Strange Bedfellows (APA)/Issue 005

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cover of issue #5, by Caren Parnes, was also the cover of A River That Runs Both Ways

Strange Bedfellows 5 was published in May 1994 and contains about 171 pages.

There were 36 members sharing 24 subscriptions.

Some Topics Discussed in "Menage a Un"

• getting tenure and what this means
• Acafen-L
• experiences with fans and fandom at academic conferences
• race and fandom
• "Paper Tiger" -- "an independent collective of videomakers who circulate their programs via local access stations around the world and sell them to educators to use in the classroom. Many of their tapes deal with the politics of popular culture from various left-of-center perspectives."
• visibility of slash, visibility of gay people, changing attitudes of Disney
• Barbie Liberation Organization -- "They are selling a video to be released this summer that shows behind-the-scenes how they remade the Barbies with the GI Joe voices and how their actions were represented in the media."
• commentary on Penthouse Forum letters and the topics of gay and bi-sexual content
• the term sci-fi
• is referring to grown men as "boys" just as offensive/inappropriate as calling women "girls"?
• disliking the actors, but liking the characters
• comments on the term Science Fiction#Sci-Fi

Excerpts from "Menage a Un"

Yes, folks, it is possible to get tenure at a major northeastern research institution primarily on the basis of research into fans and fan cultures. I am still trying to come to grips with what this concept, tenure, actually means.

Speaking of academics and fans, I want to put in a plug here for Acafen-L, the new computer discussion list which is trying to build a better dialog between fans and academics -- or more to the point, provide a comfortable place for academic-fans to hang out together, talk about our double identities, and examine the ethics and politics of writing about fandom. The list started buzzing in the last few days. Too soon to know he many or what kinds of people we will attract. But, I think people in SBF would enjoy the discussion and we want to invite you all to join us. I have enclosed a flier at the end ( my apa. (I didn't make the flier, so don't think the quote from me is immodest.) I want make clear that our list is not women-only should that be an issue to any participants, one way or another.

[snipped]

Acafen-L is off to a slow but interesting start. Lots of lurkers, few contributors. At writing, we seem to have started a discussion on defining slash and I will be putting in my two cents worth on that topic next trib. since my posting was as much inspired by re-reading all of those back issues of TNU and SBF as by anything on the net. We still encourage you to join, especially if you will participate. At writing, there is some chance I may be joining the slash-list. [Lynn C] has proposed me for membership, though I have not heard the outcome.

I will be presenting my talk on the Gaylaxians and their letter writing campaign to get a queer character on Star Trek at the San Francisco Gay ane Lesbian Film Festival in mid-June. Details are still being resolved as of writing. But, any westcoast fans want to attend, the event is open to the public with a small admission charge (which I don't see any of). You can call me at [phone number redacted].

I thought I would report to the group on some talks which I heard in my travels the term.

First, I was attending the Society for Cinema Studies conference at Syracuse, New York, and went to a panel on science fiction and popular culture... One of the panelists, [I.B.], was a clinical psychiatrist who sometimes speaks at academic film studies conferences. She is rumored to be doing therapy on several noted male film scholars. I hope they've purchased malpractice insurance! Last year, [name redacted] presented a paper on Paris Is Burning which claimed that homosexuality was the result of certain male's inability to move beyond the latency period. She was sharply challenged by several outspoken queer theorists who took exception to this archaic conception of human sexuality. This year, she decided to avoid those problems by dealing with slash fans who she felt were trapped in latency period because of their fixation on homosexuality. Some people are slow learners. She offered a number of original arguments, such as that fans collect trivia in the same way that latency period boys collect stamps, rocks or butterflies, that there is a lot of male bonding in Star Trek which appeals to latency impulses in viewers, that the thing with all of the flashing lights at the end of ST:TMP was a space vagina (an object of obvious fascination and dread for the male crewmembers). My favorite argument was that Star Trek was a uniquely latent text because all of the episodes end exactly as they began with the crew on the bridge and that nothing essential changes in their lives from episode to episode. (Many of us wondered if she had ever watched network series television!) She spoke about the fans totally through a close analysis of the aired episodes to the point that I had to ask her if she had ever actually read any slash but she assured me she had, though she could not say how or where or why. What irked me more than anything was that she began the talk with a long vague discussion of "textual poaching" (which she kept mispronouncing as "textual poking"), the "dominant paradigm" for dealing with fans today (I wish!). She then pointed to the failure of this work to address the specifics of the television programs themselves and said she would show how a close reading of Star Trek would prove that fans were less active and creative than this work would suggest. I, unfortunately, was seated on the front row, center, by myself, with all of two feet from me and the speaker. Half the audience was watching me to see how I was going to react to this snide and ill-informed talk. The panel ran out of time without allowing for any meaningful exchange from the audience and I left rather than get into a slugfest with this woman.

She, then, walked across the lobby of the hotel to ask me what I thought. I would have suspected that my glare throughout and my refusal to applaud her presentation might offer some clue. But, then, she tried to reassure me that she had not meant it personally; she had not intended her consistent reference to "textual poaching" to refer to any particular academic who had written about fandom. At this point, I came to the realization that I was dealing with a complete and total idiot...

I asked her, whether it was considered appropriate practice in her profession to perform psychoanalysis on people she had never met or had on the couch and suggested that this might be grounds for suspending her right to practice counseling... It seems to me that she was trading heavily on her authority as a practicing shrink as the basis for her judgement but that she had never actually met me or slash fans. She walked away fast and wasn't seen at the conference for the rest of the weekend. I found the exchange profoundly discouraging because it suggests that no matter how much evidence and argument presented to the contrary, a certain segment of the academic world (and I suspect the therapeutic community is going to be at the top of the list) has too much invested in old stereotypes of infantalized and passive fans to ever discard them. I suspect, if she had not read my book, she would not have felt this compulsion to speak on this topic. The good thing is that most of the academics in the room were totally hostile to her presentation and recognized it as nonsense. This would not have been the response a decade ago.

At Tucson, there was another exchange about fans that is worth reporting and seeing if anyone might suggest a response. A graduate student, presenting his first conference paper, spoke on queers and Star Trek, dealing in some detail with the letter writing campaign and computer net discussion groups around the show. A native American attacked him for not acknowledging that fandom was a predominantly white phenomenon and not discussing how fandom dealt with questions of race. I had gotten similar questions in the past and have tried to dance around them. But, this led to the Native American denouncing this poor guy at the plenary session in front of the entire conference. An easy answer is to suggest this is a flagrant example of "political correctness" run wild and I would agree in part that the native American was playing heavily on white liberal guilt and knee-jerk radical reactions. But, does he have a point? Is there something about fandom which encourages a specifically white response from us? Why are there so few minority women at our conventions and how do we deal with them when they come? Why do minority characters play such a slight role in the stories we write? I recall when I first discovered fandom reading rather a lot of Uhura stories; I don't see that same focus on race in our stories today. Without accepting all the guilt and blame the Native American speaker wanted to project on this subject, I wonder if we might productively reflect on the racial politics of fandom.

I was excited by the number of papers at this feminist conference where the speakers laid out their own passionate relations with popular culture and spoke as fans about programs, stars, etc. which mattered to them. One woman showed us some "slash" artwork published in a lesbian zine (not in fandom) showing Wilma and Betty from The Flintstones going down on each other. A man spoke of his lifetime interest in The Brady Bunch and showed other zines produced and circulated devoted to 70s tv shows and discussed from a "Generation x" perspective. A lesbian woman, who has told me she was once part of the Beverlyphiles (a lesbian fan club devoted to Gates MacFaddon) spoke about k.d. lang and how her fannish interest in this performer helped her to come out of the closet. Andrea MacDonald talked about a women-only net discussion group dealing with Quantum Leap and why the participants had decided to exclude men from the dialog. At points, I really did think I had gone to a fan con, though all of these papers had such intellectual force and rigor that few academics could totally dismiss them. I believe more and more that younger media scholars are dismantling the walls separating fandom and the academy and I think that media studies will be much enriched by this fact. This shift is the death-toll of the kinds of old-school feminist criticism that Morgan has discussed over several issues of SBF. There was a lot of discussion at the conference about how we might become "public intellectuals," writing more accessibly, engaging more directly with popular texts, audiences, and media producers, going into the public schools, government, and the media industry with our insights into popular culture. More and more, there seems to be a laudatory impulse in that direction. Now, the real question may be whether fans are interested in such exchanges, though the response at Escapade to the Henry and Connie shows of the last two years suggest an eagerness to try the experiment.

I wasn't actually citing them to get people to read Penthouse or even to endorse the values expressed so much as to get us to think about what it might mean that even straight male porn readers are getting turned on by thinking about bisexual and gay scenarios. I have heard fans for years cite the lesbian pictorials as a defense of slash (i.e. boys get off on looking at girls get it on so why can't women get off in looking and thinking about two boys.) But, this new trend suggests something much deeper. What turns us on may have next to nothing to do with what our actual practices are and even mainstream pornography is recognizing that. To me, part of what turns me on about these scenarios is where they are being published; I get off seeing them in Penthouse. seeing them as something that is no longer hidden or closeted but part of the mainstream of the commercial erotic spectrum. Having said that, yeah, some of the attitudes really suck. I was hoping we might spark some discussion about how these attitudes differed from slash, even though, superficially, both slash and these letters tell first time stories about male lovers. I do think they are very different...

[snipped]

I regard the [Penthouse] letters to be a genre of popular fiction, like slash or romances, which is why it is meaningful to talk about them in this context. It doesn't matter in the slightest to my argument that these are not actual sexual experiences. In fact, it is important that we understand that these are mass-produced sexual fantasies, written for and edited by a pretty savvy media franchise which we must assume has a pretty good grasp on the pulse of its readership. (How or where it reads that pulse, I won't suggest.) My assumption is that the magazine might publish one or two such scenarios to see how people respond, but it would not persistently publish them if they got a strongly negative response from their readership. They are in the business of making money not political statements, and so, if these letters are becoming more and more central to the publication, it must be because they are receiving a positive response. That these same-sex scenarios are being accepted or sought out by straight males is fascinating and probably revolutionary, even if it doesn't translate into those male readers giving each other blow jobs. I would think that most of us in slash fandom would agree that what we do in our fantasy life is as much a meaningful part of who we are as what we do in our real lives.

I have long known that Forrest Ackerman coined the term, "Sci-fi" rather than the press as has been commonly reported. I don't think this information changes much of my negative reaction against it. First of all, Ackerman's relation to fandom, like that of many male fans, involves a certain degree of camp or comic distance from the text. Male fans often ridicule the programs, books, etc. they love even as they proclaim their fannish relationship to them. Compare the parodies that male fans write of Star Trek which often involve aggressive, ridiculing humor to the comic stories which female fans write that retain a high degree of affection. Male fans often make fun of the characters; female fans often have fun with them. So, Ackerman's term, "Sci-fi" encodes that same ambiguous relationship to fandom and science fiction. That explains why it was so easy for that term to get accepted by the journalistic community which was equally uncomfortable with science fiction and fandom. I think people intuitively recognize the ridicule in that term and react against it. But, I also think, whatever its origins, the press has continued to use it long after it is clear that many, if not most, fans find it offensive and insulting. That means that it remains an identity imposed upon us from the outside rather than one we have embraced within our own community.

You seem baffled about what people get out of slash when they don't like one of the characters in the couple. I'm not sure. But, let me suggest a range of possible relations we might have to those characters we don't like:

a) We don't like the actors who play them but we do actually find aspects of those characters interesting. I, for example, have very little use for William Shatner, but I find when I read K/S that I am able to separate the actor from the character. I like fanfic Kirk; I just don't like the character as aired.

b) We don't like aspects of the character as aired but we like to see fan fiction that changes those aspects. I don't like a certain air of smugness or self-righteousness that Blake takes on in the series. I tend to view that character from Avon's point of view. Even though I don't like Blake, as aired, I think Avon's fiery relationship with him brings out something interesting in both characters. I like stories which force Blake to confront his inadequacies and then helps him to progress beyond them.

c) We don't like the character as normally portrayed in fanfic; we do like the character as portrayed on the series; we hold out hope that the writer might do it right. For me, examples would be Vila, who I liked okay in the series but who often comes across as a doormat in fan fiction. I like certain treatments of Vila, including some of Jane Carnall's or M. Fae's but I don't like Vila enough to want to read a whole series of mediocre stories about him. Similarly, I rather liked Ann Holly in the series but have been deeply offended by the way she is treated in most fanfic.

d) We don't like the character, period, but we are willing to suspend our distaste long enough to see what a good writer can do with him. So, for example, I don't really love Riker, yet M. Fae's Riker-Worf story really fascinated me, because, for a fleeting moment, she found something in the character that strikes a sympathetic chord, which explains why he does the things I dislike and helped me to pull together some of those fleeting moments in the series when I do sorta fancy him.

e) Scenarios may be more important than characters. This is not a fannish reading practice, to be sure, but sometimes, since I am used to reading Penthouse Letters. where the appeal is often the scenario rather than the character personalities or expressed values, I can get off on a hot story even if the characters don't do much for me. I read some of the Manacles Wiseguy slash well before I saw any of the episodes and they worked for me just fine, even though I had no emotional relationship to these characters before reading the story and couldn't really remember which was which after reading it. (This is a product of how I read it, not a complaint about the story!) Many people read their first Pros, slash without having any pre-existing familiarity with the characters.

f) We can dislike a character while still finding them compelling and interesting. We all love villains who we wouldn't enjoy bedding in real life.

Bisexuality confounds such easy distinctions and suggests a more fluid range of erotic interests. If the characters are bisexual, does it "violate the basic romantic premise" you describe. I think a lot of romance surrounds bisexuality. I know of many bisexuals who have become so emotionally involved with a member (of one sex or another. I've seen it work both ways) that they have committed to a long-term monogamous relationship with them. This doesn't take away the fact that their erotic desires and fantasies are open to a broad range of object choices. But, here, romance leads to a "fixing" or "limiting" of sexual practice that is tremendously romantic. At the same time, there is something romantic, a la slash, about someone who has hidden from or tried to repress their erotic feelings towards men who are brought to confront and act upon those feelings by their romantic attachment to someone of the same sex. As I know from my own experience, being bisexual doesn't mean that you have had gay sex or acted on non-hetrosexual desires or even that you have always been honest with yourself about what you want. It can be a pretty dramatic experience to re-conceptualize your sexuality and re-identify feelings you have had for years but didn't want to label as queer. So, seeing the characters as hi could mean more or less the same thing as seeing them as straight. They are overcoming tremendous barriers to act on a love or desire which refuses to accept such limits. It also doesn't seem to me to preclude them as potential object choices for straight women. They are still male; they are still potentially attracted to women; they are perhaps more open to sharing a sexual experience with you and the other male object choice in the partnership than a character who is either straight or gay. Do you really think that identifying them as hi will "remove them from the realm of my sexuality," as you seem to be arguing? I don't mean to challenge your erotic fantasies, only to question some of the logic of your argument. I would love to see a story state, "I am not gay; I'm bi and I love my partner."

