slash vs gay: brief musings

[lobelia321]

childeproof asked how do I distinguish slashy writing from gay writing. Here are some brief initial musings on the subject:

I said in another post that Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty was definitely a gay novel, not a slashy novel. And Sheela na Gig asked me to elaborate:

Slashy vs gay?

To me, Hollinghurst is like a researchy glimpse into gay culture because he is very good at describing it, unflinchingly, unsentimentally. And there are things in his books that do not, simply do NOT figure in slash: e.g. campy queens; men cottaging and having sex after sex after sex with fly-by-night-partners; detailed and loving descriptions of foreskins, penises and sphincters; the very word 'sphincter'; love as a problematic and complicated thing. He's too tasteful to describe 'thrusting' (which, in my admittedly limited experience, features large in gay porn) but he does pay attention to 'size' (how many inches?). Slashers couldn't give a fuck about size or about any of those other things. They are romantics through and through and it's all about either the overwhelming love or the overwhelming angst. Gay culture features not at all or as a marginal glimpse in fanfic, as does coming out or secrecy due to societal pressures. Men in slash love men because they love those individuals; they can't help themselves. This is why I found Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain definitely slashy: two straight men who are overcome by this thing that is bigger than the both of them, their passionate love for each other. The love is transported through the sex. That is slash.

In gay writing, sex and love are separate. This is, I think, actually closer to how men operate. They're from Mars and all that. Slashers feminify the men. I write feminify because we don't feminise them; we like the manly. Well, not all of us do but the manliness of the manly is a big drawing point for many. But what we love about the manly is how it fights with itself to overcome its manliness and admit and submit to the power of lurv.

Comments

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

I might be completely off the rocker here, but isn't 'slash' the term for same-sex pairing in fanfiction, while 'gay literature' (if that's the term, I'm not sure) refers to original fiction? Because I've definitely seen Hollinghurst-esque concern/style/themes in slash fanfiction, though I have to agree it's not as frequent as the romantic take.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I have rambled about this elsewhere (can't remember where; in a post or tig a few days ago). Technically, yes, slash is same-sex fanfiction. But I'm taking it further here and proposing that there is a slashiness beyond fanfic slash, that it extends into origfic as well. I mean, we all use it in that sense already, don't we? When we see a movie or two football commentators on TV and go, "Omg, how *slashy* is that!" (Note football commentator icon.)

Now where have you seen Hollinghursty fanfic? *is intrigued*

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

Now where have you seen Hollinghursty fanfic? *is intrigued*

Oh, sorry, no - my bad. I meant the kind of writing style and word use...

'Slash' as the realm of the romantics... I really don't know. It does seem to be a large phenomenon in a lot of internet writing, and would certainly be fascinating to see in what direction the use of the word is moving. The 'romantic' strand is certainly much more present and obvious (having to do almost as much with rating as with genre, I suppose), and what comes to mind most immediately at the mention of 'slash' (for me too, I think), is perhaps H/D and S/R romance rather than higher-rated, explicit writing...

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I meant the kind of writing style and word use
Yes, yes, that's what I meant, too! *g*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

P.S. Oh, and the higher-rated slash can be incredibly romantic...

[bunnysquee.livejournal.com]

hmm, i thought gay writing was about, well, gay boys, real or fictional. and slash is pairing up 2 boys whose sexual identity is unknown, say Dom or Orli, or who are straight, say, Bean or Viggo.

i think brokeback mountain is gay writing since it is about discovering their true sexual identity.

omw! i don't think i have ever disagreed with you. *runs away*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

omw! i don't think i have ever disagreed with you.
I am still getting over the shock.

*self-administers valium*

i thought gay writing was about, well, gay boys, real or fictional. and slash is pairing up 2 boys whose sexual identity is unknown,
Oh yes, I completely agree that the non-gayness is precisely the slashiness. Or for me it is, anyway. Which is why I find rl Ian or rl Craig so profoundly unslashy.

i think brokeback mountain is gay writing since it is about discovering their true sexual identity.
No, it's not about discovering their true sexual identity; it's about discovering their true love. They don't fuck on Brokeback Mountain, discover their identity and go off to fuck hundreds of other men. They say at various points how they are overwhelmed by this big thing, 'i wish i knew how to quit you', 'i ain't no queer', this is just between the two of us, i ain't been fucking nobody else. Now Jack Twist may be lying about not fucking anybody else, there's a suggestion that he is, but the main thing about that story is their love.

So that's why it's slashy. Because they are both married, too.

And in slash, too, it's rarely about discovering your gay identity. Even when they do sort of do that, it's never emphasised. It's always about their attraction to each other and about love. Because gay identity is generally so un-monogamous. Male het identity is, too, actually.

