Radical Sheik, Conservative Trojan: The Politics of Sexuality in Slash

What I am about to say is liable to cost me any number of friends in the slash community, and offend the living Hell out of a number of writers I respect.

So be it. Mighty is Truth, and shall prevail, we are told; and it was Aristotle who said, amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas: ‘I love Plato, but I love Truth more.’

The issue I am addressing today may be called, the Problem With Good Slash. God knows I’ve already addressed the problems with bad slash, which boil down, essentially, to literal, emotional, and conceptual illiteracy. But some of the most competent, affecting, and talented slash writers I know of, people whom I read religiously, suffer from this infirmity of noble mind – of far nobler mind, I need hardly say, than the minds possessed by BadSlashers.

This infirmity is the obtrusive, nay, obsessive, politicizing of slash. And the politicization is wholly – I almost wrote ‘purely,’ which would be precisely oxymoronic – it is wholly one-sided: it comes from the Left.

Why, you may ask, am I gleefully (actually, I’m not gleeful in the least. I undertake this painful duty with the greatest reluctance) not merely treading on so many toes, but dancing the Lindy on as many corns as possible? Why, moreover, am I doing so when I have already once adverted to this problem (https://www.angelfire.com/zine2/bbsrps/rpsmanifesto3.html)?

There are several reasons. Why? Because. Yes. The issue is important on several counts.

In the first place, it is pissing me the hell off. And I am not the only slash-writer (and reader) of whom that is true. Another of my favorite slash writers, a rock-ribbed Republican physician of my own vintage in years, positively froths at the mouth over this persistent, nagging, no-longer-sub-textual problem, for example.

And mind you, I am reasonably even-tempered in these matters. Among my favorite writers and colleagues are radical lesbians of color, for example, with whom I have no superficial things in common at all, but to whom I relate on very deep levels despite all that legitimately divides us. Nor am I some super-censor out to purge the slash world of all who do not meet my standards: another of my dearest friends and fellow slash writers is a young lady who writes hallucinatory, super-saturated, un-put-downable slash with mild BDSM kink to it, and who, though I love her dearly, would be a still more impressive writer were she to go through her work and randomly cull every second adjective and adverb. (She uses them the way Emeril Lagasse overuses spices.) Yet I am fond of her personally and an obsessive reader and fierce defender of her work.

Yet, as I say, the modish Leftishness of so many otherwise brilliant slashers, insofar as it’s creeping into their work, annoys me unutterably. (I don’t give a damn about their politics so long as their politics don’t color their work.)

In the second place, it implicates the whole issue of what is and isn’t canon – and fanon (and no I’m referring to that Leftist twit Frantz Fanon, either) – in Sparkly Dance-Boy / Boyband Slash (SDB/BBS. We have more acronyms around here than does the Department of Defense).

Frankly, the issue of what is and isn’t canon in BBS RPS is vexed in the extreme. For example, I don’t know a single person of any intelligence who doesn’t recognize that there are gaps in the Official Backstreet Saga storyline large enough that even an indifferent carriage-driver could drive a coach and four through them; and that at least insofar as it has to do with Lance’s joining ’N Sync, it is a self-evident truth that that band’s Founding Myth is a steaming, garden-compost heap of horseshit.

Yet there are things that are certain. Lance, for example, is a Mississippian who collects firearms and edged weapons and is on record, back in the Germany days, as being a Ronald Reagan fan and supporter. (Ah, GermaNSync days. You can see the scene in a small, cut-rate, Pearlmanized Munich hotel:

Chris: And Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and kobolds and dwarves and witches –

Joey: Mmmmm. Bavarian barmaids. What month is Oktoberfest in, anyway?

Joey: I’m the tool?

Chris: Ooookay. So. Cuckoo clocks, huh?)