Your comments about the lack of attention to history in Poachers and in some other book, I forget which one , is well taken. I struggled with that problem in writing the book. I couldn't cover everything in the first book and I had no idea what might surface in the other unnamed book since I didn't have access to The Ethnographer's manuscript when I was writing mine. But, beyond that, I kept getting such conflicting information. You have no idea how many people have written me to claim they wrote the first slash story or made the first music video or started this or that fandom or... and I had no reliable way to sort through these claims. In truth, given the nature of fandom, most things probably did get invented multiple times by people in different regions who had no contact with each other. So how can a history of fandom be written? The best bets may come from within fandom. Joan Marie Verba is doing a history of Star Trek zines - - more of a chronicle or list actually but it's a good start. And I have seen signs at Media West about a Star Wars fandom oral history project.

[...]

I found your discussion of romantic sadism fascinating though I don't have many comments -- not being a big hurt/comfort fan. It certainly makes more sense than The Ethnographer's account of the genre (and I had previously regarded the h/c section to be both the best and worst section of that book.

As for Beatles slash, it seems like this is getting more and more public. First, there was Jane Champion's A Girls Own Story that I mentioned a few issues back that dealt with a young lesbian's coming of age through making love to a girlfriend, while wearing John and Paul masks and pretending to be the Beatles. Then, there is Backbeat which is very slashy in its treatment of the John Lennon and Stuart Suttcliff relationship, including some dialog suggesting that they are in love with each other and John running around angsting about whether people think he's queer. A lot of classic slash situations there. Then, there is a gay independent production I haven't seen yet, Hours in The Time, which depicts a weekend long sexual encounter between John and Stuart. So, this fannish fantasy is starting to get more and more open as the people who grew up imagining homosex between two or more of the Beatles now have access to the filmmaking apparatus.

Some Topics Discussed in "Notes from Tomorrow"

• opera

Excerpts from "Notes from Tomorrow"

Very short and not very fannish.

Some Topics Discussed in "Slash is Everywhere"

• Diana Bennett vs Catherine Chandler
• comments on much-talked about Wiseguy zine, The Terranova Situation
• comments about how gen Blake's 7 fanfic is acceptable reading to this slash fan
• Beatles fanfic

Excerpts from "Slash is Everywhere"

I love "Terranova Situation" - I enjoy the soap-opera-saga feel to it; the details of daily life add to the feeling of really living with these three men. Re Carlotta accepting the situation, she sure showed on the series how flexible she could be. As for the women not being well developed. Max is a terrific character and, as the story develops, is becoming as "real" to me as the rest of them. My favorite storyline so far has been where the FBI kicked Frank out for being gay, and his dealing with this. I'm amazed you've read so much of it, actually; my boredom threshold for novels is usually around 50 pages - if it hasn't grabbed me by then I assume it never will, maybe skip ahead in the book to see if things improve, and if they don't move on to the next one.

B7 fandom is still the only fandom I'll read gen stories in. The characters are all so fascinating and well developed, and pairing them off in almost any combination works (well, depending on the skill of the author...!)

I'm an A/B fan who likes both Avon and Blake; and a K/S fan who likes both Kirk and Spock. Actually, I'd found more K/S fen disliking Spock; might be the company I was keeping at the time; I seemed to be the sole Spock fan for miles around, while everyone else was in awe of the "golden god". I could never quite figure out how some people could like slash if they disliked one of the characters - after all, what does that say about the taste of their hero?

I prefer Diana to Catherine, and right now most of the energy in B&TB fandom seems to be in the Diana zines. How many times can you read bring-Catherine-back-from-the-dead stories anyway? The whole Classic B&TB fandom is so focused on that there's little room for anything else. (Then again I've probably read literally hundreds of K/S first-times, and I'm still not tired of those. Could be because B&TB is straight?.... Re Catherine/Vincent vs. Diana/Vincent, B&TB fandom destructed so badly over the 3rd season that there isn't a whole lot left (a few signs of revival have been showing up lately) - and what is thriving, interestingly enough, is Diana/Vincent. Not that that still won't get you lynched around certain quarters, but the people I met at the last TunnelCon seemed on the whole a lot more tolerant of different opinions than the fandom was even a year prior to that.)

Now as for Michael Praed vs. Jason Connery, it's Praed all the way. And I liked the first Travis better; the second seemed just too silly for a part that had previously been weighted with such menace. I've only ever seen one Honor Blackman of THE AVENGERS, so sure can't judge that one... I suspect I'd still prefer Mrs. Peel, even if I'd had the opportunity to see the series from the beginning.

I've heard several people mention various slashy type stories written about the Beatles and other rock groups - as groups as you mentioned, not couples - that were circulated on a "circuit" in the late 60's. I've heard most of it was very "..." type of writing, but I'd still be curious to see some of it anyway. Anyone ever run across any of this?

What makes a "/" story? Can the names be changed? Certainly that's been done in a lot of the very extreme AU Bodie/Doyle stories, where the characters share nothing in common with the aired characters of Bodie and Doyle except their physical appearance and, perhaps, a variant on their names. That's definitely still "/". The only other fannish examples I can think of that deals with entirely new male characters in stories focused almost entirely on their relationship are two pieces by DVS, one of which appeared on "Thy'la" # 9, and the novella which comprised "Lovers" III. In each instance a human and Vulcan males are paired. True, both stories still rely on the Trek universe as background, and thus qualify as fan fiction by definition. DVS has done a good job in illuminating the background of her stories with convincing details of what life might be like in the future, they make good SF reading. I feel that if she deleted all references of Trek from these stories they'd still qualify as "/".

Some Topics Discussed in "With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemas"

• what makes a show "slashable"
• comments on femmeslash
• the thought of an "electronic fanzine," fears about copyright and visibility
• comments about music vids and copyright, a mention of vids that splice mainstream porn into their content
• the similarities between media fans and sports fans
• ages of fans, generational differences, young people today!
• role-playing and exploring gender
• comments about House of Zeor, homophobia, and sexual violence
• comments about Jacqueline Lichtenberg's term intimate adventure

Excerpts from "With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemas"

I do think that the most 'slashable" shows are also the ones most interesting to non-slash media fans. I like to read stories about compelling characters in intense relationships, whether or not they end up in bed together. Slash fans are as discriminating as non-slash fans; contrary to popular belief, we don't slash everything in sight out of sheer obnoxiousness or lechery. (I'm fairly sure those flyers that appear at MediaWest each year advertising Calvin/Hobbes, Gumby/Pokey, Gilligan/Skipper, etc., are just a joke...)

I've read a few lesbian slash stories; they seem to be becoming more acceptable these days. To me, they are very similar to male/male slash, dealing mainly with the struggle to achieve intimacy. The pairings tend to be what you'd expect, extrapolating from male/male slash: Thelma/Louise, Cally/Jenna, Beverly/Deanna. Personally, I prefer any kind of slash over straight; slash offers a fantasy of a relationship effortlessly free of gender inequality.

In my less sane moments, I've considered doing an "electronic fanzine" something like what you suggest. Copyright law makes me hesitant, however. Movie and tv producers have looked the other way with print fanzines, but music videos are another matter altogether; they are much closer to the original product, and the producers may not be able to ignore them ~ especially those that splice in clips from porn flicks! It's safer not to sell fannish vid for a profit; I don't want to risk bringing the wrath of the establishment down on us all.

Also, a compilation tape would mean the vids were another generation down from what you'd get directly from the videomaker, and some videos wouldn't hold up to that very well. Anyways, I don't really have the equipment to do wholesale dubbing. Kandy Fong does; she has stated that she plans to found a fannish music video library, offering copies at cost of whatever is donated, as well as information on how to contact those videomakers who prefer to do their own distribution. I think it's a great idea, but unfortunately Kandy does not seem to be very reliable. I and several of my friends have sent her numerous SASEs, and she never replies.

Sports fans do remind me of media fen. There is that bonding, that connection. That's why sports fans get so upset about free agency, and reminisce at length about the good old days when players spent their entire careers with one team. They remind me of Trek fans protesting that casting new, younger actors as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would be sacrilege.

I've noticed that media fandom in general and slash in particular are pretty much baby-boom phenomena. Most fans were born sometime between the end of WWII and the mid-sixties. Sure, there are a few who are older or younger than that, but the vast majority fall into that age range. Looking at the zines of the seventies, it's obvious that many of the readers, contributors, and editors were in their teens and twenties. Now they are mostly middle-aged. Fandom has aged noticeably; neos seem to be recruited not from the younger generation but from the same generation that invented it. An example of this is MediaWest. Why is fandom's premiere zine con held in East Lansing, Michigan, of all places? Because it used to be run by the Michigan State Star Trek Club. But rather than pass the convention down to future generations of college students, the organizers took it with them when they graduated. Though it's still held in the same city, it's no longer connected with Michigan State. It's not that younger (or older) fans are unwelcome in media fandom; it's simply that they aren't interested.

CNN, Gannett, and others have run stories on fanzines recently. Desktop publishing technology has created a burgeoning small press. Supposedly, fanzines are produced by and for young people. Most readers are in their teens or early twenties; the average fanzine editor is twenty years old. The fanzines themselves are devoted to a huge variety of topics, from kitchen appliances to rock stars to original fiction and art. The Gannett article gave brief mention to tv shows as a topic; CNN did not mention media fandom at all. So apparently there are lots of baby-busters out there who are churning out fanzines ~ but not media-oriented ones. No doubt part of the reason is technology. Kids who grew up with cable tv, vcrs, cyberspace, Nintendo, etc., had more options with their entertainment; perhaps they're not as inclined toward textual poaching. (As Henry points out in TP, media fandom stems as much from dissatisfaction with the source material as from appreciation of it; a generation accustomed to more interactive entertainment may not feel that need to remake television in their own image via fanzines.) There are also sociological factors. Demographer Neil Howe claims that baby-busters are the most tolerant generation in the history of the U.S. In general, they take racial and gender equality, gay rights, etc., for granted in a way earlier generations can't even understand. So perhaps the issues that baby-boomers are struggling with in media fandom simply aren't as compelling for other generations.

And speaking of cyberspace... I've heard that it's customary for people hanging out in multi-user dungeons and other shared universes to assume personae, characters which may or may not share their creator's gender. It's apparently not uncommon for people to flirt and even fall in love over the computer nets, only to find that the object of their affections is not of the gender advertised!

I'm reminded of the time when, as a young teen, I wrote to Jacqueline Lichtenberg about her novel, House of Zeor. I wondered why she had made her hero, Hugh Valleroy, so homophobic. She replied that it was necessary, in order to show that the intimate, deadly relationship between Hugh and Klyd wasn't sexual in nature, and that the reason I didn't understand was that I hadn't learned to associate sex with violence yet. Yet. Well, it's over ten years later, and I guess still haven't learned to associate sex with violence -- and I hope I never do.

I doubt most fans view hurt-comfort as a power or revenge fantasy. There was that book about movie heroes — I can't remember what it was called — that claimed physical pain and injury was a way to redress the power balance between men and women. Since it is almost always men who are the powerful ones in a relationship, weakening them by torture, maiming, and mayhem puts them on an equal footing with women. That may apply to conventional romances, but I don't think it applies to fanfic, particularly h-c and slash. With all male characters, the power balance is already redressed. I attended a panel once, moderated by a woman who wrote in many fandoms. She remarked on the tendency of fans to pick on the more vulnerable member of a male/male pair, saying, 'If you're smaller or blonder, you're toast.' If redressing the power imbalance were the main concern of fans, then it should be the less vulnerable partner — the taller or darker one — who is tortured. So what's going on here?

[...]

Lately I've been thinking about what hurt-comfort and slash have in common, and the obvious answer is: intimacy. Not all slash is about intimacy, but all the early stuff was, and even today the slash most fans prefer is about intimacy. Lichtenberg coined the term 'intimate adventure' to describe the kind of SF she and many other female fans like to read, books where the action is primarily psychological, involving two or more characters trying to achieve intimacy (not necessarily sexual). Many people who approved of the new genre disliked JL's name for it, saying that the word 'intimate' carried unwarranted sexual connotations. But no one could think of an alternative; in our society, psychological closeness/vulnerability appears to be intrinsically linked with sex. The only relationship that compares to the sexual pairbond, intimacy-wise, is that between mother and child. Slash and hurt-comfort are thus two branches of the same tree: intimacy in the two main socially acceptable modes. (One needn't be a Freudian to see a link between the two types of relationships. Look at Amy Grant's song, 'Baby, Baby,' which she wrote after she had her first child, to express the similarity she discovered between passionate love and maternal love. Or note how similar people sound when they are cooing to their lovers and to their babies.)

You have some good points in your 'AU theory.' I would add that AUs seem to proliferate mainly in single-pairing fandoms — probably out of boredom. The possibilities of any relationship are exhausted eventually; the novelty wears off and the honeymoon's over. In shows with ensemble casts, like B7, fans move on to alternate pairings to alleviate such ennui. This strategy is unsatisfying when the show has a very limited cast, like Pros. (Though they tried, as evidenced by the extraordinary elevation of Murphy, a spear-carrier if ever there was one!) Thus fans move on to AUs, rather like a long-married couple trying to spice up their love-life by doing it in an elevator or while dressed up as pirates.

Some Topics Discussed in "Desert Blooms"

• music with slash content and overtones
• U2 slash

Excerpts from "Desert Blooms"

Slash and music: I'm very interested in the idea of combining slash and music in various combinations. There was a slash and music panel at Escapade that discussed all sorts of rock and roll stars who've been slashed either fictionally (Tris & Alex, Eroica) or as themselves (the Moody Blues, the Beatles). (Where is this stuff? I really want to read it.) But it never discussed what to me is the real concept of music and slash (as opposed to slashed musicians).

There is a long history in Pro's slash to include appropriate song lyrics to highlight or frame stories (does this exist in other universes?). While the lyrics aren't really a part of the story they can accent or add mood. The problem with this method is that one has to assure the reader knows the song. So much of the emotion of the song is in it's combination of music and lyric. When the lyric is extracted and presented separately it generally loses a tremendous amount of its initial impact. It then becomes a piece of poetry and, let's face it, most rock and roll is pretty lousy poetry. It hears much better than it reads.

Then there's the whole sub-genre of Pro's stories with either Doyle going undercover with a rock band, Bodie becoming security for a rock band, or one or both having grown up with the famous but dissolute rock musician who is in desperate need of their help. But this is something else and doesn't count as slash and music. It counts as bad plot ideas.

