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lgbtfest is up and running. As usual, I didn't sign up to write for it, largely because I a) suck at deadlines and b) am in the middle of writing an epic-length fic that's coming along agonizingly slowly. Seriously, we're actually revising it. I have never made a substantial revision to a piece of fiction in my life. But another part of the reason is c) I don't feel comfortable writing something that's supposed to be a sensitive examination of queer issues, something that's supposed to have any kind of authenticity or speak to other queer readers. I write Id-porn and emo-porn and action/pulp (or, well, I aspire to create action/pulp, but I suspect usually just achieve emo-porn). And I do so by choice. I want to write escapist fiction. I want to write things with exclamation points in the title. I want my fiction to be people's comfort fic and guilty pleasure and trashy beach reading - I want it to be the best trashy escapist Id-porn beach reading it can be, but the best escapist Id-porn I can write is not, I suspect, what the purpose of lgbtfest is supposed to be. I suspect the ideal fest entry leans more towards Bastard out of Carolina, than Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary (both execellant books I highly recommend). More towards Dykes to Watch Out For than I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space. Thus, meta. About trashy books and escapist Id-porn.
An article by Yvonne Keller that I read recently on the role of lesbian pulps in the formation of female queer identity in the 1950s and 60s* got me thinking about slash. Keller's thesis is that old school pulp novels, despite existing in a homophobic and sexist context, were valuable to lesbian readers because they provided them with some of the only available representations of themselves.
And I quote:
The 1950s were a time when most lesbians could not access any stories about themselves, much less positive ones, since lesbianism was mostly invisible in popular culture. When it was conceptualized at all in the 1950s, homosexuality was a crime, sin, or illness; many homosexuals thought of themselves as "flawed individuals" or people with "a homosexual problem." In this difficult context, lesbian pulps were crucial "survival literature," in Joan Nestle's evocative phrase, coveted and treasured for their sometimes positive and sometimes awful but decidedly lesbian and decidedly available representation.
They're certainly remembered fondly by at least some queer women. Ann Banon's Beebo Brinker novels are still in print -- I read two of them in college -- and have been adapted into a play. And the aformentioned Lois Lenz book is a loving pastiche of 50s pulp given a modern queer-positive and women-positive twist (happy ending, written to the female gaze not the male, lesbianism depicted as natural and normative instead of deviant).
Many of them were also, let me not hesitate to stress, godawful. Like, not only were a lot of them homophobic, they were also frequently sexist and often racist as well. I submit as exhibit A one lesbian pulp novel about two white women "descending into degrading savagery in savage Africa" (I think the word savage actually appears in the cover copy, and probably "exotic," was in there somewhere, too) that's simuntaneously one of the most sexist and the most racist book covers I've ever seen that didn't actually feature a racist caricature on it. I don't have a link, but I'm also not sure seeing the image would actually improve anyone's life.
But they had lesbians in them, and pretty much nothing else did.
Probably of particular interest to fandom, Keller goes on to quote Donna Allegra, a lesbian WoC ,who described pulp novels as "vital" to her survival as a teenager despite the sexist and homophobic [note: and undoubtably racist, though the article doesn't go into that] content and lurid covers that made buying them an excercize in embarassment:
"No matter how embarrassed and ashamed I felt when I went to the cash register to buy these books [lesbian pulps], it was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival.... I look back now and see where those books and their ideas rotted my guts and crippled my moral structure [however] in nothing and nowhere else in the world I lived in could I have seen the possibility of a lesbian happily-ever-after, when I was a teen, outside of [these pulps] ."
Sometimes, for some people who are members of an invisible minority, any representation is preferable to no representation at all. It tells you you're not alone. That there are other people like you. That the things that make you different are real and have a name. I discovered fiction about queer characters before I realized that I had a sexuality of any kind, queer or straight (and I credit my lack of freak out over that realization entirely to said fiction), but I can imagine at least a shadow of what discovering one of those books must have been like.
I remember what it was like to find an article in the New York Times that described married couples whose relationships worked the way mine did**, and how awesome it was for the first half of the article, before the inevitable pathologizing started. Even with the pathologizing, and even with the fact that the article only mentioned het couples, I still remember said article fondly for the description of the happily married couple given at the beginning. Yes, that couple's story said, your marriage can [be like x] and still be just as real as marriages that are not.
