Strange Bedfellows (APA)/Issue 006

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cover of issue #6

Strange Bedfellows 6 was published in August 1994 and contains about 138 pages.

There were 36 members sharing 24 subscriptions.

Not all tribs were included in the table of contents.

"Minac warning! If you do not contribute to the next issue, you will be dropped from the apa."

From the OE

This is a good place to mention part of my minac policy. The reason for the minac

(minimum activity) requirement is to keep the membership to those people who are actively interested. So, in the figure that if you can't write one page of commentary in three issues, which after all is nine months, you re not actively interested. People who are active but tardy, however, count as actively interested. I figure if that if you can't write one page of commentary in three issues, which after all is nine months, you're not actively interested. People who are active but tardy, however, count as actively interested. So, in the activity tally I keep Laura and Nina (who's zines arrived [late]) are both credited with being active in issue #5, despite the fact that neither of them, technically speaking, had a zine in it. Minac is not designed to force people out.

[Is] it ok for men to be in the APA or on the list. For the record, the

has never been any question of men not being welcome in this apa, and as long as I'm OE there never will be. Just to keep the record clear. The list is a different matter, as I understand, but I'm not on it so I don't know.

Some Topics Discussed in "Notes from Tomorrow"

Excerpts from "Notes from Tomorrow"

I was awestruck — I didn't notice it so much while we were sitting in the restaurant, but following him out the door, my jaw must have dropped — I didn't think real people actually had legs that long! Honestly — he was about 6'4", very lean, and aside from the fact that his shoulders were a mite broader than anything I've seen in manga, he could step into Eroica (figuratively, I meant — literally too, I suppose...) and fit right in!

Some Topics Discussed in "Writing from the Margins"

Excerpts from "Writing from the Margins"

Some Topics Discussed in "Strange Tongues"

Excerpts from "Strange Tongues"

One thing I have done is watch a lot of Quantum Leap and X-Files, both shows that seem to attract fans, but which are not very apt for slash. XF stars only two continuing characters, a man and a woman; QL gives a new meaning to "untouchable" and also characterizes both male leads as somewhat more convincingly hetero than many male-bonding epics do. It occurs to me that slash is difficult in these shows exactly because the attitude is that women, to the show characters and in the general tone of the drama also, are respectable human beings. Could it be possible that the slightest modicum of actual equality for women will succeed in making slash obsolete, where studio outrage and moral pronouncements of every kind have failed utterly?

On the other hand, it's rather fun to "dream it" in slash, as well as "being it" by living and wage-earning and generally participating in the world. And we are a long way from actually being it with any regularity; it's just that a couple of programs have shown it, sometimes without completely undercutting the idea with contradictory subtext. This would still leave us the perhaps - workable fantasy of slash based on two characters who love each other more than anyone else despite having the opportunity and ability to find opposite-sex (or otherwise conventionally acceptable) partners.

Forbidden love as the only possibility for any love in a space-going tin can is quite possibly how slash became thinkable - Kirk and Spock, isolated by rank as well, didn't have a lot of options in day-to-day life except celibacy or each other. Yet slash from the beginning has built instead on the positive relationship that could be read from the screen, not their lack of options, and has created whole universes where Spock and Kirk, Bodie and Doyle, and all the others, find each other in spite of enormous odds to keep them apart in every possible way. In other words, slash writes of partners who would freely choose one another over all others, no matter who else is available. Is it more or less exciting to write that fantasy when the screen characters are not constrained by circumstance and psychology to choose no one but each other?

The spies and undercover cops aren't stuck alone in a spaceship, of course, but they are isolated emotionally from everyone who doesn't share or at least understand the psychological pressure they're under. Possibly some fans prefer these couples not just for the contemporary settings, but because the isolation is psychological: the problem is of the same order as the solution. And Quantum Leap goes further in making the two characters able only to see and hear "each other; the relationship is intensely psychological, completely non-tactile. This may be why I continue to hope for slash for Sam and Al, even though the physical possibilities are limited and the characters more likely than some slash regulars to find satisfactory female partners. The show doesn't emphasize it much, but the notion of a mental bond is built into the premise: the computer control of the Leaps is based on their two sets of brainwaves and no others. This may be as close to telepathy as technology-based SF has ever come. Given the themes and plot devices of much slash, can this be ignored forever?

X-Files can't boast anything quite so juicy, for all that it's about seeing various supernatural manifestations as possible, but it does present a well-balanced working partnership between characters who are not set up as romance partners by the show, but do exhibit the supportive, more-than-just-a-job behavior that would suggest slash for same-sex partners. What now?

Speaking of music, or rather of Tris/Alex/etc., it occurred to me in one particularly inspired (or is that "slutty") moment that there was no need to panic when Coverdale became Jimmy's main man singer; as a paradigm for Robert Plant, he was every bit as qualified to be Alex as Alex himself is. If Alex and Tris go on the road again, newly invigorated and better-dressed than ever, where is the problem? Isn't this what they did in the follow-up to the novel?

Perhaps the correct analogue to slash for women is "dyke slash," in tune with adding heroic stature to pairs of women to make them sexy, rather than adding the emotionality men need.

As I understand it, the Concupiscence zines are intended to illustrate the title in any case. Is there something wrong with including stories therein that illustrate it more, ah, indulgently than usual? If you want to distinguish it from the slightly darker and more together (this sounds rather like making good chocolate pudding) stories that you prefer as your main output, you could call the issue Concupiscence Light and Sweet or Cum Cupid's Sense or something similarly frivolous. I don't see anything wrong with the "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" story [1], although I could stand a different title for it; the smoky siren here would blow any pop singer away in two seconds, so it trivializes your story unduly. And since it's about how Bodie is manipulated into a slash relationship that he desires but doesn't let himself want consciously, it seems perfectly apt for any slash-theme zine that doesn't explicitly promise "No Girls! Hot, Hung Sex On Every Page!"

Point taken about use of "boys" being too much of an excuse for childish behavior from males. Would it help if I called them "immature brats" instead?

Lovely reasoning about the difficulties of a/u writing, including the reasons we love to do it anyway. A little charity towards others' kinks will produce a less rigorous, sloppier, slipperier, massage-oiled time all around, which is fine until we run into someone whose current kink is canonical rigor. Just remember that there isn't any such thing in after-the-fact fanfic — it's all degrees of deviation. There are times to push one's nose up against the screen and try to meld with the First Source, and there are times to stand back and take a broader perspective on the whole of TV; like, wouldn't it be better with a Strauss soundtrack instead? If Kubrick can do it to the space program, why should we hesitate when it's only a TV show in the first place?

I'm not always aware if a bit of quoted verse at the beginning of a story is a song lyric or plain poetry - if I never heard of the song, it has to stand on its own. I can't say it always does, but then I haven't had much luck in prefacing stories with "Archduke Trio 2nd Movement" either, even if it seemed significant to me at the time. I did want to write a complicated Avon/Anna story once, so that I could preface it with a short bit of [Robert] Frost, but that wasn't quite sufficient payoff to make me finish the story.

I've never seen that slash is based on changing straight characters (or people) to queer characters, though it's hard to explain what it is instead. Can we postulate that slashy writing about a given character (or person) remains slashy regardless of the character's original or real-world interests? 1 mean, that wouldn't change what the writing is like, would it? And if it's slashy, it's either slash or slash-except-for-not-being-based-on-a-TV-show, or whatever your arbitrary boundary is. So far, the only accounts of behavior that I'm excluding from slash (by this definition) are factual reporting of living people, and I don't think I want to exclude those either, in theory. Can something not be slash (or at least "slashy") just because it really happened? This seems similar to "camp" in some ways. Comments from the audience? - In the same vein, I'd class kiss-and-tell bios as pornography (which you practically said anyway), sometimes for the mind, sometimes in the more traditional sense; they pander to voyeurism at the least. And while slash is often pornographic, all pornography is not slash (as you did say).

Klaus and Dorian, oooh, let's see. Well, in the manga, they weren't friends in any acknowledged way, and certainly not lovers, but they were two people who met often and intensely and screamed at each other and then cooperated (beautifully) on some goal that they happened to both want for different reasons. That is, they were destined. To the Western slash-educated eye, they were clearly and obviously destined for each other, but sexual friendship in the sense of doing anything except (for Dorian) lusting after Klaus and (for Klaus) noticing it far too much, is something I and other fans read in. I'm told that Japanese fans do their best to read it in too — at least sex happens in the Japanese fan stories, though I couldn't say how well they parallel any other element of Western fans' stories. Klaus, by the way, has co-workers who are gay in a less flamboyant style than Eroica, with whom he gets along as well as necessary (it can't be said that Klaus gets along with anyone really well in the social sense) so while it's tempting to read him as a classic repressed gay homophobe, he does seem to be reacting specifically to Dorian, not just homosexuality per se.

Your descriptions of Carnes's research all seems to add up to a batch of small boys putting up a sign, "icky gurrls KEEP OUT!" on the clubhouse. Does it approach any higher level of theory than that? And does some acceptance of that stance by women prompt the 99% male cast of slash in general, do you think? If the Proper Thing for men to do is go off and re-enter the wilderness (symbolically or otherwise) in all-male groups, then heroic adventurers from a frontier of any kind (crime, space, etc.) can properly express their solidarity in (male) couples... Well, maybe. It's pretty obvious that secret male societies allowed the men in them to feel part of an exclusionary group, and while fandom may not be exclusionary by the same mechanisms, it is certainly a group self-selected by fairly stringent criteria. It's the group identity built and bolstered by the shared story telling that is an obvious similarity — is pointing out this similarity a defense of secret male societies or a description? I'm not sure "sexist" describes either those groups or fandom in some senses, but it's difficult to define how the term applies to any segregated group and I don't think that's quite the point.

The power of the Wiseguy episode where Roger and Vinnie talk at the end of the Profitt arc [2] is undeniable; yet I have a lot of trouble seeing Roger as redeemable, even if he does seem to be, inexplicably, redeemed. Actually, I think you discussed the issue much better than I could. None of this prevents me from enjoying the idea of gripping emotional slash for Vinnie and Roger. Angels and devils make the best lovers — even broadway musicals have said so — and Roger's got to be one or the other. How many slash characters, or fan-written characters, could this apply to? Is it a sex-charged thing or just a numinous attention-getting thing suitable to inspire any sort of fanfic?

I agree that lesbian slash will have appeal (as do hetero romances) as long as the struggle to achieve intimacy is part of the story. The male/female traditional power inequity in many hetero romances is one kind of bar to intimacy, especially to verbal, intellectual intimacy, which is where slash can score over straight writing very easily and often.

Your comment is intriguing, about Murphy having been so much developed in B/D fandom just to provide variety. He's so entrenched in the fandom that I never did think of him as a spear-carrier — and he did appear in more than one episode which puts him one-up on Kate Ross, Ann Holly, Macklin, Towser, and several others. You probably know that he was introduced to be Bodie's new partner in case Shaw, and thus Doyle, left the show. So, rather like some female characters in various shows, he was brought in as a potential long-term lead, and then dropped or trivialized in later scripts. Yet fandom treats him very differently from, say, Jenna in B7. Is a penis that important, or can you pick out other factors that make Murphy more usable than Susan Fisher, Cally or Uhura?

I'd guess that slash is based on action-adventure and SF shows because those tend to isolate together, physically or psychologically, a pair of men who are young, in good condition, and demonstrably successful risk-takers - i.e., sexually attractive. No doubt female characters who draw the most attention from fans would be the most workable slash characters (that is, they'd have a chance of interesting the readers) and those are also the most intense female characters. Yes, like Servalan for one. In general, along with less screen time and fewer career options, most women are simply shown as less vivid, adventurous, and meaningful in adventure screen shows, so the exceptions stand out. Emma Peel stood out, and Dana Scully is doing so now in X-Files; they function as adventurers with their own strong personalities, not as "feminine" characters.

Hmm, could one well-disguised version of Illya in pro literature be Simon Illyan from Bujold's [Vorkosigan] books? This keeps occurring to me even though the description of the character isn't an obvious copy. There's something about the character's style... and of course the name.

Part of the confusion and argument on whether slash characters are "gay" seems based on varying definitions of "gay." Does the word denote a lifestyle, which has undeniably included a positive value on promiscuity in the past, or the simple fact of engaging in male/male sex? The "I'm not gay but..." line may be like saying, "I don't have kids, I have well-behaved offspring." There's a distinction, to be sure, but not one which excuses you from parenthood.

Shoshanna, great analysis of several aspects of fannish storywriting, suggesting some of the assumptions behind much of it - such as that the leads who are adopted as primary fannish characters are sympathetic and trustworthy almost by definition, that they naturally gravitate toward each other, requiring no motivation within the story. For slash, the show often has a subtext that supplies a motivation, but this can hardly apply to created characters, even genetically. I suppose analogous reasons are why stories where all of CI5 turn out to be gay irritate me - they hypothesize too far from the elements of the show, usually with no explanation. There was one short piece by Eros, however, where Cowley had deliberately selected his agents as committed, mostly gay, couples for a "sacred band" of his own, that was hilariously apt. [3]

UNCLE slash has always been a bit weird. I suspect the 60's atmosphere and timing of the show leads to some of it. This may be the slash couple that comes closest to sitcom behavior and style (especially in the silliest third seasons shows), although those who are familiar with I Spy are invited to comment. As such, domesticity and weddings are slightly more apropos than in, say, Professionals. One strong vein of N/I for a long time was and is extremely "romantic," which tends to lead to formal lifetime commitments instead of a quickie behind the weapons arsenal, time permitting. Perhaps, too, it should not be ignored that Napoleon has a general resemblance to Darren Stevens, which come to think of it might explain a lot about why Illya is so much the more numinous and put-upon of the two, as well as account for the plotlines of several well-known fan stories.

