More thoughts about hot man-on-man action

[bodlon]

I should be working up a couple of writing samples and composing some initial comments on a work in progress for someone, but a whole knot of friends are having an incredibly impassioned discussion on Twitter about the m/m fiction debate, and I can’t condense my feelings on the issue into 140 characters or less.

So here I am.

A few days ago I made a post with some initial thoughts on the issue, but managed somehow not to incite any riots. To recap:

- I believe that anyone should be allowed to write anything, but that writers who step outside of their own experience and into someone else’s needs to tread carefully and with respect.

- There are fewer queer people than straight people, and the success of queer fiction depends to some extent on straight people being interested in it.

- I am troubled by the double-standard in which m/m written by women is treated as more mainstream and more broadly marketed than m/m written by men.

- Not every story about a same-sex pair (or threesome, or whatever) is queer literature, nor is every person writing it an activist, or even someone with the LGBTQ community’s best interests at heart.

- I have reservations about making a lot of noise in this debate because my voice doesn’t fit neatly into either “side” as a queer transman, and I’m not about to appropriate gay cismale experience in order to obtain legitimacy in the debate any more than I’m going to put on the lady hat.

Fast-forward, then, to tonight and my friends tweeting about this post that asserts that m/m slash fiction is anti-gay and its follow-up about femslash (i.e. f/f fiction) and lesbian experience. They were upset. They found these posts faily and angrymaking.

The reason, as they related to me, was that the original poster glossed the experience of queer women (including female-identified or genderqueer people living as women) who write m/m fiction and appeared to assert that these women either don’t exist in fandom in any quantity, or that m/m fiction isn’t interesting to them.

Which is, in fairness, an interesting and complicated point. According to at least one person who’s collected some of the extant data and done some simple analysis, fandom may be significantly female, but may also be significantly queer. Which, based on my experience of fandom, seems plausible. A majority of the fanfolk I know are women (or present/live as women a significant amount of the time), but virtually all of them are lesbian, bisexual, or gender non-conforming.

So I see why the first post made them uncomfortable. Feeling invisible often isn’t any nicer than feeling blamed or guilty, and any combination of the two is miserable. I’m uncomfortable, though, that the discussion has to be about ’she missed out queer women!’ instead of taking the salient points of the first post to heart.

When a marginalized group is the object of discussion, and another group takes the discussion and turns it into a discussion about its own members, that’s derailing.

It’s derailing when women are talking about their experiences of rape and someone makes it a conversation about how men are also raped. It’s derailing when people of color are talking about economic disparity in their communities and someone turns it into a conversation about the realities of white poverty.

Please understand, I’m not saying this because I don’t love my friends very much, or think that pointing out that many of the women writing in fandom are not, in fact, perfectly straight is an important thing to do. I especially don’t think they had malevolent intentions. What I am saying is that a lot of what I’m seeing in this debate — not just this evening’s discussion — has been about the rights and intents of women who write m/m fiction, the benefits of writing and sharing m/m fiction among women, and the discomfort of a group of people who view themselves as reasonably progressive at being called out on a culture of appropriation and asked to recognize it and be mindful of it.

Yeah, hi.

(All of which is tangential to the actual commentary I couldn’t condense into tweet-friendly nibbles, but there you go.)

In her post, freifraufischer makes a case that slash is fundamentally anti-gay. She supports her view by pointing out that slash fiction is not a significant factor in queer culture, that the slash community is a female space, that slashers write stories in which characters’ attitudes and behaviors don’t match the attitudes and behaviors of actual gay men, and that women who write slash defend their pastime by declaring that their detractors are homophobes. She also points out — as I and others have elsewhere — that merely writing slash does not make one an activist.

That last point is the only one that I can accept without reservation.

On the whole, I find the position that slash (or mainstream m/m fiction written by or for women) is anti-gay hard to sustain.

I agree that it’s problematic in that there’s a tremendous amount of appropriation going on, and that there’s a significant amount of factual error and projection happening, but slash doesn’t arise out of some sort of hostile impulse.

Practically speaking, slash exists virtually independently of Actual Gay Men. The only necessary thing that Actual Gay men and slash have in common is the idea that men can be attracted to one another emotionally and/or sexually. If Actual Gay Men were a significant factor for slash to exist (or if slash were a significant factor for Actual Gay Men), there would be more of a connection there.

Side note: one of the first slash writers I ever met is a gay man. We dated. He’s a fantastic guy and I love him to bits. I know several other men who write slash as well, and they run the gender identity and sexuality gamut. It’s delightful. It also brings me to my next point.

Fandom and the slash community are not a “women’s space.” That’s ridiculous. It may be a space where the population skews heavily female, and where the men involved sometimes struggle to be acknowledged (pet peeve: things which should be inclusive that start with the word “fangirls”), but fandom isn’t the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I can’t speak for all the men I know who write slash, but I’ve certainly never been made to feel unwelcome or like a guest instead of a full participant when I do get involved.

The appropriation aspect is a concern, especially when a group of not-gay-men use gay men to elevate themselves, as a defense, or to enhance their credibility, but like I said in my original post, some of this comes down to the matter of the numbers game and the fact that the actual material itself is not necessarily queer lit. The slash itself is not the problem. It’s the attitudes of the slashers who are appropriating the gay male experience and believe that writing slash is inherently activist/pro-gay who need adjustment and correction.

On the whole, though, I do agree with freifraufischer that there is a Problem in the slash subculture. I agree that the community is dominated by people writing experiences that are not their own (and doing so while giving their own wants more weight than someone else’s reality). I disagree about other elements of the argument, though, and I think she and I have different opinions about what slash and the mainstream m/m fiction markets are all about. And this is, I think, perfectly okay.

(Disclosure: My own experience is so atypical that it’s hard to write overtly to my own experience in anything by original fiction without diverging wildly from canon. Except when it isn’t. Transness is complicated, masculinity is complicated, conditioning and social experience is complicated. Blah, blah, blah.)

Does this make sense? Am I insane? Am I missing some critical point? Did I misunderstand this evening’s outpouring of rage because I’m a guy, or because my viewpoint on this problem is nearer the queer guy’s side rather than the female slasher’s side?

(Also, if freifraufischer is reading this: Michel Foucault. Post structuralism. Deconstruct. Simulacra. Sarrasine. Dyads. Authorial intent. Cyborg. Bingo.)

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com