Bill/Steve's Sexcellent Adventure
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Bill/Steve's Sexcellent Adventure |
| Commentator: | Leander Kahney |
| Date(s): | 13 June 2002 |
| Venue: | Wired.com |
| Fandom: | RPS |
| External Links: | Bill/Steve's Sexcellent Adventure, Archived version (Wired.com) |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Bill/Steve's Sexcellent Adventure is a 2002 article about RPS. It focuses on Steve Jobs/Bill Gates fanfic and links to an author page with fanfic based on the 1999 TNT movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, "which chronicled the early history of Apple and Microsoft, personified by Jobs and Gates." On the author page it is explained that the stories are based on the characters in the movie, not the real Gates and Jobs, however, for the purposes of the article they are treated as RPF and several sections are quoted and commented on. According to the article, the author couldn't be reached.
The article also gives a short summary of the history of slash fanfiction:
Slash is homoerotic fan fiction that is usually written by women, for women. The stories detail erotic encounters between pop culture figures. Usually the works feature lead characters from popular movies or TV series: Spock and Kirk from Star Trek; Luke and Han from Star Wars; Mulder and Krycek from the X-Files; and Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street. The term "slash" comes from the punctuation mark denoting paired lovers, as in Starsky/Hutch. Slash fiction arose in the '70s among straight female Star Trek fans who wanted to render the gay subtext between Kirk and Spock explicit through their own writings. Since then, it has flourished into a lively literary subgenre on the Net. There are dozens of sites, archiving thousands of stories.
As many of these articles do, it contains an unsubstantiated claim about the sexuality of the authors. Henry Jenkins is quoted on the topic of RPS:
"The extension of slash from fictional characters to real people would be troubling to the original fans who conceived of the genre," said Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT and an author of Textual Poachers, a book about fan literature. "They maintained very rigorous ethical norms within the community against basing the stories upon real people and their actual sexual lives." Jenkins said as slash moved onto the Internet, the genre's conventions began to be flouted and there was a dramatic increase in stories featuring rock stars, politicians and business leaders. Examples include pro-wrestlers, boy bands like NSYNC and even the members of Metallica.
Catherine Salmon, co-author of Warrior Lovers, is quoted as well.