Don't Ask, Don't Tell

[jane_elliot]

I just finished a DADT fic that, like most of the genre, was about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (the rest of the genre, meanwhile, seems to be based around how much DADT made a gay soldier's life utter hell and tend to be depressing; I rarely read those).  It was a pretty good fic and I might have recced it, except for one thing: the author

Comments

[love_bug_54]

Thank you for this. I was in the US Navy in the 70s and I vividly recall a friend of mine (also in the Navy) being questioned by the Naval Investigative Service about a sailor she had dated some months earlier. He was suspected of being a homosexual and yes, they did ask her if they ever slept together. She was so intimidated by them that she didn't dare lie to protect him -- in other words, they never had sex -- but she felt awful about it afterward. She never suspected he was gay and liked him as a friend but he had been sent on to his next duty station so they lost touch. We never did know what happened to him. So yes, prior to DADT it was that bad

[jane_elliot]

I get the impression that DADT stories are a lot like the anatomically-improbable artwork in modern comic books. It's not that there aren't resources out there on how to draw people who look like, you know, *people*, but a lot of comic books artists learned to draw by copying comic books and each one made the muscles (and breasts) just a tiny bit bigger and the waists just a tiny bit smaller. After fifty years of this, the muscles (and breasts) are so big and the waists so small that the characters make Barbie look frumpy. Not to mention the fact that female superheros don't have enough room in their torsos for vital organs

[gwendolynflight]

Vital organs are for the weak!

I've never run across a fic in which DADT wasn't a step forward, but then SGA usually ignores such things as rules with gleeful abandon.

[jane_elliot]

I hit a couple of DADT fics in the SGA fandom that are the reason why I tend to avoid DADT fics these days:) Still, they're not all bad, especially the ones that are all about the repeal and less about making the implementation scary oppressive.

[love_bug_54]

Until your initial post I didn't even KNOW there was DADT fic!

I write Sherlock Holmes slash and am also a Sherlockian in real life. I can always tell if another writer has read the original stories or has only seen the Robert Downey movie, for example. That's ok if that's what they are writing, but otherwise they ain't fooling anyone.

If someone wanting to write a DADT fic wants to write about persecution or torture, all they have to do is google "Oscar Wilde" and read the transcripts of his trials and how he was subsequently treated in jail. DADT was wrong but compared to how things used to be it was Persecution "Lite."

[jane_elliot]

Heh. In some fandoms, there's a *lot* of it. I can't imagine how it could show up in Sherlock Holmes fic, though:)

To me, DADT was a step. A kind of stupid, ridiculous step, but sometimes (usually) it's easier to bring about tolerance and understanding with small steps rather than try to force it through all at one go. Maybe not as satisfying, but to me what matters most is that we get to tolerance in the end.