I feel like fandom, and slash particularly, have been instrumental in helping me grow as a person, as a bisexual person and as a writer. When I see posts that can be summarized as "slash is inherently anti-gay" or "female erasure in slash shows it's misogynist", it feels like my last ten years are being sneered at
This. I think a lot of us are reacting that way, to judge by the outpouring of rage that that one post where the poster declared that slash was anti-gay and that all bisexual slashers were lying liars who lie got (one of the only times I've ever knowingly abused anon commenting, because I'd have had to be poltie and respectful and not use cuss words if I were signed in).
I feel like some of this debate is getting mixed up with ongoing intra-LGBTQ issues of bi, pan, ace, and trans/genderqueer people getting ignored in the wider LGBTQ community, too. It happened during Lambda Fail, when a few people's legitimate concerns that the new awards policy would lead to them getting erased or left out (because that had happened before, in other LGBTQ venues) were swallowed up in the general "What do you MEAN I can't get an award oh NOES! It's not FAIR!" fail and dismissed as concern-trolling. And it's happening now, when slashers objecting to bisexual erasure, asexual erasure, to the gender binary implicit in much of the debate, etc. are being labelled as derailing. And when people say that things like paradox-dragon's post are derailing, and are issues that need to be put on hold for later...
We get told that often enough in the real world. Even if it's true, and I'll allow for the sake of argument that it might be, "your concerns can wait until later," is something some sections of the LGBTQ community hear too often in RL ("we'll add transphobia to this anti-discrimination bill later..."), and I suspect that for some of us, it's an automatic rage button, the same way "bisexual women aren't really queer (enough)" is for me.
For all that I'm not heterosexual, I'm still not a part of the LGBTQAI community. There's a lot of reasons for that: I'm not welcome there, it's not where I found my support when I came out, I don't have friends there, etc and so forth. I support various political goals, but that doesn't mean anything.... I am writing about characters in the same limbo I'm in, where I'm not straight but I'm not of the LGBTQAI community.
I do identify as LGBTQ, but I'm also not really a part of the LGBTQ culture that people seem to mean when they refer to the LGBTQ community -- my queer friends are all through slash fandom, I don't go to any local queer hang-outs and instead spend weekends staying at home with my girlfriend, I've only ever belonged to any LGBTQ groups or hung out with any non-slasher, non-fandom queer women when I was at college, because fandom is my main social outlet. And because I have limited first hand experience with wider LGBTQ culture, and because the characters I write about live what appear on the surface to be heteronormative lives in canon, I don't ground them in it, either. Because I don't know how to. I don't know that tis is a problem in fanfic, where the characters have to follow canon at least a little, but I don't know what I would do about that if I went pro. Write historical fiction and fantasy novels about girls instead of modern-setting m/m stuff, I guess (original fiction, after all, is pretty much designed for exorcising all one's Mary Sue impulses).
Everyone who knows Marvel on my flist will know of seanchai & elspethdixon, but I feel like I should point them out as a pair of non-porny slash authors doin' it very right
*blushes all over the place* I feel weird commenting on this, because it seems immodest or something, but since your post is listed on linkspam's delicious links,I feel like I ought to point out for non-Marvel audiences that elspethdixon and seanchai are a) women and b) dating/engaged/common-law-married/whatever, and c) don't write explicit sex because we kind of suck at it (as in, "oh Jesus, I have channeled the soul of bad Harlequin novels and it is awful. Let's go for a tasteful fade to black now" combined with "gah, why is it so hard to descibe people kissing? This is harder to block than fight scenes! Let's just cut to the post-coital snuggling.")
no subject
This. I think a lot of us are reacting that way, to judge by the outpouring of rage that that one post where the poster declared that slash was anti-gay and that all bisexual slashers were lying liars who lie got (one of the only times I've ever knowingly abused anon commenting, because I'd have had to be poltie and respectful and not use cuss words if I were signed in).
I feel like some of this debate is getting mixed up with ongoing intra-LGBTQ issues of bi, pan, ace, and trans/genderqueer people getting ignored in the wider LGBTQ community, too. It happened during Lambda Fail, when a few people's legitimate concerns that the new awards policy would lead to them getting erased or left out (because that had happened before, in other LGBTQ venues) were swallowed up in the general "What do you MEAN I can't get an award oh NOES! It's not FAIR!" fail and dismissed as concern-trolling. And it's happening now, when slashers objecting to bisexual erasure, asexual erasure, to the gender binary implicit in much of the debate, etc. are being labelled as derailing. And when people say that things like paradox-dragon's post are derailing, and are issues that need to be put on hold for later...
We get told that often enough in the real world. Even if it's true, and I'll allow for the sake of argument that it might be, "your concerns can wait until later," is something some sections of the LGBTQ community hear too often in RL ("we'll add transphobia to this anti-discrimination bill later..."), and I suspect that for some of us, it's an automatic rage button, the same way "bisexual women aren't really queer (enough)" is for me.
For all that I'm not heterosexual, I'm still not a part of the LGBTQAI community. There's a lot of reasons for that: I'm not welcome there, it's not where I found my support when I came out, I don't have friends there, etc and so forth. I support various political goals, but that doesn't mean anything.... I am writing about characters in the same limbo I'm in, where I'm not straight but I'm not of the LGBTQAI community.
I do identify as LGBTQ, but I'm also not really a part of the LGBTQ culture that people seem to mean when they refer to the LGBTQ community -- my queer friends are all through slash fandom, I don't go to any local queer hang-outs and instead spend weekends staying at home with my girlfriend, I've only ever belonged to any LGBTQ groups or hung out with any non-slasher, non-fandom queer women when I was at college, because fandom is my main social outlet. And because I have limited first hand experience with wider LGBTQ culture, and because the characters I write about live what appear on the surface to be heteronormative lives in canon, I don't ground them in it, either. Because I don't know how to. I don't know that tis is a problem in fanfic, where the characters have to follow canon at least a little, but I don't know what I would do about that if I went pro. Write historical fiction and fantasy novels about girls instead of modern-setting m/m stuff, I guess (original fiction, after all, is pretty much designed for exorcising all one's Mary Sue impulses).
Everyone who knows Marvel on my flist will know of seanchai & elspethdixon, but I feel like I should point them out as a pair of non-porny slash authors doin' it very right
*blushes all over the place* I feel weird commenting on this, because it seems immodest or something, but since your post is listed on linkspam's delicious links,I feel like I ought to point out for non-Marvel audiences that