As with "gay," a great deal of the debate and lack of agreement on "pornography" stems from differing definitions of same. The word is used to include representations of mutilation and rape in the same breath as it covers accounts of consensual playful sex. These are hardly the same thing, and treating them in the same way is not generally appropriate. Lumping all topics which have any slightest relation to sex together (which our culture frequently does) is no way to clarify the issues involved in sexual responsibility. Good point that making casual sex permissible and practical does not necessarily lead to emotionally intimate sex, in life or — to return to slash —in fiction. I usually prefer slash stories where the couple develop or show off a capacity for emotional and sexual intimacy rather than for acrobatic casual sex, although let us not forget that intimacy may differ radically for different people and situations; there's nothing to say that acrobatic sex is not casual, and narratives that focus on sexual choreography can include the emotional connection as well. At the least, the show's subtexts (if they exist) must be confirmed and not contradicted in a slash story that means to evoke the romance of male bonding.

If you selfishly prefer slash writing that serves your particular kinks, consider that some of us are (equally selfishly) unable to suspend disbelief, and therefore to enjoy as fiction or fantasy, sexual stories that fly in the face of our perceptions of gay men's behavior, or of male physiology. In asking for stories that show moderately realistic gay elements — not always the characters, but things like the existence of a gay subculture and legislated intolerance — we are expressing our kinks as readers, rather than any duty to gay men or any other group outside fandom.

The argument about zines using characters out of already-copyrighted shows and therefore having little or no moral ground to object to zine-copying has always bothered me, since the cases are not parallel in a very significant way. Literal or mechanical copying of an original work is very different from extracting elements from it and reusing them in a different medium, along with creative invention, to make up a new story/picture/etc. The latter is all but the basis for Western art of all kinds. The argument that fanzine content is nothing but a debased and illegal copy of something else so that unauthorized duplication of it has no further to sink on the moral or legal scale is not one I can agree with. A fan story or zine is not a duplication of a TV show — would it substitute for a tape of the show to someone who wanted to play the tape, for instance? I'd rather consider that zines have valid independent existence of their own; the ethics of copying them is another question entirely.

Some Topics Discussed in Cat's Darkling Zine"

  • comments about Lois and Clark
  • "I'm not a deeply prejudiced person, I think. I believe it is O.K. for two curly men to have it off with each other."
  • "Slash is between fictional characters. IMO, as soon as you are making historical characters say lines that are not recorded anywhere, they become fictional characters and can be slashed."
  • comments on the slashiness of Trust, Like the Soul
  • comments on Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Professionals story by Dawn Woods in the previous issue
  • a review of No Holds Barred #5, see that page
  • a review of Goblin, see that page
  • a review of A Kiss is Just a Kiss, see that page
  • DS9 action figures
  • song vids and rare pairs
  • many detailed analysis of scenes from Star Trek: DS9 about why the appeal and proof of Quark/Odo
  • Ferengi and their function, speculation on female Ferengis
  • a con report for "the seventh Star Trek convention of the Alliance Normande in Le Havre" (France)

Excerpts from "Cat's Darkling Zine"

I remember a story about screwed-up human and a Vulcan with development problems. It's one of the last Trek stories I ever read, and I remember enjoying it, reading for the story alone. I think it was one of the DVS stories you mentioned. Can't remember the specifics though, but if I had thought there mere more Trek stories like that, I might still be trying to read them.

Waiting expectantly for the Wind & Tree song whenever you're ready. Jane, yes, but a Bodie/Cowley video tape I might like? I'd have to like Bodie first, no? Still, I doubt that Doyle/Murphy or Cowley/Murphy video songs might exist. Miguel Ferrer found a picture of him in Fangoria. A nice thought for me: A Coop/Rosenfield video song could be made to a song sung by Miguel Ferrer. Hey, that's an idea. I could try to do that. All I'm missing are the Twin Peaks tapes. But I know people in France who have them

And now, on to my newest focus for emotional lust. I seem to develop one every three months or so, but I never seem to grow out of any of them. I suppose that what makes this possible is that I tend to go for marginal couples, so I never reach saturation: There's never going to be enough Rafael/Buddy or Robert/Guy slash written to sate me. Obviously. So the newest couple that makes me go al gooey inside... So, my new infatuation is to be found in Deep Space 9. The most endearing couple I ever came across: QUARK and ODO.

Due to limited budget, I had to choose carefully what DS9 dolls I would buy, and I bought one of Quark and one of Odo. The DS9 dolls are difficult to resist, because there are the best media dolls I've ever seen. The Next Generation ones were good, too. Both NG and DS9 dolls are bizarrely articulated. It's impossible for those dolls to sit down because the hip and the knee bend at incompatible angles. Another quibble, is that Quark seems to be a bit too tall compared to Odo. But it doesn't matter. I've had them in each other's arms ever since I acquired them.

[...]

I have just put my Odo and Quark dolls in a different position. Odo is behind Quark, and has grabbed both his ears. But I can't make the Quark doll cover Odo's hands with his. I hope in some glowing future dolls will come articulated to their fingers. What can one think of a civilisation that can built sophisticated heat seeking killing machines, but can't build dolls which can touch their own ears?

I warmed up to [the character] Quark quickly enough, so quickly, in fact, that I was starting to wonder if there was not REALLY something wrong with me. But others have displayed the symptoms. I came across this quotation from Supervising Producer David Livingston:"... The Ferengi are us. They are the side of us we don't want to see... playing that sort of unpleasant side of human nature in a comic way we will engage the audience more. That's one reason Armin (Shimerman) is becoming popular is because he can make those human foibles humorous and palatable. We see how silly we are as people. You look at Quark and you want to take him in your arms and give him a hug. Why are you such a little shit?"

This interpretation twanged a cord within me. (And I also think it goes a long way to explain the attraction of characters like Avon. So? Avon and Quark, brothers under the skin? The one has outrageous ears, the other, an outrageous nose).

I've got the vague suspicion that Bashir/Dax counts as slash. Jadzia never fails to remind the ducky little doctor Bashir that she had been a man several times before. Not to mention that if something happens to Jadzia, it is likely that Dax will transfer into a male body. It's never clearly stated, but when you take into account casual remarks, it seems that trills alternate.

Ferengi Women: I suspected they were not intelligent. Had the mind of three years old or so. Which would explain why they'd be considered property and not educated, and considered an embarrassment, since they are never seen. I'm not sure if there are examples of species evolving with different intelligence levels according to gender. It seems unlikely as a natural process. Maybe a genetic disease of which men are healthy carriers? (the one intelligent female Ferengi shown could be explained as a throwback.). In fact until that episode, I had also

suspected that the Ferengi had lied all along, that there Were no Ferengi females, and that all it really took were two Ferengi to fertilise a husk. But the Ferengi did not want to be put in the same bag as people as colourless and uninspired as the Je'nai. Very bad for business that. So they had lied. Still, the difference between male and female Ferengi is so slight that it might explain why one of the genders insists the other remain unclothed. Otherwise, the amount of confusion that would follow would be... interesting.

Went to a very definitively non-slash Star Trek convention two weeks ago: the seventh convention of the Alliance Normande in Le Havre. I got to spend money I did not have, I bought a Will Ryker uniform shirt I did not fit into, I purchased a heap of trading cards without checking whether I had them already or not, I ordered a French produced non-slash Classic Star Trek Trivia zine, and I still can't figure why, since my interest in mainstream Star Trek is marginal at best.

The first tent we were supposed to sleep in got soaked though, which was lucky, because it kept collapsing, so we got to put up another tent in the middle of the night. The sleeping bags had remained outside in the evening and were fairly wet with dew, at least, mine was. There were babies, kids and dogs launching themselves at your legs, trying to make you trip. To sum up, I really had a whale of a good time. Fandom is a strange thing.

There were new people, videos of German conventions, trivia and caption contests (I won a LaForge pass at the

caption contest. In my opinion, the funniest line was the one illustrating a picture of Kirk about to smash something with a rock after a drawn out fight: "Sorry Picard, there can only be one of us!") and lots of activities, among which pyrograving on cardboard. Not wanting to deface a character I liked (like Quark or Albert Rosenfield) by a new technique, I burned a Bodie into the cardboard. But that day, Bodie was not the only one to roast under the calculating caress of the flame. Me, during the proceedings, I got myself scarletly sunburned on half my arms and on the left side of my face. A new style Cheronnite, as it were.

Though I don't do any, I would love to see you expand on the technical side of video songs making.

The "I'll do anything for love" [4] sounds great. Now we can see american tapes without all the fast forward lines, we've got to know where video songs can be bought from, yes? The Star Trek "New Math" Tom Lehrer is one of my top favourites, with the Smut song and a man from from Uncle one where pornographic bits have been inserted. What I like in video songs is the tricky synchronisation to the story told with the help of the song.

Rock Bands: It seems weird, now that I think that slash has to be based on fictional characters, but I remember, when I was much younger, I used to daydream about slash stories between Brian Jones and David Bowie, and a smattering of greek gods who had wandered by due to my search for slash material.

Loccoco/Dorian sigh... [5] Are you planning a cross-over with the Turquoise Mine Affair? Loss of innocence: it's cute and disorderly. Love it. What does subsuming mean?

In my opinion, TL the Soul could be slash (unless transgender defines a category by itself) (and I might modify my views after I've actually read it.). This follows the reasoning that if Avon and Vila entered a graphic cyberspace, and perceived themselves as a blue pink polka dotted cube and a red and yellow striped pyramid copulating, that'd still be slash. If they both used cyber-female bodies, it would be male slash as well. Those stories would, however, be very close to the border of the definition. On the other hand, take a story where Cally receives a bang on the head. When she wakes up, she's convinced that she's Avon in Cally's body, and then proceeds to seduce Vila, would that be slash? What if Cally woke up in Avon's body, and has sex with Vila? (funny how the reaction of people waking up in unfamiliar bodies seems to be to want to have sex with Vila first thing. Me, I don't quite see it. Blake yes, but Vila?).

My objection to the story [Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Dawn Woods in the previous issue] is this: I've enjoyed the Ripley/Hicks story in Heroes, so I know I can appreciate the unexpected straight story in a slash zine. But if there are two characters I like, and a third one is going to be introduced, that I don't know, and who's going to be important to them, it's going to have to be somebody more real than Karen. That women is almost as much in control of the events in the story as the writer herself, she's almost as tough as Bodie, as eager for sex as Doyle, and as smart and conniving as Cowley. What IS the point of her? I guess I'd have minded less if she had been Susan Fisher. I can believe all that from her.

About Macho Masochism: I remember, a couple of years ago, an article in STERN, a German weekly magazine, on an American macho camp, where men would pay to be tortured, or rather kept in rough conditions, naked and tied up, without food or drink, by men of military or ex-mercenaries type. And they did that to prove they were men, if they could stand the whole course. There were pictures. A man in uniform; holding a weapon, pudgy naked men tied up, sitting on the floor. No one looked like they were having any fun.

As to finding someone unappealing. Sure, you don't have to look at him when you write him: you have to do worse, you either have to BE him, or, describe in his lover's words as to why he is so irresistible. You don't have to do things like that to yourself when doing Video Songs. You merely have to look at him.

Tarrant/Travis? Where is that to be found?... Yurk. Poor Travis. To be forced to fuck the curly-haired wimp is really too much to ask even from a baddie.

I have seen the Pilot [of Babylon 5 ] (in French) because I had heard that Bill Mumy would be in B5, and since Bill Mumy is a friend of Miguel Ferrer (which should be totally irrelevant to me) I wanted to know what he looked like. He wasn't in it, so I must have got it wrong. None of the characters really appealed to me, and Commander Sinclair must have done something terribly heroic he doesn't remember to stop the war with the people with the funny thing on their heads whose name escapes me. And the very thought of it turns my stomach. I can't trust the series that it will reveal a secret less trite and more complex. I am, however, attempting to see more episodes, but the girl who has them has promised that one day her tapes will probably turn up at [A's] place. So I've got the feeling I will have to wait some time still.

Some Topics Discussed in "Untitled (H J)"

  • his comments at Aca-Fen (The new list for academically-inclined fans or academics who study fans or fans who study academics, etc.) which include MUCH about defining slash
  • much about sexuality, history, society, and personal experience
  • comments on hate speech and free speech on campuses, the difficulties in both rejecting and embracing "political correctness"
  • much discussion about the book, Gone with the Wind
  • some similarities between the privacy of slash communities and academic context
  • lengthy comments about two press publications printed in the last issue, one about Dartmouth and Dr. Cole, and the other a New York Times article about Cynthia Wolfe, includes eyewitness comments

Excerpts from "Untitled (H J)"

Slash deals with pre-existing fictional characters who are minimally familiar to and "poached" [6] by the writer. Slash (now) and probably always has involved a broader range of texts than simply dramatic television series. Slash can and is about films (Lethal Weapon. Star Wars), comic books (From Eroica With Love), literary works (Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayers, William Shakespeare), musical groups (Trish/Alex [sic]), etc. What is important to me is that the figures at the base of slash come with pre existing emotional connotations — at least for the writer and most often for the reader as well. We care about these characters beyond the story we are reading at the moment. They make us hot. They make us laugh and cry. Now, in some cases, as when people started reading Bodie/Doyle slash before they had access to The Professionals, we are often prepared to take it as a given that the writer has an emotional investment in the characters and that these characters exist in a fictional form elsewhere. For me, a story with original characters may be slash-like but not slash. Slash most often deals with television characters for many reasons: a) because slash most often deals with these characters and so it shapes what we sit down to write; b) because television allows the most sustained and intimate relations between characters and viewers; c)because television series unfold characters over longer periods of time — ie. more hours of texts to explore; d) television characters are most readily recognizable by readers and thus it is easiest to get the story distributed and read.

