How Fanfiction Made Me Gay
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| Title: | How Fanfiction Made Me Gay |
| Creator: | J.M. Frey |
| Date(s): | 2016 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | multifandom |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Wayback link |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
How Fanfiction Made Me Gay is a 2016 essay by J.M. Frey. It is a chapter in the book, "The Secret Loves of Geek Girls."
Sections
- Once Upon A Time, When We Were All Bella Swan
- Fanfiction Taught Me Everything There Is To Know About Relationships
- Fanfiction Taught Me Everything I Know About The Mechanics of Sex
- Fanfiction Taught Me Everything There Is To Know About Questioning the Default “Straight” Setting
- Fanfiction Taught Me Everything There Is To Know About Starting Discussions
Some Topics Discussed
- mainstream media for girls taps into their insecurities about how the world, love, and sex work
- not all girls, such as goths, fit the accepted template
- Mary Sues
- "straight" as the default
- labels: pros and cons
From the Essay
My first crush was a sarcastic know-it-all Immortal named Methos. A character from Highlander, who to this day I am convinced is my perfect soulmate. And the focus of my sexual awakening. Lots of people cite The Boiler Room Scene from My So-Called Life, Jareth in Labyrinth, Colin Firth in Pride & Prejudice, or any/all members of the Fellowship of the Ring. But mine happened when Methos rolled out of bed in nothing but boxers to defend his life with a Roman short-sword. Unf.
[Mainstream media and portrayal of girls] offered me no advice and made fun of me. It labelled me a weirdo. As a baby geek, I was told that my interests and my desires weren’t normal enough. Because of this, making a fool of myself in front of someone I liked was my biggest fear. My diary was filled with stories about The One picking me out of a crowd because of my Unique Specialness and sweeping me into an effortless romance where there was no fear of rejection, where he led the way so there was no fear of misstep on my part, and any fights could be resolved with passionate sex and a teary apology. I was his perfect mate in all ways.
When I reread those diaries for this piece, I was struck by how similar this narrative was to that of Twilight, Sailor Moon, and dozens of YA novels where the heroine is the love interest simply because of who she naturally is. This explains a lot about the popularity of these stories. These authors have tapped into that first yearning that we, as young, inexperienced but romance-hungry women, possess.
What is better than having the perfect romantic fantasy about a fictional character? Sharing it with your friends, of course. This isn’t a new phenomenon. For as long as there has been fiction and celebrity, there have been fangirls talking about how dreamy Romeo is, or how fun Genji would be at a party, or the jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold Mr. Darcy. The Brontë Sisters had such lady-boners for the Duke of Wellington that they wrote hundreds of pages of fanfiction about the guy.
It was through writing and posting these Mary Sue stories that I began to read more fanfiction. In general, these stories are filled with the scenes that are missing, what happens after the canon story is over or with the moments that are referred to but never shown.
Many of these fics, especially the kind that deal with resolving the protagonist’s sexual tension or relationships, taught me what it means to be a girlfriend, wife, or lover. Here were stories written by women of every age, from every walk of life, and they weren’t just writing about first kisses and Mary Sues. They were writing about domestic situations, about buying curtains, about fighting over the remote, about miscarriages and bringing home baby, about wedding nights and divorces.
These female writers were filling the worlds of fiction that I loved so much with a sort of realism that was absent in other media. They were telling stories based on their own lived experiences, even if they were happening in fantastical worlds.
Here, finally, was a roadmap to my kind of romance.
Through fanfiction I learned about BDSM, and the tenets of “safe, sane, and consensual”. I read stories featuring blood play, puppy play, sugar daddies, and professional sex workers. I read stories about tentacle sex, mind sex, and alien pollen that Makes You Do It. I read about safe sex, realistic sex, sex that was awful and aborted halfway through. I read about dental dams, condoms, and IUDs. I read about sex that was filled with laughter, and sex that gets away from you, sex that gets a little too violent and requires a conversation after, and sex that wasn’t violent enough and required a frank discussion of fulfilling kinks.
My favourite was, and is, the Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamic stories, where beyond their primary biological sex (breeder, breed-ee, or neither) characters have a secondary gender which defines their place in society. These question what gender and sex really are in our world. Traits commonly assigned to each gender on the inherently flawed binary scale are blown apart, reassigned, or done away with all together. These are stories where gender fluidity, pansexuality, and trans bodies are celebrated and explored, where societies outside of a patriarchy are discussed. It questions what their pitfalls and advantages would be. And this arms readers with the vocabulary and critical thinking to take back into their real lives and start discussions.
While fanfiction was addressing the parts of the stories that we never got to see, it was also addressing the parts of our society and culture that was obscured, hidden, or taboo. I was a teenager in the days before same-sex marriage was legal in Canada, when there were maybe only five queer characters on television, and erotica was not the mainstream hit that it is today. The only canonical lesbian I had ever seen on TV was Ellen.
But in fanfiction anything was fair game. If we could turn protagonists into vampires, bounty hunters, or elves, we could sure as heck turn them homosexual, bisexual, asexual, or any of the wonderful, beautiful in-betweens. Characters slid all over the rainbow. And through fanfiction I learned about identities like transgendered, genderfluid, and demisexual.
Fanfiction writers, especially queer ones, found their voices by borrowing a character’s. They forced room for themselves within narratives that excluded them. They appropriated the white, the straight, the cis, the male and they transformed it into the sorts of people they were or saw around themselves. And in doing so, they made me, the white, straight, cis girl accept their voices as authentic and human.
I liked fantasising about Methos. But I liked Xena, too.
“How can you know that?” my mother asked. “You’ve never even kissed a girl.”
I hadn’t kissed a boy then yet, either. Yet it was assumed that I was straight because that was the default, even though I hadn’t done anything with anyone.
That shocked me.
For the first time I really understood that people were assumed straight until proven otherwise. That people around me thought that the world really was like it was portrayed on television, and not at all as diverse and colourful as I had read about in fanfiction.
And then in my first year of university I met Her.
We were best friends, but I wanted desperately for it to be more. But I was so shy, too inexperienced, and in the end too naive to ask for it. For all I learned about sex and romance from fanfiction, nothing I had read so far had taught me how to say “I want you in ways I didn’t think I could, and it scares the ever-loving frack out of me.” I wished I could put on Xena and turn to her and say, “You know, I feel the same way about you that Gabrielle feels for Xena.”
But she couldn’t use fandom to convey meaning the way I had learned to do. In the end, our friendship crumbled. In part, I think, because of all the things we couldn’t say or allow ourselves to be to one another.
Labels are useful. Some people don’t like them – they say they shut people up in impenetrable boxes, don’t allow for variances, or play into the narcissistic desire of the Millennial Generation to define themselves in ways that make them special, special snowflakes. I’ve heard every argument there is against labels.
But I think they are good starting points. They are words that can be used to get everyone on the same page and at the same point; how it diverges from there is a matter of the discussion, and how the person using the label explains themselves. And how labels can change over time, and that’s okay, too.
Through fanfiction I discovered asexual!Sherlock and greyace!Spock, bisexual!Steve Rogers, demisexual!Rodney McKay, homoromantic!Xena. And of course, my beloved Methos, having lived through five thousand years of sociocultural sexual norms that change with each new empire he watched rise and crumble. My Methos, whose sexuality flowed like a river, filling the shape of whatever vessel he chose as his secret identity that decade.
Because of fanfiction, I know who I am. Fanfiction has armed me with the knowledge, the confidence, and the vocabulary to talk about who I am, and what I want.
Where, like Methos’, my sexuality finally flows.