But even without that "yes, I recognize myself in this! I am not alone!" moment, I can still sympathize with those fond memories of pulp, because as I said above, without fiction about queer characters, I would have had a much harder time sorting out my sexuality. Or rather, more accurately, without escapist Id-porn about m/m relationships, I'd have had a much harder time sorting out my sexuality.
There's a growing amount of YA fiction with LGBTQ characters or themes out there now (and by "growing amount," I mean "some actually exists now"), but when I was in middle school and high school, which was not that long ago given that I graduated in 2001, there was essentially nothing featuring queerness that was available to a teenage reader. Or at any rate, to a teenage reader who lived in a rural area and didn't have internet access.
I discovered that men could have sex with other men, and how they did it, when I was eleven, via a male-on-male rape scene (well, the lead up to and aftermath of it - the actual rape occurred offscreen) in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which I feel is a particularly apt detail to offer now (the literally thousands of pages worth of slash fanfiction I've written over the past eight years are all due to you, Diana). I may have read some references to gayness in fiction prior to that point, but Outlander had flogging and torture and a kickass hurt/comfort scene where the male lead has to have all the fingers in one hand set without anesthetic after they've been broken during a torture session, so the entire novel is pretty much burned into my brain.
I discovered that women could have sex with other women via the first novel of Jack L. Chalker's Changewinds series (I think? It was the one with the butterfly tattoo geisha girl), which contains a scene where two teenage girls make out and finger each other, for the reading pleasure of the male audience. It was a revelation for me. Before that, I thought that lesbian lived together celibately because they loved each other Just That Much. Seriously, prior to the age of fifteen, I didn't know that any forms of sex other than fellatio and penetration-with-teh-cock existed.
That was my introduction to gay sex. Rape, and hot, nubile girl-on-girl action designed to titiliate male readers. The novels I read featuring m/m or f/f relationships prior to college were as follows:
- Swordspoint
- The blue and green riders in Anne Mccaffrey's Pern novels, but pretty much only Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern counted, because it was the only one featuring an actual blue/green couple.
- Jean Claude's bisexuality in the Anita Blake books (up through Obsidian Butterfly, published my senior year of highschool)
- A few references to "pillow friends" in the Wheel of Time books
- The hot nubile girl-on-girl action from the Jack L. Chalker book.
- The sadistic, rapey gay villain in Outlander
- The Sardonyx Net (where teh gay was also characterized by rape and sadism, but I suspect it was more due to the author possibly having a kink for fucked-up relationships and issues of consent than to authorial bias)
- Pussy Galore and Tilly Masterton in Goldfinger and Wint and Kidd in Diamonds are Forever. Galore, Wint, and Kidd were all criminals, and they all died. So did Tilly, but she got to sleep with Bond first, because Bond's so hot that even lesbians want him. You know why Tilly was a lesbian? Because one of her older male relatives raped her when she was a child. So she couldn't like or trust men anymore, obviously, so women were the only option. Goldfinger was not one of my favorite Bond books. (Diamonds are Forever is, though, because there's a lot of nice Bond and Felix roadtripping content, and Wint and Kidd, while they're assassins who try to murder Bond and then die, don't try to rape anybody beforehand).
...and that's it. That's the compete and total list of literary LGBTQ-ness I was exposed to prior to the age of 18 (well, that, and reading a transcript from Oscar Wilde's sodomy trial, and one Newsweek article on same-sex marriage that came out in 2000). Is it any wonder I didn't figure out my sexuality until college?
