It's a Girl Thing: An Interview with Ellen Milholland

Interviews by Fans
Title:	It's a Girl Thing: An Interview with Ellen Milholland
Interviewer:	Christinecgb
Interviewee:	Ellen Milholland
Date(s):	May 1, 2002
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	femmeslash
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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It's a Girl Thing: An Interview with Ellen Milholland was conducted in 2002 for Zendom.

The Introduction

"Girl-slash. You've heard about it, you think it might be interesting, but where the hell is it? And what's it all about? You can search the internet for ages and not come across the quality stuff - there just isn't that much of it. Want some help? Well we asked Ellen M to deliver the State of Girl-slash and give you the 411. Read and learn."

Some Excerpts

Originally, before I knew there was such a formal thing as "fanfic," I was writing Picard/Crusher (Star trek: The Next Generation) stuff on my first, ugly little Mac. The first stuff I read online was P/C, but the first stuff I wrote was J/C, yes.

Funnily, Voyager had this bizarrely accepting, huge, wonndrous girl-slash community. I really can't figure any explanation for it (Wait, Seven!). And now, girl-slash is definitely there, and there's no animosity towards it at all... Some people find it odd. It's harder to find the subtext, I guess. Yes! Janeway and Seven were interesting because people loved the idea of them throwing traditional butch/femme rules into the garbage. But, the maternal thing Janeway had for Seven, that was easily interpreted sexually, and they spent a lot of time on screen together. If you watch TV closely, I think you'll find that strong women characters are rarely given screen time together.

there really are relatively few really talented girl-slash writers out there, especially if you compare it to the number of boyslash or het writers who are stellar. Girl-slash tends to attract not the Love A Challenge people, necessarily, but purely the lesbians. And I say this as a lesbian myself... I'd say that something like 90% of girl-slash writers are lesbian/bi... It's funny, isn't it? I mean, a lesbian writing boy-slash. But-- it's all about dynamics, character dynamics, sexual dynamics, etc. But, I'm not sure -- I think the reason I've never really gotten into it was just because the dynamics between men don't interest me as much as those about women. I guess because I feel most everything we see on screen is about the relationships between men.

I can think of maybe one serious romance in girl-slash (this ongoing Scullyslash piece). But other than that -- I mean, I started to tread into that territory with my CJ/Ann stuff-- and people were liking it, wanted to know what would happen. Because... I'm not sure. Because that's not the fun part. The homophobia, and that stuff-- people have no concept that lesbians go on dates, really, or buy groceries or any of those things. Which is weird, because it's lesbians writing it. Maybe that's why. We don't want to write about relationships -- we're either having them or we aren't. If we are, we don't need to write about it. If we aren't, we're bitter and don't want to talk about it. The sex is what gets us.

[regarding "girl-slash written by guys"]: I think it's been given a bad rap. I mean, it's essentially the same as boy-slash written by girls, isn't it? Except, we tend to think of f/f as porn and m/m as erotica. So, it's okay for women (much less the stereotypical porn fiends) to write boyslash than it is for guys to write f/f, which is looked at as just writing porn to get off. And I think girls do it just as much, just writing to get off.