We see slash everywhere because romantic friendship is almost everywhere in popular culture. Homosocial desire can also be found in intense rivalry between men (B/A) or in situations of divided loyalty between men (Wiseguy), since these are situations where the men must make strong emotional investments in each other. often most pronounced in situations involving the exclusion of women (hunting trips, the military, etc.) involving the exchange of women or good (such as ships) between men. The concept of homosocial desire draws no fixed distinction between hetrosexuality and homosexuality but sees sexuality as a process. Homosocial desire already contains an erotic and affective element even if our culture often tries to block the full realization of that element. Women may also experience homosexual desire but it poses different issues for them than it does for why I recognize the potential and actual existence of lesbian slash but feel that it will ultimately evolve into a new genre to explore new issues.

Slash works to intensify the barriers between homosocial and homosexual desire, to make them visible, precisely because it will be that much more interesting to see the characters work through them, and as Lezlie has pointed out, slash is primarily interested in the process by which the characters overcome the barriers and come together. Most commonly, this barrier comes to rest on issues of anxiety about first time homosexual experience for predominantly or exclusively heterosexual characters. In some of Barbara's Eroica erotica, that barrier exists between a flamingly gay and a homophobic character. But this is not the only way to create dramatic interest in slash. In SF universes, where homophobia can be imagined away, or in stories where the characters are assumed to be bi, other forms of barriers can surface around issues of class (Villa/Avon), race (Miami Vice. War of the Worlds. I Spy), temporality (Quantum Leap), alliances (Wiseguy), etc. This part of the definition both explains the predominance of first time stories, which can deal most directly with the crisis posed by those initial barriers but also why most long-term relationship stories must start by posing some new problem in the relationship which previously-committed lovers must confront and overcome. This barrier and its crossing is at the heart of slash.

On same sex kisses on American television, it is useful to note that there have been to date, three such kisses on American network prime-time series: C.J. (bi) and Abby (straight but willing to think it over) on LA Law, two teenage girls exploring the issue on Picket Fences (in the dark) and the recent kiss on Roseanne. In all cases, the kisses involved women with at least one of those women conceptualizing herself as straight. Still no male kissing on network primetime, though PBS is another matter. Northern Exposure has done good by its queer characters, even showing two men in bed together in one episode, but it has not had any same sex kisses — not in the episode on the founding of Cisely [sic], not in the gay wedding. I believe one reason many straight people believe they can get AIDS by holding hands with or even being in the same room with gay people is that this is the only form of gay sexuality they see on American television. :-)

About the women-only debate on the slash list: My comments were based on the reports of that controversy in this apa, which may well have been one-sided. I was not there and at that time, I would have been excluded from the group by virtue of my membership in two categories — as a male and as an academic. The thrust of my comments were to say that, while I don't necessarily agree with the rules in this context, there are very reasonable arguments to be made on behalf of them and to lay out what I thought some of those arguments might be. I close by asking others who belonged to the group to tell us more about the discussion, since I am frankly curious. So, I ask in all politeness to read my remarks in context. Since I wrote that discussion, I have finally, after multiple invitations from fans, agreed to have [Lynn C] put my name into consideration for joining the list myself. I have always said that I would not come unless asked (and I have been asked more than once) or if I felt it would be disruptive (at the time I was told it would not be since Lynn, my brother in slash, had been integrated in the group and there were other out academics there.) It sounds like my name may have caused more controversy than I was initially told that it would. For that, I am very sorry. I had no desire to cause trouble, though I can't help being male and would rather not have to give up my profession in order to participate in fandom. Believe me, I have met many male fans with whom I would not want to talk on a daily basis, but that doesn't mean that I think a blanket exclusion of all male fans is the best solution to the problems raised by the internet. I think a case-by-case review of applicants is a far better solution and that seems to be what the list is evolving toward.

[...]

...I do see the issue of women-only space on the net in paradoxical terms and I do find myself at an impasse in my own thinking. That was the point of my original remarks. I thought the discussion in the apa was making a black and white issue out of something that I felt was almost impossibly grey and murky.

[...]

I feel like I am spending half this issue correcting myself on this cyberspace issue, but I didn't say that the slash net should be "female exclusive," only that there could be reasonable arguments for making it so.... I know that I seemed to be speaking out of both orifices at once, but that's because I have very conflicting feelings on the topic. In any case, the ability to mask one's identity isn't really the issue. It has more to do with styles of interaction, codes of ethics, and modes of behavior, which are still somewhat different for men and women and it is my observation, open to counterargument, these differences get exaggerated in the mediated, non-face-to-face communication on the nets. But, obviously, as a male slash fan, I do not think my mere presence is disruptive or that it is not possible for men to learn to play along with the rules of etiquette set by a predominantly female group.

What I say in a classroom is to a specific group of people who have had the whole term to understand the context in which I am speaking and to judge my ideas fairly. The readers of a right-wing student newspaper don't have that context, don't even have basic information about the intonation with which I deliver lines. Just as you rightfully object to an academic "outing" you as a slash fan, I do feel threatened with the prospect of having my words to my students reproduced in a campus publication and then exposed to national ridicule. I see it as a violation of the understanding that exists between teacher and student.

I ask, which poses the greatest threat to intellectual debate on this campus, the so-called "political correctness" movement or the crusade to root it out and destroy it? And, what has any of this to do with slash you may ask — very little, which is why I was encouraging people to find another term, besides "political correctness" to discuss disagreements within slash fandom, since I would hate to see the same kinds of witch hunts erupt here.

When IS Babylon 5 going to "out" its [same sex] character? I had first heard that it would be at the end of the first six episodes (did I hear this from Meg?) and then I heard at the end of the first season, but both have come and gone without results. After our experience with Paramount and ST:NG [7][8] [9]. I think we should see the results on-screen before we give them credit for thinking about the concept.

Sorry to be so preoccupied with academic and cyberspace politics this time. I promise next time to be a good boy and focus on slash a bit more. I will also offer some thoughts on teaching a course on masculinity. You know what they say -- those who can't do, teach!

Some Topics Discussed in "Untitled (C J)"

  • addresses the statements in the previous issue/s made by some fans that are anti-acafan
  • preference for writing in a "closed text" rather than a show that was on-going
  • comments about biographies of famous people, that they are usually useless titillating

Excerpts from "Untitled (C J)"

Re your uneasiness about the apa becoming an academic colloquium — why do I feel like I need to ask if I get to have an opinion on this? A colloquium is an informal discussion, a good description of this apa. It is a word frequently used in academic circles to rationalize getting together and having a good gossip, usually centered around a general topic, like slash. That actually sounds to me a lot like what you say your goals for the apa are. Does whether we refer to it as a review of the literature or dishing a zine change the substance of that discussion? I honestly don't think anyone in the zine is trying to talk in academize in order to be difficult or impress others or create a distance from non-academic fans, or whatever. But some of us honestly do talk like that. Others of us don't. Can we ask someone to change the voice in which they write? I know this is an easy question for me personally. I enjoy the discussions that lean towards the academic and the less structured gossips. I enjoy hearing both the academic and non- academic fans "trot out their newest theory about slash." My knee jerk response to this set of comments runs to the tune of, the apa is composed of its membership. Each member is directly responsible for contributing to the body of the whole. So write what you want to read, and encourage others to do likewise. If someone else bores you, well, most of us have probably been known to skip reading parts of this collection. We all respond to (within limitations) what provokes strong response in us.

But your last sentence actually suggests a somewhat different problem. You say that "some of us without academic credentials are the most guilty of treating this forum as a chance to read out papers... and move on without listening/responding to anyone else, or sharing anything remotely personal about our reactions to slash." [emphasis mine] This suggests to me that you think lack of response to the ideas of others or personal sharing is a significant part of your problem with academics in the apa. This confuses me on several levels. First, if anything I would have said the apa members I tend to think of as more academic respond at least as much to the ideas of others as the apa members I think of as less academic.

Second, because I would not have said there was a split between the two groups in terms of willingness to offer personal reaction to slash. Perhaps we are mentally sorting out comments as relevant/not relevant differently? And third, because even if I did see this sort of difference in the content of the tribs of the two groups, I would be very hesitant to suggest that the apa should privilege one sort of discussion over another. I see our interest in slash as what binds the group together, not a shared conversational style. Obviously, shared assumptions about conversation do bind fandom together in very real ways. Try talking about the interpersonal relationships of TV characters in other settings and you may get humored for a few minutes. You might even find someone who enthusiastically leaps into the fray and argue some point with you. But then they will finish the conversation and head home and forget about it. As fans, we take it for granted that such conversations can offer more pleasures to us than a few minutes (hours? days?) diversion. I guess I just hadn't seen the academic piffle as falling outside the standards of the community. I'm wondering how heavily the "to slash" part of the sentence figures into this. Is it possible we are seeing different sorts of content as relating "to slash" differently?

I have read at least one of the T'hy'la stories (although I'll be damned if I can remember its/their name(s)). It wasn't my zine, alas, so I can't look back at it. But yes, so far as I remember it, it looked like a duck, it walked like a duck, it quacked like a duck, etc. I'll call it slash. Deleting Trek references from these stories in more than a superficial manner, however, would require more than changing a few names. The Vulcan culture and the notion of using the human/Vulcan pairing are central to the whole, aren't they? This opens us to the lovely, if sticky question of what makes Trek, Trek, and when does something stop being Trek and start being simply science fiction.

Some Topics Discussed in "Vice Files"

Excerpts from "Vice Files"

Re: B5 (as opposed to B7), it's far from episodic - there is a continuing story line going through the season, with a couple of episodes that are 'episodic' non-arc ones. As a matter of fact, I'm relieved to find another show like HSB or WG with real genuine continuity; very close in structure to the better anime series. Things may not appear initially to tie together, but as things go along it becomes more and more evident that later events are triggered by earlier ones. We were quite frankly unnerved at Gaylaxicon when one of the panels said that there, were complaints that B5 had "...no structure, no plot..." WHAT? Are we watching the same show? Is it just our long-time exposure to anime? Are American fans, in general, truly incapable of following a continuing story?

True, there's no "We encounter the [a) omnipotent being, b) space phenomenon, c) new alien race of the week, and a) are tested it, b) test it, c) can't communicate so a) s/he tosses us into a black hole, b) we destroy it, c) we violate the Prime Directive] again" plotline, and problems aren't all tied up in one episode, but isn't that the way things are? Actions make ripples - something you do today may have a result that seems to come out of nowhere weeks later, until you look back and think about it. I don't understand how fans can know every scene their favourite character gets hurt in & which episode it's from, - in one series, but can't follow the storyline in this one??!

I don't know,maybe it's just me.

YES! Garibaldi/Sinclair! I'm working on one, although it won't be seeing print until the production company eases up on the "NO ZINES!" policy; and it does kinda ignore one of the creator's ideas re: acceptance of homosexuality. JMS says in the B5 world, no one cares if you're gay or straight or bi, but I think that in 260 years we're not going to be totally accepting. Look at the sudden rise of the religious right and all the anti-gay-rights legislation popping up...Other bigotries continue in barely altered forms, so I don't really see that that one thing will change so totally. I say that the military will allow gays, but as in Germany now, not in command-level positions. I.E. the Station Commander and the Security Chief are NOT supposed to be gay.

Of course, upcoming personnel changes on the show will also be causing me a problem, depending on what they actually DO with Sinclair. *snort* I don't see how people can say he can't act! He's playing the part of a military commander who HAS to maintain a controlled image (and who has PTSD & doesn't want to deal with the ickies in the back of his mind...) VERY well...Have the people who say he can't act watched the looks in his eyes when Sinclair is stressed or afraid or angry?

JMS himself said, "But there is a strong link to Sinclair that prompted him to give Garibaldi what is, essentially, his last chance." Uh huh. Just what KIND of strong link?

Ivanova is GREAT, and I am now (after "Eyes") convinced that she is indeed at LEAST a latent telepath, which could make her life really interesting... Talia I think is quite attracted to her - they both fight against it so much... (Talia is supposed to be the bi character, but I kinda wish it had been Garibaldi. Almost all the media gay/bi characters are women - they're still so goddamned afraid to show gay men! And there's always Lennier's (Bill Mumy's character, Delenn's assistant) eagerness to help Garibaldi build his motorcycle, and his fixation on its symbolism in Earth culture.

Re: slash from sitcoms, well, the only sitcoms I've watched in ages are semi-genre anyway — M*A*S*H, Barney Miller, Bakersfield PD. I just don't like sitcoms - for the most part they're stupid. I don't enjoy stupid shows. Since I don't like them. I wouldn't write slash about them...Now, I would for Bakersfield PD (after all the OTHER things I want to...), but I also can't write comedy, so that's another problem.

Re: netfic, this was the exact reason I didn't buy the QL netfic zine - I'm gunshy of paying for something full of fiction that quite likely was put out quickly because it could be...I may be totally wrong - there may be much more care taken in producing it, but I suspect not... On the other hand, knowing that 'The Escape From New York Affair' was, in essence, written on the net, I was amazed by the tightness of the writing and the gripping tension that sometimes made me turn a few pages ahead to check & make sure things weren't going to turn too bad, before I fainted from hyperventilation!

Re: the two Travises (I love your term Travii!), when I saw the appearance of Travis, I just basically thought 'And just how do they intend to explain this?...Oh - they don't..."

That was another thing at Gaylaxicon that kinda scared me. On one panel, the subject of slash came up, & the reaction was somewhere between ick, ridicule, and 'why on Earth would people do THAT?' - and here I'd been thinking that a group of people already so accustomed to ridicule & social ostracism would have a much more 'live & let live' attitude towards things. If I hadn't been so stunned, I may have asked that, but as it was I didn't even think of it until about an hour later.

