What The Eff? No, Seriously, What?!

[eumelia]

Goddamn! Life is kicking my ass.

I have been trying to write about Zachary Quinto and his coming out for days now, because the significance of why he came out, i.e. because it was the socially responsible thing to do, is a clear challenge towards other closeted celebrities.

I think anyone who can come out should, but I also understand why you wouldn't or don't. As it is, being out is more a negotiation or a process than anything else and it needs to happen over and over again.

When Quinto came out, in an interview, in which his sexuality was not the focus of the article (i.e. it wasn't about him coming out of the closet), he did it in a way I find myself doing more often than not - matter of fact and casual.

Of course, it never is, matter of fact or casual that is. You can see the person in front of you rearrange every single thought they have on you, no matter how liberal and no matter if the other person is LGBT themselves - I know this, because my thoughts rearrange themselves and reshuffle my expectations regarding this person, who has decided that the cultural assumption of heterosexuality is not something to partake it, or that living your life in which every time you talk about your life you need to make sure you don't "slip".

Regardless as to whether one is celebrity or just a person going through life and interacting with people, when a person comes out, usually, the main reason is for their own benefit.

The fact that it is the responsible and ethically correct thing to do in neither there nor there, because it is also a matter of personal choice and circumstance.

A matter of personal choice and circumstance, which, when you're a celebrity, opens you up to a whole lot of shit just because you're a gay public figure.

I find it personally offensive and disgusting, as a fangirl, as a slasher and yeah, as a gay person, that in the passing weeks, when two men (Sean Maher came out of the closet a few weeks ago), who are first and foremost genre actors, come out I encounter (via Sparkindarkness) this and I quote from his post:

"Oh I would totally slash him!"

"brb writing that slash"

"Yaaay I have a new OTP!"

"I'm shipping him with X now"

"A new ship is born"

.... and so on so on.

Seriously - a life changing extremely powerful and personal moment, a moemnt that requires support and congratulations - and this is what is presented as support? Yay, a new fuckpuppet! Bring on the fetishisation! What does it even say about these people that the minute a gay man comes out that slashing them is their reaction?

I think fantasising about people, celebrities especially, as they constructed to be fantasy fodder, is fair. I think if you're going to be public about it, you show some fucking respect to the persona you're objectifying.
Attached to that persona is an actual person who is doing a job.

Fictional characters are a whole other kettle of fish, but that's not we're talking about, but it does need to be said.

Beyond the basic human decency mentioned above, I find it absolutely abhorrent that people in slash fandom, my cultural home, my intellectual playground, would actually create a meme that diminishes and marginalises gay people:

The "You Konw You're Addicted To Slash" meme
1. You start mentally pairing up random guys on the street.
2. You wish you had gay friends just so you could perve on them kissing their boyfriends.
3. You don’t remember the last time you read a heterosexual fiction.
4. You have developed a sexual fetish for handcuffs, leather and BDSM.
5. If you are a heterosexual girl, you keep trying to 'seme' or top your boyfriend, despite the fact that you don’t have the necessary parts.
6. You suddenly become interested in gay rights, thinking this will increase your opportunities for voyeuristic activities.
7. You try to get your friends into it, simply so you can talk to them about it without them getting that bored look on their face.
8. You keep lying about the number of hours you spend each day on the computer reading slash fiction, watching gay anime etc.
9. The most exciting moment of your life so far was when you discovered hentai manga(slash).
10. You celebrate turning 18 not because you can watch R movies, but because you’re old enough to watch movies with explicit gay sex scenes.
11. It’s the only aphrodisiac you need.
12. When your boyfriend tells you he’s gay and has been dating another man, you immediately ask if you can join in.
13. Your gay son wishes he had a normal, homophobic mother who didn’t ask him questions about his latest sexual exploits.
14. You have weird dreams of being a boy an kissing the same gender.
15. You're reading this and thinking of what you are also doing that has a connection to this!
16. You start pairing up people you saw in your television.
17. You tend to mentally accuse 'sexy' and 'hot' guys of being secretly lovers.
18. You start asking some of your friends if they have gay friends.
19. You suddenly had the urge to draw something perverted. Or try to.
20. You have this awesome idea of trying to pair up your 'submissive' male friend to a 'dominant' male.

With a very distinct few, all the ideas under the cut are homophobic. The fact that the ideas that aren't homophobic are contextualised in the meme above renders them just as disgusting and infuriating.

Most of the time, when I see criticism of fandom, participatory culture and slash, I read with interest even though I am not the target audience (usually there is a whole lot of misconception and mistakes in talking about fandom - we're not all straight and we're not all women, to start with. Just saying), but the criticisms of appropriation, misogyny and fetishism are ones I do read. I read them with the knowledge that these things happen far too often and are not called on (at all or enough) in fandom.