M. Fae has done some interesting stories incorporating songs into her work. Wish You Weren't Here evoked the depressed mood of a Morrissey song and her recent stories, If I Fell, Revolution, If I Needed Someone, etc., actually use the lyrics of the song as dialogue (a very clever and very difficult task). I used a U2 song as inspiration for a recent story. Incorporating some of the lyrics into the story, not as dialogue but as part of the narrative.

But is there music that invites, evokes or inspires slash? M. Fae e-mailed me recently about U2's album ACHTUNG BABY saying that "I know it's supposed to be about all sorts of things, but I personally found it made the most sense when seen as a description of things between Bono and Edge (the lead singer and guitarist in U2)." I think her outlook on the album is a particularly slash outlook. She heard the music and the lyrics and combined them with her predilection for "men swooning over other equally attractive men" and voila, a slash soundtrack. The album is emotional, angry and bitter and about the Edge's divorce. But it can also be interpreted as two close friends, Edge & Bono, trying to find some sort of footing in the turmoil of their lives. It was slash to me the first time I heard it (and that's probably why I got so addicted to it). It's very easy to interpret it in that light, more so than most albums. So, you could say this is slash music.

Some Topics Discussed in "Vice Files"

• comments about A Weekend in the Country
• comments about Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: DS9
• Babylon 5's ban on fanworks as per JMS's decree
• Suzan Lovett and Wiseguy art
• Blake's 7 and alternate universes
• Mary Sues
• will "net" fans get more information faster than fans who do not have access to a computer

Excerpts from "Vice Files"

Alex & I went to Weekend in the Country on 4/22 - 4/24 and had a lot of fun in the video room - lots of songtapes. The Bullshitters part II (missed pt I) which was very amusing; and did some of our Media West shopping early - not that I've got any time to read any of it...I still have zines from LAST Media that I haven't read!

[...]

At Weekend in the Country, we saw a songtape we thought you & Jane might like - it was a Cowley/Bodie one to Gloria Estefan's song "Cuts Both Ways" - was a pretty good video. (And this from a non-fan!)

Suzi Lovett doing Wiseguy art? PLEASE tell me you were mistaken! My wallet's aching... - I don't wanna think about how high the bidding could go...(EEK!)

DS9 is a vast improvement over TNG - the characters are individuals who do not always agree; they're not 'all one, big happy Fleet' - the commander even has a semi-grudge with Picard because his wife was killed by the Borg when Picard was Locutus... B5 is another show that's very different from TNG - dark, cynical; government conspiracies abound, cross & double-cross, and wonderfully flawed main characters! No Ubermensch cardboard cut-outs here!

Re: Nets, one question you missed: Will it serve to isolate the poorer fans who don't have access to 'net compatible' equipment, making them the last to know about things because it has to filter down by 'conventional' methods?

Re: the DS9 story with the fanatically religious couple & sick child, there was an episode just last night from that very same idea, but written by David Gerrold. They did, however, ask the child if he wanted to live - or at least the doctor did. But, his answer didn't matter anyway...

Re: Mary Sues, I consider a story with a new female character a MS when she knows everything and can do everything to get the usual characters out of any trouble they get in. If she's just a new female character, who has flaws like everyone else, and doesn't "steal the show", I've got no complaints!

Liking a pairing while disliking one of the pair - I don't like Blake as much as Avon or Vila (I don't dislike him, but he can be a pompous, self-righteous, blind- to-all-but-the-Cause ass...), but I prefer the B/A pairing because of the dynamics of it - the two personalities clashing against each other. In A/V, one personality tends to change to accommodate the other, and I just don't find it as interesting...

Re: "The Escape from New York Affair" - I LOVED that one - I desperately want them to write a sequel where Napoleon & Snake go to rescue Illya!!!

Re: B5 fanfic, I've heard the production team has said they will NOT allow any zines and since JMS was supposed to be at Media in '92 (and couldn't make it at the last minute), he knows where to look if they suspect any...

My theory on the lack of B7 AU's isn't the lack of established partnership but the fact that we know so little concrete info on the universe itself. Earth of the 60's, 70's, or 80's (U.N.C.L.E., Starsky & Hutch, Miami Vice & Wiseguy) is something we're all at least a little familiar with. One can create just about anything in the B7 universe and not contradict things everyone knows to be fact, so AU's aren't necessary... .

Some Topics Discussed in "But, T-shirt Slogans ARE Intellectual Discourse"

• comments about acafans
• some plays by Leslie Shell
• comments about Party Spirit and "All Talk", a story in Concupiscence #3
• comments about Virgule-L about letting a man join the list, the possible cooling effect this may have had on discussion
• f/f stories and the future
• Bodie/Cowley stories, and power
• comments about Blond Shall Not Touch Blond, Nor Curly Touch Curly
• descriptions of an acting class at in Santa Barbara being taught by Jonathan Banks
• comments about songtapes

Excerpts from "But, T-shirt Slogans ARE Intellectual Discourse"

Christine pulled me kicking and screaming (hah!) into taking an acting class from Jonathan Banks, better known as Frank in Wiseguy or as the smarter less good-looking guy in Frank/Vinnie and Frank/Roger stories. JB (as we don't call him to his face) is a wonderful caring teacher, who combines a passion for acting, and desire to push each student to work 'til it hurts, with an amazing ability to create a safe place for that work to happen. I still love Frank, but my respect for JB just keeps increasing as I realize just how different he and Frank are. Christine and I have been doing a weekly "The Jonathan Report" to the e-slash-list, with each class's highlights. The only trick there is deciding what stuff really isn't appropriate to mail to 50 of your closest friends. The fact that his wife is pregnant and having twins? Yeah, sure, we know there are people who will want to know. What JB had for dinner? Probably not. How tight his jeans are each week? Definitely!

While on a Frank/Wiseguy moment, I must respond to M. Flay's review of Terranova Situation. It was beautiful...! Honey, would you be willing to do a Siskel and Ebert at Virgule? I can't imagine anything more fun. The only trouble would be finding someone else as — but differently — opinionated as you for you to play with.

We also watched, (with open mouthed amazement and enjoyment) the con tape for IDICon 4 (1988)|Idicon ? in 1988. People were already complaining about fandom swapping, and au's from hell, and any two guys, and such subjects 6 years ago. Fandom Most Easy to Make Fun Of at the time was definitely Beauty and the Beast. (I don't know what it is now: Kung Fu, perhaps?) Good tape: I don't know if it is still available, but it is well worth a watch if you come across a copy, mostly for Lezlie's play .

I 'm still enjoying the heck out of Tris/Alex-Robert/Jimmy-Allyn/Derek fandom (If that list of names doesn't make sense, please ask. Nothing would please me more than an excuse to explain the whole fandom.) Robert and Jimmy have played together in public recently, for the first time since Jimmy took that slag, Coverdale, to his, well, studio, and the Tris/Alex fans that also like to make up things about the public personas of Jimmy and Robert are having a field day. I have to admit that I didn't know how long T/A fandom had been around; I recently saw a play that Lezlie wrote in '88 that mentions Plant fandom, and was surprised it was even 6 years old, since I hadn't heard of it until recently.

What would a trib be without at least one rant, I say. I didn't get my trib in last ish at least partially because of some uneasiness about where SBF is going. In Sandy's perfect world, this apa would be like a written slashbash, where when we first walk in the door, we start catching each other up on our lives, and then move quickly on to dishing the fans that didn't make it to the party, revealing the new gossip, and reviewing casually the new zines and stories we've read. As the party continues, we generally eat, and drink heartily, and then start to philosophize on the origins of slash, why fandom seems committed to having Bodie and Doyle circumcised even though they probably aren't, and important stuff like that. What I don't want this apa to be, is a academic colloquium. Academic bashing, you say? Not at all; the academics and would-be academics can be a social and personal and as en-dialogue as I could want — and some of us without academic credentials are the most guilty of treating this forum as a chance to read our papers, trot out our newest theory about slash, and move on without listening/responding to anyone else, or sharing anything remotely personal about our reactions to slash.

Ember Days: I didn't like most of it, and though I'm an inveterate re-reader, haven't wanted to reread it even once. I did go back and read the entirety of Party Spirit recently, and though as whole they weren't as good as I remember them, they've held up a lot better than many stories I thought were great my first year in Pros. (I especially like the £act that when they tell Cowley, he kicks them out, no ifs ands or buts. If an author brings the moment of discovery into the late eighties/early nineties, I am slightly more willing to believe Cowley would keep them on, but I still figure that the odds are probably 20 to 1, making me wish that the story proportion wasn't closer to 1 to 20...). Maybe *my* big problem with the novel was I expected something more like her other slash writing, and definitely didn't feel I got it.

By no means were all of the arguments against [a male fan's] inclusion [in Virgule-L] foolish, whether whether I agreed with the participants or not. The discussion in our culture around issues of gender separatism is nowhere near over, and the addition of the anonymity of cyberspace ((remember, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog...)) complicates, rather than simplifies the questions. I'd also like to mention that since the group discussion about whether he should stay, conversations on the slashlist have been generally less personal and casual, and there has been considerable less traffic, even though we have more people.(Obviously there are other possible reasons, including another flame war immediately preceding [his] arrival, and the increased size of the list, why the change in the style and content of the list discourse might have changed.) Almost off the subject, I have rarely seen a less personal desire to reject someone; the only people who knew [him] were uniformly for letting him join.

I have been thinking a lot about [f/f fiction] as well, as I have tried for months to write a Jenna/Cally story that worked for me in a way similar to m/m slash. (I dislike the term lesbian slash for no good reason. I think the parallel construction -gay slash- would be accurate for only a subset of slash, but I admit that f/f slash will probably never be more than a small and untypical subset of slash in general.)

Reyrct on Heat Trace: I agree that the equal=ideal issue comes up a lot in slash. There was even a joke about that in Threesome, the straight guy and the gay guy both agreed that lesbian sex was 'better' for women, while the woman looked on, somewhat confused looking. One of my fav recent treatments of the theme was a Maggie Hall's Pros story in Concupiscence 3: It's early in their relationship, Doyle learns that he loves being fucked, and finally wants to try doing it. Bodie doesn't tell him that he already knows that he hates being done. Bodie feels he must submit to it though, or Doyle will eventually feel unequal, and leave him. Doyle breaks it to him, that there is nothing that mates him (Doyle) feel more topdog, king of the hill, etc., than having Bodie kneeling in front of him giving him a blow job. At the end of the story it is clear that Doyle is still going to get fucked, and that Bodie isn't, and that is fine for their relationship.

Your comments about rude Doyle fans reminds me of a couple of things. One, [J] has been talking about people who judge slash stories because of content,(instead of quality) something I had never thought about. I read death stories, my lads fucking other people, elves, you name it. It is only fairly recently that I realized other people didn't. I will avoid authors that I haven't enjoyed in the path, but not plots. At Manacles, (and probably other presses, but I haven't seen any others ed's secret files), people write and complain that X story had no sex, or that they didn't even read Y story, because a friend had told them that it had Bodie/Cowley (or Murphy, or was depressing, or secondary characters in the show were the main focus of the story, or whatever...)! My jaw was hanging open!

My least favorite songvid of the ones I have done is to the song, I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles). The clips are not on the beat, there is no effort to tell a story, there's lots wrong with it. On the other hand, lots of people tell me it is their fav of my vids. Why? Because the entire vid is just an excuse to show Doyle, in tight jeans, walking to the music. Not for one minute to knock Doyle in tight jeans, but it's depressing, and leads me to understand more clearly than I had before about the dangers of working to please an audience.

No, I don't think it is baldness that saves Frank from the slash fate worse than death (feminization, that is...), because hair for hair, Frank and Vila are awfully similar, and Vila's one of the most mistreated girlymen in slash. Good try though.

I still remember my first months of B7 infatuation. It was the sort of bittersweet emotion usually connected with high school romances. Why bittersweet you ask? Two reasons: First, I found TerraNostra Underground just before I got into B7, and was excited that I had found this apa that was obviously — I mean, look at the name — going to be a great place to discuss B7. Then I found that most of my friends and fellow tribbers had been B7 fans, and now were bored with it. Second, and more painful, was the realization I had about 6 months into it, when I had borrowed a bunch of zines, and bought a bunch more: I realized that never again in slash would I be able to walk into an existing fandom and just read and read and read.

"...virtually no slash hero is a bad soldier, just an iota less superb than his [..] superior partner." I wonder if that is one reason that War of the World's fandom is growing so slowly. (It is a C- to C+ show, but we've slashed worse, and there are some good writers in the fandom). Harrison in the show, will not carry a weapon at all. In stories, he will sometimes shoot to save Ironhorse, and of course, once he does decide to fight, he does it with a traditional heroes strength and ability.

I've loved your song tapes for some time (though I admit many of my B7 tapes say "songs by Carol McCoy and Leigh Motooka" so I've never been quite sure which of them were actually by you...). I recently got a tape with just a few songs on it, including Tom of Finland (quite a funny tribute - I assume they are scenes from the movie? I wish I'd seen it), and a few others. Definitely the funniest was "I will do anything for you, but I won't do that." I don't much like the song, and I've already seen a couple of other fannish versions, and still...undercutting the "I won't do that" bits with the graphic stills of B/A fan art, was an inspired concept! Also, just from a technical viewpoint, I'd love to hear how you take the shorts of the stills; they were very clean, and the movement was great.

The reason that Carol was almost lynched has nothing to do with crossing fandoms! She was trying to break a fundamental rule of slash pairings: curly guys can NOT sleep together. It is bad for two dark haired guys to sleep together, it is worse for blonds to sleep together (equivalent to first cousins, I'd say) but the elemental taboo is two curly-haired guys!! Starsky and Martin Caid (Martin Shaw's non-curly haired character in the Chief) would be fine..., trust me.

I have for the most part, not called myself a B/C fan, but rather a Jane Carnal fan, because most other renditions of B/C haven't done anything for me. I finally have realized why; that I am only interested in B/C if there is enough risk in it for Cowley. If he is triple-thinking and on top of the relationship from the beginning, it is a big yawn for me, If he has things to lose emotionally (which does NOT mean I necessarily want Bodie on top-in either way-in their relationship).

If most Mary Sue stories in fandom had character's as good as Harriet Vane, would the name Mary Sue ever be coined?

I had a lovely time talking with you while discussing the rockers get slashed panel at Escapade. I still think that combining incest and real people slash could be just the ticket that makes Eddie/Alex Van Halen the next big slash fandom - 'Two, two, two taboos in one!"

The closest thing there are to zines in the songtape world are con contest collections. These take any submissions, so the quality is terribly uneven, and aren't always copies as carefully as you would hope (Friscon had a lot of trouble with that-their songtape turned out so bad that some people withdrew their permission to have their stuff show up on the tape). Other than that, you just have collections people have made of their own songvids. I would like to see collection very like zines (some one fandom, some multimedia, some more silly, some accepted by editors with a discerning eye, other full of schlock); the two problems I see are the loss of quality with every generation, and the unwillingness of vidmakers to be edited. It is still virtually unheard - of for a vid maker to redo part of a vid, and without 'zines', there is no incentive for people who don't like to be edited to submit to it.