Yaoi and yuri would probably have been a godsend to adolescent and teenaged me, and ditto for slash. As it is, I credit discovering slash as a college freshman with being the thing that made me able to figure out my sexuality with minimal internal angst, beyond the "how will I ever tell my parents" aspect and some initial weirdness over being able to confidently label myself that way/feeling like I had a right to the label.* **
Yaoi, yuri, and slash was what normativised LGBTQ people and relationships for me, when I was still figuring my own sexuality out (or, rather, realizing that I had one). Yes, it was all guys, but a) from a shallow perspective, guys are just as hot as girls, b) stories about guys were often more likely to have the kind of things I wanted to read about in them in terms of plot/action/hurtcomfort/violence against main character that isn't squicky to me, etc. and c) they were still gay, and they were a kind of gay that it was safer to read in some ways than f/f, because straight girls read it, too. In fact, straight girls introduced me to it. Slash presented me with queerness as a viable, normative, and positive (or at least, not negative) option, and it was kind of like babystepping into queerness. First AyaxYohji and HeeroxDuo and Duncan/Methos and Remus/Sirius, where the gay was still at one step removed from myself because of the gender divivide, and thenThe Rubyfruit Jungle and Tipping the Velvet, which I bought to read on the plane when coming back from a study abroad because it had Victorian underwear on the cover and was about 19th century music halls, and didn't realize had R-rated f/f sex cenes in it until I was midway over the Atlantic ocean, actually finding something I was reading hot on more than just an emotional level for the first time in my life and mortified that the guy next to me might realize I was reading OMGporn (somehow, R-rated girl-on-girl was vastly pornier than NC-17-rated m/m anal sex scenes, because, I don't know, it was hotter?) . Late 90s and early 2000s slash and yaoi fandoms were my Anne Bannon, my Vin Packer, my Valerie Taylor.****
Slash/yaoi fandom was also my first real exposure to people who were queer-positive and to other queer women (via the anime club at my all-women's college, half of which were dating the other half). Since leaving college, where there were things like campus-wide Day of Silence celebrations, it's also been my major source of interaction with other girls what like other girls. It may not be a queer safe space, but it's functioned as my queer community for pretty much my entire adult life. Seriously, it's slash fandom and the emails I get sent by the LGBTQ activist groups I donate to, and occasionally reading AfterEllen and AfterElton. I don't even have access to free copies of the Washington Blade to read on the Metro anymore, since I (thank God) left DC. Yeah, I live in NYC, so it wouldn't be *hard* to find an ofline queer community to belong to, but my desire to go out somewhere in the evening and hang out with people who are not fannish and also not my relatives is limited. When once in a great while I go to slash cons? It's one of the few places offline where I can openly and without hesitation say things like "my girlfriend," and not have to mentally remind myself that I can't pet seanchai's hair because we're in public.
So that is one reason why I love (slash and yaoi) fandom. It may be imperfect, but it gave me something I couldn't get anywhere else, something I didn't even know I needed and wouldn't have known how to look for if I had.
* "Was It Right to Love Her Brother's Wife So Passionately?": Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965
Yvonne Keller. American Quarterly. College Park:Jun 2005. Vol. 57, Iss. 2, p. 385-410,590 (27 pp.)
**details withheld because my significant other is also in fandom. It's probably not whatever exciting kinky thing you're likely imagining, though.
***There was a lot of, "but maybe I'm actually asexual because I have no interest in sex... no, okay, I do have an interest, just much less of one than many people... does kissing that girl and making out with her actually count, I mean it's more than I've ever done with a boy, and it was hot, but am I actually bi? Do I just *want* to be because I read slash and some part of me thinks it would be cool?" It took until my junior year to feel confident IDing as bisexual, so, about 2 years, and until my senior year to actually ID that way to others, once I'd actually dated an actual girl and had actual sex with her. And I still struggle with feeling like I don't count somehow when discussing this stuff, because the last time I hung out in a queer female space that wasn't part of slash fandom since I my senior year of college, which was also the first time I did so, and I've pretty much never hung out in queer male space or lesbian feminist space, which seem to be the gold standard for how legitimate queerness is measured. The way "queer" is defined in a lot of online discussions seems to be as much dependant on which other people you hang out with and what your politics are as who you're attracted to, like you can't be LGBTQ in isolation.
