tiamatschild | (no subject)

I am obsessing about a potentially hurtful thing I said over a year ago. Which is a thing I often do. I worry about hurting people a lot, and when I'm feeling down I loop into tracks about Did I Hurt That Person? I Hope I Didn't Hurt That Person, I Don't Think I Can Make Up For It Now.

In mostly unrelated thoughts, I'm feeling intensely ambivalent about

lgbtfest. It's an odd thing. I like reading the fic that comes out of the fest, but I hate reading the prompt lists, because...

Okay, so this probably isn't entirely fair. But sometimes it starts to feel like a lot of the people prompting are basically prompting misery porn, and given that I have immense issues with the extent to which stories about LGBT people generally are. Not joyful. I mean, okay. As a queer teenager, I hated reading YA novels about queer people, because -

Well. Let me be honest here. I tended to get the feeling that those novels weren't for actual queer teens. That they were intended for straight teens, and that was why they were so horrible, and the people in them were rarely brought joy by their sexuality, and when they were it was frequently elided, while pain was examined and almost reveled in. It used to make me so mad.

It still makes me so mad. Because yes. Things are hard, and the closet sucks, and frequently so does being out, and people are always happy to tell you how you're not you enough, and sometimes it's hard not to believe them, and it's always dangerous, people might very well hurt you, and hurt you very badly, kill you even, and there is vulnerability and danger -

But damn it. Just. Just.

Fuck that, I'm going to be happy. Judging by the fic that gets actually written, a lot of people feel the same way.

(This might be somewhat ironic, coming from someone who writes incessantly about mental illness, which means I write a lot about fear and pain and sadness, but pfffffffft.)

Threaded | Flat

I'm so glad you made this post.

I agree, so much. When I was growing up as a queer teenager, I would have LOVED to see something about queer people being HAPPY and having FUN.

There's also the issue where people seem incapable of giving queer characters any conflict that doesn't revolve around other people's reactions to their sexuality. Which is, er, not good.

mm, this.

I am so, so for more writing about canon queer characters, and characters who are actually written as queer people rather than just having 'slashy relationships', but I have the same reaction when I read over the prompts. I read fic primarily as an escapism thing, and I just...the last thing I want is to read about characters I love having to deal with homophobia/transphobia, because I get plenty enough exposure to that in real life. I wouldn't want to write most of the prompts because 1. it'd feel too personal and 2. I'd be paranoid about just projecting my own issues on to the characters.

Now the prompts about X's friends/family/random alien coworkers being wonderful and supportive, those I wanna read. And a lot of the X-working-out-their-identity prompts look interesting to me. It's just the ones that sound like looming homophobia trauma porn that turn me off.

Oh, man, this so much. And it made me SO ANGRY when I would say I wanted stuff like the Alanna books, but with a queer main character, and I got told I should be happy with angstfests in totally different genres.

...actually, it still makes me really angry, although it's starting to get better in YA fiction.

And fandom has always been an escape from the angstfests for me. I mean, even when there's angst in fandom, it's usually because The World Is Doomed or whatever, and not because the characters are queer. At least in the fandom I hang out in.

Did you ever see the film version of Maurice by E.M. Forster? Here was an English gay male writer who asked that the book not be published until after his death because he knew that it was impossible that anyone living in the Edwardian era would publish it, he lived rather a long time..at any rate! In the 90s... Recently in other words, a film is made from it as there is so much wonderful British fiction and so many wonderful British actors in need of period piece acting....more digressions.
Well aside from having a gay male protagonist, his book had an ending that wasn't awful, another reason why it couldn't be published in its day. So what do the filmmakers do? They rewrite the ending and make it awful. WTH? I hope that E.M. Forster rose from the grave to smite them in their sleep because even living in his day he hoped for better times, and probably thought that once he had passed on it would be much more possible.

I agree with your post!