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jlhI've said this before, but now I'm saying it again, with renewed conviction but also with much less of a defensive edge:
I am not a slash writer.
(Cue![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
epicyclical rolling her eyes at me and saying, "I've been telling you this all along!")
I've been edging toward this conclusion for a little while, though I admit I was fighting it a good deal, too. I can't explain clearly how I knew this; it might have been the response or the way certain kinds of debates about slash itself made no sense to me. There was a very specific kind of satisfaction that I wasn't giving the slashers no matter how much smut I wrote. Despite its main romantic pairing being two men, the primary audience for EWFS was always the het crowd, and not just because there was plenty of (ew) het within.
Then I read the latest essay on why het women write slash this weekend and it finally penetrated my (admittedly very thick) skull. When someone asks me, "Why do you write slash?" my answer is generally, "How could I not?" Among my very closest, longtime friends are gay men and lesbians; to write a story that didn't include them was, to me, unthinkable. But I wasn't thinking about writing these men as a vessel for my desires--or, any more of a vessel than any of the other characters, which I suppose is why there are so many of them. They didn't offer me a means of escape from the female, or the male, or the heterosexual; they simply were, because they exist.
Which, of course, means it isn't slash, but hopefully something closer to just gay fanfiction. My mistake was in not recognizing that these were two entirely different things. Part of the reason was the semi-regular rant about slash characters not being either recognizably gay or recognizably male, which I think threw me off the scent because, I begin to finally realize, writing about gay men isn't really what slash is trying to do in the first place.
(This is not to say, however, that one is necessarily better, or that slash is bad gay fanfic, or that slash aspires to be gay fanfic, but that slash is not and apparently in most instances isn't even trying to be gay fanfic. Where I went wrong was to write gay fanfic that in some ways was trying to be slash. That word "hopefully" is in there to say that at least it aspires to gay fanfiction, even if it doesn't necessarily achieve that status.)
Perhaps now I can move forward with a clearer sense of purpose and much less envy. It's so freeing to stop trying to be what you are not, isn't it?
I am not a slash writer.
(Cue
epicyclical rolling her eyes at me and saying, "I've been telling you this all along!")I've been edging toward this conclusion for a little while, though I admit I was fighting it a good deal, too. I can't explain clearly how I knew this; it might have been the response or the way certain kinds of debates about slash itself made no sense to me. There was a very specific kind of satisfaction that I wasn't giving the slashers no matter how much smut I wrote. Despite its main romantic pairing being two men, the primary audience for EWFS was always the het crowd, and not just because there was plenty of (ew) het within.
Then I read the latest essay on why het women write slash this weekend and it finally penetrated my (admittedly very thick) skull. When someone asks me, "Why do you write slash?" my answer is generally, "How could I not?" Among my very closest, longtime friends are gay men and lesbians; to write a story that didn't include them was, to me, unthinkable. But I wasn't thinking about writing these men as a vessel for my desires--or, any more of a vessel than any of the other characters, which I suppose is why there are so many of them. They didn't offer me a means of escape from the female, or the male, or the heterosexual; they simply were, because they exist.
Which, of course, means it isn't slash, but hopefully something closer to just gay fanfiction. My mistake was in not recognizing that these were two entirely different things. Part of the reason was the semi-regular rant about slash characters not being either recognizably gay or recognizably male, which I think threw me off the scent because, I begin to finally realize, writing about gay men isn't really what slash is trying to do in the first place.
(This is not to say, however, that one is necessarily better, or that slash is bad gay fanfic, or that slash aspires to be gay fanfic, but that slash is not and apparently in most instances isn't even trying to be gay fanfic. Where I went wrong was to write gay fanfic that in some ways was trying to be slash. That word "hopefully" is in there to say that at least it aspires to gay fanfiction, even if it doesn't necessarily achieve that status.)
Perhaps now I can move forward with a clearer sense of purpose and much less envy. It's so freeing to stop trying to be what you are not, isn't it?
