Slash Seminar: The Florida Elective

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Ian McDuff

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Good morning, class. Today, we shall consider – oh, joy: be still my heart – Slash Disorders. The pre-meds amongst you ought take the most copious notes.

Homonym-phomania: An all too common condition that could be avoided by the simplest of preventive measures. Gertrude Stein, in dismissing the city of Oakland, California, did not say, 'There's no they're their.' (She said, of course, 'There's no there there.' Bitchy, but accurate both factually and grammatically.) Only in the punchline of a Garment District joke involving a tailor from Lublin and a seamstress from Kielce is the correct answer, 'So sew.' That two words sound alike is not to say that they are interchangeable and mean the same thing. Even boybands aren't interchangeable just because they sound, um, very, very similar (but not of course alike. Not at all. Promise. Now if you young ladies will calm down, untie these Official Justin Timberlake bandanas with which you've pinioned me, and return to your middle school Civics class...). I am presuming, doubtless all too sanguinely, that you good folks actually know the difference between its and it's, too and to: that you err only in typing at speed, hastening under the excitement of the Muse. So edit already. Just let the thing cool, then go back and read it for errors. Remember the classic exchange between Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote: Kerouac was bragging that he never rewrote, never edited, just poured out his soul without conscious effort. Capote looked at him with pity: 'Dear boy! That'th not writing, that'th typing.'

OCD (Obtrusive Conceited Disorder): There are few things sadder than seeing a fifty cent story, about boys who are queer as three dollar bills, go a-striving after five dollar words. Everyone has his or her own style, or voice. Fine. Some of us (hello) simply write on an elevated, mildly academic plane: the Michael Innes types or Anthony Prices of slash, Sayers clones, Heilbruns amidst the Danielle Steeles. But if you do not by nature, and consistently, write in professorial wise, it's almost always a mistake to try for a sudden grab at elegance and intellectualism by dragging a six syllable word into a Dick and Jane bit of exposition. There's nothing inherently wrong with simple, straightforward narration, I'm not saying that at all. It worked for Hemingway. But if you are doing the Hemingwayesque:

The leaves were green but you could not see the green. Grey dust covered them. Grey dust covered every surface. The only things left with color and life were the leaf-green eyes that stared back at him. The eyes stared from a face gone as grey as the dust. Whatever the note had said, it had shaken Kevin:

then it's risky to suddenly swerve off into Faulknerian tropes, dabs of Welty, and the like, and it's simply fatal to do a one-eighty into Henry James territory. For one thing, it's a lead-pipe cinch you'll pick the Almost Right Word (and there is nothing so jarringly wrong as the ARW).

Serial Allergies: This is a tricky one. There is ample medical authority, stretching back to the days of Dr Dickens and Dr Wilkie Collins and that noted surgeon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for the principle that a serial, irregularly published, with lapses of time between installments, ought be structured in such a way that any significant information that the reader may have forgotten since the last update is subtly repeated. This 'in medias res' tactic also allows the new reader to start with a chapter other than Numero Uno and not be wholly lost. However, some people have a sensitivity to this, an allergic reaction. The only advice I can offer is, firstly, to do subtly only the minimal recapitulation necessary, and in a way that doesn't slow the story, and, secondly, to keep antihistamines handy for the allergic types.

Commatose Conditions: Comma abuse, sadly, is rife – rife, I tell you – within our community. Commas separate items in a list, or set off clauses, they shouldn't be used to combine what could stand as two separate sentences, that is called a comma splice, a fuller example of correct comma usage is available at http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/commas.html, the preceding has all been an example of what not to do.

I mean, seriously, people. In the slash community, shouldn't it be easy to remember FANBOYS? (The acronym is for 'For, And, Not, But, Or, Yet, So.' They signal 'Comma Time!' at Tara.)

Compulsive Lying, Laying, Leila, and the Clap(ton): American English goes about in horror of two things: the prospect of (gasp!) dishonesty and the hint of (double gasp!) sex. (That is why for so long Americans have referred to 'white meat' when they speak of chicken: 'breast' was shockingly risqué. As an old queen, I could make enough white-meat / chicken jokes to fill the entire lecture period, but I won't.) The fear of sexual references and of giving anyone the Lie Direct has led to linguistic schizophrenia: American's don't know when they're lying and when they're laying.

