The Art and Ethics of Boyband RPS

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Title:	The Art and Ethics of Boyband RPS
Creator:	Ian McDuff
Date(s):	July 2001
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	online here, Archived version
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The Art and Ethics of Boyband RPS is an essay posted to Citizens Against Bad Slash by Ian McDuff.

Excerpts

So. Why slash? And why RPS?

RPS, especially BBS RPS (boyband slash, people. Follow the bouncing acronym and let's all sing along with Mitch), has an odd universality. Much of its underlying resonance is due to the way in which the character pool is to hand. The carefully manufactured public persona of celebrities, and especially boyband members, are like the Personified Virtues and Vices of a medieval morality or indeed miracle play, and of such progeny of that genre as, say, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. One may be Everyman, another Mr Worldly Wiseman. Still more affecting is the way in which, through RPS - and again, especially through BBS - we can take young men, pre-selected for talent, charm, and looks, and use them to point the moral and adorn the tale of the most constant of themes:

the closet...

coming out

self-discovery

first love

and all the rest.

The BBS characters are made to order for an exploration of some damned important issues about love and longing, sexuality and self-hatred and self-acceptance. They are without exception average young men, of average or indifferent education (though some appear to be innately intelligent), from middle and lower-middle and in a couple of cases high prole backgrounds, who now suddenly live and move and have their being in a markedly artificial, hallucinatorily-saturated, over the top world. They've been forced, as a matter of business, to make for themselves 'elective' families in place of their actual kin, whom they rarely see, just as so many out gay men are forced by anti-gay sentiment to create 'families of choice' as surrogates for the birth families that have rejected them. The pressures - the purely monetary interests, if nothing else - of the closet are heightened for them. It's as if Fate created a little lab experiment for writing about male bonding, rites of passage, self-awareness, coming out, and finding love.

There are folks who writhe in horror at the thought of virginal little [insert name of favorite boyband member here] stumbling across slash fic on the Net and realizing he stars as the object of mass lust. There are folks, equally, who get cold sweats thinking, What if their lawyers find this stuff? I'm not going to go into a disquisition on the applicability of New York Times v Sullivan, here, or to what extent fiction is free to present celebrities in what they or their handlers and in-house counsel might contend is a 'false light,' or any of that. I want to address an ethical point, not a legal one. That point is, The boys can't have it both ways. (Get your minds out of the gutter and pay attention, damn it.) For all any of us know, the religiously inclined, green-eyed, Southern bass singers of both main boybands (you ever get the idea there just might be a formula at work here?) are both straight, are both secretly studying astrophysics by correspondence course from MIT, are both huge fans of Johann Sebastian Bach or Duke Ellington and cannot stand pop, and so on. I think these suggestions unlikely and implausible, but they are possible. What is certain is that they are selling sex quite as much as they are selling soulful harmony. I'm sorry, but the world is not waiting with bated breath (or, for those who had sushi for lunch, baited breath) for Mr Timberlake's breathy nasality to be applied to Nessun dorma at the Met. If Mr Carter looked like Richard Tucker or Luciano Pavarotti, he'd need to sing at least as well to make a living at it, and his fanbase would be the crowd in dinner suits, not the teenies in tube tops. (Random observation: glitter, glow sticks, slutty clothes, dance beats, cute young men singing and thrusting on stage for Your Entertainment Pleasure ... boyband concerts are basically circuit parties for thirteen year old girls.)

The whole purpose of their presentation, in short, is to inspire - in order to drive sales of their CDs - fantasies and less-than-innocent longings. Fan fiction of the teeny sort is the end and goal, in a very real sense, of what they do. And what is sauce for the goose is assuredly sauce for the gander. They have invited our fantasies and our writing about them as sexual beings; and they surely know damned well not all the fans whose libidos they stoke in the clear-eyed pursuit of royalties are pubescent females whose dreams are of the lads as straight knights in shining armor.

And there's a sense, as well, in which RPS is more ethically defensible - and may require more authorial talent - than the use of fictional characters that (characters that, people who: please get that right, folks. Pet peeve there) are in fact other creators's intellectual property.

My conclusion, therefore, is that there is nothing illegal, immoral, or fattening about BBS RPS.

Engineering 101. The writer is a pontifex, a builder of a bridge to another, mystic world. The bridge at issue is a suspension bridge: one sturdy enough to support the reader's willing suspension of disbelief, her or his willing acceptance of the alternate reality you have constructed. This requires work, people.

It is partly for this reason, and not merely as a matter of taste, that I am so vociferously against such devices as supernatural themes, most AUs, and the whole of the inexplicable recent fascination with stories in which one of the guys miraculously ends up preggers. Those talentless hacks King and Rice have a lot to answer for, not least in inspiring this sort of rubbish. It would take, frankly, more talent than anyone I've encountered possesses, to make this sort of thing, and the supernatural tropes that are so popular, believable. (Hold that thought.)

The devil is in the details here. The very artificiality of the actual environment in which BBS characters exist makes it all the more necessary that the author take a naturalistic tone and stance, grounding the story in gritty reality and realism. Otherwise, it becomes a queer version of a trade paper romance novel, in which everyone is simply too, too rich and perfect and elegant ... and nauseating.

I should note here that I don't necessarily agree with some of the strictures others have advanced on how to write gay characters. It's true that Our Fearless Leader, Jane, has a definite point about how straight guys are incapable of showing affection. But we're not writing straight guys here. And - unlike those who write slash about fictional characters with established persons that are, if not straight, so butchly straight-acting as to cause testosterone poisoning - we can write characters who drop the occasional hairpin, camp it and queen it at times, rebel against the inarticulate conventions of the het male who cannot say a tender word. I am in most respects, and quite naturally, without affectation, one incredibly butch queer; but I can assure you that there will always be times I and my gay friends have fun with the stereotypes and roles - believe it, Mary. By the same token, to whatever extent you - as you must of course do, to have any story at all - broaden and deepen and round out the cardboard persona of your boyband avatar, making a real boy of the wooden puppet, you have to make it credible. That's why I don't slash the married ones, or ones I simply cannot envisage as ever being less than 100% het.

As to how to make these things credible ... well, that's why there's a links page with resources for aspiring writers. I ain't giving away no trade secrets for free, yo.