Re: nets, yes, exactly. Paper and postage are just much more financially accessible to most. And I feel left out because I have no affordable method of quickly contacting someone (no, phone is not affordable either — we don't make phone calls outside the local area unless we have to. And, it's far more difficult to get through to people like show creators by phone than it is by net...) or passing on an idea. Even IF my work had access to a net, they would not allow use of it; I don't have the luxury to ride in free on the coattails or my job or school.

At least in my mind, sex between two (or more) people of the same sex is homosexual sex. It does not mean these people live the gay LIFESTYLE, it just means, pure & simple, that I am not ignoring a literal definition. Two men in bed together, no matter how long they have been hetero, just can NOT say they aren't having homosexual sex. "It doesn't mean I have to provide a realistic description of these characters as gays. I know why you're talking about, and it seems you and some of the others in the apa (myself included) are arguing two separate points of this debate.

I was unaware that BatB fandom was starting to become tolerant - good! I think I actually prefer Diana too - Catherine is just such a wuss. Personally, I wish they'd had a chance to tell us what Gabriel really was - some of the hints they dropped nay not have been intentional, but it seemed to us they were making him something not-quite-human. And then they hurried it & just dropped the whole thing.

Re- Highlander, I don't like Richie either. There could be slash possibilities, but most of those in the past with Duncan and various old friends. Of course, you could set up a fantastically tragic story with someone he's loved before coming back into his life and either being killed by another Immortal, or he himself being forced to do it... (the ultimate sacrifice for your Immortal loved one - die & give him your Quickening?)

Re queer character on ST, from what I heard about Paramount at Gaylaxicon, now that ST has become semi-mainstream (even an Emmy nomination for Best Drama - the world really MUST be ending...), they seem to think they can do whatever is the best business-wise, and the fans can take a flying fuck. So, because sponsors get all freaked-out around the "G" or "Q" (no, not THAT Q) word, I wouldn't hold my breath for it happening in THIS lifetime...

There IS no essential change in the characters' lives from one episode to the next. That's the problem with American episodic TV. Even when things DO change (for example, Picard living an entire extra lifetime), they only change for that one episode. The ONLY lasting result from that one episode was him playing the penny whistle. There would have been attitudes towards families, children, fatherhood, etc. that just NEVER appeared.

Re: minority characters playing such a minor role in what we write, take a look at War of the Worlds fandom. The new production company killed off the 2 minority (one Cherokee, and one black wheelchair-bound man) characters when they took over for the second season. A lot of the fanfic not dealing specifically with the 1st season is 'resurrection' type stories bringing at least one of them back. Also, look at Miami Vice - the primary pair is between white Sonny and hispanic Castillo . We can't blame it all on fandom - there are also the racial politics of Hollywood to think about. There AREN'T many minority characters in the shows fans write most about, so the fans don't write about a lot of minority characters. If they put in an extra (original) character and make him/her a minority, will they be accused of Mary-sueism, or would they be accused of putting the character in 'just to make the cast more politically correct'?

Some Topics Discussed in "Ghost Speaker"

Excerpts from "Ghost Speaker"

[My slash] has everything to do with that magic moment, when everything clicks and I know that those two are lovers — or ought to be. Or perhaps simply that there is a resolution to be achieved if I can get those two to touch. Someone (no-one in this apa) once accused me of writing unconventional partnerships "to be difficult" (she had been trying, vainly, for years, to persuade me to write Bodie/Doyle).

I know it must look like that. And the fact is I don't like Kirk at all, I'm not very keen on Doyle, and I've only grown to appreciate Blake over the years.

But when I first started to write slash in B7, there was no conventional couple. There were maybe half a dozen B7 slash zines in existence. I wrote A/V because Avon and Vila were who I wanted to write about. I found it astonishing that all those Americans were mad keen on writing about Avon and Blake. (Of course, I hadn't actually seen either of the first two seasons at that point - but even once I had, I still couldn't see why Avon/Blake was so appealing.

I see Bodie/Cowley, Spock/McCoy, and Avon/Vila, as the most obvious couples in the three series I've been seriously interested in. What I don't understand is why practically everyone else goes for the bizarre but weird pairings - whatzizname with Bodie, the Captain-thing with Spock, and the guy with the curls with Avon.

OK, I have read a lot and enjoyed some K/S and a fair amount of B/D — out never enough to write it. There's no magic, no click, no feeling that if only those two touched it would be the most important thing in the world.

There are two kinds of slash stories to write; one, the simple puzzle-solving story.

Take two people (Murphy and Macklin, Cowley and Illya, Blake and Spock) and get them into bed. This is of interest the first time and seldom thereafter; the fun part is solving the problem. And there's no point in writing such a story for Bodie and Doyle or Kirk and Spock - it's already been written too many times.

The magic couples are different. What I want out of slash is a kind of macho tenderness - a shield, over either or both, so that if they can touch, if they can make that connection, then it will be more important than anything else, their world will be transformed. (Not necessarily happily.) With Avon and Vila, the whole point was that Avon didn't reach out, so that when he did, it mattered. With Spock and McCoy, they're both very defended people, and both of them alien to the other, so (particularly in the Mirror Universe) if they could touch it would be a miracle. With Bodie and Cowley, it's even better - both of them defensive, shielded, macho, closety, snarling... if they touch, it's a miracle, it matters, but even more, they have so much to lose if they stay together, that the miracle of touch continues.)

My various writing partners will tell you that as far as I'm concerned research is something I have collaborators for. This is true: I'm lazy. But I don't like writing what I know isn't true, and reading what I know isn't true is irritating. ("Cowley's beloved England" was one particularly infelicitous example I remember.)

Getting it right includes, in stories written in or around the present day, reactions to being gay. It's one area in which I can call myself an expert, since I am gay. That's why a comment in [L's] apazine annoyed me very much. She said: "Something that was an extension of me is now being reality checked to fit the sexuality of a group of people who don't even READ slash."

Well, no; it's being reality checked because of a group of people, like me, like [B], [N], [S], and others, who do read slash, and write it, too. I can't speak for the others, only for me.

In June 1984 I started a fanzine called "touched", with two friends from the gay youth group. We wanted there to be at least one slash zine in which the words "I'm not gay, I just fancy you" would never ever be printed. I like to think that "touched" had something to do with the changes in slash fandom since then.

I stopped being angry with [L] when I realised that what she was describing was not a reality she was living in where slash is strictly the preserve of straight women, but only her own particular perversion; liking stories in which two straight men fall in love and fuck each other's brains out. (And who knows? Maybe straight men do behave like that when women aren't looking.)

I always liked slash, among other reasons, because it was gay. I bought my first slashzine at about the same time I came out - age 16. ("I state that I am over 18...").

It was, and is, very soothing to read stories which take gayness to be normal.

In Star Trek and in Blake's 7, it is perfectly possible to write stories in which the issue of two men fancying each other hardly needs to be discussed. (As far as I've noticed, at least recently, most of the writers who see a need to discuss it are those who don't write slash - and, presumably, need an excuse not to do so....) But The Professionals is set in a spacetime adjacent to mine; 1970s England.

I need a word to describe stories in which Bodie and Doyle (or whoever) fall in love and fuck and are still supposed to be straight. Straight slash? Slush? Whatever it's called, it wrenches me. Something that was an extension of me is taken and twisted to remove it from my reality, to fit somebody else's sexuality.

I can accept - and even, if it's like Professional Dreamer, enjoy - a story in which Bodie and Doyle snuggle down together afterwards and assure each other quite seriously that they're still straight, they just fancy each other. It's a rationale I can imagine someone who has previously always thought he was straight indulging in. (What would be really funny would be a story in which Bodie and Doyle then have to deal with the fact that they do fancy other men - and each of them desperately trying to conceal it from the other one....) I don't tend to enjoy those kind of stories very much because as a concept, the first-time-ever story does nothing at all for me.

[...]

But if I think of these "straight slash" stories as yet another perversion, or yet another A/U - then it's just one more thing I don't particularly go for in B/D. (Elves, vampires, and Regency romances...) What makes it hard to think that way is the defendants of this particular perversion who find it necessary to claim that Bodie and Doyle are really straight (No, they're not. They're fictional.), or who complain that other people don't share their perversion and insist on writing stories in which Bodie and Doyle are gay. That's like someone complaining that not every slash writer does elf stories. Or like me complaining that not everyone writes Bodie/Cowley.

I hope Anne Rice is making a lot of money from these travesties of her novels, because she is sure as hell not earning anything in artistic integrity... what next? The Beauty trilogy as a heteromance? (Incidentally, it's worth reading John Preston's Entertainment for a Master, from Alyson Press, for his viewpoint on Anne Rice if for nothing else.)

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for the songtapes. "Cuts Both Ways" is very neat - I enjoyed it very much. I also enjoyed "Renegade" — good Bodie songtape. [10] Now I have ambitions - all I need is to get me, Nicole, two VCRs, a stop watch, and all the tapes we'd need, together in one place for some time, and mmm. There's so many good Bodie/Cowley clips that "Cuts Both Ways" missed - and so many perfect songs. Hey, it could be a good conversion tool - "You don't believe in B/C? Watch this..."

Some Topics Discussed in "Yamibutoh"

Excerpts from "Yamibutoh"

What did I learn from this MediaWest Con (besides that I should not, for the sake of my checking account have had so much money to spend) was that I am missing a lot by not being on a computer net. Please, everyone, if you discuss slash topics on computer, don't forget us poor souls who are computer illiterate. It sounded like I was missing out on a lot of good stuff.

One problem with using "Eroica yori Ai o Komete" as the link between Japanese "shonen ai" (yayoi) and western slash is that it is very atypical of the genre here. While a great deal is done in the yayoi with a gay character chasing a straight, the fact that both Klaus and Dorian are extremely adult is very unusual. The humor in Eroica is also unusual. While there is some humor in the typical Japanese yayoi zine, it generally appears in the "domestic" stories (superheroes shopping at the market et. al.) and rarely in the adventure ones. The classic "shonen ai" story is tragic (death, or unrequited love, or both) and romantic (tho' M Fae might appreciate the new trend towards the graphic and violent). Mainly, what is missing in the "shonen ai" stories, however, is the humor that Aoike puts into all her work. While Eroica serves a purpose of showing western fen that they are not alone in their appreciation of slash fic, it is not an epitome of either culture's slash. It is interesting, I think, how much Eroica fanfic in the states falls in with western slash trends and how much the stories resemble Japanese slash fic done for other comics and shows, but not for Eroica. While some of lack of Japanese fanfic for Eroica canes from the fact that Aoike does not like people playing with her characters, much also cones fron the fact that there are so many other stories here that fall in the romantic/tragic slashfic mold that Eroica getting overlooked. I am not sure that there is a big market for "shonen ai" in the west, at least not without changes.

Eroica may be the exception. "Shonen" is "boy", and they usually are. Someone in the APA suggested that we treat anime characters as if they are as old as they appear and as we want them to be. The problem is that to the Japanese, the fact that they are very young is often very important.

Before Japanese and westerners are going to be happy with each other's slash, they age thing has gotta be resolved, I think.

Fans seem to identify heavily with one of the regular characters instead. This pretty consistent with the Japanese girl attitude that boys get all the adventures. Also, there is a pretty heavy prejudice against hetero pairings of any kind in anime fanfic by women. It would be interesting to speculate how much of this reflects distancing" the sex from the writers and readers by making all the characters male and how much of this is dislike of the hardcore hetero stuff the guys do in fanzines.

One thing I have noticed about mainstream porn is that the people are bodies, not characters. If there is a character created, it gets forgotten when the "important stuff" starts. I am not terribly interested in how some guy I don't know or care about makes love (except maybe for technical data), but am very interested if the guy is Avon.

Re Comicate, that isn't the half of it! A friend here now works for a genuine Japanese company whose main job is professionally producing collected "Best of" fanzine collections (dull or porn) and a magazine that reviews fanzines. They are making more money than they know what to do with.

Some Topics Discussed in "Mardi Gras Favors"

Excerpts from "Mardi Gras Favors"

Nothing of note.

Some Topics Discussed in "Desert Blooms"

  • seeing an old favorite show through a new fan's eyes
  • some differences between pro fic and fan fic, the emotional intimacy fans have in fan fiction
  • some comments on the controversial Wiseguy zine series, The Terranova Situation
  • having a backlog of zines to read
  • doppleganger (selfslash, self/self) fan fiction
  • music slash and being picky

Excerpts from "Desert Blooms"

I've been re-watching a lot of Pros episodes with a brand new fan and it's been great seeing them again through fresh eyes, especially someone who's developing into almost as big a Bodie fan as I. It's been very nostalgic (not that I'm that jaded or that it's been all that long since I first watched them) and refreshing to see her enthusiasm and also to see how she progresses as a fan. So many of her first reactions were my own first reactions, which makes me wonder how much I've passed on to her and how much is a fan universal. Having fallen instantly in love with Pros, my friend has been struggling with that over-whelming obsession to spend every possible second immersed in episodes, fanfic or talking about both. She daydreams of them at work and dreams of them at night. She has trouble deciding whether to watch or read or do both.

Yes there are elements and types of stories/themes found in slash that can be found elsewhere but one of the key things that slash and fanfic have that doesn't exist, or exists to a much lesser degree, in mainstream fiction is the knowledge and understanding we have of our characters. We've seen them at their best and at their worst, in fact, in just about every conceivable light, every situation, every possible ordeal, physical or emotional, that could be thrown at them and so we know them better, often better than ourselves or our friends. Even if you don't like a story, don't agree with it, you still take away a little more insight into the characters and add that to the already considerable storehouse or information about them. Even with series characters in mainstream one only ever gets a single author's insight. We have the luxury of dozens of writer's interpretations.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with a backlog of zines to read! I still have stuff from 2 Escapades ago! It's not that the eyes aren't willing to read, it's just that I've got far too many distractions.

