writing emo? & between 'fabulousness and outness' and slash

[reenka]

It's odd... and I wonder if other people who've written slash for awhile feel like this: reading this op-ed piece on Johnny Weir (the figure skater) in Washington Post, it just struck me that I'd really like to explore this whole... what it really means to be 'queer in the real world' thing. In my writing, I mean. I dunno. It's like... there should be more space between all-out 'queer lit' (not interested) and something beyond romance-fantasy (getting tired). I don't want to write some cliche coming out story or write about 'typical' gay men (or any typical anyone), but. Especially this quote struck me in particular:
    One of the privileges of modern celebrityhood is a comfort zone between fabulousness and outness, and it is here that athletes, pop stars and actors who seem as if they might be the slightest bit gay go to live.
    The safest refuge is to equate being gay with a set of sex acts only and not address it as part of an identity.


Specifically, that differentiation Weir himself makes between his 'private' life where he fucks (whomever, but I'd place money on men) and his 'public' life where he skates, and how false and sad that boundary seems to me. Not the sex-life-is-private bit (which it can be, depending on the person), but the relegating of orientation into sexuality only, a sort of... kink. I mean, you couldn't really get away with saying that about love, could you? Because while who you love may be personal, it's usually no more personal than your hopes and dreams, your ambitions, your personal history-- things closeted celebrities would share readily enough, generally, right. Things you're not ashamed of.

It's like, it's most publically accepted these days that queerness is a sexual identity; when we're not talking about gay marriage, we're talking about 'fucking whoever he wants to fuck', and love+dating+romance, so intrinsic to hetero discussions, come second or not at all. And then there's slash, where love comes first, like 'loving who he wants to love' and the sex part is either an afterthought ('so of course he also wants so fuck because he loves him'), a prelude or a consequence, somehow. I guess in slash, it can't really be about -overall- sexual orientation because generally even in porn, the character wants to fuck another specific character and no one else, which is inherently romantic. It's like this divide in perceiving the individual first vs. perceiving their gender first. (And clearly I'm on the 'side' of seeing the individual and do think that being attracted to 'other men in general' just seems dull, but at the same time some history/context is what gives that individual choice depth, also....) It's frustrating, 'cause hetero love-stories are so transparent in this respect, so you don't have to go against the current of gender; it's assumed the character also likes other women (in a theoretical sense) and can like that one woman above all others and never want another, all at the same time.

Anyway, for a moment, reading that essay, I felt like by (usually) separating my fic characters' sexual identity & their overall identity (which I'd prefer/try to leave as close to the canon source as possible), I may be perpetuating this boundary. In reality, it -does- matter; I mean, it matters to me. Not that every story could or should 'address' the whole coming out thing or any queer 'issue', but rather it matters that any romance story focusing on that character's identity sort of needs to contain the awareness that their sexual identity is part of their overall self. If they compartmentalize it, then that's what they're doing, but that too is a reflection on both their relationship to their sexuality & their overall personality.

The truth is, I just want to write about a gay boy (like Johnny), who doesn't just do 'gay things' but also does gay things, or things that 'read' as gay, and I feel a little hemmed in by the fact that the furthest you could go with most canons is that the guy is 'straight-acting'. I think the homoeroticism of straight-identified men/boys is fascinating, obviously-- that's why I love slash in large part-- but I do think there are interesting things to be found in the other modes of queer identity, like the weird midway zone between 'fabulousness & outness', for instance.
    I mean, this isn't to say I haven't seen fics that project that sort of vibe onto an existing character in a fandom (like Draco or even Blair... good god, even Jim), but it almost always rings false & OOC. It's very hard to do it subtly enough to 'pass' in regards to canon, to slip between the cracks. So what I'm saying is, I sort of feel constricted by the limitations of slash as a genre in terms of what sort of story I can see myself believably telling. And yet I have this confusing attachment to the boundaries of slash, because while I like the existence of queer protagonists in fantasy novels these days & I realize some 'original slash' online is well-written, these never quite capture what I read boys together for, somehow. In fantasy books, usually 'cause the focus is more on the plot than the relationship/identity-angst stuff, and in most original slash I don't build up enough affection for the characters to read much about them, which is a sort of Catch-22, I guess.

