#i have no real preferred genre and largely choose books by how many lesbians are in them. this will be fun

[scealaiscoite]

this is underway, prepare for the oddest possible combination of genres and prompts yet 🫡

wanna make another list but with lines from my reads so far this year, it’ll be like. mostly unusable but very very fun for me lol

[olderthannetfic]

There’s a meme floating around in fandom that hordes of impressionable “children” in their 20′s read nothing but slash fanfic and are, therefore, developing a warped view of what it means to be a gay man. Thus, goes the meme, it is the duty of those evil, exploitative “straight yaoi fangirls” to write very dull slice-of-life slash full of PSAs about condom use and a realistic treatment of sexual orientation. As a queer woman who did grow up reading fic from the age of 13, I have to ask:

What kind of fuckhead gets their entire queer education from fanfiction?

Queer media has existed forever. As a teen, in the 90′s, I avidly consumed the oeuvre of Pedro Almodóvar, freely available at my local video store. I remember when Velvet Goldmine came out and fandom just about wet itself in joy. It’s a movie largely focused on men, though as an adult, I definitely appreciate Toni Colette’s put-upon character. I have no idea how that character would identify by the later eras in the movie, but she loudly proclaims herself bi in the flashbacks.

Maurice set a precedent in the 80′s for being the first Merchant Ivory gay film. It’s a gorgeous (if kind of slow) costume drama with all the usual repression and longing of one of their films. I’ve been amused to see fandom rediscover it in recent years, probably by googling “Lestrad naked”. [A pause while all of you who haven’t done so run to google...]

Growing up in the Bay Area, I was surrounded by people who were massive fans of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, including my straight mother. Those books chronicle entire eras of my hometown and all the many varied orientations and types of people found therein. But when I wanted something more exclusively female-centric, my local bookstore carried Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For anthologies. I have to say, I always found Almodóvar’s nutso characters more personally relatable than Bechdel’s banally neurotic lead, but it was nice to have both. Around this same era, riot grrrls were producing all kinds of female-centric media, lots of it about queerness, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

Now, in the era I’m talking about, many people didn’t have the privilege of easy internet access or living near bookstores with gay sections or video stores that carry peculiar European art films. I’m talking about 20 years ago.

In the modern era, however, internet piracy is rampant, half the people I know subscribe to Netflix, and even people who can’t afford to leave a trail on the family computer can watch racy gay art films illegally uploaded to youtube--and that goes for people in many countries, not just mine. I have mentioned a tiny sampling of the media I was personally aware of as a teenager and personally a fan of. There is an entire world out there to explore!

There is no excuse for limiting your media consumption to slash fanfiction.

If you prefer slash to other media, great. You do you! But if, as I keep seeing, you are offended that slash fandom is largely women writing things that appeal to themselves and not constantly stopping to Think Of The Men, then you are in luck: the vast majority of queer media caters directly to queer men, especially gay men. The internet abounds with forums and recs lists aimed at gay men. There is no need to feel like an outsider in girl cootieville. Go where the men are if you prefer that!

Tumblr provides a skewed view of what’s out there, and that goes whether it’s mlm whining about “fujoshi” or people who ship het pairings honestly thinking they’re an oppressed minority.

If you want amateur, free m/m erotica that is most likely written by and for men (just as slash is most likely written by and for women), try Nifty.org. No, it won’t be sweet or nice or well-labeled. It’s trashy free erotica. Fandom doesn’t have a monopoly on that. And if you think Hydra Trash Party fans are the most sadistic or tasteless people on the internet, a day on Nifty should disabuse you of that notion. (Or, conversely, if you’re disappointed by HTP, Nifty is your new best friend!)

If you want writing with central queer characters that actually addresses homophobia in a non-fetishistic way and that is not just about romance or sex, look to a queer press. I don’t mean a publisher of ebook m/m romance novels: I mean a real, traditional, oldschool indie publisher of queer books that are not genre romance. Any recs list of mid-20th C. queer lit will net you plenty of books that are by queer people, for a queer audience, about queerness. Most of this stuff will be either gay or lesbian if it’s pre-90′s, but bisexual and trans* literature saw a big upswing then. It’s not exclusively written by people of the identities the books are about, but there’s a very strong correlation--vastly more so than you find in ebook romance novels.

There’s an entire world of queer media out there. So when I see men on the internet whining that slash fandom is not All About Me, I know that they are choosing to shit on a place women have made for ourselves instead of seeking something they would enjoy more. It’s not a legitimate complaint, even if the women they’re directly attacking are straight. It’s a sign of entitlement, male privilege, and an inability to lift a single fucking finger to help themselves.

I ain’t your Mommy, and I don’t owe you the free labor of my fanfic writing.

I don’t owe you a story in your fandom. I don’t owe you a story about your OTP. I don’t owe you a story with your favorite headcanon. I don’t owe you comments on your own fic--and, conversely, you don’t owe me comments on mine.

I used to be an economic moderate, but the last ten years have made me keenly aware of how much free labor women are expected to do. Well, enough! That kind of entitlement is the worst kind of capitalist exploitation coupled with a steaming dose of misogyny. To top it all off, it won’t work. Yelling at women that they don’t belong in their hobbies won’t make more men join those hobbies. Yelling that you feel alone because slash fandom isn’t about queer identity categories won’t make that any less true.

As a queer person, you do yourself a disservice if you only read slash. Slash and queer media that is intended as queer media have different aims. I have found both valuable in different ways at different times in my life.