****All right, to be strictly accurate, Anne Bannon was my Anne Bannon, since I was given copies of her Odd Girl Out and Woman in the Shadows my senior year of college, when a girl in my dorm was weeding out her book collection. I gave them away to another girl down the hall the day before I graduated, though, because I was afraid to bring them home when their (awesome) covers so loudly proclaimed exactly what they were. The megabytes worth of slash on my laptop, on the other hand, were invisible, and I could take them anywhere.
note:this is going to be flocked for the first 24 hours to make sure people don't think there's anything in here that would cause wank, Unlocked now
An article by Yvonne Keller that I read recently on the role of lesbian pulps in the formation of female queer identity in the 1950s and 60s* got me thinking about slash. Keller's thesis is that old school pulp novels, despite existing in a homophobic and sexist context, were valuable to lesbian readers because they provided them with some of the only available representations of themselves.
And I quote:
The 1950s were a time when most lesbians could not access any stories about themselves, much less positive ones, since lesbianism was mostly invisible in popular culture. When it was conceptualized at all in the 1950s, homosexuality was a crime, sin, or illness; many homosexuals thought of themselves as "flawed individuals" or people with "a homosexual problem." In this difficult context, lesbian pulps were crucial "survival literature," in Joan Nestle's evocative phrase, coveted and treasured for their sometimes positive and sometimes awful but decidedly lesbian and decidedly available representation.
They're certainly remembered fondly by at least some queer women. Ann Banon's Beebo Brinker novels are still in print -- I read two of them in college -- and have been adapted into a play. And the aformentioned Lois Lenz book is a loving pastiche of 50s pulp given a modern queer-positive and women-positive twist (happy ending, written to the female gaze not the male, lesbianism depicted as natural and normative instead of deviant).
Many of them were also, let me not hesitate to stress, godawful. Like, not only were a lot of them homophobic, they were also frequently sexist and often racist as well. I submit as exhibit A one lesbian pulp novel about two white women "descending into degrading savagery in savage Africa" (I think the word savage actually appears in the cover copy, and probably "exotic," was in there somewhere, too) that's simuntaneously one of the most sexist and the most racist book covers I've ever seen that didn't actually feature a racist caricature on it. I don't have a link, but I'm also not sure seeing the image would actually improve anyone's life.
But they had lesbians in them, and pretty much nothing else did.
Probably of particular interest to fandom, Keller goes on to quote Donna Allegra, a lesbian WoC ,who described pulp novels as "vital" to her survival as a teenager despite the sexist and homophobic [note: and undoubtably racist, though the article doesn't go into that] content and lurid covers that made buying them an excercize in embarassment:
"No matter how embarrassed and ashamed I felt when I went to the cash register to buy these books [lesbian pulps], it was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival.... I look back now and see where those books and their ideas rotted my guts and crippled my moral structure [however] in nothing and nowhere else in the world I lived in could I have seen the possibility of a lesbian happily-ever-after, when I was a teen, outside of [these pulps] ."
Sometimes, for some people who are members of an invisible minority, any representation is preferable to no representation at all. It tells you you're not alone. That there are other people like you. That the things that make you different are real and have a name. I discovered fiction about queer characters before I realized that I had a sexuality of any kind, queer or straight (and I credit my lack of freak out over that realization entirely to said fiction), but I can imagine at least a shadow of what discovering one of those books must have been like.
I remember what it was like to find an article in the New York Times that described married couples whose relationships worked the way mine did**, and how awesome it was for the first half of the article, before the inevitable pathologizing started. Even with the pathologizing, and even with the fact that the article only mentioned het couples, I still remember said article fondly for the description of the happily married couple given at the beginning. Yes, that couple's story said, your marriage can [be like x] and still be just as real as marriages that are not.
But even without that "yes, I recognize myself in this! I am not alone!" moment, I can still sympathize with those fond memories of pulp, because as I said above, without fiction about queer characters, I would have had a much harder time sorting out my sexuality. Or rather, more accurately, without escapist Id-porn about m/m relationships, I'd have had a much harder time sorting out my sexuality.
There's a growing amount of YA fiction with LGBTQ characters or themes out there now (and by "growing amount," I mean "some actually exists now"), but when I was in middle school and high school, which was not that long ago given that I graduated in 2001, there was essentially nothing featuring queerness that was available to a teenage reader. Or at any rate, to a teenage reader who lived in a rural area and didn't have internet access.
