~~ the real gay, out of context.
Dec. 19th, 2003 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaSome things seem so obvious to me, I don't even bother talking about them. I mean-- it's just not something that occurs to me to really engage with, but finally I've cracked. You know how every now and them, someone will mention the level of gay culture or gay-male realism in slash, and whether or not one should aim for that or whether-- and here's the kicker-- it's colonising of the gay male experience for women to get too far into writing it as if they "knew" it.
I was just reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tinderblast's interesting challenge post urging people to write more non-penetrative sex 'cause it's not as popular as it could be among actual gay men, etc. And then I came across this word. "Colonising". And it just hurts my head, really. It really does. Who in the world thinks like that?
The very idea of segregating fiction into the "knows" and the "know-nots" just kind of blows my mind. I mean, this is fiction. Do I need to say more, really? How... how does this non-separation work in anyone's mind, and do I even want to know? I mean, I think when people say "fiction", they mean different things, though. Some people mean it to say "anything goes" because it's all lies, basically. That seems so lazy to me. I mean-- the very idea of writing something you're aware is a -lie- seems different from writing -fiction-. Fiction is based on the imagination of the writer, which admittedly isn't something that's true in the sense of "well, this happened exactly this way to these people". To some degree or another, all communication between people, all verbalization, involves fictionalization-- because the "truth", whatever -that- is, is just so -big-. How can you ever fully represent it?
What I don't usually see in terms of a position someone takes on the nature of fiction is somewhere in-between this quest for represenational realism & the celebration of utter frivolous fantasy. I think I would almost say that pure heedless fantasy isn't "fiction" any more than complete realism is. Projecting what you want directly into words & adding some extra decoration isn't writing a story, it's role-playing in the "sexual role-play" sense of what people do in the bedroom, to me. And yes, okay, the boundaries are v. fuzzy here & I -am- treading carefully, but I do see some sort of distinction regardless.
To me, storytelling has always clearly been about a wedding together of "reality" and "fantasy", truth and lies. You can't really shove it into either corner, and I don't really know why people try so hard. You can take both positions with ease, but it just hurts my head to think about it too much. One can say "all stories are true"-- and one can also say "every word out of anyone's mouth is automatically a lie". To some degree, I believe both positions are valid. The more interesting question-- to me-- is how is this particular story true, and -how- is it a fiction.
In terms of whether to include realistic gay-male behavior in fanfic written by non-gay-male writers:
The writer should probably ask themselves this question-- are they writing something they consider "real"? Are these characters actual people in their mind? Do they follow some sort of external logic? If so, then to some degree you owe it to them to have them behave like real people, whatever you think that entails-- it's the prerogative of the writer to decide. That said, as a reader, if I feel you're -not- talking about real people (even though it's not a "true story", whatever -that- means), I feel I have no incentive to actually -read-, because what actual relevance does it have to me, then? Or anyone who doesn't share the writer's exact context?
As far as the "colonisation" bit, that just gets my goat, right there. The very idea of "proprietary" material-- how offensive is that? Proprietary parts of the human experience? Say what??! We're so defensive about our identities we need to clutch them like teddy bears so they won't get taken away and abused without our consent?? Huh?
The only issue of colonisation I see being possible here is if the gay males were being silenced in their attempts to talk about the lives they know, while the straight females' accounts were being favored. You could say that that's what happened with black narrative in the US. So okay, that was something that needed fixing. This is clearly not going on with slash, so the whole dialogue here doesn't even make sense to me entirely. Why is this even an issue?
The women who say they're exploring their own sexuality issues through mock-up dummies they like to call "boys" just crack me up. I mean... okay, that's good, they're getting therapy for free. That's great. As far as whether that sounds like good writing... er... let me just yell a loud and resounding HELL NO. And that's all I'm going to say about that.
Realism in fiction is a style, which isn't necessarily applicable to every story. But reality itself isn't a style-- it's reality. What else can one say about that? How can one colonise or exploit or avoid something like reality?? I don't (want to) get it. The way boys act in reality? Ain't no way of getting around that, baby. On top of that, most of the power that stories have in general is in their ability to comment on real people's feelings & thoughts & issues. If a story isn't doing a thing to comment on those things, then it's an empty, barren sort of story. And if a story's only reason for existence is to comment on the body issues of some confused straight female or something, then it's a story with a very limited scope and potential, which could've done a lot more-- but didn't.
"Write what you know" is all well and good as a rule of thumb for beginning writers who are too lazy to do research and really -think- about things, but as a precept to rigorously follow it utterly baffles me. Mostly because then you're prescribing knowledge of what writers can know, and once you start in with that, where are you left? In the end, how does anyone know anything? How can one be sure that as a member of some "group" like lesbians or geeks or New Yorkers or college students, I know anything worth knowing about them? Does knowledge just automatically accumulate based on experience? Don't you need a-- well-- brain for these sorts of things? I'm confused.
Anyway, I think the whole idea of trying to legislate the degree of realism that "should" be included in slash fanfic is ridiculous, not to mention hopelessly doomed in execution. If one is talking about personal-level realism, it can only be a good thing, 'cause that means you're writing about someone who's recognizably a human being, which makes the story relevant to other human beings, that's all. Human beings with certain traits-- say, homosexuality-- in certain circumstances-- say, school-age in Britain-- tend to behave in certain observable ways. Keeping this in mind can only be a good thing-- something to broaden a writer's scope. Something to deepen a writer's understanding of what they're writing about. Something that makes the characters being used feel more -real-. More vivid. More alive.