In a way, what I want is a more realistic sort of yaoi (ie, most yaoi manga fixes the 'too much plot' issue even when it has a fantasy/other plot & maybe I bond more with the characters faster 'cause I can see them & that overcomes the clichedness of the characterizations that throws me off in fiction-only stuff).
    In any case, this is more about my writing preferences and wanting to write new things, I guess. Feeling like I've been ignoring the ramifications on the identities of the boys I've written because it's been easier not to tell that story, which sucks in the sense of somehow cheating the characters. I guess what bothers me about commercial queer lit is that it's -just- about Teh Gay part of the equation (ie, focusing on that one social aspect of identity & unequivocally uniting sexual & overall self), the opposite of the way fantasy novels tend to be like '& btw, they're gay' (like, there must be some middle ground between gender-blindness and homophobia, that sort of thing). None of it feels right.

I dunno, I'm just rambling on. :P
    I think it just struck me... realistically speaking, we're usually implying that most of the characters we slash are or have been closet cases (not like Johnny Weir-- because, I mean, how can you match a figure-skating queen??-- but still). And, you know, I think being in the closet is something that's... interesting, an interesting thing to add as a dimension to one's characterization. Like, what does it -mean-? Why are they? Like, they don't even have to come out, but I'm still starting to feel odd that I'm writing all these fics where closetedness is a non-issue. Not to be realistic vs. unrealistic, but just because-- hey, repression can be sexy :P All these little behavioral cues that gay men somehow apparently pick up (and I honestly have no idea how that works-- someone enlighten me)-- those are also interesting. Not that every-- or any-- character needs to share them, especially seeing as it'd be OOC most of the time, but these things aren't negative/boring/unrelated to the slash vibe the way cruising/disease issues/discrimination would be. Y'know, not so much the social-image stuff and more the individual psychology stuff that gets much less attention, maybe.

I just... okay, I basically feel like Draco is Very Gay (in my head) and so is Remus for a lot of people, but I myself couldn't seem to write him that way even in my 'Queer As Malfoy' fic, which turned out to be mostly parody-- and I don't see many believably (subtly) gay Lupins, either. It's like, I'm fine with ignoring the social consequences and concentrating on the personal & the romantic, but you have self-identity issues that define a person aside from their central relationship. And you rarely get 'just Draco' stuff in H/D fics and 'just Remus' stuff in S/R that involves developing sexual identity issues shown through behavior rather than emo introspection. It's those subtle (or not-so-subtle) behavioral cues that make one want to slash in the first place sometimes, isn't it? And yet I usually find these conspicuously absent (even in over-the-top omg-he's-so-gay characterizations, the character may be femmed to high heaven, but acts more like a stereotypical girl than a gay man, y'know? and... er... there is a difference. -.-)

...No, I don't know what I'm saying, why? ^^;;;
~~

Man. Sometimes I'm just. I mean, I don't think I'm a productive member of fandom (...though what is that? eh) but wandering out a little even onto the general interwebs just makes me want to huddle back to lj, having seen the error of my ways. -.- Maybe it's just that I'll always be a fangirl even when I'm not in a fandom or communing with the hive fangirl mind... but the point is, I feel so much more kinship so much more often just in terms of how we talk and view the world & what we think is important (ie, boyz, books, & of course Teh Buttsex... oh wait. well, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN). It's cold & alien out there, man. Cold. And. ALIEN :(

