BBC series I Kissed a Boy decision "homophobic in the extreme" - LGB Alliance

@murasaki Fawning reviews on Points of View. No criticism apart from 'not enough diversity of body types'.

So, working backwards: it would be nice for the show to present a variety of body types to emphasize that all bodies are beautify and encourage people to be comfortable in their own bodies. And yet one of the show's 'winners' was a female whose gender (body) dysphoria resulted in her choosing to have her breasts amputated. And that not only allowed her to appear shirtless on the show, but was presumably a prerequisite for getting the slot as the token heterosexual, trans identifying female. 😳

This is really interesting to me as I am a great anime fan, and while I don't like yaoi, I see a lot of similarities. The women in the yaoi fandom write v disturbing & sexually violent relationships between the seme (dominant) and uke (submissive). I know there is a lot of crossover w anime & other fandoms, I wonder about this. It's a bit like disturbing Japanese porn warping stuff for men.

So true. Butch lesbians are still sadly underrepresented in that kind of thing, seen as threatening or just unattractive. If someone marketed a dating show that represented them properly, I think it would have a good following though, lesbians are a loyal audience.

Oh, that makes me a bit sad... Before I saw this post I read a bit about Xena & it was described as a pioneering lesbian show.

Digging in, I see that there's some debate as to whether they intended some subtext from the start or at least were aware it could be perceived that way. But certainly they ended up leaning into it w deliberate innuendo & the kiss at the end. Some writers & actors say they are, others say it wasn't meant that way but they see how it could be interpreted like that.

Ofc, even if they had intended it from the start, lgb rights & tv rep were very different in the early 2000s and 1990s, so it's not surprising they danced around it for that reason.

Sorry for the derail!

But there was diversity of body types, one of them was female....

Fawning reviews on Points of View. No criticism apart from 'not enough diversity of body types'.

Hmm...when you say most YA fiction is smut, dp you mean solely about sex, or that it's poorly written romance? Twilight, or newer romantasy like Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yaros does feature sex scenes but also a fantasy plot. The sex scenes are not the center piece, but the romance is. But is romance smut? I would call smut a story that's mostly sex.

I enjoy the Strike books but Cormoran Strike makes me giggle because he's such a conventional romantic hero, Mr Rochester with muscle. He's the son or a rock star! He's a misanthropic war hero! He's even got the mad wife. JKR is my generation and that's the kind of romance we grew up with. Germaine Greer wrote about it in "The Female Eunuch". She also wrote about rock concerts and screaming fans and how sexually aroused teenage girls were by androgynous / boyish rock stars.

Back in the 1990s one of my friends showed me some K&S porn. I cringed. I've been fond of a bit of a bit of implied bromance since childhood (Rosemary Sutcliffe, anyone?) but guuuys - keep your latent content latent! Make it explicit and spoil the fun, why don't you.

And as for thinking you can take hormones and live it - fantasy is fantasy. It's not going to work any more than expecting some hunky bloke to sweep you off your feet into happy ever after.

@lcakethereforeIam
I remember years ago Xena and Gabrielle being made a couple by a section of their fans. That became a thing in the show although I doubt, from the way they danced around it, it was what the creators originally intended.

Funny, I used Mulder and Sculley in my example but my initial thoughts went to Xena. I was a huge fan of the TV series and has a massive crush 😂

I think many kids go through a stage of reading rather poor stuff. I'm not sure I;d have said it was smut as such, for the most part.

I think that just as with porn, the medium itself is a significant part of the impact. It's just so much, and anything can be posted, there is not even the need to be acceptable to a rather lazy editorial process.

Tumblr culture is something I completely missed out on - was too old for it TBH - and that seems to be the key to lots of what seems weird in the general culture now.

Comics used to be one of my fandoms, and I don't read the contemporary stuff, but I do follow industry gossip. There are an extraordinary number of straight women in the business pretending to be lesbians. I don't mean saying they're bisexual, which nobody can check, but flat out declaring themselves to be lesbians when you know they're married to men. I always assumed that was for cynical career reasons.

Meanwhile the actual lesbians who were always a small but lively part of the industry are all now identifying as men. The one who comes to mind is Nate Stevenson, who used to go by Noelle. Stevenson is a talented artist with a distinctive style. At the risk of stereotyping, it's an extremely girly style.

The whole dynamic always seemed very weird to me, but for the younger women involved I assume it's mediated by Tumblr.

Yes, there's a definite sense that the gays can have a dating show, but only on the condition straight people would feel comfortable watching it.

It's the same reason lesbian dating show contestants are all high femme and look like they wandered off the set of The Bachelorette. With one token soft butch in the mix, who is permitted a short haircut

I'm really interested though, and still don't quite understand, how it so overwhelmingly became straight girls writing canonically straight male characters in gay relationships (or their mental image thereof, which is very unlike gay male sexuality). There's something quite weird happening there.

This is a big complicated answer with a lot of factors, some of which have been touched on already in the thread.