More alive = more fun, I think.
I was just reading
tinderblast's interesting challenge post urging people to write more non-penetrative sex 'cause it's not as popular as it could be among actual gay men, etc. And then I came across this word. "Colonising". And it just hurts my head, really. It really does. Who in the world thinks like that? The very idea of segregating fiction into the "knows" and the "know-nots" just kind of blows my mind. I mean, this is fiction. Do I need to say more, really? How... how does this non-separation work in anyone's mind, and do I even want to know? I mean, I think when people say "fiction", they mean different things, though. Some people mean it to say "anything goes" because it's all lies, basically. That seems so lazy to me. I mean-- the very idea of writing something you're aware is a -lie- seems different from writing -fiction-. Fiction is based on the imagination of the writer, which admittedly isn't something that's true in the sense of "well, this happened exactly this way to these people". To some degree or another, all communication between people, all verbalization, involves fictionalization-- because the "truth", whatever -that- is, is just so -big-. How can you ever fully represent it?
What I don't usually see in terms of a position someone takes on the nature of fiction is somewhere in-between this quest for represenational realism & the celebration of utter frivolous fantasy. I think I would almost say that pure heedless fantasy isn't "fiction" any more than complete realism is. Projecting what you want directly into words & adding some extra decoration isn't writing a story, it's role-playing in the "sexual role-play" sense of what people do in the bedroom, to me. And yes, okay, the boundaries are v. fuzzy here & I -am- treading carefully, but I do see some sort of distinction regardless.
To me, storytelling has always clearly been about a wedding together of "reality" and "fantasy", truth and lies. You can't really shove it into either corner, and I don't really know why people try so hard. You can take both positions with ease, but it just hurts my head to think about it too much. One can say "all stories are true"-- and one can also say "every word out of anyone's mouth is automatically a lie". To some degree, I believe both positions are valid. The more interesting question-- to me-- is how is this particular story true, and -how- is it a fiction.
In terms of whether to include realistic gay-male behavior in fanfic written by non-gay-male writers:
The writer should probably ask themselves this question-- are they writing something they consider "real"? Are these characters actual people in their mind? Do they follow some sort of external logic? If so, then to some degree you owe it to them to have them behave like real people, whatever you think that entails-- it's the prerogative of the writer to decide. That said, as a reader, if I feel you're -not- talking about real people (even though it's not a "true story", whatever -that- means), I feel I have no incentive to actually -read-, because what actual relevance does it have to me, then? Or anyone who doesn't share the writer's exact context?
As far as the "colonisation" bit, that just gets my goat, right there. The very idea of "proprietary" material-- how offensive is that? Proprietary parts of the human experience? Say what??! We're so defensive about our identities we need to clutch them like teddy bears so they won't get taken away and abused without our consent?? Huh?
The only issue of colonisation I see being possible here is if the gay males were being silenced in their attempts to talk about the lives they know, while the straight females' accounts were being favored. You could say that that's what happened with black narrative in the US. So okay, that was something that needed fixing. This is clearly not going on with slash, so the whole dialogue here doesn't even make sense to me entirely. Why is this even an issue?
The women who say they're exploring their own sexuality issues through mock-up dummies they like to call "boys" just crack me up. I mean... okay, that's good, they're getting therapy for free. That's great. As far as whether that sounds like good writing... er... let me just yell a loud and resounding HELL NO. And that's all I'm going to say about that.
Realism in fiction is a style, which isn't necessarily applicable to every story. But reality itself isn't a style-- it's reality. What else can one say about that? How can one colonise or exploit or avoid something like reality?? I don't (want to) get it. The way boys act in reality? Ain't no way of getting around that, baby. On top of that, most of the power that stories have in general is in their ability to comment on real people's feelings & thoughts & issues. If a story isn't doing a thing to comment on those things, then it's an empty, barren sort of story. And if a story's only reason for existence is to comment on the body issues of some confused straight female or something, then it's a story with a very limited scope and potential, which could've done a lot more-- but didn't.
"Write what you know" is all well and good as a rule of thumb for beginning writers who are too lazy to do research and really -think- about things, but as a precept to rigorously follow it utterly baffles me. Mostly because then you're prescribing knowledge of what writers can know, and once you start in with that, where are you left? In the end, how does anyone know anything? How can one be sure that as a member of some "group" like lesbians or geeks or New Yorkers or college students, I know anything worth knowing about them? Does knowledge just automatically accumulate based on experience? Don't you need a-- well-- brain for these sorts of things? I'm confused.
Anyway, I think the whole idea of trying to legislate the degree of realism that "should" be included in slash fanfic is ridiculous, not to mention hopelessly doomed in execution. If one is talking about personal-level realism, it can only be a good thing, 'cause that means you're writing about someone who's recognizably a human being, which makes the story relevant to other human beings, that's all. Human beings with certain traits-- say, homosexuality-- in certain circumstances-- say, school-age in Britain-- tend to behave in certain observable ways. Keeping this in mind can only be a good thing-- something to broaden a writer's scope. Something to deepen a writer's understanding of what they're writing about. Something that makes the characters being used feel more -real-. More vivid. More alive.
More alive = more fun, I think.