In retrospect, those guys on the craigslist 'platonic' section are kinda hilarious, in a sad, sad, pathetic loser sort of way. If I wasn't in fandom, though, I wouldn't know just how pathetic the average 'intelligent' guy's ideas of women really are, y'know? Like, uh, the truth is that most girls aren't... uh, all that geeky or if they are, not all that free with their sexuality, yes, but to go from that to 'omg, all you womens are so unintelligent and frigid, I may as well just be friends!!1' is just. Haha, yeah. -.- It's sort of funny to think that I spend a lot of time reading/writing about men and really, most of the time I'm glad there are so few in fandom ^^;; Mostly because explaining things I consider obvious to anyone with a minimum of emotional intelligence just feels pointless and draining? I dunno. It feels like babysitting. :/ Though obviously there are emotionally intelligent men... somewhere that isn't on the internet, usually :>
    I know, I know. -.-;; I say that, but what is (the near constant) wank if not an expression of utter lack of emotional intelligence? Blech.

...I just feel weirdly nostalgic and maudlin again, don't mind me. Reading thechiapet's old post on her H/D fic characterization pet-peeves and the fic kinks one reminded me of my '02 self and I was like 'awww'. I'm still like that at heart... which is probably why sane people avoid me, I guess, but anyway.... :>

Comments

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can definitely see the merit of raising these issues in the context of fic -- I mean, that's where you take the specificity of a character seriously, that's where you really do take the time to answer all the questions as truly as you can. And I think you're right, also, that people differ in how much or how self-consciously they do or don't play off existing cultural stereotypes.

I guess in a sense that's what "serious" as opposed to "genre" fic is for, though no doubt I will get in trouble for making that distinction and should call it a tendency rather than a strict dichotomy! :)

I don't know, I think your own cautions about fandom/slash are well-warranted if you're talking about realism, or realistic character analysis. Slash does tend to fetishize romanticism, and ignore the whole "coming out" thing, and pretend that "gender doesn't matter - it's about loving the individual" which I think is far from a universal truth. So it's sort of quicksandy to start from there if your object is realism.

I think one of the reasons it may be so hard to capture people who are "in that zone between fabulousness and outness" is that they themselves are already in the space you're trying to inhabit as a writer -- they're already doing a meta-meta- take on themselves, on cultural stereotypes, on other people's responses, and they're performing constantly, passionately, with great sophistication. So I suppose you could depict them in a fic if you opened up that whole project, got into the spirit of it, and made what was going on clear for the reader. But I think for a really interesting character, it would be hard to be "smarter enough" to really get outside them as well as inside them and say something definitive about them. It would be a project worthy of the most serious art-literature, maybe. (And now I'm trying to think of someone who does this, and I'm sure I will as soon as I sign off.)

Johnny Weir is a pretty stereotypical queen, y'know :>

Well, so is Gore Vidal. And he's not shy about discussing his past conquests. But he insists that in 30 years of companionship with Howard Austen, their relationship was never sexual. So go figure! People are hard to nail down. :)

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I suppose that's what interests me-- it clicked when you said 'performance', because that's really what it is, a sexual(ized) performance of self. I'm fascinated by characters who do that, who project identity as an image, partly because it's so alien to me and horrifies me a bit what with my eternal fixation with authenticity. So you can see how I'd be obsessed with finding the 'authentic self' in a character who's so flamboyantly determined to mask or dress it up, y'know? Heh.

I do think it'd be a huge project to do it honestly & well, if anything because it's quick-sandy just to write any self-aware/self-conscious character for a writer who's already too given to meta in their fic like me :> Before I wrote slash, my fic protagonists were always too self-aware, but in a bad way, and it was very difficult to get outside them at all 'cause their self-perception was so strong and influenced so many things. Like, when I write third-person-limited, I tend to write a very -strong- version that skews reality quite a bit....

