Closely Watched Trains

Bodie/Doyle Fanfiction
Title:	Closely Watched Trains
Author(s):	Susan Douglass
Date(s):	October 1990
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	The Professionals
External Links:
Closely Watched Trains
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Closely Watched Trains is a Professionals Bodie/Doyle story by Susan Douglass.

It was published in the circuit and is online.

Author's Comments

This observation [of Doyle written as "feminine" and needing protection] definitely leads into my comments to LINDA TERRELL: Yeah, how do we sort all of this out? I go with some of the trends — but buck others. I just wrote a story where Bodie is the helpless captive whom Doyle has to rescue. I decided it was time to study this whole issue from the other side so to speak, without trying to deliberately "get" Bodie There isn t any rape or sexual abuse, and I didn't have Doyle affect any sort of extreme macho pose -- it just didn't seem in character. The story IS called CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS and I just put it "in the circuit" (sent 5 copies to the BILP Library in Glen Ellyn, Illinois). Anyone who wants a copy, send me a 25 cent SASE or SAE and 2 IRCs.

Perhaps Doyle is the one who usually gets savaged because (mostly) women writers can identify with the "more feminine" character getting hurt He can suffer right along there with him (ah, what ANGST!) I don't mind angsty stories at all. I can swim in Chesapeake Bays of angst. I relish a good rape/recovery or hurt/comfort story.

But some of the "humiliate Doyle" stories seem designed to deliberately degrade this character, whom most of us see as the most woman-like. Perhaps I'm stepping out on a limb, but it seems that a few writers are lashing out at their own identity as women — back into the

worship of machismo, the degradation of women and femininity. And you're right, Linda. How does a person insult a man? By implying that he is female." In some ways, a feminine man is seen as worse than a woman — look at all the "pansy-bashing" in the mundane world. Some stories seem to be engaged in "Doyle-bashing;" the writer defines Ray as a feminine man, then goes off to pile humiliations on him.