It's debatable which of the two is taking whose cue here, but none the less, here is a muddy moment, between two muddy people.
Nuance and subtext seems to be something many in fandom sees fit to neglect and overlook - though not the buttsex, funnily enough.

The fact that many took umbrage that it was over and decided to cry homophobia was a hijacking of the issue, when in fact we were meant to feel - I felt the whole thing was a huge Greek Tragedy, what with the secret daughter, grandson, secrets being dug up from the past and the whole loss of sovereignty.

To tie this fandom meta into the more general discussion of Slash and m/m fiction is the notion, brought forth by solitray_summer, that the issue of fetishisation has been there from the start:

So, yes, the 'hysterical women' comment was sexist and misogynist, everyone can agree on that, but after six months fandom can maybe start to look beyond that, and realise this was also coming from somewhere, namely a gay writer thinking he wasn't just dealing with straight women fetishising homosexuality and making judgements about what gay relationships were supposed to be like, but straight women now explaining homophobia to him. Now clearly the situation was more complex than that, clearly there were gay people as well as straight people who disliked CoE for a wide variety of reasons, but I think this was the main impression that came across, and I doubt anyone involved in TW fandom can honestly say that it was wholly unfounded in reality.

A straight woman writing slash doesn't automatically make one a LGBT ally. Especially when one is doing that hijacking thing in which actual LGBT issues are used to push a ship.
Decrying that Ianto was killed and that's homophobic, while ignoring the fact that Tosh - a Queer Asian Woman - was killed and no homophobia or misogyny was mentioned is rather telling.
So tell me another one.

Again, you want to talk context of CoE, in which sexuality was explicitly mentioned and talked about - well, yes, many more issues were also explicitly mentioned and talked about - have I mentioned the class and ethnicity thing, yes?
Is one more important than the other? Or is sexuality merely the easiest one to attack because you supposedly don't need to understand background in order to understand homophobia?

When you write slash, you're writing characters who are there to be looked at. When you're straight and you claim to understand what it's like to gay because you write slash I'm going to roll my eyes at you.
And be pissy, if that wasn't clear.

I'm queer and I do not know what it is like to be a gay man. I read slash for a variety of reason, I've also written secret slash stories which will never see the light of day - us queer girls who like and read slash exist; for some reason we're too often ignored and it's bloody irritating!

Let's not conflate the fact that the fact that RTD wrote a gay relationship that didn't end as many of us wanted and the fact that LGBT issues are, in fact, daily issues for us.

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Gotcha -- it's not gay fans being offended by homophobia, but this is all about the straight fans using homophobia as a 'reason' to be offended by the death of their favourite 'ship. Now it makes sense.

This is not the same as the accusations of racism towards Avatar, which is a movie made by a white man and which uses a common white-guilt-fantasy plot.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I've now seen Avatar and I am going to rip it.

It was just soooo baaaaaad!