On Being Queer in Fandom

[eumelia]

This post touches an important pan-fandom subject and as such I think it should be read far and wide, so please, spread this link around! Thank you in advance.

verasteine has written a parallel post of her own regarding being straight in fandom.

Something has been weighing on my mind for a while now.

It’s not a new thought, in fact I’ve written and discussed this before, because it is a pervasive issue and it touches me again and again in fandom.

Slash fandom is not a place without problems, this we all know, as fans, but this one particular issue is one which I’m finding harder and harder to let go as time goes by and I’m wondering if other fannish queers and/or queer fans feel it as well.

I’d like to state that I’m very aware of how problematic the use of “queer” is as a word – because while I personally identify with it strongly, it is a word with a traumatic past and not every QUILTBAG person sees it as a reclaimed word, as such, please bear with me regarding its use in this post.

Things are not as they once were, over the past decade the media landscape has changed in a way I still find hard to describe, I’m sure you who are older than I feel this even more acutely.

I don’t want to talk about the canon queer characters, relationship and storylines, because you can critique those from here to high heaven from our perspective and that has been done.

I want to talk and ask you, my fellow queer fans, about the ambivalent feeling I get from slash fandom as a queer fan.

Slash isn’t queer fiction, but it is queered fiction and a lot of the time, the idea that gay people exist within a larger cultural context is either forgotten or exploited. Forgotten in the sense that a lot of stories write the two men as though there isn’t an entire gay history and culture that informs on how these relationships are constructed.
And they are exploited in the sense that some aspects of gay culture are used to differentiate these two guys from those other queers, because they are the strange and the freakish, whereas the two guys are in love.

There are of course the instances in which authors try to be inclusive of queer culture, but due to the stereotypical way it is depicted in the media the image of effeminate men being “less than” masculine men gets perpetuated in fic.

The coming out process and the whole notion of being queer in public is, at times, reductive and lacking in the narrative complexity that informs our own queer identities. Not to mention the use of the work “queer” itself without any acknowledgment that hey, for a lot of these guys, it would as bad as the f-word (no, not “fuck” or “fellation”).

There are times where I will be thrown out of a fic that deals with homophobia, but succumbs to gender stereotypes, because the relationship becomes yet another reflection of heterosexual and heteronormative models, only with two dicks.

And of course, the ever popular of putting “slash” or “m/m sex” in the warning part of the header.

There are other issues and other instances, some of them too numerous to recount, and yes, fandom can’t but reflect the larger straight assuming culture from which it emerges. But QUEER PEOPLE EXIST in slash fandom and I’d like to hear our voices with regards to how these narratives and stories are written. Because even though this isn’t gay fiction, I am a part of this creative and transformative culture that takes from my sexual culture and doesn’t seem to realize that that is what it does.

Do other queer fans and/or fannish queer fans feel this way? Are there areas in slash fandom you feel more welcome and included? What other issues have you felt that corresponds with being queer in fandom, if at all?

Comments

[sevilemar]

In my mind, fanfiction per se has nothing to do with representation or politics; when you write fanfic, you share fantasies, erotic or otherwise. What I think makes it political, and highly so, is the automatic policing that's going on in fandom. Certain fandoms, certain pairings, certain types of fanfic, certain kinks, certain views of characters and relationships, certain themes and discussions, in short: certain types of fantasies get a huge amount of people involved and it's easy to find what you're looking for. Others don't. That's why it's really hard to find, say, any No.6 fanfic, let alone in German and about Nezumi not being able to live like he always did because he's not that fit anymore, without it becoming h/c and/or about sex and/or romance.

What I'm saying is that by sheer number of people interested in one thing and not the other, the other becomes hard to find. And it really doesn't help to say "You just have to write it yourself, then!", it really doesn't. Not all of us in fandom are writers, or want to become one. Not all of us have the time or the inclination to shout our desires from the rooftops in the hope that somebody, somewhere might share them or know where we can get fic.
[I apologize for the mansplaining, but sometimes I need to get the basics spelled out in detail to remind myself of what we're dealing with]

I am asexual and identify as queer. I was involved in slash fandom (m/m) long before I knew these two labels exist; it was (mm-slash) fandom that eventually pointed me to the resources I needed to name and contextualise the things I've struggled with since I was eleven. So yes, I feel very strongly about mm-slash and slash fandom. But the more I allow myself to accept that yes, I really am different and yes, I really am allowed to want the things I want even if nobody else does, the more frustrated I get with mm-slash fandom (Sherlock, in particular).

It is as though I have to wade through endless meaningless, even hurtful prompts on the kink meme to find one or two I really want to see filled. I post my own, but they don't get filled. I have given up on keeping track on AO3; too much, and too hurtful or frustrating. These days, my only interaction with the fandom I loved passionately ever since it exploded in Sept. 2010 is through recs and reccing communities. I read ace fics, but only when they're recced by someone I trust.

The other day, I devoted three hours to find something fannish for a BBC radio play called Marlowe's Diaries (by Roy Kendall, 1993), which was the first really queer thing I noticed as such in my life. I went through all the fannish resources I have at my disposal, even tried to google it various times. The only thing I found was the audio-mash-up-crossover I did with Sherlock in 2010.


So for me, it definitely is true that the more I embrace my different/other/queer desires online and irl, the more I feel unwelcome and unwanted in the very place that helped me accept them in the first place, i.e. mm-slash fandom.