Some Topics Discussed in "Strange Tongues"

• a long con report for Escapade, focus is two panels: one on Eroica and one on Music RPF and slash
• a response to the statement that women have power as they are in control of domestic households, and nuns have power over their minor charges, that "it's still a command of a limited, usually household, social space"
• liking, and not liking characters, and how that plays out in writing fanfiction
• commentary on Michael Dery's broad use of "slash" in Science Friction, and how this more mainstream, academic use may meddle with fan's purer use of the term; fans are rattled and grumpy by Dery's publications, as well as high-profile...
• comments about the 1992 book Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, a book by Jayne Ann Krentz
• comments about two essays The Development of the Kirk/Spock Relationship: Its Foundation in Fan-Fiction (1978) by April Valentine and Shanon Schildknecht and Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines (1986) by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith
• comments about power balances and men and women
• comments about hurt/comfort
• an Eroica story fragment
• the proliferation of teddy bears in slash stories, and why
• do gay people make better spies
• "Fanac at its best is hard-working play, or it wouldn't be rewarding."
• academia, acafans, and snobbishness
• comments on gender and pronouns in The Crying Game
• remarks on copyright
• comments on slash, for-profit "slash" (m/m romance market)

Excerpts from "Strange Tongues"

I think your underlying question has to do with whether slash as fiction is as valid as other fanfiction, as much based on an intriguing show or well-acted characters, and not merely on the overactive imaginations and libidos of a lot of underemployed women. Not that I want to denigrate imagination and libido if it produces entertainment of any kind! One could argue, and I will if given the chance, that so far as slash is based more on its writers' imaginations and fantasies it is more heartfelt, original and sincerely literary than other fanfic. (I didn't say technically well-crafted; that's something else.) To get back to what I think is my point, fannish slash generally attempts to evoke unique aspects of its parent show and succeeds at times in the same way straight fanfic does at times; can manage to evoke the show's genre or related genres (or the author's choice of genre, occasionally) by use of the show's devices, or by counterpointing them; can develop the show's characters and situations in ways that are humanly plausible (unless you think homosexual behavior is inhuman, of course); can enrich as well as re-define our understanding of the original show. Not always, of course, but then neither does straight fanfic.

Your remarks about student reactions to Mystery Science point out the only real objection there may be to fanfiction or derivative fiction from the artistic perspective of the original producer/writer/creator. Copyright IS mainly about the money to be made from a work, not the work itself; and the foofaraw about sex is based on our society's social hypocrisy on the subject, not the work it appears in. However, derivative versions of anything will necessarily present an altered view of the original, often a devalued or distorted view, and in sufficient quantity can devalue the original as well by subsuming it in the category created by the cruder derivative versions. Given that media fanzines reach only a tiny fraction of the broadcast show's audience (which doesn't seem likely to change even ST fandom, which has vaguely made an impact on the public at large, is seen as jargon-users and costume-wearers, not story-writers, after thirty years of continued activity), I doubt that TV producers of even the most fannish shows have much to worry about. Depending on our resilience, it's the individual fans who face having an enjoyable show or an amusing story (like the teddy-bears in my comments to Nancy earlier this zine) degraded by association with 'way too many silly, badly-done, or just not-on-the-subject new versions.

[...]

I doubt slash is immune to being devalued by a flood of badly-crafted or unfannish stories, wherever they're printed ~ many fans will no doubt consider that this has already happened with the development of an independent "slashdom" rather than single-show-oriented fans. I could fear (and practically predict) that a commercial line of slash-type books would, like the ST novels, be virtually a guarantee of much extremely routine-quality slash at the best, because the commercial bottom line needs it Tuesday, not good. But — don't we get lots of less-than-stellar slash already in fandom? And, there have been some readable Trek pro novels, not coincidentally mostly by fans. Possibly the idea of a fan-run small press getting into the bookstore-slash market early is the best strategy for keeping some amount of the elusive "fannishness" in the genre if and when it outgrows semi-private zines. If slash (surely it would be called something else commercially... which would mark a dividing line right there) is an idea whose marketing time has come, there would be, inevitably, a lot of bad imitations, but this may not be fatal. To draw a comparison: pulp SF developed from visionary antecedents, was known as commercial trash, and in turn evolved into a thriving and respectable, more or less, literary genre. Of course, this took about a century all told. I may be exaggerating the importance of fandom as an ongoing support for slash-style fiction in public, but I doubt I (or anyone) could exaggerate the interest value of emotional/sexual fiction for readers.

The attractions of slash parallel something I've seen (rarely, but seen) in pro fiction. What I'm looking for in slash is available, here and there, in books such as Mary Renault's novels — other APA members have cited other examples that work for them. While the label, so far applies within fandom so that any same-sex story in a zine can be called "slash," I can see it as not exclusive to fandom, but applying also to a subset of pro fiction, though not to the whole of gay or homoerotic fiction. I can hardly require that other readers get the same kick out of slash in the same way from the same examples that I do, but I do base my own definition on its appeal, as much as its circumstances of production. Fandom is merely an environment in which slash is desired and sought (and, surely not incidentally, named), rather than a necessary condition for finding a type of erotic literature produced rarely elsewhere.

I recall saying somewhere before that some slash writers and readers seem to be satisfied as long as a narrative includes the appropriate names, male pronouns, and one or two rigidly cliched descriptive tags for each character: Doyle has curls and a penis, Bodie has crooked eyebrows and a penis, Spock has pointed ears and a penis, Avon has a sneer and a penis, etc., etc. Evidently for many fans, any variation on character is acceptable (and many on appearances — how did Doyle get to be a redhead, for instance?) except turning them into women. That, however, strikes me as much less revolutionary than turning the boys into Edwardian aristocrats or mental defectives. Or both. While one purpose of fandom is to provide Doyle (or Illya, or etc.) enthusiasts with a playground in which to speculate about their favorites with like-minded folk, and stories which delve into Blake, Kirk or even Riker's inner selves can hardly be faulted as "not fannish," I cannot see that delving into the inner self of a chipped tooth and a pair of jade-green eyes as the sum total of character development is a particularly significant addition to either fanlit or to analysis of Doyle's possibilities.

I'm afraid that many fans, judging by what's written, and what wins popularity awards, and even from a few comments made at convention panels, do want to ignore women in fanfic, especially in slash. Trivial or unpleasant female characters are ways of ignoring women, but a well-crafted, interesting female character seems to draw fire as if, indeed, she is evil because she takes attention away from Our Boys. My question is how I seem to be able to find as well a comfortable coterie of right-thinking fans who welcome good female characters, offbeat gender issues in storylines, and so on. Is it because I tend to hang out with lesbian/bi/queer fans? I do favor company that's gay-positive in its social interactions as well as in choice of reading matter. Still, it's not just male characters in a lumpish group that obsess fans, but often a particular single character or pair, and the fans will happily trash any other significant cast members to elevate their particular idol. (Anybody remember the "church of Ford" brouhaha?) The trashees aren't always women — one noted early B7 author apparently considered Gan and Jenna expendable in her Avon-Blake-Cally story, so Gan, even more than Jenna, forthwith became the villain. In later B7, Tarrant has drawn more fire than he really deserves (even though he is more of a lout than Kirk, which doesn't help) mainly because he's not even Blake but he's trying to face down Avon.

Someday some ignorant commenter (if slash keeps on as a trendy academic topic, there will inevitably be more ignorant commentators) will mistake a/u for A/V and evolve a whole misguided theory on that basis. You see, Avon/Vila stories are an alternate universe to the primary B7 where Blake has been eliminated so that Avon can snuggle with this Vila character to provide all the warm fuzzies that B/A clashes can't believably encompass. There will be some argument that a "Vila" never appeared in the original show, but only in the mythical 3rd and 4th seasons, where he was created by fans to be as opposite as possible to Blake... Well, perhaps it's a little extreme...

Possibly some men are teeming hotbeds of uncontrollable lust, but I suspect this would apply to far fewer if it weren't socially acceptable for a man to teem with lust, thus placing the burden of covering up and restraining sexuality on women, and putting any woman at fault if either her own or any man's sexual impulses go astray. Considering that women are expected to teem with lust when (and only when) it's convenient for men, the odds seem a bit stacked. Considering that women among themselves can talk about their genuine lust, which doesn't always match the images conjured by and for men but does exist (slash being a prime example) teeming lust isn't a male monopoly at all.

Upon lengthy and thoughtful consideration, it might be said that the trees ennobled by you and other good Wiseguy writers have been evenly balanced by those wasted on Terranova Situation. You may have to write some more to get ahead again, hmmm? Fortunately, in intangibles, the dullness of TS can be ignored as neutral while good writing remains positive. One supposes that humanity and fandom are equally responsible for ever having taught certain fans to read and write. Indeed, I'm sure we each have a "better illiterate" list.

Your comment that Highlander would be more fun if there could be two (only two?) immortals instead of one breaks through some kind of barrier, though I can't name it. It's an a/u not as fanciful embroidery on the show or apt new background for the characters but as a necessary precondition for slash as early-wave fanwriters would want it. It's expanding the show's premise, instead of the characters, to find slash possibilities. This would drive purists crazy in short order, but surely it's no more radical than the changes (or new readings) fans find to make on other shows after a progression of several changes. Well, I hope we've no purists here...

Eroica artist Aoike has produced a portfolio of paintings of the characters in various situations and poses, apparently without connection to any particular storylines. They're just pictured doing this or that or sitting in a garden, or something. (I'm fond of the one where Klaus sits in a deck chair beside a swimming pool, from which Dorian in full evening tails is emerging, dripping but undampened. Nobody knows how it happened. That I know of.) It's lovely work, appreciable best as Attractions, and hoo-boy, are they Attractive.

You said something about reading some of the older B7 fanfic and enjoying the straight zines. Well, of course fandom did begin with lots of writing about the characters and the show setting that didn't introduce sex at all. While slash was first making its appearance, prim little voices would pipe up constantly pointing out that there's lots to write about besides sex, and they were perfectly correct if only they hadn't been trying to say that therefore we shouldn't write about sex, or any variety of sex. It is also possible to write about some thing other than transporter accidents in ST (although you wouldn't guess it by reading the show's scripts), Servalan's command style in B7, or inter-agency tensions of CI5 and MI6, but somehow the puritans don't seem to feel those topics threaten the balance of fandom. At any rate, there's plenty of human drama in the straight stuff, or in the show itself — if the characters aren't strong enough to find conflict with the universe and solve it, they're probably not strong enough to find conflict or love with each other and solve that. (Obligatory reference to TNG's lack of both to be inserted here. Need I say more?)

The notion of checking how and why fanfic is written by analyzing stories where the author liked one, but not both, characters of a slash couple, bears further thought. Well, maybe. But almost. If the writer loves Avon but Blake is just along because he's Avon's designated love-interest, what does Avon do and what does Blake not do? How much or little is Blake shown outside of necessary scenes with Avon? Or is a stated dislike for Blake to be taken as something other than real dislike, since the author does write stories about Blake anyway? Jane Carnall has said she doesn't care for Doyle, or not as much as for Bodie and Cowley, and she has written four Bodie/Cowley novels to prove it. That's the more convincing evidence to me. Do you think some writers get around this by, if they dislike Kirk, writing a Spock more or less like the one they see on screen, and a character vastly different from Kirk, with only the name and the golden curl to identify him? Could this be the source of some of those cringe-makingly ridiculous characterizations we see in fandom (not just in slash)?

Working from a historically-informed and literal perspective, your information that the Robin Hood legend has no connection with elves or elf lore is no doubt accurate and significant information. In a fannish environment which invests Doyle with elfhood and other characters with assorted witchcraft/vampire/werebeast powers, the Praed bone structure is irresistible (and perfectly obvious) as a candidate for same. Even though I've seen no such stories, I'd be very surprised if there weren't some, somewhere.

On the question of Science Friction and lousy zines, maybe the difference between that and Frisky Business is that FB is a fannishly-produced lousy zine, while SFr comes essentially from outside fandom even if the creators had heard of slash and were consciously imitating it. Either way, it's easy enough to point out that it's a lousy zine (to your — and many other fans' — tastes) and try to ignore it. It's ominous, perhaps, in that it embodies fandom's fear of outsiders messing up our playground, but I haven't heard that it's been successful enough (within the fandom we know) to coax the makers back with more of same. (Really, I haven't heard anything — does anyone have news on this?) Fandom's tastes may evolve with time, but it's still pretty insular.

I've looked up Dangerous Men & Adventurous Women and read it with great interest. The similarity of the writers' motives to those we as slash fans cite for producing slash, is quite striking. Notes about male and female traits being important in both leads in a romance was particularly interesting, although last time I looked it was still absolutely requisite for the hero to have more guts, money, authority and strength than the heroine (at least in combination — some heroines might have more of one but not all), and she generally starts out with more emotional sensibility and probably ends up with more, even if he acquires some along the way. That emotional strength can balance physical or monetary qualities is perhaps a more overt message in modern romance than it has been in the past — and frankly, I'd rather see feminine social traits given their due (they are, after all, as essential to society as digging wells or repelling predators) alongside masculine values instead of seeing a heroine as worthier only if she can shoot, wrestle and manipulate capital "like a man." All of which reminds me of a dichotomy I see in slash, another way of sorting stories, perhaps. Some of the TV character pairs chosen as major slash icons are very much equal partners, and some have an initial rank difference which defines them as leader—and-follower. Slash as a product of equal—buddies camaraderie seems as popular as slash which takes the leader-and-follower difference as more than trivial. (A few pairings, such as Hardcastle/McCormick, are based on a mentor-protege pair with a larger age and power difference, but these don't seem to be a major trend.) Slash stories can emphasize the equity in a partnership or point out the complementary talents that level out captain-lieutenant power differences or king-soldier power differences, in many situations. The Lamb & Veith listing of masculine and feminine traits parceled out to both Kirk and Spock indicates this tendency to balance hierarchical rank between a slash couple — the parallel with the newer style of romance novels should be clear, here. Some writers and stories do like to exaggerate rank and power differences, however, or go to great lengths to create them, in everything from h/c to slave-and-master stories. This, too, is clearly done for the erotic kick as much as anything else. In some stories the gross power differential is resolved; in some it's simply a condition of the partnership — A/V springs to mind. Even then, however, and even in the most reactionary romance-writing, the partners' complementary is an important factor.

