The Art and Ethics of Boyband RPS

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Ian McDuff

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If you've made it all the way here, you know, you must know, what RPS is. And what slash is. Real Person Slash; slash, fiction - 'fan' fiction - involving male-male relationships.

Oh, horror.

Yeah, well, it's time to clear up a few misconceptions.

Fan Fiction. Sure, there's an appalling amount of subliterate teeny codswallop out there, when it comes to 'real person' fanfic. Most of that, as it happens, is het-oriented: first person fantasizing about running into Mister Boyband Star at McDonald's (or Burger King, depending on who has what endorsement these days). But non-fans: big band fanatics, kickers, metalheads, who-have-you: non-fans often write RPS. And as a rule, precisely because these writers are not the sort of folks who have pinups of their subjects on their walls, the writing is much, much better. Sometimes, it is superb.

Real Persons. The usual celebrity subjects of slash are (a) acting celebrities and (b) pop stars. Especially boyband members. There's a reason for that, which we will get to.

Slash. Why slash? And who writes this horrid, shocking, wicked stuff anyway? Elderly queens (hi), sure. Circuit boys, maybe (um ... if any such are out there, call me, please?). Oodles of hetero women, many of them - as the French say - of a certain age, long past their teeny years. And a curiously high percentage of lesbians.

What this means ... well, several points arise, but the salient one is, This ain't necessarily stroke lit anymore, and that's at least partly because the writers aren't necessarily writing to get themselves off. It's always painfully easy to spot RPS that was written primarily as a means for the author to get his or her own ashes hauled. It's almost invariably painfully bad.

So. Why slash? And why RPS?

RPS, especially BBS RPS (boyband slash, people. Follow the bouncing acronym and let's all sing along with Mitch), has an odd universality. Much of its underlying resonance is due to the way in which the character pool is to hand. The carefully manufactured public personæ of celebrities, and especially boyband members, are like the Personified Virtues and Vices of a mediæval morality or indeed miracle play, and of such progeny of that genre as, say, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. One may be Everyman, another Mr Worldly Wiseman. Still more affecting is the way in which, through RPS - and again, especially through BBS - we can take young men, pre-selected for talent, charm, and looks, and use them to point the moral and adorn the tale of the most constant of themes:

the closet;

the pressures of a relentlessly heterosexist society, anomie and deracination (face it, people, 'they' - the Powers What Am - take you out of a small town in the Bible Belt at the age of fifteen, make you a sex object whilst enforcing public chastity on you, hand you fame and fortune in a Faustian bargain the payment for which is that you unsex yourself, force you to grow up and deal with adolescent and young adult questioning and self-discovery in a camera-lens fishbowl ... well, you'll crack, too);

coming out;

self-discovery;

first love;

and all the rest.

The BBS characters are made to order for an exploration of some damned important issues about love and longing, sexuality and self-hatred and self-acceptance. They are without exception average young men, of average or indifferent education (though some appear to be innately intelligent), from middle and lower-middle and in a couple of cases high prole backgrounds, who now suddenly live and move and have their being in a markedly artificial, hallucinatorily-saturated, over the top world. They've been forced, as a matter of business, to make for themselves 'elective' families in place of their actual kin, whom they rarely see, just as so many out gay men are forced by anti-gay sentiment to create 'families of choice' as surrogates for the birth families that have rejected them. The pressures - the purely monetary interests, if nothing else - of the closet are heightened for them. It's as if Fate created a little lab experiment for writing about male bonding, rites of passage, self-awareness, coming out, and finding love.

What Would They Think? There are folks who writhe in horror at the thought of virginal little [insert name of favorite boyband member here] stumbling across slash fic on the Net and realizing he stars as the object of mass lust. There are folks, equally, who get cold sweats thinking, What if their lawyers find this stuff? I'm not going to go into a disquisition on the applicability of New York Times v Sullivan, here, or to what extent fiction is free to present celebrities in what they or their handlers and in-house counsel might contend is a 'false light,' or any of that. I want to address an ethical point, not a legal one.

That point is, The boys can't have it both ways. (Get your minds out of the gutter and pay attention, damn it.) For all any of us know, the religiously inclined, green-eyed, Southern bass singers of both main boybands (you ever get the idea there just might be a formula at work here?) are both straight, are both secretly studying astrophysics by correspondence course from MIT, are both huge fans of Johann Sebastian Bach or Duke Ellington and cannot stand pop, and so on. I think these suggestions unlikely and implausible, but they are possible. What is certain is that they are selling sex quite as much as they are selling soulful harmony. I'm sorry, but the world is not waiting with bated breath (or, for those who had sushi for lunch, baited breath) for Mr Timberlake's breathy nasality to be applied to Nessun dorma at the Met. If Mr Carter looked like Richard Tucker or Luciano Pavarotti, he'd need to sing at least as well to make a living at it, and his fanbase would be the crowd in dinner suits, not the teenies in tube tops. (Random observation: glitter, glow sticks, slutty clothes, dance beats, cute young men singing and thrusting on stage for Your Entertainment Pleasure ... boyband concerts are basically circuit parties for thirteen year old girls.)

