IF YOU TAG THIS POST WITH ‘Q SLUR’ I WILL BITE YOU
Much of this is true, though Rice was a complicated human as we all are.
She didn’t write the show. She was an erotic novelist, although many of her full-on porn works from the 1980s carried an internal throughline of women being ‘normed’ into sexually submissive roles relative to the men ‘strong enough’ to keep them. Her personal peccadillos often included arguments that the age of consent should be lowered, particularly for sexual predators who were ‘geniuses,’ and the sexual fantasies she wrote rarely had so much as a passing acquaintance with consent as we know it in the real world.
Regardless of her motives for aggressively and vociferously opposing fanfiction, the effect of that action was untold archival damage and a distinct warping of the fandom’s norms for interaction, relative to other communities of similar vintage. She was incapable of handling any criticism from anyone, be it editors (which she eschewed following QotD and only allegedly got back on board for Blood Communion) or the general public (as in… Amazon comments sections.) She mobilized her Facebook fanbase to harass Jenny Trout, another author, after Trout said that negative Goodreads reviews aren’t… grounds for harassment.
Trout received, among other things, death threats to herself and her kids including doxxing and one gentleman’s offer to send Rice a necklace made from Trout’s teeth. I flatter myself, perhaps, for considering the persistent harassment and death threats that I have received in this fandom similar, or at least stemming from a similar source: the insularity of VC fandom after the whole ‘no fic’ thing, plus the cult of personality that surrounded ‘Mater.’
She was not above racism, not just in the creation of Louis but also in her defense of Paula Deen and the implications shot throughout every one of the VC books in regards to whiteness, beauty, sexuality, savagery, and servitude.
Her on-and-off relationship with Catholicism meant that she did at times back away from describing her characters’ queerness; indeed, I would argue that much of the extant queerness in IWTV (1976) stems from a decidedly homophobic framing, in which the deathly ‘sterility’ of these characters and their makeshift queer families are relegated to the darkness and contrasted against all that is natural in the world of heterosexual, cyclical, nuclear family systems.
It is there. It always was there.
When Louis describes his desire for Lestat, and for Armand, and seduces Daniel over the course of the night–that’s still there. The scene where Lestat very literally demands that Louis come out of the closet is there.
Lestat and Nicki were always lovers. So were Armand and Daniel. These were all real.
No matter where it originated, it’s fucking stupid to claim it’s not there at all. #Problematic texts involving queerness are everywhere, and that’s just how reality works. To use another Tumbly hobby-horse as an example, you can’t claim Rocky Horror Picture Show isn’t queer or was never pivotal just because it’s wildly outdated and Richard O'Brien’s become kind of a disaster.
And as time went on, Rice’s views changed, because she was a human. Sure, people love to dunk on guys who say “now that I have daughters, I understand why feminism matters,” but isn’t that better than them staying stuck that way?
Rice had queer friends, some gay men who died of AIDS. She learned from them, and from her son Christopher. (Sometimes what she learned wasn’t really taken onboard in a very helpful way, as the excellent @vraik mentioned so recently here.)
Rice did, in fact, Do That when marriage equality was realized for (non-disabled) queer couples in the USA.
And you know what else I remember about that?
The comments were a fucking SHITSHOW.
Do you know how. Many. People. Came out of the woodwork claiming to be ‘fans’ and saying in the same breath how 'disappointed’ they were in her for 'ruining’ these characters they’d always seen 'as brothers’?
It always stuck in my craw that there was a pretty hard 'live-and-let-live’ strain of Toxic Positivity in this fandom, in which talking about queer relationships that exist in the text was called 'shipping’ and some considered it 'polite’ to let these vocal homophobes continue with their blinders and illusions. Pointing out that that was BS was, I suspect, one of the reasons I became persona non grata for a while.
If seeing butts in the new show has you cheering and running over to yell that the books were never gay HAHA OWNED, maybe you should look around and see what kind of people are wearing the same team colors as you.
IF YOU TAG THIS POST WITH 'Q SLUR’ I WILL BITE YOU
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