As far as contrasting slash and romances goes, I can venture that erotic stories with all-male casts may still have one or two advantages over hetero romances for female readers, specifically because they do not focus primarily (usually not at all) on female/male sex. For female readers, male characters brooding or otherwise carry the eternal mystery of otherness; one can impose more variations on their behavior and responses without losing suspension of disbelief. (Men have certainly been doing this to their idea of women for long enough; some fantasies vice versa seem only fair. If men stuck to fantasy instead of believing all those airbrushed bunnies and so on are real women, we'd have far less to complain about.) Also, to be simplistic about it, the physical basics of male sex are more defined and visible and in popular fantasy are more reliable than getting a woman to believe a female character is aroused and orgasmic. An erection is a pretty obvious indicator and most slash characters have little trouble producing one on the author's demand.

...there is at least one medieval-knights-and-wizards a/u novel for the B7 characters. It's by Sheila Paulson; I get the feeling that she had a free week and a ream of paper and just wrote it for the hell of it. Like JJ, Paulson writes well enough and fast enough to work out odd variations for the sake of doing them, rather than doing them because they're the most important out of ten or a hundred ideas when the author has time to write out only one.

One thing I'd like to hear more about, if any information is available, is the purported use of the Beatles as vehicles for female love affairs. This might be called slash, or serve the same purpose slash does in exciting erotic interest by use of male personas within a female group"; I'll happily admit to role-playing with fictional slash characters, in and out of bed, during part of my fannish career. It's not the only way of inventing material, but it's a lot of fun with a like-minded partner. I can't speak for what other people do in bed, but improvising stories and action sequences "in character" is something I've seen done, participated in, and had other fans describe to me (Henry mentions something of the sort in his zine last distie) numerous times as part of their usual fannish interactions.

Liked the notion that slash lets female readers (and writers... ooh, yes, the writing process... ahem) simultaneously have and be a man during the story. And yet... do we insist on men, necessarily, in either or both of the roles, or do we just take that as a precondition in slash to get the style and emotional interaction that we want? Many slash readers also read some (maybe not all) types of hetero romances as well, or lesbian material. Despite that, I'd guess that some fans do get a thrill out of the specifically male personas, although some of them do have exceedingly odd ideas of male, or human, sexual behavior if so; but I don't think it's an absolute condition for all slash fans, even if it's enjoyable. For once I recall exactly the first conscious flash of a pet theory: The notion that slash characters are fascinating as "shared men" to fandom first occurred to me from a comment overheard in the MWC dealers room, 1983 or 1984, that two fans at a nearby table were "united in lust for Luke Skywalker." So much of the noisier camaraderie of mediafandom makes a certain sense in the analogy to stripper bars — but emotionally as well, of course!

As long as an all-male story can include "feminized" characters (obviously meant by their authors as female paradigms, even if the depiction is of weakness rather than femaleness) and female-oriented themes, surely an all-female-cast story can include male-identified characters and themes. All of which shouldn't keep you from enjoying it. The idea that men and women are intrinsically different and that something identified with one is barred to the other is ridiculous. You've about 98% commonality with a man (frightening, isn't it?), so enjoy whatever you like. I hope you don't see a male slash character who's a victim as ipso facto feminized. Sometimes it seems as if overenthusiastic feminist theorists are arguing in a circle: that women are represented so often as victims that any victim is necessarily a female symbol. This is self-defeating in more ways than one.

Enjoyed the "Ten Reasons to Avoid Reading AUs," although I must point out that the teddy bears (cf. Reason #5) do have sex in at least one story, albeit between the lines. I believe they were watching their counterparts from on top of a wardrobe and became inspired. It was actually a rather funny story, until nineteen others appeared on the same theme and teddy bears of Vila in black leather became a sales-room staple. Perhaps teddy bears serve a deep-seated need in some segment of fandom (as slash does in another, overlapping segment); those overcute stories came flooding out onto the circuit, ill-spelt, ungrammatical, totally without plot devices let alone plots, as though the mere whiff of an idea had opened a long-pent gate of desire in their authors' minds and hearts and had impelled them to writing-like activity (you know, as in "cheese-like filling") regardless of talent or experience. That much output indicates a real interest, revolting as it is to some of us. Just what the real interest is (since it certainly isn't Bodie and Doyle, or even sex), I'm not sure.

Actually, I rather enjoy a/u's, at least in theory, although [ Alexfandra ] does point out the many, many unfortunate possibilities for tedious bypaths. Some of us don't mind elves (when the writer remembers that elves are an immortal, inhuman, wittily sardonic, goddamn dangerous race, or at least vaguely alien to CI5); archaic language (you're talking about the Shakespeare and Congreve I love); and professions other than hired state killers. They only suck because they're so hard to write and more fans are ambitious than have good sense. The opposite combination wouldn't have led to fandom at all, so we may be ahead, on balance. When a familiar media character (or pair) is put into a nice new setting — historical, fantastical, pastorical, music-comical, whatever, and retains significant aspects of his (or their) original, recognizable, why-we-love-them personality, that's a kick. But it's harder, not easier, to maintain Hutch as a vampire or Blake as a successful revolutionary without losing sight of what made him fascinating in the first place. So finding or writing a story that answers the question: "What, other than UNCLE and cold-war prime-time TV, would make Illya like Illya?" or "How would Illya change and how be the same, in a different world?" is no mean feat.

Reading fanfic generally takes more energy than reading profic, I find. Good fanfic, like any really good writing, rewards careful reading; bad fanfic requires careful reading just to see what the author was getting at and why it was good to her. Maybe that's why I'm so enraged by facile, but not bad, writers. When I put in the effort to decode someone's awful syntax, I'd like to know it meant something to her, not that she was just filling paper. In pro fiction the syntax, at least, has hopefully been through an editor, and a proofreader who knows "it's" from "its" may have made a pass at the text. One hopes. And as long as I'm appreciating the finer things in slash as well as the heavy breathing, it's nice to find them occasionally (even without heavy breathing) in cheap, convenient, compact paperback form.

As for chest hair — let's not be silly. One character has to be taller than the other in every show, too. One has to have darker eyes than the other. They have to have different names. For esthetic and commercial purposes, they have to be different enough on screen that the viewer can tell them apart during a mud- covered truck chase and shootout dangling over a cliff, that's all.

M Fae, do write a critique of "The Hunting"! Or of any Doyle-as-elf story you care to select! Or, as an exercise, how would you write a Doyle-as-elf story while not compromising your principles or, to put it another way, without vomiting into the computer?

The essay by Bonds and Schildknecht sounds like something that would delineate the development of things like the slash signifiers in K/S — the brushing away of a lock of hair, Kirk's hazel-gold eyes, and so on. These were evidently so readable later that their presence in Delia van Rise's manuscript (with, apparently, very little overt homoerotic content) was read as slash by fans and caused the dust-up you probably recall. Does the essay go into such details, and would you say (if you remember it) that the original Killing Time was more or less slashy than, say, Price of the Phoenix?

Jane Carnall has expressed her natural distaste for Kirk (an overbearing lout, in her estimation, and I cannot say she is without evidence), by writing Spock/McCoy stories of great verisimilitude and subtlety. Possibly similar feeling for Blake in many fans accounts for the otherwise-inexplicable (:-)) popularity of A/V. Or, to expand on this theme... possibly some fans feel they ought to dislike Kirk's overbearing loutishness, but secretly enjoy it as a fantasy, and so claim they dislike Kirk and then write yet another K/S story and wallow in him. Or are these the fans who write stories where Kirk suffers a lot? Or stories where Kirk is quite, quite unlike himself and less loutish?

Some of your comments on fannish disapproval of menage-a-trois slash, or nonstandard pairings, reminds me yet again how much of fannish perceptions are created by the fans themselves. A show can present the characters so that only two of them appear to be a stereotypical buddy pair (or closer even if the producers don't acknowledge it). It's fans, however, who envision the couple as monogamously wedded life-long, fans who reject and exclude any more subtle pairings or groupings that are readable from what an aired show presents. All those fannish biases are projections (usually of what the individual fan prefers, or of what women as a group are taught is Right and Good, such as monogamy) onto the aired characters, even as the slash reading itself is. It's the fans' biases that produce a horror of Kirk/Sulu slash or threesome arrangements or whatever, when those could be developed from the show's characters by approximately the same process (a little more complex, perhaps) as finds slash in the first place in those shared glances and bouts of loyal camaraderie. Incidentally, what's wrong with getting Doyle and Starsky together? If Vila is seeable as a Delta slut, Doyle is no less seeable as the same, what with the up-from-the-slums background that's hinted at for him. Possibly Tarrant is less universally admired because of his rather stiff I-am-Alpha-you-better-believe-it attitude. (A similar stance hasn't hurt Avon, but Avon's got over being stiff about it.) Puts me in mind of a solidly middle-class, respectable young man who went to Space Fleet Academy and made himself an Alpha grade — but he's still young enough to be a snob about it. Why am I assuming Delta - or working-class - origins translate to sexual availability? (Lots of stories do, of course.) Was that implied, or was "Delta" just an incidental description of Vila, whose personality you see as free with his favors? (I don't actually share this perception, but then I don't think Avon is a god, either.)

I intuitively agree that slash appeals more to feminists than "traditional" women, no matter that some slash does its best to re-institute sex roles. The concept of slash evades sex roles and makes it unnecessary to belittle women by showing them in stereotypical helpless-female roles. (This is one reason the hostility in those few stories that are actively misogynistic is so jarring.) In terms of presenting a fantasy universe that would look feminist to non-fans, slash may look retrogressive; in terms of a fantasy for fans who already assume that women as a class can be belittled only as a mistaken premise, the absence of stereotyped women is more a relief than a drawback. Non-stereotyped women, aside from being difficult to create and more difficult to create out of TV templates, are not needed to make a slash story's point. It's not slash erotica that needs female characters, but just about every other type of fan fiction, not excluding explicit hetero fiction, as either erotica or character development (or both). In stories where the two leads need not be the same gender to define and carry out the intended storyline, by all means, I should like to see more women as important and believable characters. From there, I suspect they'll look more sexy more often as well.

Some Topics Discussed in "Darkling Zine Fanotome"

• very short with little fandom content, handwritten
• contains clippings in French about a new series called "Les Trois As"

Some Topics Discussed in "Ghost Speaker"

• slash possibilities in Shakespeare
• George Cowley would never allow openly gay people to remain in his employ
• George Cowley is gay; this fan reprints a short essay on this topic that she included in Be Gentle With Us #4 in 1991, see Is Cowley gay?
• comments on Mary Sues
• is Harriet Vane (Lady Peter Wimsey) a Mary Sue
• zines and profit

Excerpts from "Ghost Speaker"

Editors do put effort into producing a zine, and run all the financial risks; obviously an editor is entitled to make sure she gets all her costs back (including usage of her computer, her printer, and additional letters and phone calls), and — within reason - to make enough of a profit to have seed money for the next zine. All I said was that I didn't think it was fair for an editor to make enough money to get to a convention on the profits of her zines; that does strike me as profiteering off the writers. If an editor is going to treat producing a zine as a commercial proposition, she should pay the writers a royalty on the sales. The Japanese system sounds good, circle production of a zine, except that this does require having enough local slash fans to make it work, (4-M Press, the only example I can think of this, produced a perfectly dreadful series of zines, and still hold the record as the worst treatment I ever had from a fanzine editor; I was never told they'd accepted my story, though I sent two letters and a postcard Squiring what had happened, and I got a contributor's copy out of the second printrun — the first I heard that my story had actually been accepted was when I got a letter from a friend in the US telling me that my story had been the best in the zine. And unfortunately, when I got the zine, I agreed.)

[...]

... when I get a contributor's copy, I'd rather have a good zine than a drecky one; well put together, good selection of well-written & well-edited stories... Put all that in the balance against the merely intellectual repulsion at the thought of someone getting to go to a con which I can't afford to go to, on the back of a story I wrote, and well, it does tip the balance.

A Mary Sue story is one where the writer wanted to be in the story with her characters, and wrote herself in. The first Star Trek story I wrote (fortunately it remains unfinished) was a Mary Sue, and I well remember the pure, sweet, cold, and ultimately rather sticky feeling of being inside the story as I wrote it. (My "Mary Sue" happened to be an artificially-created alien being, with reversed eyes, white on black, multi-coloured hair, and two bone-white horns... and his name was Matheas.) Actually, [H's] description of impending orgasm sounds rather like what it felt to write a Mary Sue. Still feels like; though I haven't committed one to paper since. A writer who is inside the story as she creates it cannot do full justice to the story - like playing Monopoly with yourself. The story when it is finished will be rather like a burst paper bag — the character who is the writer will have stretched it beyond its capacity. A writer may use her own experiences in writing a story, or created a character. So long as she builds in only her experience, and not her ego, she has not created a Mary Sue. Therefore Harriet Vane is not a Mary Sue.

My personal definition is that slash is when you take two people of the same sex out of somebody else's universe and write exciting stories about them, and somebody else's slash may not fit this definition at all but be slash nevertheless.

If two men are attracted to each other, then they are bisexual or gay. They may not want to accept that label, but a writer who cannot deal with her characters' sexuality has a similar problem to that of men writers who cannot create believable women characters - they put politics ahead of the story, and the story fails.

Gee, where did you think I got the phrase "weak, helpless, rescuable males" from, if not Joanna Russ? It was that essay in MMTSPP that made me look at that strand in my fiction. She's my hero. I love her, I've even written a fairy tale about her.

Is canonical fiction more interesting than uncanonical because the writers have to be able to follow complex rules in constructing the story (and hence are better writers), or because the characters are more likely to be in character according to the aired series, and therefore we find them more Interesting? Good question. Probably both. Writers who can do good canonical fiction are probably better writers because they can write using the complexities that taking the aired series for granted creates. Making changes to the aired series, whether minor (change the course of an episode; Ann Holly and Doyle marry) or major (in an alternative universe, Cowley is the captain and Bodie is a sergeant in the palace guard), creates a characterisation problem. Either you make changes in the characters to fit them into the universe, or else you warp the universe to fit the characters from the aired series into it. In the first case, you get the kind of story where you have people called by familiar names who simply are not those people. In the second, you often get a good romp through Shakespeare or Georgette Heyer or wherever, but with the uncomfortable feeling that this is really most unlikely. In fact (though this is not really where I intended the argument to go) you have to be a superlatively good writer to write an A/U well. Most writers of A/Us, I think, have not really thought through what Bodie and Doyle (it is, from what I've read, usually Bodie and Doyle, when it isn't Kirk and Spock) are doing in this alternative universe; they only want to see these people in this universe because it would be fun. And since I'm in the middle of writing two Profs/B7 crossovers for that very reason, I can't really argue with it. (Not to mention the Profs/SW crossover in Homosapien Foreplay ... well, I said I wouldn't mention it.) To retrieve my argument; many stories are uncanonical not because the writer deliberately chose to make changes because she wanted to explore the effects of these changes on her characters, but because of sloppy research or sloppier thinking. (To paraphrase someone at WriteShop; "for Bodie to read Samuel Beckett is not as I conceive Bodie, therefore Bodie hasn't read Samuel Beckett and the moment when he appears to refer to the author in an aired episode is therefore a mistake".)

