gay in the media, slash, and why trek fandom makes me wibble.
i'm quoting someone on my Dth reading page here, who said "some day i will write a post that's not about star trek, but it is not this day"-- really it's more like, some day i will not spend half my work day thinking about star trek, but it is not this day
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otoh i don't think anything will ever make fandoms stop generating. maybe 'ship fanaticism will decrease (which i think could only be a good thing-- i'm still scarred from witnessing the shipping wars in the HP fandom, lol, and that was years ago) and maybe it won't be such a big deal to be a fandom person anymore-- i mean even now i'm always running into people who i'm surprised to hear admit they read fanfiction or take part in RPGs and stuff like that. my friends and i joke about being in the 'fandom closet', and how it's not so much a closet you come out of but once you go in you realize it's actually the size of a ballroom b/c of all the other people who are secret fangeeks.
but idk, i think there'll always be people who want to expand on the worlds they see in movies and read about in books. i hope so, anyway. :}
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ship fantasicm reduce, yes please. I do remember the wank in HP fandom, though I was a pretty wide-eyed newbie and just wanted my H/D.. *cough* I kinda took up the habit of tormenting my university classes (doesn't matter which, lol) with fandom snippets and always throwing in the "but where are the homosexual people?" discussions, they are never quite willing to talk about it but I will make them!>D Because I believe talking about it, rising awareness and always, always pointing out that we are human beings, goddamnit, will be the most effective way to change this stupid ignorance!
'Fandom closed' I like this one!
Oh my, please forgive my rambling, it's been months since I last had a inspiring conversation like this and my inner fangirl is running circles and rejoicing in finally meeting others who think like I do! I firmly believe that one day we won't have to hide in closets anymore, oh, and we will have world peace, definitely!
and that's the wonderful thing about it, without people thinking outside the box we would still be crawling about trees and eating bugs. Yuck.
Wow, I really am having a "let's make the world a better place" moment right now. Sorry, lol!
And thanks for your answer!♥
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there is a /reason/ we slash, i think that's the most important part of what cimorene was saying in the post i linked to above-- slash is so prolific because there is almost no space for non-straight people and non-cisgendered people in mainstream media. you just mostly don't see them, unless they're the villain or they get killed off. yes, there's 'to wong foo', 'boys don't cry', 'imagine me & you'; there's 'queer as folk' and (much as i loathe it) 'the l word'. but the entire premise of those two shows, at least, is "look, gay people are just like straight people, they're people, did you know?" and it's infuriating that we /have/ to turn to our own devices to find a world where being gay is okay. it's absolutely ludicrous that we can imagine a world where it's possible to travel through a black hole and create an alternate reality, but still not possible to imagine two guys falling in love.
the portrayal of gay/non-straight women makes me mad, too, because i think it's still very stereotyped. part of why i hate the l word is the lack of diversity-- like okay, i went to a women's college, and you're telling me shane is the closest to a butch dyke you could put on screen? sorry, but i'm not buying it. i hate the portrayal of the gay women in most of those media i listed, and i find it hard to identify with them. and really that's what you want in a book or movie or tv show-- you want to be able to identify with the characters, you want to be able to sympathize with their hard choices and care enough about them to share in their triumphs.
fandom is doing a good job, i think, but like i said in my other post, i really would love to see all these talented authors put their brains to work getting themselves published and into the light of day. we need more tv pilots with gay main characters, more movie scripts where the gay characters don't get killed off and don't turn out to be traitors in the end, more books where a character's sexual preference is as much of a side-bar to the action of the plot as their hair color or how they take their coffee.
i, too, was the token "it's about gay sex!" person in a few of my college classes; in my shakespeare class i remember the prof would always try to lead the class to be thinking about a passage in a certain way, and if they didn't get it he'd just turn to me and i'd go "GAY SEX." (cus oh god, the gay in shakespeare, i could write a thesis, lol)
it really is all about raising awareness and just VISIBILITY, you know, like hi, just because i'm a gay girl does not mean that that's the sum total of what i am. when nancy farmer was writing 'annie on my mind', she said the main thing she wanted to do was to show people that gay people fall in love just like straight people-- the whole "it's about love, not about sex" thing that's such a huge part of why society sees being gay as something subversive, drives me up a fucking wall-- and we need more authors doing that, showing that gay people are normal, within the entire spectrum of "look, here is a gay person whose world is shattered because their mother/brother/child died" to "look, here is a gay person owning the asses of 500000 zombies because they're a BAMF".
i now want a bumper sticker that says "gay people fight zombies too". XD
....are you sorry you got me started yet? lolol! ♥ ♥ ♥
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