[bunnysquee.livejournal.com]

*also self-administers valium* :-D

i think it's a bit about their sexual identity too, since they are straight and married blah blah blah, yet they love each other enough to get it on. so that means they are not strictly straight ... am i being a pedant? i can see if they were, say, in the army or in prison, and there were no other sexual options, and they fucked. okay, i guess, yes, they can still be straight. but this has love all intertwined in it.

let me go home and read the thing again. i might be talking through my hat for all i know.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Yes, they 'discover' their sexual preference, I guess but it's completely and utterly intertwined with their love, as you say. And that is what is slashy about it. We think that is quite standard but in gay writing this is not the case. Sex is not at all entwined with love. That is just what we slashy women think. For us, the discovery of sexual identity may be a sort of by-product of love or a prerequisite of love (which is what it totally is in Brokeback Mountain). But in gay writing, love exists quite separately from sex. Hollinghurst's men fuck like bunnies: scores of different partners. Proulx's men fuck like bunnies but only each other.

[tvillingar.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I haven't read either of the books in question so I've nothing to say about them but have had my forays to gay porn in the internet. And let me just say how boring it is to read about how many inches the characters have. First of all, no-one's going to remember it after few paragraphs and secondly, who cares? How many people either us knows who pull out a tape measure in bed?

Also, I grew up with the metric system and figuring out inches and feet has always been problematic. I've still no idea how tall the hobbits really are since I can't turn the measurements into centimetres.

[tvillingar.livejournal.com]

Of course, now that I look at this in the morning, I realize I'm talking specifically about gay porn. Just ignore me.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Who cares? Exactly! Men care!

[dolores.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you wouldn't have written the above if you hadn't intended on debate, and so I hope you won't feel insulted if I disagree with rather a lot of what you say!

Whilst I agree with you that gay culture is not usually represented in slash (unless the fandom is Queer as Folk of course) I think you've rather over-generalised in your assessment of gay writing.

I'd certainly make a distinction between purely 'erotic' gay fiction and slash: there is the tendency of the one to be focussed on the physical compared to the other, but by the same token I've read plenty of slash PWPs where little or no emotion is involved and also works of "gay fiction" where emotion and love are integral parts of both the narrative and the characters' sex lives.

And, yes, there is a culture of promiscuity in the gay community, up to a point, and so there are novels which reflect that - but they are not the only type of gay novel just as camp queens and cottagers are not the only type of gay man. There are some briliant authors who can blend sex and emotion very well, and the two concepts certainly aren't mutually exclusive in gay fiction. Read Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley, The Venice Adriana by Ethan Mordenn, The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh, E M Forster's Maurice, any of Armistead Maupin's work, any of Patrick Gale's work... I'm sure there are lots of others.

In any case the boundaries between gay fiction and slash are pretty blurred. For me slash is partly about usurping the predominance of heterosexual characters in tv shows, films, etc., to bring an element of gayness to an all-too straight world. That said, I do recognise a lot of the themes you highlight. But then that's the rules of the game: we play around with characters we didn't invent, and we have to find ways of getting people into sexual relationships that are still believable.

With RPS there's even more blurring because we often only have their public personas and it's usually easier to adapt those than it is the personas of fictional characters.

And themes like overcoming societal pressures to conform, the expression of long-buried desire, gay relationships outside of "mainstream" gay culture, romance, love, etc etc etc are all themes to be found in original gay fiction too, and slash does not have a monopoly.

So I would contest your theory that Brokeback Mountain is slash alone. It shares many elements with (traditional) slash fic, but I don't think it's about two straight men somehow overcoming their heterosexuality because of their love for one another. They wouldn't, I am sure, recognise much of themselves in stereotypical gay culture - either as it was then or is now - but I'd still interpret it as a story of two homosexual men who fell in love. However, because of the society in which they existed, they could never express that love in the way they might have wanted. Had they lived 40 years later maybe they might well have ran off to San Francisco and bought a minature poodle, but there was simply no such option then. So it could, I think, be treated as gay fiction, with the characters operating within the boundaries of their reality rather than modern-day concepts of gay culture and community.

Anyway, I don't mean to ramble on, sorry. I think it's just that I often see people try to separate slash from gay culture at large, which is understandable because it is primarily a straight, female phenomenon, but it worries me.

A lot of the desire to do so is bourne out of bad experiences within mainstream gay culture, for which I am always sorry because it's far from perfect. But I think that in doing so it can be interpreted as a moral statement and although I'm quite sure that's not what you meant it's how it can be seen.

So then I ramble. And now I will be quiet.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Hey, Dolores! Long time no hear. *g* All that you write is very interesting but I am still not entirely convinced.

Of the novels you mention, I have read E.M. Forster and Armisted Maupin. Forster, btw, I like a lot and Maupin bores me although I have read all of his novels. I do not, however, get slashy 'vibes' from either of them. Although I will happily ponder Maurice some more.

So what do you then think distinguishes gay writing from slash writing? And do you think it has to do with the sex of the author or is it independent of that?

[dolores.livejournal.com]

Long time indeed. Good to converse with you :)

As I said above I think the boundaries between gay writing and slash are blurred, and slash these days is something of a nebulous concept anyway, but I have some thoughts as to a vague dividing line.