Some Topics Discussed in "Weirdness on a Swan's Song"

• erotic fanfic starring Wesley Crusher
• being embarrassed about slash in front of a gay man
• tenderness and fluffy slash

Excerpts from "Weirdness on a Swan's Song"

I was having a conversation [at the national British science fiction convention] with a couple of authors of my acquaintance - one well-known and one as yet unpublished (professionally). The latter, a good friend of mine, had given me a copy of her latest slash story earlier in the day... it was a wonderful piece of fluff. I had just joined them and muttered very softly to my friend 'loved the story'. I had forgotten that our companion - though about a foot taller than us - missed nothing. Before we knew what we were doing or how we had done it we had revealed to this man that we wrote slash. I was a little embarrassed, he is a hero of mine, I love his books... he's a lovely person... and he's gay. I just hoped he wouldn't take offence. My friend was mortified, she is trying to establish herself as a serious author and currently has a novel under consideration by a publishers... she felt her credibility was completely blown.

We should have had more confidence. He was fascinated and wanted to know more about what we wrote and why we wrote it. Apparently he'd been a guest of honour at a media con once and was asked to read a large amount of K/S. He told us that a lot of the writing was first class, and most of the writers (mainly women - surprise, surprise.) had the mechanics of the relationships accurate... he did say there were one or two cases where it was obvious that the writers just hadn't a clue what two men could do together in bed. However, his quibble was that the stories were too romantic. "Men just don't behave that sweetly," he told us, "Oh yes, they do form long term relationships but they aren't ever soppy like in these stories."

Well, we chatted on for a while about why we wrote what we wrote then the conversation moved on. We went to eat and came back and joined another group. Our writer friend no longer with us - which was a shame, because we were about to prove him wrong. The group we had joined was lazing about in the middle of the floor of the main sitting area in the hotel. It included my friend's boyfriend's brother, a sweet guy, and his new boyfriend. Well, we couldn't help grinning at each other... these two were so cute. They cuddled and frolicked and nuzzled... any diabetics present would have been in severe danger! It totally contradicted what our erstwhile companion had been saying.

I admit that I write sweet and soppy romantic slash stories. It's what I like to write. ..and read. Definitely the comfort side of hurt/comfort. I've discovered that among my friends the most likely reaction - on first reading one of my stories is 'awww.' But most of my characters would be macho brutes compared with these two cuties. They announced that they were on their honeymoon and spent the rest of the weekend enchanting con-goers and hotel staff alike. 1 wouldn't dare write them into a story though, everyone would tell me it was too over the top!

A while ago a friend asked me to find out something for her. I'm hoping that some of you will be able to help. She was talking to some people she had met who were fascinated that She not only knew about slash but that she actually knew people who wrote it. I gather that this meeting was at some fairly serious SF meeting. Anyway they were fascinated by slash in general but especially by something known as 'Wesley porn'! She promised to find out more for them, even get hold of some for them if she could... then she asked me. I can't seem to find out anything about it. I know that there are Wesley stories about but haven't seen any of them. For the life of me I can't think what the attraction is... unless the little dear gets horribly tortured. Can any of you help? Information or stories would be helpful... however, I'm not sure if these people are seriously interested or merely curious so don't send screeds.

Some Topics Discussed in "Yamibutoh"

• comments on the Japanese movie "Nemurenai Machi; Shinjuku Zame"
• women's roles and hard work in the past
• comments on romantic sadism and movies by Valentino

Excerpts from "Yamibutoh"

Your comments on Mystery Science and the attitude it takes spilling over into the classroom reminds me of anime fanclub video watching. There are lots of silly shows out there that those of us who understand a lot of Japanese love to pick apart and joke about while watching. A lot of the newer fans got into the habit of this and then couldn't watch the serious shows seriously. They, too, missed a lot that way. I think a video with commentary might be amusing once, but it would get very irritating quickly. Some of the fun of slashing TV series has got to be seeing the potential in the characters oneself. Someone making cracks every time Avon touches Blake would get old fast, I think.

The characters denying they are gay or even bi can make perfect sense in a story. Denial is a perfectly human trait and can help an author get around the problem of putting pretty homophobic men in bed together. However, when the author denies the character is gay or bi you got a real problem.

Labeling MarySue by irritation factor is actually reasonable. After all, what people hated about MS and why it got such a bad rep was because of how incredibly irritating and poorly written and plotted most of the stuff was.

Some Topics Discussed in "Mardi Gras Favors"

• working on secret and confidential work for Exxon on new projects in Russia, comments on engineering and geology databases
• comments on religion, kindness, and hypocrisy
• comments about some song vids

Excerpts from "Mardi Gras Favors"

I'm beginning to like "Babylon 5." The aliens look different. They have actually thought to include different airlocked levels which have various kinds/pressures of atmospheres for visitors that find Earth like gravity/atmosphere of the station too heavy/toxic. It's improving since it's debut in January. D.C. Fontana wrote last week's show "War Prayer" and as Harlan Ellison is the Creative Consultant perhaps he will also. Having actual science fiction writers write a lot of scripts the first season on "Star Trek" was one of the main reasons it was good.

RevelCon 5 is over again. Sigh. Kandy Fong was selling tapes of "Bullshitters" which she said were very sharp and clear. I bought one and could very clearly enjoy Bonehead and Foyle's assets when they were running around London in bikini briefs and leather jackets. I also bought several of her song tapes: especially liked [ Megan Kent's ] S/H video "Don't Use Your Penis for a Brain" and Beth Cambre's S/H "Dust in the Wind" plus Kandy's own S/H video "Losing My Religion." I've seen that song in 3 fandoms so far: Sandbaggers, S&H and B7. It could easily fit Pros, WG; hmm how about Uncle? I first saw "Nobody's on Nobody's Side" which is a song from the musical "Chess" used in a video by Jeanne DeVore for Willie of the Sandbaggers.

Some Topics Discussed in "Lunatic Fringe"

• this fan wants some input about publishing a zine of her stories in Manacles Press, of stories that don't really fit the press' criteria: too weird, to female-oriented, not realistic... there is some descriptions of the stories that are candidates
• comments on a review by M. Fae Glasgow of The Terranova Situation
• this fan owns a tape full of Trek songvids, one of which is a Spock-Kirk-McCoy vid to Kenny Rogers' Through the Years, "is definitely about the three of them, and is absolutely beautiful."
• a Pros story: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, by Dawn Woods is included with this comment: "I thought I'd ask the SBF for comments on this. "Throw this away" will be politely ignored; nothing hurts the Circuit after DAMEON , I reckon. But if someone sends me great feedback I'll very likely use it...."

Excerpts from "Lunatic Fringe"

Dear, you have more chutzpa than I do, and in spirit I agreed with your flame of Terranova Situation. I wanted very, very much to like the epic, but it kept getting farther and farther from anything that resembled the Wiseguy characters I knew. It made these strong, tough and terribly complex characters seem like cardboard cutouts, washed-out comic-book versions of the real, cool guys. I was incredibly frustrated with it, as you know.

Some Topics Discussed in "When Correctly Viewed"

• comments about several books and essays: Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology (first published by UMI Research Press in 1988 and reprinted by Icon Editions in 1991). This is from "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Consciousness," by Lise Vogel (p. 48), "The Erotic Male Nude," by Sarah Kent, in a book of essays by various people entitled Women's Images of Men (London & New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1985)
• comments about "Playgirl," "Playboy," the male gaze, the female gaze, power, threats
• why are slashed shows almost always SF or action-adventure ones, not sitcoms, etc.
• cross-dressing, Japan, the book "Vested Interests," the Takarazuka company
• men and women's pornography and body odors and cleanliness
• comments about the Japanese actor, Shoken
• Blake's 7 Avatars, Blake's 7 AUs

Excerpts from "When Correctly Viewed"

Thanks for the Internet tips. One of these days I'll figure out how it all works and get on.

I have a vivid memory from a quarter-century ago of a scene in I Spy in which one of the guys was racked by the villains, and his partner came and rescued him, and there was a very tender moment between them. How come there's no I Spy slash that I've ever seen? The age of the show? Racism? Bill Cosby's later squeaky-clean image?

B7 AUs, one of my correspondents pointed out that while there aren't many of them in fan fiction (though I can think of maybe 2 or 3), probably for the reasons you suggest, there are a good many examples of B7 characters in other settings to be found in professionally published novels — things like P.N. Elrod's Art In the Blood, Lois McMaster Bujold's Brothers In Arms, Barbara Paul's You Have the Right to Remain Silent, etc. Are these the real B7 AUs?

The closest that a TV show ever came to what I'd really like to see was in the interaction between Avon and Servalan in the third and especially the fourth season of B7, which I interpret as a symbolic representation of a heterosexual SM relationship with the woman on top. Servalan is hot stuff, all right (several otherwise heterosexual women of my acquaintance have remarked that if Jackie Pearce wanted to seduce them, she could); but what the camera is really telling you (or at least me) is how beautiful and desirable Avon is, how very probable it is that something Really Awful is going to happen to him, and how pleased she will be when it does. Delicious.

When I first started reading B7 fan fiction I was hoping to find some luridly explicit explorations of what I perceived as the main erotic subtext of the show, but there isn't nearly as much as I would have expected. The producers and consumers of B7 smut are far more interested in slash, and while I have no objection to that (far from it; snicker), it strikes me as being only the second most perverse possibility suggested by that particular show.

I keep trying to explain to fannish friends what exactly it is that I want from an h/c story, but I'm not sure if I've ever succeeded. I like it hard, and I like the hurt better than the comfort, but I want it to be very wallowy hurt, with lots of going on about how beautiful and piteous the victim is and how evil the villain who is doing these terrible things to him. (Consensual SM is substantially less interesting to me, probably because it has less potential for wallow. Not that that stops me from reading it and even trying to write it.) I want plenty of visual description so that I can see what is happening very clearly in my head. (To this day I'm still stewing about how, exactly, the sacrifice was chained to the altar in that Susan Matthews story. And did the yellow silk altar hangings have grommets for the chains to go through, or were they just sort of draped? These details weren't made altogether clear in the story.)

Ooh, you brought up the old "are the guys gay just because they have sex with each other" question. It's a dangerous thing to talk about, since it touches on a sensitive aspect of people's own personal lives; and yet I think it's an essential problem in a consideration of slash. So I'll take the opportunity to sound off here, though much of what follows is only tangentially related to your comments, for which I crave your indulgence. I appreciate the point made by both [J] and [S], that there is a distinction between a character (e.g. Bodie) thinking that he's not gay if he gets it on with his partner, and the author thinking that. Still, why do so many authors think that, or at least imply it? What is the appeal of the idea? Homophobia is one possibility, but I don't think it is the only answer by long shot. I tend to agree with your idea that the "we're not really gay" claim, ridiculous as it seems on the surface, is appealing because it raises the romantic stakes; it's just an amplification of the idea that "you are the only one for me." Two other possible reasons why the idea crops up so often may be:

A) The guys we saw on screen didn't look gay; they radiated the kind of vibes that heterosexual women pick up on. I'm convinced that most people, whatever their orientation, are in fact able to spot potential sexual partners with a fair degree of accuracy, though we all make embarrassing mistakes sometimes. Whether or not the actors were heterosexuals in their private lives, they were doing a good job of acting it, and that has to be accounted for somehow in a story.

B) Most women are turned off by the promiscuous lifestyle that is very strongly associated with present-day male homosexuality. (And I'm afraid that anyone who thinks the idea that promiscuity is an intrinsic part of gayness is homophobic is going to have to classify an awful lot of outspoken gay men, such as Chip Delany for example, as homophobes. That seems counter-intuitive.) In fact, in some cases the very reason for postulating a slash relationship may be that the female writer is repelled by the heterosexual promiscuity of the characters as seen on screen and wants to explain it away. The danger then is that the story may slip into misogyny ("Women are OK for casual sex, but you, my darling, are the only man for me"), but that's a separate problem. The basic issue here, it seems to me, is how important the labels are. Is sex something people are, or just something they do? I incline to the latter opinion myself. If I think about it in personal terms, then the idea that gays or bisexuals are fundamentally different means that if I were to go to bed with a woman (an event that is unlikely but by no means impossible), then I would suddenly become a different kind of person, or perhaps would realize that I had always been a different kind of person all along. I don't agree; I think I'd still be basically the same. In theory at least, a new sexual experience wouldn't be all that different from travelling to a new country or trying a new kind of food. Was I a different person after I'd been to Japan? Or after the first time I slept with a man? I don't think so.

Yes, I've noticed some surprisingly raunchy things in gen zines (most recently a story in Rebel Destinies in which Avon and Servalan get off on torturing each other, with fairly explicit descriptions of bodily reactions). The contrast between the inclusion of those stories, and the exclusion from gen zines of even very inexplicit slash stories, is ironic.

I have recently been turned on to Miami Vice by a friend who thought I would like Don Johnson's expressions of suffering. The other night, watching some old tapes of the first season, I made a startling discovery: Roger of Wiseguy fame started out as a character in a MV episode!! I suppose WG fans know this already, but I didn't. At first I thought I had stuck the wrong tape into the VCR. It was definitely the same character, actor and all, even though in the MV episode he was called Evan instead of Roger and was an undercover cop instead of a CIA agent. There were some very intense and suggestive scenes between him and Sonny in which they clutched each other and cried over their former buddy, who had more or less committed suicide several years before because they had rejected him when they found out he was gay. I was particularly struck by the line, "Make me happy, Sonny." Now what was that supposed to mean? Some of that stuff carried over into WG, too. You (or was it someone else? Now I can't find the reference) mentioned the episode where they go to Tennessee or some such place, which opens with the kid getting raped in prison and also includes such interesting bits as a scene of Roger naked (well, all right, there's a towel, but one can easily remove it mentally) and Roger and Vinnie teasing each other about homophobia when they unexpectedly find out that they have to share a bedroom. I'm now convinced that those odd little hints were a carryover from the MV episode, in which they made a bit more sense; there the implication seemed to be that Evan/Roger might have been so nasty to the dead buddy precisely because he was secretly attracted to him. What do you think?

On the legality of using a media character in a professionally published book, I've been asking around about this and it seems that as long as you change the name, you can probably get away with claiming that any resemblance is coincidental. At least half a dozen writers so far have got Avon in their books under another name, and I know of one deep-cover Illya, although in that case the writer really tried to disguise him.

