Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 30

Two-up Truly Queered is a controversial Professionals Bodie/Doyle circuit story written by Jane Carnall in 1989. It is a responsefic to Jane of Australia's 1986 circuit story, Two-Up.

While some responsefics are written with the permission and/or approval of the original story's author, Carnall's was not.

In the original story, "Two-Up," Bodie and Doyle play a drunken game of "two-up" (strip coin-toss). They begin to become physically intimate, something they'd not done with each other before. However, when Doyle cuts things short, Bodie accuses his partner of being a prick-tease, causing Doyle to become aggressive, physically assaulting Bodie and yelling that he is "not gay, never was, and [doesn't] intend to become gay". Bodie apologizes to him and a misunderstanding is resolved, whereupon the two have sex after all.

Carnall was angered by the premise of "Two-Up," and wrote "Two-Up Truly Queered", including the original text of "Two-Up" with her own commentary in boldface, followed by an alternate ending in which Bodie reacted quite differently to his partner's anger.

"Two-Up Truly Queered" generated a lot of fan discussion regarding the trope We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other, homophobia, the ethics of publicly "rewriting" another fan's story without permission, and whether "Two-Up Truly Queered" wasn't really fanfiction but instead a public conversation about political and social views. There was also some discussion of gafiating and taking things personally, as Jane of Australia reportedly cited TUTQ as the cause of her leaving active fandom.