By the same token, canonically, Justin is on public record as having supported Al Gore in 2000. (Of course, I’ll kiss a fat man if Justin Timberlake has ever entertained a serious and cogent thought about economics or politics. Which, come to think of it, would explain why he supported Al Gore.) Similarly again, Kevin Richardson has become a noted tree-hugger of late, and publicly and irretrievably embarrassed himself in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 atrocity by parroting the ‘blame America first’ line trotted out by Chomsky, Kingsolver, and other dimwits. Equally, his cousin by contrast is canonically and quite honestly the ultimate Red State, social conservative, evangelical Bush voter. And Howie? An announced Bush voter, despite being generally considered in the Streetslash fandom to be (as Lance is, in the Syncslash fandom) the One Most Likely Actually Not to Be Straight in Real Life. (AJ endorsed Gore, as did Kevin; Nick as well as Brian and Howie endorsed George W. Bush.)

What is fanon rather than canon, no matter how strongly we may chose to believe in the Basez Love, is the presumption that Lance is a card-carrying Family member. This will remain fanon rather than canon unless and until he comes out or is outed, if in fact he is gay or bi. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to Howie.

But mark well what happens in the fandom. I know of one – one – conservative-leaning slasher who has conceived a total loathing for Kevin, largely because of his publicly paraded politics. (I don’t slash Kevin because, A, he’s one of those SDBs – Timberlake being another – over whom I ought to drool, but whom I in fact find utterly unattractive, and, B, this being wholly unrelated to that issue, I cannot write him as a character as anything but straight-as-a-stick.)

On the other side of the equation, many, many otherwise reputable and otherwise intelligent slashers absolutely piss themselves in horror – usually in their Live Journal entries – at the thought that Lance, say, would dare not to be a Democrat (‘hasn’t anyone given him a copy of And the Band Played On?!?’). This is based on the fanonical, not canonical, presumption that he’s gay, and the perverse idea that to be gay mandates a lifetime membership in the Left wing of the Democratic Party.

(I, myself, am a Boll Weevil Southern Democrat, too conservative to be a Republican … though I vote for a good few Republicans at the top of the ballot. Yet I am in fact gay. Not ‘gay’ in the sense that my gay cred relies on, say, having MP3s of Des’ree’s ‘Stronger,’ Deniece Williams’s ‘Let’s Hear it for the Boy,’ and the Collected Works of Sylvester playing as I type this (that is a notional example. In fact, at the moment, like any good gay Southern preppy of my generation, I’m listening to good old Carolina shaggin’ beach music right now). ‘Gay’ in the sense that all of my sexual relations and relationships, and most of my romantic relationships (okay, so I’m 20% bi), have been with other men. ‘Gay’ in the sense that I would be, if the world were safer and I had no inhibitions (and, okay, if I were a lot better looking than I am), a total bottom-boy slut. Gay and active for longer than most slashers have been alive. Gay as in, I turned street-legal in 1980, just when AIDS hit and before anyone knew it was out there, and am thus damned lucky to be alive, as a lot of my gay contemporaries are not, thankyouverymuch.)

Look, in an age in which Michael Signorile is (rightly) raising hell against Gay Movement Orthodoxy on the grounds that activism, not silence, is what allowed the plague to become an epidemic, and damned if David Horowitz wasn’t right all along after all; in an age when Dan Savage is a proud reader of Bill Buckley’s National Review, for which Florence King actually writes; in an age in which Camille Paglia is a neo-con to the point she’s become the dyke version of Jeane Kirkpatrick; in a time when Andrew Sullivan is merely the most visible of a cadre of conservative or libertarian gays, this sort of plantation mentality that cannot conceive of any queer being anything but a paleoliberal parlor pink is simply inane. And I get annoyed and disappointed when writers I respect and avidly read in this fandom subscribe to patently silly notions.