The whole purpose of their presentation, in short, is to inspire - in order to drive sales of their CDs - fantasies and less-than-innocent longings. Fan fiction of the teeny sort is the end and goal, in a very real sense, of what they do. And what is sauce for the goose is assuredly sauce for the gander. They have invited our fantasies and our writing about them as sexual beings; and they surely know damned well not all the fans whose libidos they stoke in the clear-eyed pursuit of royalties are pubescent females whose dreams are of the lads as straight knights in shining armor.

And there's a sense, as well, in which RPS is more ethically defensible - and may require more authorial talent - than the use of fictional characters that (characters that, people who: please get that right, folks. Pet peeve there) are in fact other creators's intellectual property.

My conclusion, therefore, is that there is nothing illegal, immoral, or fattening about BBS RPS.

So much for its ethics in the large sense.

What of its art?

I write BBS RPS. (That is why this site exists, after all.) I read BBS RPS (not all of it, not hardly: but the select portion that is technically well-written and meaningful, I do read). On the one hand, I do not take it seriously. As a writer of real work - and works (not, obviously, under the byline at the top of this page) - I regard my writing of BBS RPS as a hobby, an occasional indulgence justifiable (a) as an exercise, akin to practicing scales and arpeggios, and (b) as implicating important issues best addressed through fiction: those issues we have already adverted to: a defense of gayness and an explication of exploration. Equally, though, as a real live published writer under my own name, I am incapable of not taking writing seriously, at least to the extent of doing my level best even in these ephemeral bits of fluff. Bach applied the same level of engagement in the writing of his Coffee Cantata as in the writing of the B-Minor Mass; Chesterton and Kipling were as dedicated to their craft when writing a newspaper squib as when writing a novel. That is how it's supposed to be.

That doesn't mean I haven't committed gaffes, typos, boneheaded errors, and dropping-an-infield-fly idiocies in my own copy, nor yet does it mean I always catch them before they're published. But one has a duty at least to try.

Engineering 101. The writer is a pontifex, a builder of a bridge to another, mystic world. The bridge at issue is a suspension bridge: one sturdy enough to support the reader's willing suspension of disbelief, her or his willing acceptance of the alternate reality you have constructed. This requires work, people.

It is partly for this reason, and not merely as a matter of taste, that I am so vociferously against such devices as supernatural themes, most AUs, and the whole of the inexplicable recent fascination with stories in which one of the guys miraculously ends up preggers. Those talentless hacks King and Rice have a lot to answer for, not least in inspiring this sort of rubbish. It would take, frankly, more talent than anyone I've encountered possesses, to make this sort of thing, and the supernatural tropes that are so popular, believable. (Hold that thought.)

The devil is in the details here. The very artificiality of the actual environment in which BBS characters exist makes it all the more necessary that the author take a naturalistic tone and stance, grounding the story in gritty reality and realism. Otherwise, it becomes a queer version of a trade paper romance novel, in which everyone is simply too, too rich and perfect and elegant ... and nauseating.

I should note here that I don't necessarily agree with some of the strictures others have advanced on how to write gay characters. It's true that Our Fearless Leader, Jane, has a definite point about how straight guys are incapable of showing affection. But we're not writing straight guys here. And - unlike those who write slash about fictional characters with established personæ that are, if not straight, so butchly straight-acting as to cause testosterone poisoning - we can write characters who drop the occasional hairpin, camp it and queen it at times, rebel against the inarticulate conventions of the het male who cannot say a tender word. I am in most respects, and quite naturally, without affectation, one incredibly butch queer; but I can assure you that there will always be times I and my gay friends have fun with the stereotypes and roles - believe it, Mary. By the same token, to whatever extent you - as you must of course do, to have any story at all - broaden and deepen and round out the cardboard persona of your boyband avatar, making a real boy of the wooden puppet, you have to make it credible. That's why I don't slash the married ones, or ones I simply cannot envisage as ever being less than 100% het.

As to how to make these things credible ... well, that's why there's a links page with resources for aspiring writers. I ain't giving away no trade secrets for free, yo.

Angst, Sturm, Drang, Dreck. Speaking of realism and credibility....

Goethe and Schiller, frankly, couldn't make angst readable. There's no reason to expect Mary Sue Smith-Jones, the novice slasher, to be able to do so. That does not, alas, stop Mary Sue from trying. And trying my patience, in the process.