The Delany interview was very interesting. But to judge by what's presented as a turn-on in his books, I think he would probably consider even M. FAE's kinkiest offerings to be too "antiseptic" for his tastes. The man likes literal, physical dirtiness — grubby boys with gnawed fingernails. A fair number of gay men seem to share that taste, at least in fiction (to judge by all the stuff about locker-room smells, etc.); but all the women I know are totally grossed out by physically dirty men, either in fiction or in real life. (In fact, one of my pet peeves about the other sex is that they are more willing to clean themselves up and make an effort to look attractive for each other than for us. Hmmph.) I have never, ever seen a slash story in which an unwashed body was presented as attractive because of the dirt. (I'm not talking about romantic scenes in which someone shows that he loves his partner no matter what condition he's in at the moment: "X was disgustingly filthy but Y kissed him anyway because he was so glad that X was still alive"— that kind of thing.)

Why are the slashed shows almost always either SF or action-adventure? No sitcoms, etc.? There is of course the historical factor— the fact that organized media fandom, including slash fandom, was originally derived from science fiction fandom and therefore could only have come from a science fiction show— but is there also something inherent to those kinds of shows that is important?

Actually, something you said a couple of pages later may be a partial answer; the very interesting idea about the archetypes of king and soldier being reflected in many slash pairings. (So is Vila a prince of thieves?) I have thought for some time that the heroic quality is a big part of what makes slash, slash. The idea that both of the lovers are fabulously worthy individuals is one of the main things that makes slash so hot, at least for me; and since the writers, the readers, and the media products they are drawing on all come out of a culture that devalues women, it's hard to get the same impact when one or both parties are female. I hope that your suggestion that things are changing will prove to be true. This may explain why some stories of heterosexual pairings do have a kind of slash-like aura to them. I'm thinking particularly of stories involving Avon and Servalan; extraordinary villainousness is, after all, a kind of twisted heroism. She's the Evil Empress of the Galaxy, and you can't get much more large-scale than that. Maybe that was what people had in mind when they were calling her androgynous? I myself think of her as intensely female, but it's true that intensity of any kind is a quality not often allowed to women by television producers.

I was quite struck by what you said after comparing your experiences to those of people who had done somewhat similar things voluntarily, as part of a consensual SM scene, to the effect that it is not the activity itself that matters so much as the attitudes toward it. I had come to the same conclusion some time ago, approaching it from the opposite direction, as it were. When I first discovered sex I was very uninhibited precisely because I was so naive. All I knew came from my father's collection of antique pornography, so that although I had a pretty good idea of all the things that human bodies can do, I had no idea what my peers considered acceptable or "dirty." I did it all. Then it dawned on me that certain men wanted certain activities not so much because they enjoyed them, as because they thought I didn't, and liked the idea that they were coercing me into something. I am not going to cater to that kind of meanness! So I became much more "inhibited" in what I was willing to do, not because I disliked those activities but solely because I was suspicious of the other party's motives in demanding them.

Some Topics Discussed in "For the World is Hollow and I Fell Off the Edge"

• some ideas for a Forever Knight story that features an alternate version of Nick's origins
• comments about two Forever Knight zines: Dreaming of the Knight and Forever Net
• comments about the differences in the shared canon of Forever Knight fans online as opposed to other fans
• comments on her own Pros novel, Never Let Me Down
• comparing relationships in The Sandbaggers and Blake's 7
• the terrible quality of "internet fiction"
• comments about Jadzia Dax, slash, and gender

Excerpts from "For the World is Hollow and I Fell Off the Edge"

Are slashable shows more likely to generate non-slash fanfic as well? I have only one response to that, and it is: Professionals. Yes, there is straight Pros, but damned little. I haven't seen much, if any, non-slash Wiseguy, either, but that may be because I'm only looking for Wiseguy in slash circles. Still, I don't think an argument can be made that slash normally shows up in shows that have non-slash followings as well.

Internet fiction: I'm not sure why, but the net fiction I've seen has been generally pretty bad, and that it is bad doesn't surprise me. I expect it has to do with it being so easy to put things on the net that they go out before they're really polished and thought through, and also with the generally male culture of the nets, as Henry was saying, as compared to the generally female culture of media fandom, which would lead the nets toward producing fiction that wouldn't be to our general taste. On the other hand, the Forever Nets were better than I had expected, although they are certainly selected from a much larger mass of FK netfic. The other FK netfic I've seen (a QL cross and two Highlander crosses) were choppy, unspellchecked — and there is no excuse for that—and underdeveloped. I didn't keep copies, so don't ask...

Their ineffectual, inconsistent, and flinching handling of the questions that a host-symbiont character raises is one of the things that annoys me about DS9, and I remain convinced that print sf will always be better sf than tv sf, simply because it has the opportunity and the brains to really get into these questions. The question of queer sex may be, to quote you, "a question which the character of Dax invites us to consider, but it is a question which the show makes every effort to muffle.

I’m not sure if I’ve heard the phrase “peripatetic slash fan” before, and while it’s quite evocative, I rather prefer “slash fan” myself, a fan of slash-qua-siash. That describes us not as moving rootlessly around from fandom to fandom, but as being as rooted as anyone, in a fandom defined a little differently from others: not by a show or an actor, but by a type of character interaction. I too prefer slash to straight, at least in part because I find slash less likely to be anti-female or sexist or stupid about women than straight stories. And it’s easier for me to swallow silliness when it’s not directly about me. (I am happier with outrageously good sex between men than I am with Jenna's first (heterosexual) sex in the Hellhound story “I Was So Young,” for instance.) Talking about being a fan of slash-qua-slash problematizes terms like “fan sluts,” too, of course; but I’m happy being a slut of almost any description, so I don’t worry about it. I went from being more the type of fan you’re describing yourself as, to being more a fan of slash-qua-slash; but it goes the other way, too. I began reading MUNCLE slash, and was totally uninterested in non-slash MUNCLE; but then Kath handed me the two MUNCLE novels I mentioned last time, and the interest in the characters and situations that I had developed through slash translated over into non-slash reading. And of course nobody is entirely anything; do I really need to specify that?

It doesn’t surprise me that Tashery can’t write A/B but can do A/B songtapes. (And how! Yum. I love her work.) When you’re writing, you have to get into your characters’ heads, and if you find that an unpleasant place to be, it’s no fun. Doing a songtape, I would imagine, is much less emotional projection, and much more technical fiddling. (I am trying to restart the TNU discussion over whether authors “insert themselves into” their characters in order to write. But it does seem to me that in order to write a guy well, you’ve got to know him well; and in order to write about how he lusts for somebody, you’ve got to have an idea what it would be like to lust for that somebody. This isn’t “putting yourself in” the character, but it can be distasteful if you don’t like knowing him, or have a hard time imagining anyone lusting for him.)

Some Topics Discussed in "By This Time, My Lungs Were Aching for Air"

• rewatching [[Man from U.N.C.L.E., opinions on episodes and slashiness
• Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries

Excerpts from "By This Time, My Lungs Were Aching for Air"

I've only read two fanzines and I have some questions. What is it with marrying [Illya and Napoleon]? I realize I haven't seen all the episodes, but is there something in particular in this series that makes all fan writers incorporate a marriage ceremony or what? And why is there anti-Nap sentiment? The fan fic I read was pretty fair, but a couple of people on the slash list have mentioned Nap-bashing and I'm perplexed. He's a nice guy. Sure, he flirts with a lot of women, but at least he knows their names and something about them -they aren't anonymous receptacles- and he's smart, has a good sense of humor, and is good at his job. For a 60s spy, he's practically egalitarian. And in the b&W eps at least, he's prettier than Illya, almost Darrovian in aspect but with a better profile. So what's the problem? To expand this to slash as a whole, why does bashing occur at all? It doesn't make sense. Illya is the sex kitten, yes, but he's no fun without Nap. One partner on his own just doesn't work. Another thing watching the eps made me think about is the imminent demise of slash. A few months ago, people on the slash list were theorizing about whether slash could survive when there aren't many slashable series being made anymore. That is, people were arguing that series now aren't as slashable as series of the 60s and 70s, because those who make series are too aware of potential homoerotic interpretations in certain kinds of scenes and work to prevent them occurring on screen. I don't know. I think the awareness is there, although sometimes it's expressed in jokes rather than an absence of the kind of scenes that were routine on earlier series. I also think that series now are more ready to deal with emotions more realistically and that lessens the need for slash and other fan fic that tries to tease out emotional dimensions. For example, there's an Affair in which Illya is (incredibly quickly) programmed to kill Napoleon, and he tries. Napoleon disarms him, Illya snaps out of it, and that's it. No recriminations, no guilt, no aftermath at all. How flat. I can just see this happening after Gauda Prime. On the other hand, there are always emotional gaps to fill—B7 might get into the depths more than U.N.C.L.E, but B7 still has huge amounts of fan fic.

My thesis is done. D.O.N.E. I never want to think about computer-mediated communication's influence on fandom again Therefore, I have volunteered for the Media West panel on Computers and Fandom

Some Topics Discussed in "To Be Announced (T H)"

• comments on the Olympic Skating events and competition
• comments about watching the series The Champions
• the different actors who portrayed Robin in Robin of Sherwood
• some fans' preference for [[fade-to-black sex scenes in fiction, having to defend one's interest in reading explicit sex
• access to computers as rare and privileged, paper is for everyone
• women in slash stories about men
• Jane Carnall's story, As Games are Played
• physical vs emotional hurt/comfort
• essay: "Ireland: A Very Brief History" by David B., partner to this tribber

Excerpts from "To Be Announced (T H)"

Up to about a year ago I hated just about all straight media stories. Most straight Star Trek stuff I'd happily do without, it seemed to be very uninspired and the characters were not recognisable, to me anyway. But, in the last year I have found that B7 straight stuff can get me as involved as slash. I enjoy the 'exploring the relationship' stories whether they end up in bed or not. B7 and ST are popular with both straight and slash but there does seem to be a list of shows on either side that are popular with straight or slash but not both. ST:TNG seems to have spawned a lot of straight stories but very little slash (my friend is desperate for some good slash (she is a Picard fan) but just cannot find any, apart from MFae’s stories that is). Is ST:TNG the exception or the rule? As I don't read or see that much straight stuff I cannot even guess as to there being a correlation between straight popularity and slash potential.

Changes in actors: Praed vs Connery - the changeover here was done very well, there was actually a story and 2 distinct Robin characters (one dying the other replacing him). The 'actor changes' I have difficulty with are when one actor replaces another and nobody notices. I enjoyed both versions of Robin, I still watch both and funnily enough, to my mind anyway, the Connery episodes have aged better then the Praed ones. The various Doctors also come under this heading - they are all separate distinct personalities. Yes, sometimes the 'replacement' does not work as well as the first but I quite enjoy the shifting of relationships/personalities that occurs, watching them sort themselves out can be quite illuminating.

A girl I spoke to recently (during a conversation on slash/violence/movies/ Reservoir Dogs (you can all follow the conversation can't you)) who admits to being slash fan and sees slash relationships all over the place said that she didn't like explicit sex scenes - after some discussion she only likes the non existent sex scenes I hate that sort of cop out - yes if it fits in with the story but when it leaves gaping wide gaps I feel cheated, anyway when I stated that I rather liked the sex scenes, yes even the explicit ones and the PWP stories I could see her draw back into her chair with a huge thought bubble above her head saying (You LIKE that icky stuff!). I was happy with her stated preferences okay she does not like 'icky' stuff, so what, that is her choice, but she didn't want to give me the same freedom. For the rest of the conversation (which didn't last long) I felt that I was defending my liking for sex scenes as if I was defending myself from a charge of gross indecency or something. I don't expect everyone to like the same things I do - or dislike the same things for that matter, but it would be nice if they at least acknowledged the same. Talking with people of different viewpoints can give insights into both views that you had missed, conversations about the differences and similarities may allow both of you to modify or harden your view but having to defend your views from someone who gives no thought that you may have a valid view gets you both nowhere.

reyrct on Computer Nets and Fandom - my only comment is I WANT ACCESS TO THE NETS BUT MY BANK MANAGER WON'T LET ME sob sob!!! Even Morgan has found her way to your computer (she has access through UEA). One of these days. The is the only quibble I have with Computer Nets and Fandom, at least paper is accessible to all, once you have found the right addresses for your particular fandom, finding the right address on the nets is probably easier but you need access to the hardware/software in the first place.

Kerrill was such a great character in Last Stand, she was so integral to the plot and characters of Villa and Avon, how can people like the story but resent her? Some fans seem to believe that there is absolutely no place for women in a slash story. I really enjoyed the relationships between the three, I just wish that the 'slash' element had made it into the zine instead of being hived off into various Southern Comforts (or was it Lights?)

Jane sent me copies of some of her stories. I read As Games Are Played in one sitting, while I was supposed to be sleeping - that in itself should tell you all what I thought of the story. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The last few pages just about had me in tears. I felt so sad for Bodie, Cowley had all this support but Bodie had no-one, everyone was against him. Everyone in the story seemed to miss the fact that it takes two to have an affair, except maybe Miss Walsh. I love stories that can get to me that well. I am exceedingly good at bottling all my emotions up, I grew up feeling embarrassed about showing emotion, any emotion so a story that can get me crying has to be good.

Does 'Hurt' stand for physical hurt? - possibly but not always. I suppose it depends on how good the writer is. I guess some writers find emotional hurt easier to write in such a way as to engender a response in the reader and some find physical hurt easier. In either case it is still hurt. To my mind the object of this hurt is to engender a response in the partner (sexual or otherwise) that the author wants to explore, be it a caring response or something indifferent. It is the responses to being hurt/seeing or causing hurt in your partner that is the core of h/c - to me anyway.

Some Topics Discussed in "De Nada"

• VERY extensive comments about "politically correct" language and labels for things and people
• only a very brief mention of fandom

Some Topics Discussed in "Women of Houston in Pornography"

• the essay, Homosexuality has as much to do with Slash as Civil War history did with Gone With the Wind.
• reprinted articles: "Suit Depicts Fight on M.I.T. Faculty" by Fox Butterfield, "Special to the New York Times" and "Protecting Campuses from 'Vexatious' Speech" by Nat Hentoff, "The Washington Post"

Excerpts from "Women of Houston in Pornography"

[excerpt from: Homosexuality has as much to do with Slash as Civil War history did with Gone With the Wind]. Burning Atlanta gave Scarlet something to deal with and homosexuality has given Bodie and Doyle something to deal with -- sodomy. But GWTW wasn't about the causes of the Civil War, the plantation economy, battle strategy and slavery, just as slash isn't about gay rights, creating positive gay identities for Bodie and Doyle, or exploring the gay male sex scene. Two heterosexual males becoming involved in a sexual relationship is my standard definition of slash. Why specifically 'heterosexual' males? Because I view slash as a product of female sexuality, and I'll be frank here [...] slash is an intricate part of MY sexuality and a sexual outlet. Bodie and Doyle are both men, so homosexual is technically accurate, but hardcore porn is technically heterosexual but I don't see my sexuality in that, either. What I want as a woman, how I view sex and intimacy is not reflected in male homosexuality. My attraction to a fandom starts with the televised character. If I am attracted physically to at least one guy and the character lends itself to being slash (this isn't a given with me), then I'm hooked. I am not physically attracted to homosexual men. Portraying Bodie and Doyle in a 'realistic' gay milieu is taking them from the realm of my sexuality.