So let me say it like this; As a gay woman, as a queer fangrrl, as a consumer of slash; reducing gay men (be they real or fictional) to a piece of meat over which one writes their masturbatory fantasies, reduces, diminishes and marginalises me and my sexuality and my culture and every other gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer woman (and man) who chooses to participate in male oriented fandom.

Food for thought, that.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Word. I didn't see those reactions, and I'm glad I didn't. That list is appalling (not to mention factually wrong on several points), but fortunately that old seme/uke "tee hee gay guys" dynamic is getting easier and easier to avoid as people write far more nuanced fic.

I'm personally pretty uncomfortable with RPF (because of the way it ties into celebrity stalking and gossip magazines) but I really don't understand why, if it's all fantasy as people say, an actor being gay makes him "slashable", or shippable with other actors of the same gender.

[eumelia]

Yes, there may be a lot more to wade through, but the gems are easier to find these days.

Hey, to each their own when it comes to what they want to read when it comes to anything, it's no skin off my nose if someone does or doesn't want to participate in something, you know. I remember when I mentioned to a friend that I knew that a celeb she liked was gay (not mentioning here, because this celeb is still in the closet) she was so disappointed because "why are all the best ones gay" and I find that to be the flipside of the same coin in many ways.

I don't know why an actor's "actual" sexuality has anything to do with them being fantasy fodder...

[kindkit]

Hmmm, I understand your discomfort with RPF (I have some of the same concerns) but I do think it's possible to write RPF without participating in the stalking/gossip culture. Conversely, there are plenty of people who follow ontd and similar communities who don't write RPF at all.

I can understand the "slashable" thing a bit; it's not unlike the way, in fictional fandoms, one can theoretically slash any character, but it's easier if they don't have a canon het relationship, and easier still in the rare instances when a character is canonically queer. There's an added pleasure in thinking "this could be real/canon," even when you're perfectly aware it's just fantasy.

But "oh, yay, now I can slash him!" is a pretty uncouth reaction to a real person's real coming out.

[lilacsigil]

You're right about the RPF - I was speaking specifically about the kind that eumelia addressed, and I should have made that clear.

My problem with much RPF is because it is like gossip magazines and ONTD-style communities. I don't think this kind of RPF is worse than those (in fact, slightly better because at least it acknowledges the fiction) but it does feed into an aggressively entitled stalker culture.

There are certainly people who write ethical RPF relying on what their subjects have said voluntarily in interviews/shows/blogs etc., or who write about historical figures, and I don't have a problem with that at all.

[roga]

As a gay woman, as a queer fangrrl, as a consumer of slash; reducing gay men (be they real or fictional) to a piece of meat over which one writes their masturbatory fantasies reduces and marginalises me and my sexuality and my culture and every other gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer woman (and man) in fandom who chooses to participate in male oriented fandom.

I'm not trying to argue, just to understand your point better: the action you're referring to here (reducing gay men to a piece of meat...), do you mean doing that by putting them in contexts such as the meme you showed above, or the act of writing fic too? Is it that certain types of fics are okay, but others (say, a PWP) are offensive? Are you only talking about officially out fictional characters/officially out real people/all types of slash?

The meme really is disgusting :( Judging by point #10 it looks like it was written by a bunch of teens, which only helps in that it makes me pretty sure that it wasn't created by any of the fandom circles I'm in, but seriously. What the fuck.

[eumelia]

No problem :)

No, what I mean is, taking the position that gay and/or queer sexuality and culture exists for the consumption of fangirls and our fictional scenarios.
Does that make sense?

It's like, if I happen to be out on a date with a girl, and someone came up to us and say "oh, you're so adorable, will you please kiss?".

On the surface, that person may be perceived as being supportive, but actually, they are reducing me and my date to a spectacle to watch, rather than treat us as people.

Fandom and slash fiction will take a dynamic that we see in the text and make it explicit. This is fun and good and something I love. What I don't love is treating is like something exotic, like it exists for titillation.

Yeah, not the circles I'm in either, but still, they're a part of us. Disgusting.

[rho]

Wow, that list is abhorrent.

[eumelia]

Very much so.

It pains me to be lumped in with idiots and bigots who actually created and spread that meme.

[kindkit]

That meme is horrific. I think it's important to remember, though (and I'm sure you know this already, so my comments aren't directed at you, they're just general comments) that it's not a fair representation of What M/M Slashers Are Like. There are some m/m slash fans who do these things and think there's nothing wrong with it, but there are others who are thoughtful, respectful, and either queer themselves or committed to queer rights as allies. Like any group of people, m/m slash fans aren't monolithic in their views or behavior, and I feel bad seeing the worst behavior treated as representative of the whole group. (I've also seen critiques of m/m slash fandom from [almost always non-fandom-involved] gay men that are misogynistic, patronizing, and reductive in that they do treat the worst examples of homophobic, stereotyped writing and fan behavior as representative.)

