Hey There, This Is Neat

WE WILL FIGHT. WE WILL SACRIFICE. WE WILL FIND A WAY.

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.

Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!

Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?

I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.

Stop and think about that for a minute.