Essentially it is about a split between original fiction and fanfiction. Slash has its origins in people exploring the real or imagined homoerotic subtext between fictional characters other people have created. Slash is about elaborating on that subtext in a way that was, and often still is, entirely taboo. It was fed in part by the perceived glamour of some elements of gay culture, particularly homoerotic art and photography, but essentially it was apart from the rest of gay culture because, as brandnewgun says below, that culture was not experienced by most of the writers involved, and because authors write within a framework which usually doesn't include gay culture at large.

Gay writing doesn't have these boundaries because they are original characters and people can make them what they will. They can spend every waking hour in the local gay bar or they can be shepherds in Ancient Greece or cowboys in 60s Montana.

Put another way, you can easily slash characters in gay fiction, but the only way you can really create gay writing from slash is AUs, and with that you can risk losing sight of what makes the characters them.

Slash is an ever changing phenomenon, and as in some shows and films people are becoming much more knowing about subtext and deliberately insert it the framework is much more flexible and so slash can more easily resemble gay writing, and vice versa.

And it's not necessarily a gender thing, because I know several other guys who write slash and have read a few female writers of gay fic.

As for whether Maupin or Forster are slashy: I didn't say they were, merely that they both incorporated romance and love into their writing about gay men. But I do think Forster is inherently slashy because, Maurice aside (and that was only published after his death in the 1970s despite being written long before), in no other novel was he able to talk openly about homosexuality - and so there's oodles of subtext in the rest of his body of work. Check out Room With A View!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Aha! Yes, thanks for reminding me of the subtext thing... Sometimes I think I've been around here too long and start forgetting that it *is* subtext... But yes, I absolutely agree, slash-as-fanfic depends on subtext.

it's not necessarily a gender thing
But it is because these few men are an *exception*. You've got to admit they are. I mean you have tigged me now but I think you are the first man to grace my LJ for about a year, if not more. It is not exclusively a female thing but it is primarily a female thing.

And I think these female fanfic writers and readers are drawn to the subtextiness of slash precisely because it gives them a reason to edit out gayness. I used to read gay porn because the man/man thing turned me on but I also felt alienated because I knew that it did *not address me*. I was sort of reading it over the shoulders of gay men. In slash, otoh, I feel totally addressed.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

This is why I found Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain definitely slashy: two straight men who are overcome by this thing that is bigger than the both of them, their passionate love for each other.

Actually, in "Brokeback Mountain" we learn that at least one of the characters (sorry, I can't remember their names) has sex and even affairs with other men besides the one man he's in love with for 20 years. So, even though he's married, I wouldn't describe him as "straight."

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose it's not so much a case of describing the men Proulx invents as 'straight' or 'gay' but to describe the type of story she creates as 'slashy' or 'gay' or whatever else: perhaps not slashy, okay, but not 'gay literature', either. It's her attitude to her creations.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

It's easier to talk about people who write from inside and people who write from outside performative queerness and gay culture - most slashers aren't men who have sex with men (though I reckon far more femslashers are queer women). Annie Proulx, I suspect, wouldn't describe herself that way either. And perhaps there are some common features in the way that people who don't "do queer" write about it. But then, sometimes they write things that I've seen people live - especially young queer people and those coming out, or people living as queer in situations where being "gay" as we prototypically picture it isn't possible.

Slash writers are often unfamiliar with the other ways of being queer or gay, just as people coming out often are. So they're negotiating their desire to write about hot boys getting it on, within a heterocentric cultural concept, the alternatives to which they're not really familiar with. In the same way, men/boys coming out want to be hot boys getting it on, and mostly they start within a heterocentric cultural concept. Sometimes they come into contact with other cultural concepts, and take some of that on, and sometimes they don't. Slashers, for the most part, don't come into much direct contact with queer lives, and see a lot of slash by people who similarly don't, so slash's internal concept of what a queer life can be is often static, like the self-concept of a male-attracted man in an isolated situation. There's no coming-out process for slashers which brings them to "gay culture" (whether that's desirable or not, and whether that's a stable concept or not), so they just carry on slashing, and so slash becomes a thing in itself, rather than a representation of something that exists (whether or not it resembles something that exists - that's more or less a coincidence).

But there is, of course, a stylistic overlap with the writing of people who "do queer", because they're a diverse group. It's just that there's going to be more diversity in that group's concepts of queerness and gayness because they have contact with the heterocentric concepts as well as a variety (varying by their situation) of other concepts.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting; thank you for tigging.

and so slash becomes a thing in itself,
Absolutely! That is fanon! And I love fanon. I love the way slash is this whole entire independent genre with laws unto itself. And the way it has only tangentially to do with rl gay culture.

The sexual orientation of slashers puzzled me when I first stumbled into it. In my circle of online friends, at any rate, there is a total mix of straight women, lesbian women, bi women, with more straight women among the mix, probably (possibly?) reflecting overall stats. So it's not a phenomenon that's confined to straight women who find boys hot, anyway, and like to see two boys together to multiply the hotness. I have one Friend who is totally irked by men irl: this is her place for, I guess, 'safe' men; made safe by slash.