I discovered that men could have sex with other men, and how they did it, when I was eleven, via a male-on-male rape scene (well, the lead up to and aftermath of it - the actual rape occurred offscreen) in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which I feel is a particularly apt detail to offer now (the literally thousands of pages worth of slash fanfiction I've written over the past eight years are all due to you, Diana). I may have read some references to gayness in fiction prior to that point, but Outlander had flogging and torture and a kickass hurt/comfort scene where the male lead has to have all the fingers in one hand set without anesthetic after they've been broken during a torture session, so the entire novel is pretty much burned into my brain.
I discovered that women could have sex with other women via the first novel of Jack L. Chalker's Changewinds series (I think? It was the one with the butterfly tattoo geisha girl), which contains a scene where two teenage girls make out and finger each other, for the reading pleasure of the male audience. It was a revelation for me. Before that, I thought that lesbian lived together celibately because they loved each other Just That Much. Seriously, prior to the age of fifteen, I didn't know that any forms of sex other than fellatio and penetration-with-teh-cock existed.
That was my introduction to gay sex. Rape, and hot, nubile girl-on-girl action designed to titiliate male readers. The novels I read featuring m/m or f/f relationships prior to college were as follows:
- Swordspoint
- The blue and green riders in Anne Mccaffrey's Pern novels, but pretty much only Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern counted, because it was the only one featuring an actual blue/green couple.
- Jean Claude's bisexuality in the Anita Blake books (up through Obsidian Butterfly, published my senior year of highschool)
- A few references to "pillow friends" in the Wheel of Time books
- The hot nubile girl-on-girl action from the Jack L. Chalker book.
- The sadistic, rapey gay villain in Outlander
- The Sardonyx Net (where teh gay was also characterized by rape and sadism, but I suspect it was more due to the author possibly having a kink for fucked-up relationships and issues of consent than to authorial bias)
- Pussy Galore and Tilly Masterton in Goldfinger and Wint and Kidd in Diamonds are Forever. Galore, Wint, and Kidd were all criminals, and they all died. So did Tilly, but she got to sleep with Bond first, because Bond's so hot that even lesbians want him. You know why Tilly was a lesbian? Because one of her older male relatives raped her when she was a child. So she couldn't like or trust men anymore, obviously, so women were the only option. Goldfinger was not one of my favorite Bond books. (Diamonds are Forever is, though, because there's a lot of nice Bond and Felix roadtripping content, and Wint and Kidd, while they're assassins who try to murder Bond and then die, don't try to rape anybody beforehand).
...and that's it. That's the compete and total list of literary LGBTQ-ness I was exposed to prior to the age of 18 (well, that, and reading a transcript from Oscar Wilde's sodomy trial, and one Newsweek article on same-sex marriage that came out in 2000). Is it any wonder I didn't figure out my sexuality until college?
Yaoi and yuri would probably have been a godsend to adolescent and teenaged me, and ditto for slash. As it is, I credit discovering slash as a college freshman with being the thing that made me able to figure out my sexuality with minimal internal angst, beyond the "how will I ever tell my parents" aspect and some initial weirdness over being able to confidently label myself that way/feeling like I had a right to the label.* **
Yaoi, yuri, and slash was what normativised LGBTQ people and relationships for me, when I was still figuring my own sexuality out (or, rather, realizing that I had one). Yes, it was all guys, but a) from a shallow perspective, guys are just as hot as girls, b) stories about guys were often more likely to have the kind of things I wanted to read about in them in terms of plot/action/hurtcomfort/violence against main character that isn't squicky to me, etc. and c) they were still gay, and they were a kind of gay that it was safer to read in some ways than f/f, because straight girls read it, too. In fact, straight girls introduced me to it. Slash presented me with queerness as a viable, normative, and positive (or at least, not negative) option, and it was kind of like babystepping into queerness. First AyaxYohji and HeeroxDuo and Duncan/Methos and Remus/Sirius, where the gay was still at one step removed from myself because of the gender divivide, and thenThe Rubyfruit Jungle and Tipping the Velvet, which I bought to read on the plane when coming back from a study abroad because it had Victorian underwear on the cover and was about 19th century music halls, and didn't realize had R-rated f/f sex cenes in it until I was midway over the Atlantic ocean, actually finding something I was reading hot on more than just an emotional level for the first time in my life and mortified that the guy next to me might realize I was reading OMGporn (somehow, R-rated girl-on-girl was vastly pornier than NC-17-rated m/m anal sex scenes, because, I don't know, it was hotter?) . Late 90s and early 2000s slash and yaoi fandoms were my Anne Bannon, my Vin Packer, my Valerie Taylor.****
