Five Golden Rules For When To Be Discreet About Slash
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| Title: | Five Golden Rules For When To Be Discreet About Slash |
| Creator: | Stacy D.(?) |
| Date(s): | 1999? |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Slash |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
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Five Golden Rules For When To Be Discreet About Slash is an essay instructing slash fen on how to express enthusiasm for slash in a not-always welcoming environment.
It may have been written by Stacy D. on or before 1999 and was posted on a mailing list.
Five Golden Rules For When To Be Discreet About Slash1) Try not to photocopy 'zines on a public copier. You don't want to have to explain to the librarian/your boss why you're photocopying naked TV characters (if you're lucky, the fan art may be bad enough to be unrecognisable...). The naked-Avon one could be explained to a Mundane as a pin-up, which they may understand. The naked-Avon-cuddling-Blake picture will be a little harder to explain away. And (in a rare reading venture outside the b7 universe) what a certain man is doing to a certain tall, thin, breakable elf with a cucumber (lubricated w/ Hellman's mayonnaise) will need no explanation whatsover, but your colleagues/the librarian will never speak to you again...
2. If you are watching TNG in mixed or polite company, do not yell encouragement at the TV screen, adjuring Q to use rather more direct tactics on Picard. If you are watching "Duel" (b7), do not pant too obviously at the bit where Avon is practically embracing Blake. None of the Mundanes have noticed this, and they don't want to. If watching Sherlock Holmes, do not point out that Holmes is turning intense, brooding, bedroom eyes on Watson & then striding across the room for his violin as a form of displacement activity.
3. If you ever meet any of the actors (partly) responsible for the characters you love so much, remember not to ask them to sign pictures of what some fan artist fondly hopes their naked bodies might be like (*we* know it's really the characters we're interested in, but it would be difficult for the actors to grasp this). Some American fen were apparently stupid enough to do this at one point...
4. If you're listing your slash on a web-page or writing about slash on Usenet, be fairly careful. Be aware that people you do not know may be able to trace your outspoken views some unspecified time later using search engines like Alta Vista (WWW) or DejaNews Usenet). Even without that, there are a lot of daft trolling troglodytes on Usenet that ought to be told to go away and come back when they are somewhat higher evolved. Do you really want them to know about what they will undoubtedly consider your taste in pornography?
5. If your boyfriend or other close Mundane friend expresses a tentative and non-judgemental interest in knowing what this slash thing is all about (and they haven't laughed or sneered, and they've read your copy of Jenkins & have some idea why people read/write slash) offer them, say, an early Resistance or some tame, gentle, unambiguously moral and idealistic K/S. Do not let them get their grips on the copy of Oblique Sextus you have left lying on that chair. Trust me.
\/\/oof (... you're wondering which of these I've been stupid enough to do, aren't you...) B.