But one of the biggest factors is Tumblr. Tumblr, for the uninitiated, is a microblogging platform that became a huge fandom outlet in the 2010s. People weren't writing fic directly on the platform, but there were a lot of visual edits. Playlists, moodboards, that sort of thing. And a lot of fandom discussion. Some of it was serious analysis, some just fun memes. One of the USPs of Tumblr was that it was an anonymous social media platform. People interacted with you, and built a persona around you, based on the things you chose to share. So you might not know someone's real name or face, but you'd know they made that piece of art you liked and posted about their crippling anxiety once, and you really related to that post. Creators gained followers not through looks, but through personality and fandom clout. Remember this. It will come into play later.

So it's the early 2010s, and gay rights are being pushed to the forefront of pop culture, as the civil rights fight of our time. Lady Gaga just put out Born This Way. Glee is inescapable. America has just legalised gay marriage. Modern Family is getting big. Ellen and Portia are beloved. Ellen Page has come out in a speech that was universally praised for its bravery. Macklemore has released Same Love, and taught the world the power of straight allyship. Gay is in.

Tumblr is a very progressive platform, so naturally, people start loudly declaring what great allies they are. Homosexuality is capturing the imagination of middle class American girls. It feels like the last true struggle for relationships, in the modern age. Girls really romanticise the idea of all that pain and suffering. The idea that society judges you and your family might disown you, but your love is so great you risk it anyway? What could be more romantic? The concept exerts a strong pull on fandom imagination, and it's around this time you see an explosion of gay ships in fanworks.

But of course, the best fanfics are written by gay people. They're the most authentic. Jealousies arise. Discourse begins, about whether or not it's appropriation for a straight person to write gay fanfiction. This all leads exactly where you might expect: to a sudden explosion of "queerness" in fandom circles. Suddenly, every creator is bisexual! Pansexual! Asexual! Demisexual! As long as you have a label that isn't straight, you're good to go.

Then around 2015, trans mania hit and being gay became yesterday's news. Being straight was still passé and the ultimate sin, but now that everyone was identifying as some flavour of the rainbow, being gay didn't get the attention it once did. So girls moved on to identifying as non-binary. A hardcore few, who had really swallowed the propaganda, followed this all the way through to transition. There's a breadcrumb trail that essentially leads from Born This Way to our friend Lars, and it leads through Tumblr. It is my honest opinion that you cannot separate the trans contagion of the 2010s from Tumblr. Tumblr was the crucible in which it was all forged.

I think a lot of people have just become stuck in the Tumblr cultural zeitgeist, and are writing slash fanfiction when they'd secretly much rather be writing hetero fanfiction. But they're stuck on the idea that being straight is boring and a little bit morally wrong, actually, and the way to get really big in fandom is to go gay. I do think we're reaching an oversaturation point though. The pendulum is probably due a swing back.

Slash fanfiction will always be popular with women - but you're right, there used to be more heterosexual pairings in the space. The cultural dominance of TQ in fandom is why the balance is out of wack today. But it'll shift. The TQ has been in ascendence too long. It's becoming something kids cringe at. In a few years I think the landscape will look more like it did in the past.

@SnoopyPajamas

I feel so old when you describe the HP fandom like that 😅Because I was there, right there when it took off - but I was in a group called "Harry Potter for grown-ups" 😛

"There wasn't any new content to analyse in the years between books"

Like that stopped us. Over-analysing the smallest details was the name of the game. Re-reading the books, again and again. Creating bazillions of theories based on everything and anything.

"I've known women in their fifties writing thousands of words a week between chemotherapy sessions."

I've known people in their 60s and 70s to write fanfic, even some of them taking to it in their later years. And I assume there must be people even older than that out there still doggedly enjoying the hobby that has given them so much pleasure over the decades. It makes me laugh so much when the kiddos these days are horrified that anyone over the ripe old age of 25 should still be writing fic 😂

It really might just have been Lars.

I'm thinking of how it seems to be a requirement of this kind of show that it's always the camp, rather twinkish gay men who get cast. Nobody who brings to mind the rougher side of gay culture.

So if it's a transman who is attracted to gay men and passes well enough to look, at a glance, like a short and effeminate man...

...it really did have to be Lars. Who, to be fair, comes across as quite sweet, but that doesn't stop me being uncomfortable.

I suspect the answer to this is that the BBC wanted to include a trans man, but only one who stood a chance of passing. And that's harder to find than you might think. Many of the more "passing" trans men were butch lesbians pre-transition, so they don't fit the bill. To find a trans man who is attracted to men and wants to be on a show like this is already a tall order, but when you add in that they had to be attractive enough to be on the telly and also not look like such an obvious woman in the line up of men?

I suspect the BBC were pulling from a very narrow pool of candidates. It may have been Lars and only Lars.

Oh, I was speaking in jest 😂

I find that depth of character fascinating. But it tends not to appeal to teens. When you're a teen, usually, you're more drawn to stories where the main character is special (and told often by other characters how special they are) and has a grand destiny to save the day, and there's a fast pace and a lot of action propelling the story forward.

Whereas, when you get older, you feel more drawn to characters who are overlooked and a bit beaten down, trying to make the best of a bad lot. The sort of character who looks at themselves in the bathroom mirror occasionally at 3 in the morning and wonders what life is really about.

