Slash / Fiction or; A whole lotta love that dare not speak its name.
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Slash / Fiction or; A whole lotta love that dare not speak its name. |
| Commentator: | Barney Dannelke for Gaydar Magazine |
| Date(s): | February 3, 2006 |
| Venue: | online |
| Fandom: | slash |
| External Links: | Slash / Fiction or; A whole lotta love that dare not speak its name., Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Slash / Fiction or; A whole lotta love that dare not speak its name. is a 2006 essay by Barney Dannelke for Gaydar Magazine.
It's a wide-eyed fansplain article, but at least the introduction recognizes this.
Some Topics Discussed
- history of zines, of slash
- Star Trek, Starsky & Hutch, Harry Potter, Buffy, RPS, and much more
- first time, Mary Sue, PWP and other terms
Interesting Introduction
The following article appears in the current issue of GAYDAR Magazine. It is not meant to school anyone who already has connections to the fanfic or slash community. It’s simply meant as a primer for those people who have not already encountered this fanzine and internet phenomena. I’m sorry I don’t have a link for the art my friend Stevie Bon-Bon did for this article at the moment as it is truly twisted. In fact, when my friend Mark Nevins saw the art he told me we had ruined Classic Trek and the phrase “Captain’s Log” for him forever. I say it’s his fault for taking this stuff too seriously but that’s because I’m ALL about reassigning blame. Unlike some of my stuff which I think of as dandelion chaffe or a benign virus, this one is copyright. It’ll be off newstands in a couple of weeks. If someone wants to pick this up after February 2006 they can have it for free as long as they’ll forward the link to me for approval or send me two copies of any fanzine that it might appear in. I know you Kinkos freaks are still out there. Have fun. – Barney
Excerpts
As I type these words Valentine’s Day is almost upon us. A time when a not so young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of inappropriate pairings and bizarre and outrageous sexual fantasies involving characters that don’t exist, but still retain teams of lawyers who will sue your ass off if you try and speak openly about any of this. Really? My ass? What sort of inappropriate sexual couplings are we talking about? How about Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy? Consider the Mission Teams on Stargate or the boys from Starsky and Hutch. Or, those septuagenarians of Sci-Fi – Kirk & Spock. How many times have you said to yourself, “If only these beloved characters could be a little more gay!” Well, as my Valentines Day present to you, consider this problem solved.
Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, long before the internet and newsgroups and instant messaging and blogging, the way people got together and gabbed about their various obsessions was with fanzines. Now fanzines themselves were nothing new. Science fiction fanzines got their start back in the 1930’s, but an odd confluence of interests took place in 1967 when the first Star Trek fanzines got off the ground. Very quickly these types of ‘zines, as they’re called began to be filled with fan fiction, which is any story about fictional characters not authorized by the actual copyright holder. People had a field day. Didn’t like last week’s episode? Too bad. Go ahead, buy a mimeograph machine and publish your own. I say this as though it were easy, but doing offset printing in your own living room is about as much fun as facing lights-up after last call without the benefit of beer goggles. You try it.
From 1967 to 1973 people are playing in the Star Trek fan fiction bean fields and telling their various Federation stories and playing nice. Then things get kinky. In 1974 in GRUP #3, a 76 page Star Trek fanzine, Diane Marchant, an Australian fan published a story called A FRAGMENT OUT OF TIME. While this was a very circumspect story, referring to Kirk and Spock only as “he” and “him” and is only two pages long, the results have been so far reaching as to hardly be comprehensible. Essentially it’s just two guys making love on an alien planet surface. One is human. He ends up taking one for the team. Pon Far, the Vulcan mating impulse may have been a factor. That’s it. But the big gay Genie was now out of the bottle and fandom was off and running – or, typing. At first there were arguments within fandom about how appropriate any of this was. Kirk and Spock, gay? Never! But let’s write some heterosexual or “het” fiction about Kirk and Spock. Then you have ‘zines publishing mixed slash and het fan fiction. But very quickly there were ‘zines devoted to just Kirk/Spock gay fan fiction. This is where the term slash comes from. After awhile people needed to differentiate between the “regular” stories and the much more controversial Vulcan on Man / Man on Vulcan type stuff. Plus, they needed to fly under the radar of the studios who owned these properties. So, K/S was born.
Then people started asking themselves, “If we can write Kirk/Spock gay erotic fiction, why not Starsky and Hutch? Why not C.H.I.P.’s or, Miami Vice?” These combinations of characters from other franchises, and yes, characters crossing over from different franchises required a more generic catch all term, and [[/]], or slash was born..
So, right from the very beginning, we have the makings of an underground literature. Like Oscar Wilde dropping off a bundle of butcher paper wrapped manuscripts composed by “many and diverse hands of a Socratic nature” at the Librairie Parisienne, these new “notes passed from hand to hand” gave birth to an enormous underground movement of gay erotic literature.
And who exactly is writing all of this gay porn? Apparently, until very recently most of this material, 95% or more, was written by women. There is some controversy over what percentage of these women identify as straight, bi or lesbian, but whatever the demographic is on sexual orientation, they sure do like writing reams and reams of sweaty man-love type fiction. Why this has been the case is also a hotly debated topic. First, gay romantic and erotic fiction is, at heart, romance fiction, and Romance fiction is responsible for approximately half of all of the books sold in this country. With that many women reading and writing romance, and same sex relationships being more accepted while still retaining the element of the exotic, it’s probably an inevitable outcome.
Some people think these women feel more comfortable writing about their heroes and fantasy icons in same sex situations because these women are somehow less offended or threatened by a same sex pairing then a heterosexual pairing. I’m not so sure about that, but the boys at RE:Search and the fellows doing the Apocalypse Culture anthologies think it’s possible so who am I to argue. My lips get tired just reading that much post-modern textual theory.
Did I mention system servers up there? Oh, yes. The rise of the internet and the rise of slash fiction go hand in hand, or unlicensed franchise body part in body part, if you will. As soon as there were Usenet news groups, there were lists devoted to almost every TV show and movie with a cult following imaginable. From there it was only nanoseconds before flying fingers were describing the sweaty intimate details of what a pairing between the male cast members of BABYLON 5 and the UK based Sci-Fi hit RED DWARF might be like. Or, the women from XENA somehow getting it on with the gals over at ALLY McBEAL. Because the XENA women, by themselves is almost too close to that show as it was aired, and the Buffy-verse is so late 1990’s. But speaking of the ladies, and XENA, this gave birth to the most significant sub-genre of slash, namely femslash, or femme-slash which, as you may have guessed is mostly written by women, apparently mostly straight women, yet features mostly lesbian pairings. Works for me.
This takes us to the stickiest sub-genre of them all – real person slash. And who should we blame this one on? The same people I like to blame lots of cultural problems on. The BACKSTREET BOYS and N*SYNC. The nearly infinite combinations possible with this inter-musical franchise clusterfuck has brought a new wave of slash fiction to the forefront, involving other boybands such as the GOO-GOO DOLLS and GOOD CHARLOTTE and leading to the x-rated pairings of just about everybody under the sun from THE BEATLES and THE ROLLING STONES to Donald Rumsfeld and Jon Stewart from THE DAILY SHOW.
Finally hit a wall with that last one? I hope so. So, what does this all mean? I don’t know but it proves that ever since the Normans decided to insert LANCELOT into Arthurian legend people have been screwing around with stories without permission and you can’t stop them with a cease and desist order or by taking away their server space.
So, to all of you pining away for that perfect pairing between characters from THE WEST WING or castaways on LOST, I say to you, keep looking for unauthorized same-sex fictional love in all those weird spaces, and have a Happy Valentines Day.