Terranova Situation grammar: your English teacher was right to a point. The authors of TS have taken that advice to an extreme. A little variety in the "said" department goes a long way. An onslaught of descriptive verbs goes past the merely ridiculous to the truly irritating.

Riker/Riker story? God, how BORING! But the idea of pairing a character with himself... Well, now, that opens up all sorts of interesting ideas, with an Avon/Avon pairing jumping quickly to mind.

Music and slash: I'm not sure just what it is that I want in my music slash. Where I might be open enough to read any slash pairing (at least once) in general fandom, I'm not so sure I would with rock and roll. Part of it is I have very specific tastes on who I want to see slashed - but all that ties in very much with the music - so you're working on at least two levels here, at least for people who listen to r&r (for those who don't, then it's just another universe/pairing). There are lots of groups I love and would read about because I love their music. Conversely, there are many groups who I detest and no matter now good the fiction, I'm not going to buy into the story because the music has turned me.

It gets back to whether one is slashing the musicians because one likes them or if there's slash in the music and thus the musicians are slashed. I think finding slash in the music is akin to finding some sort of slash content in a TV show. Because, after all, the lyrics and the show are the same "text" to be poached [11]. And the big plus with rock & roll slash is that the songvids are already there! And if one chooses carefully, they can be just as potent and suggestive as fan-created vids (U2 spring to mind - their videos are rife with men kissing, men dancing together, men in drag, half-naked men in drag and the all-important suggestive looks).

So, ideally, one could write great fic about r&r groups that anyone, whatever their musical preferences are, could read. But because music is such a personal/intimate experience one would also have to be writing to that second level which is the music and how it affects the music fan.

Some Topics Discussed in "With Friends Like These..."

from the author of "With Friends Like These...", portrays Del Tarrant and Kerr Avon from Blake's 7

Excerpts from "With Friends Like These..."

As I think I made clear at MediaWest, those weren't freeze-frames in my latest batch of videos. They were still photographs and/or art that I camcorded. It's the technique Mary van Deusen used in that poignant video about her grandfather, and that Ken Burns used for The Civil Bar. Likewise, the Tom of Finland video is not from a movie; I camcorded his art out of a book that sweet, smutty Sarah kindly loaned me. Taking a telepic and then camcording it is a roundabout way to get a freeze frame, but it's cheaper than TBC technology, the conventional way to get clear video stills.

I'm so glad you liked "I'd Do Anything For Love." I was nervous about the reception that that particular video would receive. It's very explicit, which wouldn't go over well with the anti-slash contingent, and it sort of makes fun of slash, which might be taken the wrong way by the pro-slash contingent. That vid provided the most harrowing moment of MediaWest. My life flashed before my eyes when it was shown at Sue's party while Leah Rosenthal was in the room! I was suddenly sure that Leah would take umbrage at my use of her art in the video. (I suppose I should have asked permission, but I'm shy, not to mention lazy.) To my immense relief, no one had a cow. Leah took it as it was intended: as a humorous tribute. She even asked me for a copy. (Whew!)

(Speaking of videos, two or three of youse guys asked me about getting copies of my B7 vids.... I didn't bring copies to MediaWest to sell because I'm leery of the copyright police. I don't sell fannish videos for a profit. However, I'm happy to provide copies at cost for anyone who's interested. It's $7 for one tape, $11 for both if ordered at the same time. Price includes tapes, packaging, and postage. Age statement required for tape 12!).

Egad! Sandy, I hope you're wrong about two curly-haired guys sleeping together being incestuous. I've read some really great Tarrant/Blake stories; I'd hate to think that their authors will be run out of fandom on a rail for breaking the "elemental taboo"!

I recently read an interview with a member of Aerosmith. (I forget which one.) He said that the band's girlfriends and wives couldn't understand the bond among their men. "What's the matter, are you gay?" they kept asking. Now, however, they accept that the band members will always share something that no one else can ever be a part of — not even a wife. Is this guy asking to get slashed or what?

Hah. If anyone's a snobby Alpha, it's Avon. Tarrant is positively humble in comparison. (Actually, we don't know that either of them is an Alpha; their grades were never specified in the canon. I've read at least one story where Tarrant turned out to be a Beta. And there have been stories where Avon is actually a Beta or Gamma, a mere clerk at the bank he embezzled from. Well, it would explain why he feels such a need to prove his intelligence all the time!) So why are the traits so objectionable in Tarrant acceptable in Avon? Maybe because Avon is so grumpy. It's okay to be a member of the privileged class, as long as you're not enjoying it. Privileged-class guilt. (And Tarrant is not "even more of a lout than Kirk"! Grrr. Tarrant is far more intelligent, perceptive, and considerate than Kirk ever was, despite being 10-30 years younger.)

[...]

You're right, there's no reason to equate working-class origins with promiscuity. Vila was rather more hedonistic, not to mention openly horny, than his upper-class crew mates, but perhaps it was a coincidence. I have read one story in which it's Alphas who bed-hop like bunny rabbits and Deltas who are the prudes!

I don't find A/V at all inexplicable, though it's not my favorite. A/V is stereotypical gothic romance, in which the most ordinary of heroines transforms the violent, brooding, tormented hero into good husband material, using nothing more than the goodness of her heart. Call it Vila as Nicole Simpson. [12]

Thank you so much for the tape, Christine. I got it Friday night and gleefully watched it three times straight. (You really made my day, after a long, rough week!) It was a lot of fun and very interesting. Technically, these videos aren't as good as Mary's B7 ones; I'd guess that she did them earlier, when she wasn't as experienced. Also, as many videomakers have lamented, Trek Classic is a very static show; the camera doesn't pan or zoom much, subjects tend to be perfectly centered on the screen, etc. The visual dullness of the source material shows in the videos.

And I was a tad disappointed in the music; it was sort of old-fashioned. I did like 'Through the Years' -- a lot. Schmaltzy as the song is, it suits them. Sigh. I consider it a happy ending to '180°'!

I was surprised and pleased that there were so many Spock/McCoy vids (my favorite Trek pairing!). But I agree with you: there were a lot of great Spock/McCoy scenes that Mary didn't use, not only in later movies but in the original series. (These 'fan sluts' who video in several fandoms at once sometimes have trouble keeping track of all the choice scenes.) Makes me want to try a Trek slash video myself (though I only have SLP copies of the series, aside from a small number of pro tapes).

I've been in B7 fandom for so long that I'd forgotten that some media relationships actually do have a canonical basis! However, that doesn't completely explain it. While there's no doubt that, say, Starsky & Hutch are meant for each other, in most fandoms things are not quite so pat. For example, Spock/McCoy is just as likely as K/S. (Just look at Star Trek III; it seems even the mundanes noticed their understated but compelling relationship!) Why, then, do so many fans who dislike Kirk get upset when Spock is paired off with Bones instead? Sheer conventionality is my guess. The automatic assumption is that the two stars of the show are the ones who ought to be a couple, regardless of how the characters in question related on-screen. When this expectation is violated, some fans react like it's the equivalent of adultery. ('He may be a complete jerk but he's your husband!') In the case of McCoy and the Pros' Cowley, there might also be some ageism involved. I've heard more than one fan complain that they just can't picture men that old as sexual beings. (It will be interesting to see if this attitude softens as fandom ages!)

I agree with you about sex objects being more appealing when shown as whole individuals rather than as mere objects. (I'm rather fond of the Pieta, too, and images of people sleeping, but because they show the subjects' vulnerability, not because they reduce them to objects.) However, not all slash fans feel the same. One of the most popular pieces in the MediaWest art show this year was a drawing of two pairs of buttocks [13], one on top of the other! All you saw were generic buttocks and thighs, with no identifying characteristics whatsoever.

I don't feel threatened by male pinups who are staring directly into the camera. In slash art this is quite common, perhaps in imitation of cheesecake photos, where the women usually stare saucily or poutingly at the viewer. The art you reproduced at the end of your trib [14] is interesting but doesn't do much for me emotionally -- for the same reason some fans don't care for Gayle F's or Suzan Lovett's art. The poses are too reminiscent of cheesecake photos, and thus make the subject seem overly effeminate. Yes, this attitude is politically incorrect, but I can't help my taste. I've been indoctrinated by society to prefer subjects who are less passive, less self-absorbed. (So why do the 'effeminate' qualities of Sleigh's art bother me, while similar qualities in Suzan's and Gayle's art do not? I think it's because I know the subjects in fan art, while all I know of Sleigh's subjects is what she shows me.)

I'm still fond of the zine Forbidden Zone #1, the quality of the writing and art is quite high, as it generally was in the early days of American B7 fandom. And I'm inclined to think that the high Tarrant quotient reflected more than the tastes of a single editor; other zines of the era, such as Time Distort and B7 Complex, were also much kinder to Tarrant than later zines were. Tarrant-bashing was very much a 'second-wave' phenomena.

I was super-neo at Orbit, and no doubt clueless. I'm unsure where I got the idea that slash was not permitted at the con. (Possibly from one of my roommates, an anti-slash Christian Fundamentalist who keep saying things like, 'It's so nice to be at a con where none of that horrible, nasty stuff is allowed.'). In any case, I wasn't the only one laboring under a misconception. Mary van Deusen was very nervous about showing some of her slash vids after the music video workshop. Her husband knocked on the door while we were dubbing 'Looking For Love'; we all panicked! Mary slapped the vcr off (thus ruining the dubbing attempt), while Carol and I threw our bodies in front of the monitor. We did manage to re-do the dub later, with Mary's husband nobly standing guard at the door. It added a lot of spice to the viewing; we were sure we'd be busted by the con police and kicked out. What a letdown to discover we were perfectly safe all along. Weren't you also responsible for organizing that video workshop, Shoshanna? It's my fondest memory of Orbit, and a turning point in my life. Carol and I were there with Mary from 9:00 am until past 6:00 that evening. We didn't even stop to eat that entire day. People thought we were nuts, 'wasting' all Sunday fooling around with vcrs when we could have been chasing after the guests, but I've never regretted it for a moment.

I wholeheartedly agree with your view of the "one true love' thing. It's crap, extremely damaging crap. That s one reason I have difficulty with a lot of K/S and A/B: I cannot swallow that one-soul-in-two-bodies scenario. It annoys me when characters are depicted as incomplete without each other; I prefer people who can stand on their own if they have to. And like you, I need a sense of the development of the relationship, of the hard work it takes to nurture and maintain it. To me, that is far more engaging than the effortless, karmic destiny of so many stories.

I agree with your comment that slash is about women, not about men. One of my friends complains frequently that even the best slash doesn't depict the characters' sexuality accurately, that as soon as they get into bed they metamorphose into middle-aged, middle-class women, no matter how well characterized they are for the rest of the story. I agree, but don't see this as a problem. Reading about realistic, genuine male relationships just doesn't float my boat. I guess I agree that most people are at least somewhat bisexual. My favorite slash scenario is the old 'everyone's bisexual in this universe.' (An assumption better suited to SF settings than contemporary ones, of course.) That way you can duck the 'are they gay?' issue and all its problematic accouterments. The matter-of-fact acceptance of bisexuality is one of the reasons I like Tanith Lee's work, and Diane Duane's Tale of the Five books. (Though I could do without the Responsibility. Most of humanity's troubles are due to overpopulation, not underpopulation.)

Call me a cultural relativist. The question I always ask [about making copies of fanworks] is 'Who does it hurt?' All of us, in the case of flagrant bootlegging. Bootleggers often sell inferior copies for more money than the editor charges. Not only are consumers being ripped off, but editors who can't sell out their print runs may not produce further issues. Fans who only copy one or two stories for their own perusal are not in the same category. They probably wouldn't buy the zine anyway, and unlike bootleggers, their activity is not keeping large numbers of other people from buying the zine from the editor. Similarly, though some fannish videomakers get very upset when people copy their vids, I don't. As long as they aren't selling the copies for $30 apiece in the dealers' room (which I think would be harmful to fandom), people are welcome to clone my tapes.

[...]

I wouldn't object to someone altering my videos, as long as they didn't try to pass them of as my work. With fannish vids, of course, no one knows who the videomaker is most of the time anyway.

Found your comments on relationships that cross a line very interesting. Local fan Jennara Wenk postulates that the appeal of slash is that it is forbidden. She claims that forbidden relationships always have a spice that conventional romances cannot match -- not just slash, but interspecies relationships, human/computer, girl/horse, etc. [...] I like them precisely because they are not conventional. With conventional romances, there's always the nagging worry that true love will turn the woman into Donna Reed. Even if there's an effort to keep the characters away from stereotypical gender roles, it's always an effort. [...] There is no way I would want a real-life relationship as intense and binding as the average slash relationship, but I love reading about them. Like nuclear detonations, they look good -- from a distance.

About fans who like a pairing when they dislike one of the members of the pair... I wasn't thinking of situations quite as casual as most of those you mention. I had more in mind the kind of fan who claims to despise Kirk yet has a cow if Spock is paired with anyone else. Edi Bjorklund mentioned one writer who admitted she wrote a K/S story in which Kirk is severely bashed because he reminds her of her yechy ex-husband, but I doubt that's a motivation for the majority of fans... Your last suggestion might have some bearing on B7, specifically in regards to devout A/B fans. And it's something I tend to overlook. Though I understand intellectually that a person can be sexually attracted to someone whom they dislike, for me liking and physical attraction go hand in hand.

I wish someone would do an oral history of B7, before all the first and second wave fans gafiate or croak. It really was a fan-driven phenomenon; the show had an American fandom long before it was ever aired here. It would be so neat to record for posterity things like the origins of Avon's allergies and older brother Terrick. (We know Avon had a brother, but the fact that he was older and named Terrick is part of the 'fan canon.') Written would be okay, but the ideal media for such an oral history would be video, like that Caren Parnes interview Mary van Deusen did. (Don't expect me to do it, though; as an interviewer, I make a great engineer.)