I do want to disagree with your assertion that slash is about men rather than women. I mean, I realize Bodie and Doyle are men, I try to write them AS men, but the issues I write about concern me as a woman. While it would be impossible for me to write about men without having my feelings about men influence the outcome, I can honestly say that I am not out to score points off of men via having them under my word processor, so to speak. I was "outed" at a conference by a still unknown speaker who talked about slash and showed this non-fan group of feminist librarians zines. After the talk, the speaker saw that this woman I worked with was from Houston. She asked if she knew me and told her that I was into it. When she confronted me with it it was with a conspiratorial us against them statement of "now Kirk will know what it feels like to get screwed". I'll never forget the vengefulness in her voice.

Frankly, it sickened me. Whatever grudge I may hold against my boss, my Dad, and men in general, I LOVE these slash characters. I loved them before I even knew about slash. Hey, it might not be healthy, but I'm not in fandom and slash to become a better person or a better-adjusted person or a more politically aware person.

Some fans are SO careful to have the reader realize that the boys swap religiously that I envision a calendar like the ones couples trying to conceive use that have the "good" days circled. My take on the equality issue at the end of HEAT TRACE is that DOYUE is the one with the upper hand. After all, Bodie views his inability to accept anal sex as a liability, he isn't using it as a power issue to dominate Doyle. Doyle now can wield the weapon of guilt over Bodie and his failure.

Some Topics Discussed in "W.H.I.P.S. Redux"

• men's presence in female slash spaces
• zine piracy, fandom as a community and not an organization
• sexuality, language, and choice
• comments about the 1992 book Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, a book by Jayne Ann Krentz
• why slash?

Excerpts from "W.H.I.P.S. Redux"

I don't know if I would call myself a slash slut, exactly, but I can't be considered monogamous either. Being the obsessive sort, I tend to focus strongly on one thing at a time, without actually dropping any previous fandoms. A really good B7 can still get my heart aflutter. But when you have read everything you can get your hands on 25 times, and watched the episodes 50 times each, and made several music videos, and finished some stories and written yourself into a corner on several more as well as had numerous interminable discussions with anyone who will cooperate on which episodes have the cutest outfits; well, it would seem to me at that point you have sucked that fandom dry, for a while at least, and it s time to do something new, whether another fandom or therapy, I'm not sure which.

As to fandom mattering more than quality, I think there is a stage in every true fan love when just seeing their names on the paper can give you an orgasm. Eventually however, the thrill wears off. Sigh. I have noticed though, that stories I read in the white heat of first getting into a show have a way of remaining fond favorites even though I objectively now consider them badly written.

What makes a story good is a writer's original vision molded into story form; when a writer doesn't have an original vision, it's hard to have a good story. I honestly think we have to go back to the show to get fresh insights. Virtual Reality is an unforgettable story of the past year. Summer's Outing (not sure if it was written in 93, but that's when I read it) - I think is this AU, but excellent nonetheless. And, after accepting the premise, totally believable (Someone once said that any story can have one 'unbelievable' premise, and only one). Recently was utterly charmed by St. Christopher's Lie. I define a story as charming when it gets the characters right, dialogue in particular, fits in with and suits the universe to a T, cleverly highlights things that are between the lines and may even draw an 'obvious' inference, one you say, yes, of course, that is the way it would be, even though you hadn't thought of it before, but: breaks no truly new dramatic ground.

I laughed myself sick over your review of the Terranova Situation. I have not been privileged to read this epic, and it is just as well since I am a Reader of Very Little Patience. And yes, this sort of thing (by that I include my laughing at it, as well as your writing it) is cruel in one way, as I know someone has put their heart into the story, but I really feel that if one sends something out for public consumption, one has to accept whatever reaction one gets, even if it is "cruel." I only tend to make fun of people I know very well or not at al. On the other hand, based on the quoted material, well, it does speak for itself, doesn't it? Or was that a strangled scream?

The 'we're not gay..' brings up for me the question of what it means to say a person is gay, straight, bi? Who gets to say: the person him or herself, or an observer? Since the vast majority of the characters in slash fandoms are shown on the air to have relationships with women, they should be considered at least bisexual. What determines sexuality? Fantasies, behaviors, self-image or some combination thereof? My understanding is that everyone is bisexual to one degree or another, there is no such animal as a totally heterosexual or totally homosexual individual. If you refer to yourself as 'heterosexual' or 'homosexual' what you are really saying 'predominantly heterosexual' or 'predominantly homosexual.' (This is certainly what I always mean, no matter who I am referring to). And in the ordinary course of most people's lives, that is good enough. Practically speaking the issue does not come up for them. Ah, but if does: slash is in the air. I tend to prefer self-determination; a person is gay, straight, or whatever depending on whatever that person says they are. Behavior alone is not the deciding factor. I mean, you could call yourself heterosexual and remain celibate your entire life. In fact, most of us at one point or another identified ourselves as gay, straight or bi before we ever had a sexual relationship. So when a writer presents the characters as being (predominantly) straight men despite being involved in relationship with one another, she is not being naive or homophobic; that's her take on the characters as shown in the series. And while it can be a perfectly legitimate interpretation that a given character is a show is 'in the closet' and 'in denial' to account for the womanizing, a story of that nature interests me less for other reasons entirely.

After reading [Susan C's] essay on Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women and Sarah Thompson's on Romantic Sadism, I have been thinking about this question ever since. I recognize immediately the scenario of Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women as one of my all-time favorites, while Romantic Sadism is only a secondary theme. Which explains to me why I prefer Gothics, such as Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart, to Harlequins. The element of adventure attracts me in general which is how I end up watching particular shows in the first place; adventure and great deeds (ST-exploring brave new worlds, B7-rebellion against the evil empire; Pros-catching dangerous terrorists and keeping world safe for democracy; etc.) But adventure is not enough to lead me to slash per se. In fact, Agnes noted that certain shows just generate fan fiction, including slash, and they tend to be adventure shows.

I find the comments and points insightful and provoking, but where they ultimately led me was back to the question of what is it about slash that makes it slash and not something else. What is unique about slash? After all, Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women, or gay porn, or romances notwithstanding if slash IS just like' each of these, why bother with it? Zines are notoriously more expensive and hard to come by than any of these others, as well as available in limited quantities. Many fans complain jokingly about how fandom as broken their bank account. But we keep buying. Why is it only slash that scratches a particular itch? Maybe there is no one answer, or maybe I only get into conversations with like-minded people but certain writers in general and certain stories in particular are repeatedly mentioned as 'good' if not the most enjoyable, implying that some standard exists. These beliefs seem to apply across the waves. I think that the ideas or themes people mention as significant in slash are all to be found to varying degree in different stories. And perhaps it is this very complexity which makes 'slash' so compelling. Different themes appeal to different groups of slash writers and readers, this is clear; there's the make either or both suffer a lot' contingent, the 'love story with a happy ending' group, the 'hot sex between two guys' brigade, the 'mystical bond' crowd, and for lack of a better word, the 'transcendent intensity gang, aka, this relationship is either a path to salvation or the road to hell. Ask someone what their favorite stories are, and you will know by which theme predominates what their particular connection to slash is. However, as these and other essays indicate, satisfying, well written examples of these ideas are readily available elsewhere.

I think the element of the heroic is something we want; else why not slash sitcoms? Sitcoms can ave the characteristics of our familiarity with the characters, two cute guys who are close friends, maybe even work together, and sociological relevance, perhaps more so than adventure shows. Cop shows in particular are a mythic fantasy: good vs. evil, drawn in a clearcut way, and even when the good guys lose, they have the moral victory and we, the audience, al know it. The heroic element in the slashable shows may not be the focus of most stories, but it is there in the background.These are the good guys. In other words, the context in which the relationship takes place is important. Even if a story as no plot, or no direct connection to the premise of the show, the context exists in the mind of the reader. That is one of the basics of fan fiction, I think, the elaborating and building upon an existing universe and characters, probably a similar Impulse to the one which keeps us going back every week to a new episode of a TV show. In addition, fan fiction allows us to do things they would never do on TV, not just the kink, such as stories (common in fandom) which resolve the tensions of individuals or between characters in a permanent way, which would be death to episodic television. You linked to the Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women scenario through the metaphor of Relationship as Adventure. Brave new worlds, going into unknown territory, doing things that require courage and fortitude, breaking rules, acting according to principles, facing challenges and overcoming them are all characteristics our heroes demonstrate to various degrees on the shows Even those characters who appear to go against type such as Avon.

In the same way as Sarah shows Macho Masochism becoming Romantic Sadism, the unknown territory becomes the brave new world of the relationship and so on. For those who like suffering, the suffering of one or both characters is new or unusual, and serves to bring the characters closer together; in happy ending stories, emphasis is usually placed on overcoming obstacles and making heroic efforts towards the relationship so that it will be different this time; obviously new and different sex practices can be the unknown territory; and I'm sure you can see where this is going. The relationship is an emotional and/or spiritual adventure, and the elements or danger and the unknown are inherent in any adventure. In these elements, danger and the unknown, which are supplied by the 'we're not gay we just love each other scenario so often objected to as not realistic.' (Actually, if wanted strict realism, we wouldn't be fans of these shows, they veer widely from reality ~ this issue is about believably rather than realism. And there is a lot of variety among us as to how far we are willing to suspend our disbelief.) The danger comes from crossing a line; for most heterosexual men, homosexual behavior is threatening; the unknown, from how to conduct a relationship that has no social pattern to follow. At the very least, even in universes where homosexuality per se would not be much of an issue to the characters, such as B7, the danger of a slash relationship is in the threat to the self-concept of the characters, because I do think our sexuality is a fundamental part of our self-image, however we define that sexuality. Additionally, perhaps just for me, the threat to self-image extends deeply into the personality interaction of the characters, and a character fighting to preserve his self-image or having to change it is the heart of good drama. In fact, I think people will suffer almost any torture rather than change their self-concept, in real life as well as fiction. And in any universe, those are the best stories. By my definition, the relationship between the two women characters in the movie Black Widow was slash; in fact, a relationship showing a gay man and gay woman 'falling in love' might be slash, as is the relationship between Matt and Cathy in Alien Nation. I recall reading somewhere that in a broad and general way, men want relationships to be settled and safe, and women want adventure in their relationships, which is one reason men and women are always at odds about the content of their relationships. Content, not form, distinguishes a slash relationship from other relationships.

There has been of and on a lot of Sturm und Drang for years about zine piracy, and lot of fiery exchanges have taken place in various arenas. What gets me about all of this is how often the fact is ignored that we are stealing (poaching if you like) other people's material in the first place. In a fundamental way, none of us has any rights. I am not a stickler about any kind of piracy, but when you have a fanzine full of material that uses someone else's characters and situations, without their permission, without giving them a percentage, it seems the height of hypocrisy to turn around and take a outraged self-righteous stand about someone infringing on your rights as an editor.

Fandom is a community, not an organization. Nor is it a simple marketplace, but a network of friends, associates, peers connected by a common interest. As such, the rules of ordinary courtesy should apply. I think most of us feel this way, and get upset when we think these rules are violated, or when variations in the rules cause misunderstandings. No, I wouldn't copy someone's zine and sell it myself, because I wouldn't want someone to do that to me. But also no, I'd prefer someone not buy my zine if there are only two stories out of seven that they like at all. And if they really feel the zine is not worth the money, but is worth the time and hassle of copying, be my guest. I don't like it, but I don't feel my rights are being infringed. It's more bad manners than anything else, and particularly bad manners if they flaunt it. I've always thought the best realistic preventive for zine piracy is to make sure that any copy of the zine is an obvious and unattractive imitation of the real thing.

I know this may sound hokey on paper, and no doubt others have said it first, but why can't we operate by being reasonable about all these practical issues? If it would make you mad to have someone do something to you, don't do it to them. And given that we don't all really know each other, better to be cautious with other's material. This isn't a generalized plea for us al to 'get along'; it just seems to me that these arguments are either covering up some deeper issues (which I would like to see uncovered), or else just silly.

Not directly related to anything specific, but I did want to comment on a couple of issues that have been floating around for awhile, both in the APA and in fandom in general: the first was whether it was ok for men to be in the APA or on the list, etc. - well, I think it's great. I've heard numerous men voice the complaint, what do women want, and some of the answers are certainly to be found here. Seriously, although most of the stories are aimed directly at women's fantasies, I don't believe all of those fantasies are women's exclusively by nature of our being female, nor do I think 'the issues and stories are feminine.' As to potential embarrassment: well, any extra embarrassment is worth the potential for more detailed information on men's actual experience of sex and relationships, and their reactions to the stories. Especially from a variety of sources.

Some Topics Discussed in "Musings from the Last Possible Minute"

• why slash?

Excerpts from "Musings from the Last Possible Minute"

What are my thoughts on slash? Myriad, and changeable. In many ways I agree with Leslie's take on fan writing (if not her politics), that it is an internal process that satisfies my needs and desires and I could give a flying fuck for society's needs or desires. I too went through the investigation of all things homosexual. I have gay friends. I find that I fall midway on the sexual scale myself, though my idea of good sex with a man involves androids with great bodies and off buttons. Emotionally I only bond with women, and not too oddly, some gay men. (I think you could say that I feel threatened by "real men", in our culture's sense.) So why do I enjoy writing slash and reading slash about men, that at least from my perception ... are not gay, and are not, definitely, women? Why do these relationships push my buttons? If I use pop psychology, I could look back and see that time and time again in my own life that I took risk-free paths. That I never (gee, I just changed tenses) throw caution to the winds (well, almost never ... and that was a mistake) and invest emotionally in another person. Perhaps it is that part of me that would like to have a life with more intensity and risk is the part that these characters and stories reach. In some ways, it is also my theory about the prevalence of rape in women's romance novels. Damn it, make me deal with it, saith our heroine, put me someplace where I must, but let it not be my fault, just in case. There is an old cartoon with the caption, as best I remember, that states at one point, "I am alone, inside a shell, etc. at the bottom of the sea. Why don't you find me?" Only someone with a lot of intense emotion is going to go to the trouble. And only someone with real problems dealing with emotions is going to crawl into that shell at the bottom of the sea. My theory is that is not the sex itself, but the intense emotional needs that drive the characters to bond despite every reason not to, that rings my chimes. That is why, I think, hurt/comfort (my theory of, I will attempt at another time) also can satisfy me as a reader, though less so than it could prior to ray slash addiction. (You gotta really care to get yourself in that much pain). Intense is the operational word for what I want ... and much of what passes for slash these days seems pallid and too prosaic to me, and reeks with acceptable emotional demands. I want my characters to need each other, and the more obstacles the better to build to the climax (both figuratively and literally).