The problem, I think, is the general inability to distinguish between drama ... and melodrama. At twenty, perhaps, this may be excusable. By forty, one ought recognize the distinction. It is the distinction between soap operas and Mme Bovary. Rape, kidnaping, evil twins appearing from nowhere, sudden incurable disease ('Mimi!'), addiction, amnesia, and other staples of daytime television (and, ahem, Lifetime television), are not, in fact, as dramatic and as useful to the author as are financial worries, job dissatisfaction, loss of libido, the magic going out of the relationship.... Sure, there have been a few, a very few, great slash works concerning Our Boys as crime victims, Brian Piccolos, and so on. But superficially undramatic infidelity and middle-aged worries and 'lives of quiet desperation,' threats to family and love bonds, sudden cracks in the suburban facade: this, the territory of Tom Wolfe and John Cheever and Eugene O'Neill, of Welty and O'Connor and Faulkner and Hemingway on his good days, of Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman, this is by far the more gripping and dramatic. It was for Chekhov and Tolstoy, after all.

I'm serious, folks.

I think one reason this is so is that the drama of the everyday, the Jane Austen and Barbara Pym drama, stripped of the bells and whistles of the soap opera plots, forces the writer to write at the top of his or her bent. You can't use sleight of hand here, not the way you can with the flash and smoke and mirrors and Mighty Wurlitzers of melodrama. And while it is harder to fake, it is also harder to screw up. Most slash writers are, basically, Nice People, who have led fairly sheltered lives. They don't know what it smells like when someone's blood and bowels are spattered over a twenty yard radius, or the quirks of FBI jurisdiction over kidnaping, or what real medical personnel say over the intercom in a hospital. And unlike the pros, most slash writers don't even know where to begin in finding these things out. Inevitably, as a result, the illusion is shattered and the reader falls back to earth with a resounding thud.

Credibility and the illusion of reality: hold tight to that. It makes all the difference.

He Said, He Said (Well, There's No 'She Said' in BBS, Now, Is There, Hmmm?). Dialogue. Ah, yes. I know I said I wasn't going to give a free lecture on How to Write, but....

Two points, and I'll stop myself, by main force.

If I can't tell who's speaking from the context alone, the diction and the rhythm, without dialogue tags, the dialogue needs work. (This is true even if I may sometimes fail at this myself.) It shouldn't even be that hard, not in BBS. If it rambles and makes a Dadaist sort of sense, it's Chasez. If it's drily, slyly caustic, and magnolia-scented and mushmouthed, it's Bass. If it's totally eccentric but oddly funny in a dark way, it's Kirkpatrick. If it's a laughable attempt at sounding 'ghetto' ... well, surely you know the answer there. If it's anal-retentive and obsessively controlling, it probably has a Kentucky accent. And so on.

The other point has to do with the tags themselves. 'Said' is good. 'Said' should appear about ninety percent of the time, when tags are there at all. Not 'interjected,' unless it's important to the plot that the speaker interrupted whomever had the floor; not, for obvious reasons, 'ejaculated.' Not 'laughed' or 'said giddily' or 'moaned' unless this moves the story along or is indispensable for clarity (e.g., 'I hate your worthless ass,' he said tenderly). And the same fear of repetition should be abandoned elsewhere. Unless you've deliberately set it up to show an opposition between Lance as the public and James as the private side of 'N Sync's bass singer, Lance should always be Lance, not 'James' half the time, and certainly not 'the Mississippian' on one page and 'the younger man' on another and 'the blond boy' later still. The whole issue here is to avoid Elongated Yellow Fruit Syndrome - so called after the young reporter writing a story on the United Fruit Company and its habit of treating Latin American republics as corporate subsidiaries, back in the Fifties. He was discussing bananas and the banana trade. After about the third 'banana,' he looked desperately for a substitute, and unfortunately found one. Compared to starting a sentence with 'The leading exporters of the elongated yellow fruit,' a fourth 'banana' would have been better.

You Owe Us a Story. Not a draft. Not a synopsis. Not an outline. Not a 'treatment.' A story. Don't post it until you've made a finished product of it. I've read more stories and serials than I like to recall, that had brilliant narrative hooks, moving themes and tight plots (there's difference. Learn it. It is all-important), but were never fleshed out.

Don't. Just ... don't.

There's an art and craft to writing anything. If you care enough to post, you'd damned well better have cared enough to have given what you posted your best and fullest effort. If you don't care enough about your writing to do that, why, pray, do you expect the rest of us to care enough to read it?

And that, as it turns out, is a matter of ethics, too. So we've come full circle.

Here endeth the First Lesson.

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