Still, I've known characters like that, mostly in yaoi. Actually, I think you'd enjoy Koi ga Bokura wo Yurusu Hani if you could get yourself to read any yaoi manga :> One of its main characters, Yamazaki, is definitely a queen in the performative sense (or rather, he's both a queen and someone who performs/play-acts a lot, whether or not the two are related), but at the same time he's a lot deeper & more subtle as a character. I think playing him off Fujio, the 'straight man' (who really isn't) allowed his subtleties of performance to become more transparent, especially because Fujio ('the best friend' who was always unspokenly more) was so good at poking through his defenses to the meat of him. I definitely do think of Koi ga Bokura as 'art-literature', btw :D :D :D

I guess I'm always lost in the shuffle with the 'realism' question because my object is character-realism, not social realism, which is what most people mean-- and in slash character-realism is more about canon than 'average' or typical behavior. I want to capture more of how real boys & men are, and yet I want to retain the romance focus-- I mean, I do think orientation is about romantic desire & not just sexual (though I think it can be either/or and also both, depending on the individual). I've seen that scale somewhere on how you can be homo-romantic or homosexual or both & same with hetero, hehe, and that really works with how I see people are.

I think when you're a 'stereotypical queen' intentionally or as a part of a self-performance, the stakes are different, though. It's like, normally I don't stereotype/label anyone, but sometimes they just label themselves, y'know? In that sense, it seems disingenuous (outside the reporter context) to say 'sexuality is separate'. Like, I'm still more interested in love-connected-with-sexuality, but I want to see/write about a good range of permutations thereof, I suppose :>

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Warning: babbling ahead, because I'm just thinking out loud. But your comment about being committed to authenticity makes me wonder what "authenticity" can actually mean, given the contradictions and pluralism in anyone's actual character.

I mean, we all have this platonic ideal of a personality as a harmonious whole, or at least as a set of traits firmly subordinated to a dominant will or choice. And maybe it's a kind of personal or spiritual accomplishment to establish that kind of harmony in your own head, but I suspect many of us have a ways to go, there . . .

So what's going on with the "old queen" for example? There's the exaggerated embrace of a stereotype that at the same time expresses a kind of disdain for it, or at least a transcendence of it. There's self-loathing but also pride in mastering self-loathing. There's displacement of spontaneous emotions and feelings but also tragic acceptance of the need to make that displacement. Is there anything you can say about an old queen that he isn't already saying about himself? And if you try to reduce or eliminate the contradictions in his character, are you coming closer to his "authentic" self or just fooling yourself, crudely oversimplifying?

Maybe that's what it means to be "self-aware, in a bad way" -- to have too strong a theory about what you're about, to be too invested in eliminating and reconciling the contradictions.

So one take on "authenticity" is that it's not a search for anyone's essence -- especially not their "secret" or "hidden" essence, since positing such a thing in the first place is a way of rhetorically undercutting the complexity that's actually there and actually interesting -- but a kind of faithful, patient tracing out of all the contradictions. So the goal of understanding a character is a little like understanding a football game -- here are the forces, here are the possibilities, set them off playing against each other and see what happens in any given circumstance. And no one really can predict the outcome or create a rule for it; that's the whole fun of following the game. Where you end up, again, is not having grasped an "essence" but having followed, having intelligently comprehended, just for the fun of it, something complicated and dramatic and never completely predictable.

I don't know. See: babbling; I warned you! So now I'm thinking about boys and romance, and it seems to me that again the fascination is in the contradiction. Because sure, boys are susceptible to romance, but at the same time it's a very non-boy thing, so the fun is in seeing what they make of the tension, no? And not in reconciling or eliminating the tension, but just letting it continue to stir things around, letting it continue to wreak havoc on themselves and the people around them. No peace, no point of rest, but lots of adventures, emotional and otherwise!