And now for something unpleasant and unfortunate. I've learned some very disturbing things about [A M] since my last letter. I hate to be a tale-carrier, but I feel I owe you al a warning. If you sell [A M] anything, make sure the check clears first. And don't lend her anything you want back.

Some Topics Discussed in "WHIPS: Under Water Reflections"

  • homophobia and misogyny in fan fiction
  • what writing fiction reveals about ourselves
  • comment about Desert Heat, see that page
  • a reprint of a 1940 essay by C.S. Lewis called "The Necessity of Chivalry"
  • the similarities and differences between slash fiction and mainstream romance novels
  • the trope, We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other
  • the sweetness of Man from UNCLE

Excerpts from "WHIPS: Under Water Reflections"

The MW panel on homophobia sparked a lot of discussions, and in the middle of one of these heated debate, I suddenly realized - hey, wait a minute, where is all this homophobia? Simply identifying someone as straight is not homophobic. Yes, I occasionally get a whiff of discomfort from the author, an incomprehension of homosexuality. Discrimination may sometimes grow from such seeds, but confusion can lead to enlightenment as well. The misogyny in slash stories is a far more serious problem than homophobia — I have yet to read anything I thought was openly stereotyping, patronizing, or critical about homosexuals in a slash story, but women are so often damned as morally, intellectually and sexually inferior creatures you'd think these stories were written in the 1880s instead of the 1980s. Most discomfort is caused by references to female homosexuality, not male homosexuality, and I think that is another facet of misogyny rather than any disdain or contempt for homosexuals. We hate ourselves far worse than we hate homosexual men - otherwise would we idealize a relationship which completely excludes women? I propose that this discussion is not really about Bodie & Doyle, etc., but about ourselves.

The characters are a construct by means of which the writer engages our emotions. A lot of writers claim that they do not at all identify with their characters, that their relationship is entirely objective, i.e., that of the observer. But we assign motives and attitudes to people based on our own understanding of how the human mind and heart work, and we empathize with characters to the degree their experience reflects or reminds us of our own. And something may remind us of our experience without necessarily matching it. I think some of this awareness enriches both reading and writing, but consciousness of the process is not necessary for the writer or reader, and for some may hinder their enjoyment. The process is organic, and as such these comments are merely descriptive.

However, when we start arguing about characters as if they are real people, then it becomes time to tell the truth about what is really going on. The values, beliefs, experiences we have in stories are our own. The characters are not something other and apart from us in the way another human being is.

Literature can be viewed as a psychological game: I tell you about my experience and what it means to me, in the form of a code; a code that you will decipher and use to recreate those feelings and experiences, and connect to them. The story takes place first in my head, and then in yours, and what's on paper is a set of instructions. We use characters and stories as a way to talk about ideas, feelings, fantasies, opinions, attitudes we have, and a story is a shadowplay of our psyche.

Heroes and villains: shows about risk, danger and moral dilemmas are the foundation on which slash stories are built, and as such bring them squarely into the arena of mythic. The bringing of the mythic element, the finding of the sacred in human relationships, is a relatively new idea. The moment of supreme excitement in a classic slash story is when the masks slips and falls, thereby revealing the character as he (or she) truly is (and perhaps revealing the reader to herself). Sex, with its physical acting out of surrender and intimacy, is a convenient means to that end. I know a lot of people say they read to escape only, they just want to have a good time, etc.; they are not interested in deep angst, suffering or death in their stories, and suffering, death and transformation are the substance of myth, legend and fairy tales. But even the lightest story draws on the depths of our shared perceptions for its power. What we understand about fairy tales is true about slash stories: the events that take place are not real, even if they are 'realistic'. Realism is style of art. To say how realistic a story is, or how well it fits the canon, and by implication, to say that I see a character as straight, is an artistic judgment, not a moral one.

I have heard various fans comment to the effect of the 'how can we be feminists and still like these perfect examples of male chauvinism,' and a lot of complaints among men to the effect of 'what do women want? We show our softer side and they call us wimps.' But these men and (and the writers who bend over backwards to make the characters Sensitive New Age Guys) have missed the whole point. Surface behavior such as crying does not a New Age guy make. Men in wartime have a long history of crying over their fallen companions. What women want are grown-ups. The desire to have men (and women) be whole, fully integrated, emotionally available, strong and nurturing adults is not incompatible with courage and acts of heroism, either of the physical or emotional sort. But SNAGs are not capable of the acts of heroism we demand from our characters because they suffer from the same flaw as the Macho Pigs: they are concerned with themselves, and relate to women as nurturers or objects. Of course, for women to relate to men solely as heroes or villains, however defined, is the same kind of thing. Perhaps men, after dropping the armor, must go through a period of soul searching, hand wringing, raging and self-involved development, as women are doing: we must all be children before we can be grownups; but the belief that sensitivity and toughness are mutually exclusive is emphatically rejected by the both slash stories and romance novels.

The issues, the way the stories are written are so strikingly similar to slash stories that I wonder again if slash is simply another permutation of the romance novel. But when slash stories are so similar to romance novels, what can be the attraction of it; why not read romance novels? Is it the same as a romance novel, with extras thrown in: fan writing's strongly established intimacy with characters and the erotic power for women of two men? Well, in one sense, you would expect slash and romance novels to overlap: they are both a literature primarily written by and for women, so it is no wonder that the issues of power intertwined with caring are common to both. And slash has some peculiarities all its own, that are related to its sister genre, hurt/comfort. One major issue the characters are struggling with is permission to love, to touch, to be close. The events of the story serve to give this permission. But I think there is more going on. In the modern romance novel there is an acceptance of the way things are between men and women, and efforts to change the status quo come from within. Slash represents a direct struggle, and in many ways is a rejection of the 'way things are.' It is a search for something more. And this brings me to the heart of the matter: why do we read and write at all?

The very existence of slash has forced us to ask ourselves questions about men and women and sex and love, and a shift in perception has already taken place in the fan community — these topics are discussed openly now rather than in secret as they were 15 years ago. 15 years ago the achievement of the relationship was enough; now we want hows and whys and wherefores. Star Trek was first on the air, we didn't object too strongly to how the women were portrayed; we were just glad they were on the bridge. Now that is not good enough. Perhaps even the misogyny of slash stories is less a hatred of women, and more a rejection of traditional women, while the male characters (transformed by the slash writer into caring killers) represent an the beginnings of an ideal we wish for ourselves.

If putting B/D in alternate universe is for fun, then the writing should at least be fun and charming. I hate the fannish tendency to rewrite the characters (i.e., 'I don't believe Bodie would read Beckett,' so when he does so in an episode, 'it's a mistake.') Hate, hate, hate it with a passion. Canonical fiction is more interesting for all the reasons you mention; why bother with uncanonical fiction (I think it's called original writing in other circles, and occasionally pays quite well). I am also pickiest about B7 and Pros being canonical, and with other fandoms it becomes less important — I wonder if this has to do with the order in which I got interested in them, or level of intensity of interest, or if stories based on those particular shows need the details of the series to make them work.

I am firmly in the 'we're not gay, but we love each other' camp, I suppose, as being definitive of slash. Re: One True Love - well, of course gay men can have one True Love, that isn't the point. The deal is the characters are going against the grain of sexual preference solely and only because it is their One True Love, and this is in fact the proof that it is the One True Love. If they are gay, they might be having sex for Some Other Reason. Which could make a compelling and wonderfully interesting story, (and often has), but if you can't call yourself straight and still have homosexual sex, then you can't call yourself gay and have heterosexual sex. For B&D's 'endearing habit of going through women like used tissue paper' to somehow 'prove' they prefer men strikes me as an invisible cat argument: there is an invisible cat on that chair — yes, but the chair looks empty - well, of course, that just what you'd expect. B&D have the air of 'we'll try anything, we're sexual sophisticates' but I think Bodie in particular, and to some extent Doyle, would strongly resist the label 'queer' as it denotes a lifestyle rather than an objective fact about who you have sex with.

The sweetness & light-marriage plot in UNCLE stories is almost universal, and I'm not sure I understand it: It's occurred to me that since the show is 'light' (compared to B7 for example), fans interpret that as sweet. There's a story in one of the Rose Tints, #4 [15], I believe, called the "The Aphrodisiac Affair" and it captures perfectly the slightly insane atmosphere the show has. EROS is far and away one of the best writers, she gets the feel of the show, but even she often marries them off????

Some Topics Discussed in " WHIPS: Why I'm Reading Kung Fu Genzines"

Excerpts from " WHIPS: Why I'm Reading Kung Fu Genziness"

I am watching/taping/absorbing Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, that cheesy, melodramatic syndicated show with David Carradine reprising his role/persona of Kwai Chang Caine and Chris Potter as his son, Peter (this kid is GORGEOUS!). What is REALLY amazing to me is that I'm getting that "uh-oh, this is a fandom" feeling about the show; and when I read a story, I'm getting that combination "ahhh" and feeling of emotional satiety which is the end result (for me) of reading a good fan story. But it isn't slash. I would walk across a floor littered with Chalk & Cheese's (mediocre at best Pros zine) to get to a Kung Fu genzine ~ and these zines (with one exception) aren't going to win any prizes. Local fan friends are getting concerned. This all started with Mary Lowe. She started watching it, got hooked, and began writing a novella. Everybody knows I whine about being a procrastinator when it comes to writing. Mary makes me look like Stephen King. The fact that she got enough out of show to sit down and write after a decade long hiatus (only a slight exaggeration) got me to watch the show. Reading her novella as it appeared, page by page, got me hooked on the show.

[...]

... [It's got] hurt/comfort... Lots of touching, hugging, petting, rubbing, kissing. All this between father(s) and son. Watching all this going on without the actual slash (please, don't let the badslashwriters lumber into this fandom ~ is my prayer every night ~ And let the good slash writers write gen) has clarified a lot of slash issues for me. I'm not renouncing the dark sexual thrill of a biker gang and a lone curly haired, tough as nails, yet vulnerable CIS agent. I guess I had just forgotten how emotionally satisfying a good old-fashioned cry could be between guys; or the power of seeing an emotional connection being made. For the last several years, the relationship I've had with slash has been "reading more, enjoying it less". Now, I realize it is a case of having more sex with less emotional foundation for it. Which brings me back to female-oriented slash. In the last issue, I talked about how important it was that the slash relationship deal with the intimacy expectations of women. Reading the gen Kung Fu reminded me that while sex is undeniably an attraction to slash, emotional intimacy is needed to complete the picture.

In slash it is very important that these guys have already been involved in a deep friendship and slash takes it too the next level. This is a FEMALE requirement. Adding nipple rings and anonymous sex to this set up is like grafting the realism of MIAMI VICE to BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. The result isn't going to please anybody. That's one of the problems I had with H.G.'s HAUNTED BY DEVILS [sic]. Her Bodie and Doyle clones, Cassidy and ???, meet in a bar and have sex without knowing anything about the other. And then, whammo, these guys are changed with no real reason from bisexual men to the typical female-oriented "yes, we're going to be together for all time" guys.

Shoshanna mentioned criticism of her novel. My problem with it was that it was very male-oriented. It was beautifully written, well-plotted, but what I as a female want from a relationship wasn't fulfilled. For example, AFTER Bodie has sex with Doyle he goes and has an encounter with a stranger. That is a guy thing to do. But from the female/slash perspective, that is sex without emotional intimacy. Having sex with Doyle is supposed to CURE that practice, not instigate it.

A lot of this is done in the name of "realism". But, why can't slash be considered a fantasy literature for women? If slash had started out with Kirk and Spock having aural sex instead of oral, would it have been easier to think of it as a fantasy? Think of the loving ritual fans would have created for swabbing out those elegantly pointed ears. People keep trying to get me to read the series of books by Storm Constantino where there is no female sex. Within that fantasy I am assured that the author makes a case for a realistic society. Why can't we do the same with slash?

... the possible romantic possibilities of a gay man who assumes his tryst with his previously straight partner will be as fleeting as his other relationships? Yes, this definitely has possibilities. But, it has been done. In CONUNDRUM Bodie and Doyle are overtaken by passion in the woods after which Bodie treats it casually, while Doyle (it was his first time ~ ahhh!) gets a bit bugged. Bodie takes off and is driving back to town fuming at Doyle's attitude and gets to "it isn't as if it was his first time." Car screeches to a halt. Big "oops" on Bodie's part.

I'm sorry, but you can no more "prove" Cowley is gay/queer than you can prove whether or not the Cheshire Cat has been neutered. A case can be built for any type of characterization with readers deciding if it is AU. That being said, however, Cowley is the ONE character I have no problem seeing as gay and for a lot of the reasons you mentioned (Annie in particular — I still cringe with embarrassment all through that episode). However, I prefer to see him as being aware of his inclinations but completely unwilling to act upon them. He sees it as a matter of self-control, pure and simple.

I agree completely that joy/happiness/completion must be earned and the more barriers the better. I don't know of a bigger barrier than two hetero guys falling for each other.

Some Topics Discussed in "Untitled by M G"

  • this fan was too busy to add much and explained this in a handwritten, one-page letter
  • a one-page graphic called "Wisequest: Episode 83 "Call It Dreamberries": "I enclose the reverse warped piece of... crossed A/U? How to make anyone an elf? How to put elves into the most unlikely fandom? Perversion? For all you Wiseguy fans out there. Enjoy + pass it on -- for obvious reasons it can't be published."