Slash/yaoi fandom was also my first real exposure to people who were queer-positive and to other queer women (via the anime club at my all-women's college, half of which were dating the other half). Since leaving college, where there were things like campus-wide Day of Silence celebrations, it's also been my major source of interaction with other girls what like other girls. It may not be a queer safe space, but it's functioned as my queer community for pretty much my entire adult life. Seriously, it's slash fandom and the emails I get sent by the LGBTQ activist groups I donate to, and occasionally reading AfterEllen and AfterElton. I don't even have access to free copies of the Washington Blade to read on the Metro anymore, since I (thank God) left DC. Yeah, I live in NYC, so it wouldn't be *hard* to find an ofline queer community to belong to, but my desire to go out somewhere in the evening and hang out with people who are not fannish and also not my relatives is limited. When once in a great while I go to slash cons? It's one of the few places offline where I can openly and without hesitation say things like "my girlfriend," and not have to mentally remind myself that I can't pet seanchai's hair because we're in public.
So that is one reason why I love (slash and yaoi) fandom. It may be imperfect, but it gave me something I couldn't get anywhere else, something I didn't even know I needed and wouldn't have known how to look for if I had.
* "Was It Right to Love Her Brother's Wife So Passionately?": Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965
Yvonne Keller. American Quarterly. College Park:Jun 2005. Vol. 57, Iss. 2, p. 385-410,590 (27 pp.)
**details withheld because my significant other is also in fandom. It's probably not whatever exciting kinky thing you're likely imagining, though.
***There was a lot of, "but maybe I'm actually asexual because I have no interest in sex... no, okay, I do have an interest, just much less of one than many people... does kissing that girl and making out with her actually count, I mean it's more than I've ever done with a boy, and it was hot, but am I actually bi? Do I just *want* to be because I read slash and some part of me thinks it would be cool?" It took until my junior year to feel confident IDing as bisexual, so, about 2 years, and until my senior year to actually ID that way to others, once I'd actually dated an actual girl and had actual sex with her. And I still struggle with feeling like I don't count somehow when discussing this stuff, because the last time I hung out in a queer female space that wasn't part of slash fandom since I my senior year of college, which was also the first time I did so, and I've pretty much never hung out in queer male space or lesbian feminist space, which seem to be the gold standard for how legitimate queerness is measured. The way "queer" is defined in a lot of online discussions seems to be as much dependant on which other people you hang out with and what your politics are as who you're attracted to, like you can't be LGBTQ in isolation.
****All right, to be strictly accurate, Anne Bannon was my Anne Bannon, since I was given copies of her Odd Girl Out and Woman in the Shadows my senior year of college, when a girl in my dorm was weeding out her book collection. I gave them away to another girl down the hall the day before I graduated, though, because I was afraid to bring them home when their (awesome) covers so loudly proclaimed exactly what they were. The megabytes worth of slash on my laptop, on the other hand, were invisible, and I could take them anywhere.
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I've seen a lot of the covers of those books, but never read any of them.
From:
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I've seen a lot of the covers of those books, but never read any of them.
Do not read the Jack L. Chalker ones. The sexism fail quotient is *strong* in that series. I suspect I wouldn't be able to get through them now, but as a fifteen-year-old, it went right over my head -- It's only looking back that I look at, say, the one heroine who is sold into sexual slavery involving full-body butterfly tattoos and the other heroine who is cursed to become overweight as a punishment for screwing up and go OMGWTF.
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You know... I knew about mm sex before I knew about ff sex, even though I had made out with a few girls. What I did know was that Kinsey called everything lesbians could do together "mutual masturbation" and what I knew about masturbation was that it wasn't real sex. So I never could figure out what the next step might be, with the girls I kissed...