What I'd like to see, and I think we agree on this, is more work from within m/m slash fandom. Calling out exploitive and homophobic stuff, yes, but also more encouragement to people to write queer men in non-fetishistic ways. Things like lgbtfest and its successor queer_fest are great for that, even if much of the actual fic produced is a bit clumsy in its attempts to focus on LGBT issues.

I do think m/m slash fandom is improving. There's no longer much tolerance for the bad old "we're not gay, we just love each other" trope, nor for people who write m/m slash but don't support LGBT rights.

[eumelia]

What you say about this type of fan behaviour not being representative is true and I'm behind you 100% with that statement.

And yet, these fans do exist, whether it be entitlement or simple ignorance and carelessness regarding the issue, it needs to be called out. And yeah, it would be great to see it happen with greater fervour from within slash fandom itself.

I feel that the movement from "we're not gay, etc." is happening within the context if there being more canonically LGB (not so much on the T, unfortunately) characters, which is an improvement for sure and feeds into the dialogue with fandom.

[theleaveswant]

Agreed. I hadn't seen those reactions or that list before (*shudder* and also WTFityFingF?!) but there's an awful lot of inconsiderate, shallow, and exploitive bullshit in a lot of fandom circles, including, unfortunately, a lot of the most publicly visible and accessible ones.

[eumelia]

Yeah, the bigger they, the more common this sort of thing can become.

[dingsi]

I'm still trying to summarise all the SHITTY CLUELESS WRONG SHIT packed into this meme; it's like a prism of fail (homophobic yes, but also gender-essentialist, cis-sexist, clueless about kink, ignorant of basic healthy boundaries period). And I'm so -- I'm angry; I'm angry at the people who cheerily partake in this and at worst believe it to be true, at best to be "harmless fun"; I'm also angry at the gay folks who routinely dismiss ALL of slash fandom and slash tropes as sick rape fetishes of perverted cis heterosexual women, in the process spouting deeply gender-essentialist and misogynist opinions and erasing the queer, trans, gender-nonconforming, male (and intersections thereof) contingent of slash fandom. By now I'm just pissed off from every possible angle.

[eumelia]

Yes, it is angering from every direction.

While the gender essentialist and misogynist opinions of outsiders (gays who dismiss and paint of of fandom under a single brush) is an issue, I really am more concerned with the fact that despite that the queer, trans, gender-nonconforming and intersections of male and female fans is a much bigger contingent than it used to be, I also see a whole lot of the clueless entitlement and queer erasure in fandoms that come from more mainstream texts.

[dingsi]

I'm... not sure I understand your reply the way it is intended to be? I'm feeling fairly defensive because I get the impression you're telling me what I should be more concerned about, or reading things into my comment that weren't intended on my end. But that's not how I know you so I am fairly certain it's my fuzzy I-have-a-cold brain talking and most likely a hot button issue that was poked unintentionally rearing its head and making me feel attacked. And I apologise if my previous comment was being unfair -- I don't want to play "oppression olympics", or imply that a situation where a marginalised group speaks up about objectification and the other group defends said objectification have the same starting point because that discussion certainly doesn't happen on a level playing field. I admit that my personal disappointment likely plays a part in this as I'm (sadly) kind of used to mainstream culture and mainstream privilege intersections (i.e. straight and cis) hurting or erasing me, but when a non-mainstream culture does it even though I'm supposed to feel included (as a non-heterosexual, non-cis male) it packs that extra punch. I often feel personally torn between the two extreme positions as I have markers connectng me to both sides and I feel I am supposed to "pick a side" which... I just can't.

[eumelia]

I think we're coming from different directions when it comes to the frustration with fandom vs. non-fandom critique of the queer sexuality within slash.

If I implied that what I'm concerned about is what you should be or that your concerns are not as important then I apologise, because I don't think that at all.

I think our intersections do play into the direction we take when it comes to critique - I am more concerned and hurt when I find homophobia, transphobia and queer erasure inside slash fandom (and it manifests in different ways) and the criticism from non-fandom gay cis men who object to objectification is a lesser concern of mine, other than being helpful in finding the erasing voices within fandom - because they tend to be the loudest.

I didn't mean to imply that my stance is more important or that your concerns are in way less valid.

[ironed_orchid]

Fuck that meme. I mean, fuck it with a chainsaw.

I read that and think it was written by a couple of 18 year old girls who have not yet got to the point where they see others as fully human, with all the same feelings and conflicts as they have.

I'm very glad about Sean Maher and Zachary Quinto coming out, because both did it rather than keep hiding the truth, and because every time a celebrity comes out, it shows just how heteronormativity works, in that people are STILL compelled to hide their sexual preference in order to be considered for role on tv or in a movie.