It's really fairly simple. You can't lay yourself. (If you could, you'd never leave the house.) 'Lay' is what you do to something – or someone – else: you lay a brick. (This was the derivation of the disco classic, 'She's a Brick ... House'. No, really. C'mon. Don't you believe me?) You cannot lie a brick. You can lie to your lay (which leads to so much of the hurt/comfort fic out there, but so be it). You lie down. You lay your sleeping lover down. Got it?

Home-o-phobia: This disorder manifests in a Willie Morris / Tom Wicker Syndrome, in which the writer uses the fic to get his or her licks in and beat up on all the Babbitts and Billy Sundays and small-town, small-minded people Who Oppress Her Artistic Soul. Yawn.

It may not even involve your own 'home,' in that the straw stand-in for your horrible mean parents in Erie becomes, say, Diane Bass, whom you draw as the Ultimate Evilly-Bourgeois Conformist, and so on and on and, yes, on.

I kid you not. There is an appalling amount of South-bashing, Christianity-bashing, Baptist-bashing, Roman Catholic-bashing, and the like in slash. And it gives Kindly Old Uncle Ian (who is neither Baptist nor RC) a severe case of the red-ass.

Fine. Tell you what. You want to burnish your liberal credentials or practice your urban cool, do it on someone else's nickel. Because the reason I have a burr under my saddle on this point is simple. I'm a member of a minority in the slash community: an Actual Live Gay Man. And let me tell you something. In the present atmosphere, in the US of A and worldwide, writing a gay character as anything but a clown or a disturbed villain – shades of the 1930s Hollywood 'Negro' – is a political act. And let me, as your Resident Faggot, tell you ladies – which most slashers, statistically, are – this is my political life you're writing. There are radical fairies out there who would gladly join you in literarily fire-bombing your local parish, synagogue, or place of Prot worship; there are Queer Nation members who would happily follow you with fictive fire and sword in a re-enactment of Sherman's March, shouting 'Death to the Small Town Folks!' But that does not speak for us all, and in fact, not for the plurality of us. That is because many of us recognize that in claiming tolerance for we-uns, we are morally obligated to extend tolerance to you-uns. If we are to preach tolerance, we must practice it. Dr King was – as if this is a surprise – right all along. Any struggle anywhere for human and civil rights must be non-violent, inclusive, and itself free of bigotry.

So if your Muse and the strict requirements of the literary art dictate that Brian or Lance, Diane Bass or Hoke Dorough or Kevin's wife Kris, be your villain, that's fine. Run with it. Equally, it's inevitable that Lou Pearlman is going to be, in BBS, the villain and rotter he appears to be IRL ... but if your anti-Semitic slip is showing, I and a lot of other people will be coming after you with a rope, got that?

I'm serious. If the plot requires, legitimately, that the folks Hollywood loves to hate: church-goers, Southerners, traditionalist Catholics: be less than heroic, so be it. But if you have some deep psychological need to get all Oedipal or Electra-like and show your hatred of your miserably uncool suburban 'rents, or what have you, take it out on someone else. The mere, knee-jerk bigotry against persons of faith, Southerners, and so on, is not only poor, tired, stale writing: it is a moral offense against our very craft as writers. There are far too many sites and stories out there that spew mere bigotry and hate against, inter alia, Lance and the Basses, Howie, Chris, Joey (and note how much of this, even now, is ethnic bigotry, implicitly and not very subtly directed against 'swarthy Catholics' and 'them damn spics' and such. That's simply vile, and inexcusable. If that's your mindset, stop writing slash and go buy a sheet to wear) and against Brian, Kevin, and the whole extended Littrell - Richardson cousinage. It has got to stop. It drags the whole community down.

That's all we have time for today. Next time, we'll consider what Strunk and White would do with 'throbbing lovesticks,' and why people who've never seen the inside of a law school insist on shrieking about how RPS will cause MegaCorpAmeriCo to shut down all slash, everywhere. Class dismissed.

E. B. White once answered a critic's rhetorical question 'Why do we sit down to write?' by saying, 'Because, sir, it is more comfortable than standing.'

From the CABS 'Ten Questions': What do you struggle with when you sit down to write, and how do you overcome it?

My answer: A. The chair. B. WD-40.