Excerpts from "Untitled by M G"

  • Strangebedfellow6elfquest.jpg

Some Topics Discussed in "Two Heads Are Better Than One"

  • this fan has lost some interest in reading and producing slash fanworks
  • explicit sex in fan fiction
  • Pascoe/Dalziel mysteries
  • be wary of showing non-fans explicit Wesley Crusher fics (such as in Science Friction) as they are only looking for porn and shock value
  • Music RPF, includes long comments about U2, The Beatles

Excerpts from "Two Heads Are Better Than One"

[NB]: 1994 seems to be turning out to be a pretty non-slash year for me. Sigh. No, I don't think I've lost interest in slash, only a passionate desire to be reading it, talking it, devouring it, producing it, letting it consume me all the time.

[...]

I suppose it's a backlash. I suppose I'll get over it. I suppose I'll go back to quick and easy interest in the latest this and that slash zine, the newest story from so-and-so. Sigh, sigh sigh. It's fun observing newer fans who haven't reached my state of indifference. (No, I haven't cut myself off from contact with other fen.) It would be impossible to ever recapture the initial reaction one has to finally finding what one knows one has been looking for (even if one didn't know what it was before one found it), but it certainly would be nice to find one saying to oneself, 'Yes, I've got the evening free and a new slash zine to read!'

[NB]: There is a story in Leaps from Hell (a Quantum Leap zine from Quantum Star Productions) which I haven't seen done in any slash universe. Lucky Dog (by the pseudonymous Vixen Foxx) turns Sam into a dog and you guessed it: bestiality is the result. One question. It's Sam appearing in the guise of a dog. Does this really make it bestiality since Sam knows he's not one and so does the reader? Anyway, a perverse story which fits right in with the theme of the zine.

[NB]: M. Fae and I have an unbreakable rule. We don't do art and we don't do poetry. So what happened at Media West? We had the good fortune to have a table next to Jean Kluge's. Jean was a delight to talk to. Moreover, she had a picture ["To Taste the Trade Winds"] that really caught our eyes: Lawrence of Arabia (as portrayed by Ralph Fiennes) and King Faisal (Siddig El Fadil). Slash, slash, slash! And that's how Jean saw it too. She's as much a fan of the movie A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, as we are. M. Fae and I spent the whole con sneaking peaks at this picture and just as we were starting to haul our stuff out of there and head for the airport, we gave in to lust and admiration and bought a print. I swear never again, never again (until I see more in the series). If you haven't seen A Dangerous Man, you really ought to. It's pure slash with everything except the sex, and that we can write.

[NB]: On explicit sex scenes in slash. I think I always feel cheated if the sex scene gets glossed over (a la "They moved toward each other... Over breakfast the smile on their faces threatened to get in the way of eating...") On the other hand, I think it's really difficult to write a terrifically good sex scene. All too often (sigh!) a story could be improved by pruning or excising the sex altogether. I firmly believe that the best sex scenes are integral to the story, advance the plot, and leave an unsatisfactory hole if they're deleted. I suppose this is one reason why first time stories work so well.

[NB]: [The] question about "is it slash if the slash pairing is of an existing coupling? That is, if the characters, either fictional or real, are or have been involved, is it still slash or does it become something else?" My short answer is it's slash if you write it that way. At the risk of ticking off those who would argue otherwise, I don't believe the characters have to be presented as straight in order for the writer to slash them. To me, slash is in the eye of the beholder (or writer). It's the sensibility that you bring to your story. Some things that my partner-in-crime has written have come close to crossing the boundary between slash and gay fiction. But that's what she wanted to write and she might not agree with my perception of her work.

[MFG]: Music(ian) slash. I found what Barbara said to be fascinating, although I for one don't like music(ian) slash because it's glamorous and most definitely not because it's men cooperating with each other to create something instead of running around shooting people. For me, music(ian) slash provides all the elements I like in slash: from men shagging men to men discovering love for their best friend — or best enemy. While you commented that one of the things that interested you most about Tris/Alex was that it was 'slash at its most abstract, or perhaps slash writing at its least dependent-on-source', that was one of the things about Tris/Alex that put me off. For me, music(ian) slash is very little different from any other kind of slash. We have famous people portraying a character, giving us words, images, visuals, interplay between two males, all of which we can adopt and adapt to suit ourselves: it makes no difference to me if the role one played by an actor or a musician. What we see, as an audience watching musicians is a long, long way away from who and what they really are, to the point where musician slash isn't really about the musicians as Real Human Beings, but as the role they have created for themselves.

I would differentiate here between music and musician slash. Musician slash for me is when the lyrics are not overtly slash, but the musician himself portrays a slashy image, through any number of means: conduct on stage, hearsay evidence of behaviour at parties, etc, which would fit say, Mercury/May, Elton John/Rod Stewart, Bowie/Ronson, Michael Stipe (REM) to name but a few. Then there's music slash, where the song is the thing, such as PSB (or Pet Shop Boys for the hopelessly archaic), who have some wonderfully gay/slash lyrics...

[...]

Then comes the best kind of music(ian) slash of all, when it's the lyrics, image, performance, video, musicians themselves, every possible element, all coming together in a way that can be read as slash. Best example: U2. Here's a band of four publicly very straight men, no gossip to the contrary, two married, one in a very long term relationship, one so much the ladies' man that he was recently caught with five (count 'em, five) 'escort girls' in the one hotel room. For many years, the band had a reputation for being living saints, very religious, ethical, moral — in a word, dull. Then came a new album, Achtung Baby, and a new image. Bono, the singer, went from pontificating on the morals of the world to appearing in patent leather suits, cavorting with drag queens, chain smoking (previously rarely shown with naughty cigarettes, of course), drinking, swearing, carousing, partying — you name it, he did it in public. Song lyrics started being obsessed with 'going down' on people, the band appeared in drag, the bass player was photographed naked on the album cover, the album contained pictures of the guitarist kissing the bass player and vice versa. Bono took to kissing and hugging and feeling up Edge (the guitar player) on stage — and an amazing number of fans still saw them as being holier than thou. But for those of us with dirty minds...

Achtung Baby had wonderful lyrics that could easily be read as the story of a voyage of discovery and change, of two straight men finding out that they were in love with each other, that they wanted to make love to each other. There were songs that sounded like the first overtly sexual encounter, and the aftermath of that. Songs that dealt with the problems of being married and finding out that you were in love with someone else— and a man at that. There were videos, replete with all the looks, hugs, kisses, touches, that slash fans have such skill in interpreting (a la Pros, S&H).

[MFG]: for me, music(ian) slash is more than just pretty faces faking sex on stage. It's also because for the past quarter century (my god, I suddenly feel very very old), pop music has permitted ambiguous sexual imagery and interaction. In music(ian) slash, we have all the elements of mainstream slash, but with the added benefits of a) we already have the songvids done for us and b) we don't need to worry about fan poetry, because we're all too busy quoting song lyrics.

[MFG]: Bono/Edge works extremely well as a parallel for Kirk and Spock. In both couples, one is tall and slender, one shorter and stockier; one introverted, mysterious, emotionally undemonstrative, cool, the other extroverted, attention-seeking, visibly emotional, heated about everything; one is restrained, self-contained, the other is hungry, wild, needful — etc, etc, etc. Edge is very Spockian, Bono very much like Kirk in a lot of ways (except he doesn't need a girdle — although he does gain weight easily). I could go on for pages listing the similarities, but unless someone is desperate for that, just take my word for now that Bono/Edge are quite unnervingly like Kirk/Spock. I mean, Spock even played the guitar-like lyre!

Some Topics Discussed in "Lavender Lilies"

  • Sports RPF: figure skating drama and the Olympics and comments about baseball drama
  • comments about zines: Bonds of the Matriarch and Jewel of Sherwood, see those pages
  • there are two tribs (#17 and #18) by this author, as one was too late to be included in the previous issue

Excerpts from "Lavender Lilies"

As for the men, I l—o—o-v-e beautiful young men. So I am an Alexei Urmanov fan. I adore his frilly shirts, his trim bum, his pretty smile and silky hair. I like his spins as well. So I wasn't upset that he won the gold rather than Elvis Stojko. I wouldn't have been disappointed if Elvis had won, as I I—o—o—ve his athleticism, his incredible triples and quads, and his cute curly hair. So I'm also glad that Elvis won the Worlds. As long as I get my Paul Wylie fix every so often in "professional" competition. I was at the Campbell Soup Tour of Champions... All I can say is W—0-W!! Viktor Petrenko is so cute as a rap singer. And I was happy to see that Brian Boitano has recovered enough from his gimpy knee to be in the performance.

This sport seems to be getting "slashier" and "slashier." Some of the ads for Orioles games have featured two of the team members with their arms around each others' waists. And am I imagining things or are the uniform pants getting tighter and tighter? I

Some Topics Discussed in "When Correctly Viewed"

Excerpts from "When Correctly Viewed"

I'm going to try to get this zine done before MediaWest, which means that it will be a bit dated by the time you all read it; but that way I'll get to do the photocopying free — one last little perk from the job that I'm about to quit.

"But are they gay?" I see I was not the only one who felt moved to comment on this issue. [T] said what I was trying to say, but much more succinctly. If we assume that everyone is potentially bi anyway, then "homosexual" means something like "primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, interested in one's own sex" and "heterosexual" means something like "primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, interested in the other sex." Given those assumptions, then [L's] definition of slash as being about heterosexual men who get it on with each other makes perfect sense, as does an otherwise mind-boggling statement that I once read somewhere (I only wish I could remember where): "I'm a lesbian, but I fuck gay men."

A romance heroine, however perky and spirited she may be, is always supposed to be younger, less experienced, less educated, less affluent, in short, inferior in every way (or at least in most ways) to the hero. The idea is that her emotional worthiness as an individual somehow makes up for all that. In theory I would like to agree that traditionally feminine, emotional qualities deserve to be valued; but in fact I think that what is really going on here is a sugar-coated cover-up of one of the nastiest facts of present-day heterosexuality, namely the male tendency to marry down. I think the subtext of most romances reads something like: "Don't stand up for yourself; men don't like it. Don't try to achieve anything, or you will become unmarriageable. Just be a sweet little inferior thing, and you will be rewarded with sex, children, and social status. Otherwise you'll just damn well have to do without those things, and serve you right for not kowtowing to the patriarchy (and pretending that you enjoy it; it has to be a spirited kowtow)." The horrible thing is, that's probably good advice for dealing with the world as it is. No wonder the egalitarian fantasy world of slash has so much appeal for intelligent women! In my ideal world, a man who marries down would be despised as the weakling that he is— a frightened little boy who can't cope with a partner on his own level. A woman who marries up would also be regarded with contempt, since she has taken the easy out of acquiring social status by the selling of sexual favors rather than through her own hard work.

The unsatisfactoriness of Bowie as a slash icon, I am irresistibly reminded of my all-time strangest experience with gender-bending in real life. At a Halloween party in Philadelphia about a decade ago, I fell madly in lust with a woman who came dressed as David Bowie. Not only that, she was dressed as David Bowie in the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which was new at the time and had many highly resonant associations for me (Japanese culture, gorgeous men being tortured, etc.). She was a tall, thin redhead, and she actually looked quite a bit like David Bowie. I followed her around all evening practically drooling and feeling like a total fool the whole time. ("You realize, of course," said the rational mind, "that if you got the sexy clothes off you would be terribly disappointed at what was under them." "I don't care!" said the libido.) I suppose this must be what heterosexual men feel like when confronted with a really good female impersonator. I finally got up the nerve to say, "That's a wonderful costume," to which she replied, "Thank you," and that was the entire extent of our conversation. To this day I have no idea who the woman was. If she ever reads this apa I will die of embarrassment!

I do have some magazine articles on the show that my friend who stayed on sent to me. Interestingly, they focus not on the slashy bits but on the fairly explicit heterosexual sex scenes. I have the distinct impression that some parts of Japanese society have no idea what other parts are up to.

Well, yes, I would indeed be horrified by a man who wanted to do or see done to women, even fictional ones, the kinds of things that I like to do or see done to fictional men. Somehow it doesn't seem exactly parallel, probably because they would be much more likely to have the opportunity to treat women badly in real life. Was it you or someone else who said in some past apa or other that she laughed at the car sign reading "Ex-boyfriend in trunk" but would have been disturbed by a sign that said "Ex-girlfriend in trunk" because it just might be true? It seems perfectly reasonable to me for women to want to enjoy vicarious revenge on men, but just plain mean for men to want to read about doing bad things to women when they already doing plenty of nasty things to us in real life anyway, whether directly or indirectly.

Whether slash or h/c is "really" about men or women — I don't think either is about women disguised in male bodies ("chicks with dicks," as a witty friend of mine said in another context), which seems to be definitely Camille Bacon-Smith's interpretation of h/c and possibly Joanna Russ's interpretation of slash, though she was more open-ended about it. I would agree that both are indeed about men as seen by women, or at least as fantasized by women — not quite the same thing as women in male bodies, though there may be some strong points of similarity.

The zine-copying controversy, since I'm fairly new to fandom most of my information on this subject is hearsay, but I gather that what really set it off was wholesale copying of entire zines which were then sold at a profit by the copiers. That does seem improper to me, but I think some of the reactions against the practice went overboard in denouncing all copying for whatever purpose. I have also gotten the impression that the biggest stink of this kind was tied to some other issues, of both a personal and a fannish nature, that probably really are better not uncovered. Let sleeping controversies lie. I think your suggestion of simple common sense and courtesy is the only long-term solution.

The use of song lyrics as introductions or motifs for stories, I have a vague notion that it all comes from Miami Vice and represents an attempt to reproduce on paper the at-the-time-very-innovative use of popular music on that particular show. Or are there fannish examples that predate MV?

"Creative writing" as it used to be (and for all I know still is) taught in schools leads to grotesquely over-written stuff that no one would want to read for pleasure, because you keep tripping over all the damn adjectives and whatnot while trying to get at the plot. I see this fault in fan writing very often, even sometimes in otherwise good writers (that is, writers who are good at characters, plot, and pacing) — they just keep using weird words where simple ones would do.