Those sorts of characters don't often appeal to teenagers, so it's a very different (more relaxed) environment. I cherish that 😂

It's a generational thing. Fanfiction isn't new, but it exploded in popularity in the early 2000s, as the internet became more accessible to the masses, and as Harry Potter fandom exploded among teens. There was a real sense of community that built up as fans waited for each of the seven books to come out, and many turned to fanfiction as a way to stay connected with their fandom friends between books. There wasn't any new content to analyse in the years between books, but if you and your friends wrote stories imagining how it might go, that was something to talk about and keep the bonds alive.

I'm not saying Harry Potter invented fanfic, but it's hard to overstate just how huge the books were among my generation. Millions of kids worldwide, completely enraptured with this fictional world. It catapulted the whole concept of fandom into the mainstream, in a way I don't think could otherwise have happened. Trekkies have been mentioned by others, and they were dedicated, but still a niche. Most other fandoms pre-Potter were the same, as far as I know. Small communities of fan creators. Harry Potter is what brought the numbers to sites like LiveJournal and Fanfiction.net, and made them juggernauts. It's like you had a hundred people in a room and then suddenly you had a thousand. And most of the thousand were girls. It changed the landscape.

The Potter demarcation is why you often see quite a sharp cultural divide between Millennials / Gen Z, and anyone Gen X and above. The older generations will sometimes mock fanfiction as a strange childish hobby people ought to have "grown out of" by a certain age. Because they came of age at time when that kind of thing was only for nerds and anoraks. The younger generations, by contrast, view it the same way they view video games or graphic novels. It's a medium. A genre of content. There can be good and bad and immature content within that medium, but saying it's all bad is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, for us.

(This is a broad generalisation, of course. Obviously there are anomalies on both sides. I've known Gen Z's who wrinkle up their noses at the idea of fanfiction, and I've known women in their fifties writing thousands of words a week between chemotherapy sessions.)

It's a subculture, but one that has exploded in popularity to the point where it's no longer underground. Like K-pop, or superhero movies. It's becoming almost mainstream now.

They exist, under various nicknames such as Gary Stu or Marty Sue. But they are rarer, because authors usually just take a male canon character to write about, instead of creating an original one.

There's lots of flavours of Mary-Sue I'm not even sure if there are any male equivalents.

@SionnachRuadh

"I'm really interested though, and still don't quite understand, how it so overwhelmingly became straight girls writing canonically straight male characters in gay relationships (or their mental image thereof, which is very unlike gay male sexuality). There's something quite weird happening there."

I can think of a few reasons why straight girls would write slash rather than femslash or straight relationships.

There's the "one guy hot, two guys hotter" phenomenon. They are attracted to guys, so with a gay relationship, they get to write twice as much about how a man is hot.

Inversely, they don't have to write a female lover, which means no wondering what anyone would find hot in a woman.

Which in turn means no feeling bad for not measuring up to the female love interest(s), and in straight fics, no jealousy to be had that she was chosen by the male hero. With only guys, there's no direct comparison to fear.

This also brings a measure of distanciation from the characters being written, just by virtue of them being male while the authors and readers are female, so it's easier to deal with difficult topics. The identification with the characters is not so overwhelming.

And then there's the problem of how to write a female character who will be accepted and loved by the rest of the fandom - and basically? It's impossible. She'll be too aggressive for some, too weak for others, too much of a bitch if she stands her ground, too unrealistic if she's reasonably accomplished, and so on and so forth. Ship wars between two competing straight ships are sobering demonstrations of how vicious female fans can be to female characters, so it makes sense to me that so many just choose to ignore the female characters as potential love interests altogether.

So yeah, I can easily see why so many female fans turn to slash ships rather than straight or femslash ones.

I know nothing about fan fiction so can't contribute to that, but back on the original topic I was thinking about numbers...

If gay people are about 1 in 30 people and in the under 35 age group trans people are about 1 in 93 people, then that means that there are about 3 gay people for every 1 trans person.

Why is Lars the only trans person in this group?
If the BBC were genuinely concerned about representation then in a total group 10 contestants, shouldn't there be at least 3 trans men?

Where is the laugh reaction! 😂

I remember Xena/Gabrielle being a thing 😃

I think one thing about fanfic is, I compare it to romantic comedy which isn't just a genre, it's a very strict story form. It's a long time since I've seen Kissing Jessica Stein, but from memory, apart from the lesbian angle it's an extremely traditional romcom. It's got an endearing but hapless heroine who looks for love in the wrong places, then finds it where she didn't expect to. The only difference is that she ends up with a woman instead of a man.

I think that works. A lesbian romance isn't all that different from a female-POV hetero romance.

It doesn't work at all with gay men. I enjoyed In and Out on the strength of the comedy performances, but the romcom angle only works if you ignore that it bears zero resemblance to gay male sexuality. There is no way on earth that Kevin Kline's character would have reached middle age without knowing he was gay. And if you wrote him as being closeted rather than oblivious, that changes the story completely.