More specifically, I get a severe case of the red-ass when these idiotic prejudices seep into their writings. Look, as long as I can’t tell one way or the other from reading your work where your politics fall on the spectrum, I won’t give a two-penny damn if, in reading your Live Journal, I am surprised to learn you are a Naderite, or a Sierra Clubber, or Tom Hayden’s spiritual lovechild. (Ditto, conversely, if I am surprised to discover that you are in fact a libertarian member in good standing of the Cato Institute.) I’d only react badly to a discovery, outside your writings, that you spent weekends spiking trees in Oregon, were part of your local Klan or ‘militia,’ or were a follower of al-Qaeda.

The problem is, I all too often can tell from your fiction that you are in fact a believer in silly Leftist nostrums. What tips me off? Usually it’s the invariable tropes of Leftist bigotry: All Southerners are Neanderthals. All religiously observant persons, parents especially, are Neanderthal homophobes. Any Southerner or person of faith who is not a Neanderthal is deeply conflicted and closeted. And so on and nauseatingly on.

And what of it? Why do I care?

Because – this is the third point – this sort of kneejerk bigotry and categorizing is an offense against the writer’s muse. Didactic literature and cardboard character ‘profiling’ used to be what liberals accused conservatives of, scare-tactic writing that was supposedly engaged in to reinforce patriarchally-imposed sex roles blah blah freakin’ blah. (Teen slasher – in the sense of chainsaw massacre, not ‘slashfic’ – movies were always a favorite example: the immediate consequence of teen extramarital slipsliding-away was always, Cue the Mad Axe Murderer! The wages of sin and all that, you know. Apparently Freud did not die, he merely became a B-movie screenwriter in Hollywood.)

Nowadays, though, didactic literature, straitjacketed literature, writing forced to conform to the blinkered, narrowed Leftist worldview, fiction strained through the cheesecloth of post-modernism and ‘queer studies,’ is all the rage, I guess.

I blame ‘queer studies.’ I really do. Not a few slashers seem to have taken plenty of courses in, if not majored in, this fraudulent pseudo-discipline. I am very sorry to inform you, if you are one of these people, that you have wasted years of your life and thousands of dollars of your parent’s (and the taxpayers’s) money. You would be far better prepared for life (common and intellectual), improved in character, and considerably better fitted to write in any known genre, had you spent your days in a solid old-fashioned Classics department, reading Xenophon and Lucretius. (I would like say that that you would be in better shape had you spent the time in the History or English departments, but the AHA nowadays is a wholly-owned subsidiary, not even of the national-level Democratic party, but of the Socialist Party, and the MLA is apparently now headquartered either in Ramallah or Havana.)

Derrida, Foucault, and their company are contemptible little bloviators, intellectual abjects: a couple of cleverish sixth-formers who aren’t half so clever as they believe themselves to be. That they and their lemming-y snickets of disciples have overrun the academy is an indictment of the academy, and a testament to intellectual and logical laxity, muzziness of thought, the atrophy of the critical faculty, and the power of what A Certain Demagogue Who Hung About Nuremberg in the Thirties called ’the Big Lie.’

These are people who having failed to dazzle with brilliance have made good by baffling the half-educated with bullshit instead. They ought to be force-fed Aristotle, but then, I doubt any of them would recognize the Posterior Analytics if it bit them in, you guessed it, the posterior.

The last French critic, the last classical, lycée-trained French Man of Letters, who was (and is) worth a damn is very elderly, very conservative, and lives in San Antonio, Texas, where at least he can get decent enchiladas. Jacques Barzun: look him up.

I could go on for another five pages, but let me wrap this up. I’ve already pissed off 90% of the people I like. What it comes to, simply, is this. When you use mere labels and kneejerk categorizing to create characters, based simply on stereotypes drawn from their background or religious community, you are doing what the Left always accuses everyone else of doing. Worse yet, you are sinning against your craft as a writer. You are doing a profound disservice to yourself, your mind and writerly soul, and to your reader.

Cease and desist, please. It’s sloppy, lazy, unethical, and immoral, and a damned shameful thing. And you would be surprised at just how many of us are sickened by it, and done with tolerating it.

You have my email. Fire at will.

– Ian McDuff