I did go to was the "Homophobia?" panel, at which SANDY, CHRISTINE, and NINA were all being interestingly articulate in the audience (though at the time I only recognized SANDY, who I'd met in SUE's room the night before — I should have guessed that those other well- spoken people were fellow SBFers too). Something popped into my head during that panel that may be of general interest: it occurred to me that one reason for the frequent authorial insistence on a heterosexual identity for characters who to judge by their behavior in the story are nothing of the sort may be related to the fact that whatever the guys are doing with each other within the story, they are also, on a metaphysical level, engaging in a sexual relationship with the female reader. Hence the desire that they be presented as suitable sex objects for women — that is, in some sense, heterosexual.

Romancing the Slash: One of the joys of B7 pornography is its enormous variety. In a series that included as regular characters at various times a total of six men, five women, and three AIs, there are a great many possible pairings (not to mention more complicated groupings), and a surprisingly high percentage of them have been written up as stories. Nevertheless, amidst all this variety, there are two favorite combinations that account for more stories than everything else together. Both are male/male slash. Explanations for why this should be so include the general popularity of slash (whatever the deep seated psychoanalytical reasons for that may be), and the fact that on the original show, the male characters were better developed than the female ones. But I think there is yet another reason for the popularity of these two types of stories: they correspond to classic prototypes in romantic fiction.

Some Topics Discussed in "For the World is Hollow and I Fell Off the Edge"

Excerpts from "For the World is Hollow and I Fell Off the Edge"

In the interest of fairness and accuracy in the media, let me make clear that I badly misrepresented Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett when I said, last issue, that they loved Camille Bacon-Smith's book Enterprising Women. At the time I wrote that, I thought they did; but they do not. They are starting a review journal of queer sf called Wavelengths — the first issue came out at Gaylaxicon — and they asked me to jointly review Henry's and Camille's books (and I am hoping to do so, but not this month). I said, yes, I'd love to, but, er, you need to understand that I have some serious reservations about Camille's work, and they snorted and said, well, no kidding! Oh my god, I gasped in relief, you too? Here I'd been tiptoeing around the subject with them, and all the time they had the same problems with it that I did. They like Camille lot; not her book.

Re rock fandom, the image of "men cooperating with all their resources to create something, rather than to deal death and destruction" is indeed vivid, but I disagree that this image makes a "striking" contrast with "most slash scenarios." In the literal sense it does; music is produced in one instance, while no concrete thing is produced in others. But I do not think the characters who populate more common slash settings, or their fans in this world, see "dealing death and destruction" as their occupations. Rather, in the case of cops it is to protect civilians, bring evil doers to justice, "keep this green and pleasant land smelling ever so slightly of roses," etc.; in the case of Trek it's to expand human/Federation knowledge, right galactic wrongs, etc. The occasional sardonic comment by Bodie and Doyle doesn't really change this; they're poking fun at their mission, but it is still their mission. In the blackest Pros stories, the mission may be reduced to protecting the pair of them, but it is still a preservative, if not constructive, mission: certainly not destructive. B7 is the sticking place in all this, of course; Blake is rather more focused on the death-and-destruction part of his fight than on the building - something - better part. Avon and Vila's missions are anyone's guess, but they're usually still preservative (of themselves) rather than destructive. Everything you're saying is true; I just think you should say it about the characters means, rather than their ends; rock musicians, unlike supercops, don't deal death and destruction in the course of what they do (except to eardrums).

You asked is there a significant percentage of mediafans who pick up on rock-milieu slash simply because it's fannish and slash, regardless of the characters' origins?" The first question is whether a significant percentage of mediafans do in fact pick up on rock-milieu slash; perhaps they do. Certainly the characters origins had no particular appeal for me when I read rock-music slash; I read it because it was fannish and slash, and because it was there. But it has appealed to me less than conventional slash; I'm not sure if that is because of the writing style of the limited sample I have read, or because of the different milieu. I doubt that it's because I don't know the characters, since I got hooked on MUNCLE fandom by "The Turquoise Mine Affair"/City of Byzantium while barely having heard of the show, and I love M. Fae's Wieldy story and the like, with little or no desire to watch the shows they're based of of.

Song lyrics, the tradition of including them also exists in B7, although I don't think I've seen it elsewhere. I remember a pretty bad B7 story in one of Annie Wortham's zines which basically recapped the plot of the song "Home by the Sea" (I think that's the title; the one with the chorus that goes "Let us relive our lives in what we tell you." I don't know who did it. [16] ) Hellhound uses lots of songs.

Babylon 5, I agree with all your reasons to like it, and I would add the excellent continuity. But I'm put of by the awkward and ham-handed dialogue, the dumb plots, and the wooden acting. (Commander Sinclair will speak with normal inflection the day Ambassador Sarek has a giggling fit on the bridge.) Both the good points and the faults, I think, arise from the same source; I suspect that the creator (I can pronounce his name, but not spell it) is an incurable adolescent fanboy. So he has little knowledge of human emotion and sf logic, but an excellent fannish obsession with all the little details. I watch the show religiously, because it has tremendous potential even if they're not using almost any of it. Did everyone notice that at the end of the episode about the young telepath girl, the one written by D.C. Fontana, Talia asked Ivanova out on a date?

"I'll Give You Three Seconds..."

  • a con report for MediaWest*Con, see that page
  • comments about torture and hurt/comfort on television
  • a rant about online formatting being foisted onto print fan traditions
  • comments about slash and tradition heterosexual romance books
  • a list of what this author considers to be Blake's 7 avatars in pro books
  • irritating newbies on the internet

Some Topics Discussed in "I'll Give You Three Seconds..."

As I watched the 6th MUNCLE ep in a row where Illya is beaten, chained, whipped, bloodied, and bruised I thought "well, that's a bit more like it!" The trouble with TV today is that people take torture so seriously. Maybe we get car chases now instead? Of course characters still get physically bounced around, but not with the innocent gusto of the 60s and not on a weekly basis. If it happens at all, it's too realistic. I want them in pain, but I want them in aesthetic pain, the kind of pain where they look fragile, anemic, and really really sexy, not covered in gore and in too much agony to fuck. Whatever happened to fantasy, damn it?

A RANT: THE TROUBLE WITH MAILING COMMENTS...

...is that they are fucking with Internet format.

This isn't directed at anyone here, I just need to vent my spleen.

I realize that companies like AOL dump their clients onto the net with no preparation at all, and that many of us who have been around a while have the advantage of comp services departments ...but 1) anyone who has dealt with comp services will tell you that the services part of the name is wishful thinking in most cases, and 2) most of us learned what we know by observing conversations in a lot of different forums and adapting.

The problem is that, as more and more veteran fen get on-line, they are transplanting print habits into a new medium that allows much more freedom. For instance, on-line you can easily quote entire paragraphs of someone else's article so your reply makes sense and you don't inadvertently twist what the other person said. Pay services like AOL don't make it as easy to do this as the standard UNIX accounts most people at edu.org, and gov sites have, but, come on, when you enter a new place, you should learn the friggin' customs.

I often download things and write the reply off-line which means having to type in the >>s that indicate a quoted passage by hand. I do it because it's a convention anyone who has been around Internet recognizes. Putting one little > at the start and end of a passage is better than not quoting at all, but it not much. You should also include the poster's name so the quote is correctly attributed.

It is also an Internet convention to arrange posts by topics, rather than by names the way mailing comments are. I think the idea is that there are a lot more people on-line, as well as a method of communicating privately, therefore what you send to the list/newsgroup is meant for everyone to see and addressing it to one person is rude. I mean, if it's meant for only one person, why the hell is it cluttering up everyone else's mailbox?

Ahem. Sorry, but this is really starting to grate on me. Not just me, really, a lot of people now that the pay services are adding more Internet access for their customers.

On a purely fannish note, my disenchantment with the B7 list grows in proportion to the number of BNFs who sign on. Many seem to have this sort of Columbus "we're here to discover you" attitude that does not go down well with people who have been quite happily discussing the series without their input for years.

SWEET SAVAGE SLASH REVISITED

Thank you all for your comments. Well, some of you, anyway. Just to clarify, I was not trying to say that slash is the same as romance. What I was trying to say is that there are some similarities and they have been overlooked by most scholars writing about slash because they want to emphasize how slash is different (and some of the scholars seemed not to have read any romances before trashing them).

It's my position that the similarities are equally important and should be acknowledged rather than shrugged off like an embarrassing relative. Both genres are written and consumed primarily by women, although romance novels are mediated by a largely male-run industry, and what they have in common might teach us something about ourselves.

I've been trying to get through some of the huge backlog of zines. Mostly gen. Odd, but the slash and adult stuff always gets read as soon as it enters the house. Hmm. The only slash stuff I have that's new is the pile of Southern Comforts/Lights that finally turned up. They're only new to me, of course, but so what. They're kind of disappointing because there's too much Vila and not enough Blake. Some people might consider that a plus, but some people's taste is all in their mouth.

As series go, I prefer Resistance and Avon Calling, and not just for content: the table of contents in these series indicate what characters are featured each story. I wish all slash zines did that. Then when I'm flipping through them at a con I could decide more quickly and easily whether to buy the thing because there's enough B/A to justify the purchase or drop it in exaggerated horror and mutter "unclean, unclean" because there are too many A/Vs or even worse depravities.

I've also been trying to read pro books that have characters based on B7 (see related list under AU UPDATE), but so far I've only managed to get through two of them; Brothers in Arms and Art in the Blood. I'm still making up my mind about BiA, but AitB sucks and that isn't a pun on the protagonist's vampiric nature. As a mystery, it disappoints because I knew who the killer was going to be the very first time the character was described. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Anyone who has read a lot of B7 fan fic understands the where Blake-bashing is likely to end. Knowing that, and knowing who Leighton is based on, it wasn't exactly a challenge to figure out whodunnit.

AU UPDATE: Just this morning, the "why are there so few B7 AUs" thread was resurrected on the slash list. This is a list of sort of pro AUs. Some use one B7 character (Avon) and some only borrow a line ("I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going"). I haven't read them all so I don't know what the connection is for each and every one, but here's the info I've gathered so far, mostly from the B7 list and a few from Sarah's list in another apa.

This is the AU UPDATE LIST:

  • Banks, Iain ("Consider Phlebas," and "Player of Games," and "Use of Weapons")
  • Brust, Stephen ("Tatlos", The Jhereg Series, "Uses I'm not expendable..")
  • Bujold, Lois McMaster ("Brothers in Arms", Duv Galeni is based on Kerr Avon)
  • Carl, Lillian Stewart ("Ashes to Ashes" and "Dust to Dust")
  • Cherryh, C.J. ("Heavy Time")
  • David, Peter ("The Siege," reference to Bajoran freedom fighter Ayvon of the Seven)
  • Elrod, P.N. ("Art in the Blood," Leighton Brett = Blake, Alex Adrian = Avon, Evan Robley = Vila, Sandra = Cally, Barbara = Servalan, Reva = Jenna, also "I, Strahd" is based on Kerr Avon)
  • Friedman, C.S. ("Dark Sun Rising" and "When True Night Falls" - "There was some controversy on the list about whether the characters are B7-influenced or not.")
  • Lackey, Mercedes ("Summoned to Tourney")
  • Lee, Tanith ("Kill the Dead," Parl Dro and Myal Lemyal are based on Paul Darrow/Avon and Michael Keating/Vila)
  • L.E.G.I.O.N. DC Comics ("Vril Drox bears resemblence to both Avon and Blake, Bek is Vila-like.")
  • Lorrah, Jean ("Empress Unborn," "Pyrrhus and Wicket are based on Avon and Vila." Also "IDIC Epidemic," and "Metamorphosis," and "Survivors," "Tasha's ex-boyfriend in both TNG books is based on Avon.")
  • McCrumb, Sharyn ("Bimbos of the Death Sun," "mystery set at sf con, uses "I'm not expendable.")
  • McDonell, Anne ("Too Close for Comfort," a Quantum Leap tie-in novel)
  • Paul, Barbara ("The Apostrophe Thief" and "You Have the Right to Remain Silent")
  • Simpson, Dorothy ("Element of Doubt" and "Puppet for a Corpse," reference to Servalan)
  • Zahn, Timothy (Star Wars tie-ins: "Heir to the Empire," and "Dark Force Rising," and "The Last Command," Talon Kaard is based on Avon)

Some Topics Discussed in "To Be Announced"

Nothing fannish.

Some Topics Discussed in "Delusions of Gender"

Nothing fannish.

References

  1. ^ This is a Pros story: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, by Dawn Woods that was printed in "Strange Bedfellows" #5.
  2. ^ In that episode, Vinnie is sent to take down Mel Profitt and his sister/lover Susan (Vinnie is canonically involved with Susan); meets Roger Lococco.
  3. ^ Is this story "What Has Gone Before" in Turquoise Mine?
  4. ^ This is a vid by Tolbran.
  5. ^ This is a comment on the "Story Fragment" by Barbara T in the previous issue.
  6. ^ This is a reference to his book, Textual Poachers, published two years earlier.
  7. ^ Fan Campaign for a Gay Character
  8. ^ Blood and Fire
  9. ^ Blood and Fire (script)
  10. ^ These are both vids by Tolbran.
  11. ^ "'text' to be poached" is an example of this term came into use with fans after the publication of the book, Textual Poachers
  12. ^ Nicole Simpson was murdered two months before this apa was sent, which means this fan's comments were probably written only a few weeks or so after the crime.
  13. ^ Could it be this?
  14. ^ This was a photocopy of "Paul Rosano, Reclining, 1974" by Sylvia Sleigh in "Strange Bedfellows" #5.
  15. ^ Actually, it's #3.
  16. ^ This story is "Home by the Sea" by Michele Rosenberg in Southern Seven/Issue 003 (1988).
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