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I'm feeling so embarrassed right now, I was about to reply & then... ahaha was unable to stop reading a reeeeeally over-the-top emo-romance-pr0n H/D ficlet Oh man. Sooo OOC and horrible, why am I reading it -.-;;; Augh. I need brain bleach. *headdesk* This isn't really romance though, just as they aren't really boys... but I dunno. I guess it depends on what one means by 'romance'; I mean, it's not like its very nature has to be over-the-top & Hallmarky and saccharine with swooning and flowers & hearts. Or like chick-flicks. For some reason I'm thinking of The Wonder Years, hahaha :D I do agree the fun is (at least partly) in the tension of boys being emotional doofuses (I mean, it's bad enough with a girl... two equally big doofuses can't be good). I love the continuous tension though (at least until they grow up enough to be like 'oh wait, I'm being an idiot... I should really stop that'). I definitely wouldn't want to eliminate tension, but isn't that anti-romance? Even in straight romances, there's tension in the fact that basically most boys are dumb about... certain things and girls are impatient and needy; I mean, I was looking at anniversary-related Hallmark cards at the supermarket today ('cause I'm easily distracted) and man... most of them are like 'hey, so we know that Mr Hubby isn't really into all this romance shit while Ms Wifey has Expectations, but you must be married for SOME reason, right? riiiight?' heh.

Still, I think that not all boys are like that; some are more like Keats than the Fonze, y'know, young poet or rock star wannabes everywhere, right, all hormonal longing and obsessing over The One They Can Never Have and so on and so forth :D And some are full of spit and vinegar and like to go around pretending they own the world but are really in denial about what they want emotionally (or who!) & inevitably that catches up to them one day & BAM! The biggest playboy turns out to be Mr Brings Home The Bacon :> Or something a little more appetizing, but anyway my point is that I'm not sure if it's a 'non-boy thing', even though in one sense it's not-- in another sense it's more that communicating it well isn't a boy thing, generally, though sometimes it is & you get emo boys who pine and skulk and take out their unloved emo rage on inanimate objects, etcetc :D :D Ahh, so cute. :>

I'm sort of torn between totally being with you on the 'faithful, patient tracing'-- yes!-- that's totally what I meant-- and thinking that with the more repressed 'manly' types, there really -is- a hidden essence. It really depends on the personality, I guess? I think the nature and mode of authenticity depends on the character; in the case of the conscious performance-artist, the mask is as important as what's 'beneath', if anything could be said to be 'beneath', and I've always thought so! So then, by 'authenticity' in this case I merely mean 'honesty'-- as in, an approach of total disclosure, whatever the contradictions or complexities it may produce. I don't need consistency (being woefully inconsistent), merely disclosure. I don't really want to sum up or condense, only find a pattern-- though you're right that 'self-aware, in a bad way' means having 'too strong a theory', yes! It's when you let your need for understanding get the better of you, and you see patterns where there are none, or not just patterns but rules. Generally, in real life, it takes quite a bit for me to see 'rules', but in fiction I get carried away with the certainties sometimes. At the same time, for some people it's just in-character to possess these certainties about themselves, whether or not they're true, and shape their world accordingly, through the application of Will.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I don't think 'real' personality is a whole, or a product of Will-- I know by myself that I'm a seething mass of frivolous details and digressions and contradictions and tangents within tangents-- but at the same time I do think some people are much more unified than I am, much more consciously forceful in creating themselves as a whole. Like, I don't think we're naturally a whole, but some people do have a certain strength of will, a drive to create themselves & shape their world. I'm fascinated with those types, too :D They tend to be pretty dominating and semi-repellent to me 'cause they're usually abrasive and -wrong- about many things, but I also can't help but admire that sort of Will. The chameleon performer type is quite interesting when paired with the dominant Creator, though, seeing as they're such different animals-- hehe, this makes me think of one of my all-time favorite pairings, the Hebrew God & Lucifer :> :> :> Lucifer was really the first self-creator performer queen, I think :D IN MY HEAD, THIS IS DEFINITELY TRUE :D I think God was very proud. Ahem, speaking of going off on tangents and thinking aloud... *blush* 'Tis what I always do :>

I love the way you painted the Old Queen as the Trickster archetype, somehow-- it's very endearing :D Or maybe that's just my wacky associativeness again :> I did say I was fascinated because it was alien, but wanting authenticity in this case is just wanting purity, not simplicity-- 'cause I can separate the two. Sometimes the performance is 'real' and sometimes it's an obfuscation, a deception. Even masks are important & always telling, but I'd rather keep only the masks that they are unable to live without, and then see what's left :> It's the sadist in me :D