I just read this and I couldn´t agree more. When I look back at different pairings I´ve shipped (Ennis/Jack- BBM, Keller/Beecher- OZ, Buffy/Spike- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jarod/Miss Parker- The Pretender, Nikita/Michael - La Femme Nikita etc), it´s never really been about gender, but rather with "transgression, overcoming hurdles in an irrevocable manner and/or a radical change in one's self-image, also irrevocable", or what this writer refers to as "the slash edge".
The Slash Edge: Why Queer as Folk isn't Slashy
Debra Fran Baker
[email protected] Last December, I joined a slew of other slash fans and changed my cable subscription from HBO to Showtime. This gave me access to Stargate:SG1, which was a major plus, but I did it for another reason. I wanted the US version of the British series "Queer as Folk." After all, it had everything a slash fan could want in a series - romantic situations, beautiful boys and lots and lots of gay sex. Obviously, it would be slash heaven. Except that it's not. It's a fun series to watch, certainly. The boys are beautiful, and the sex scenes are hot and the plots involving their lives are engrossing enough to have hooked my husband for reasons other than the Lesbians. I love watching it. However, it is not what I would call "slashy."
The problem is that it lacks what I call the slash "edge" - a feeling that is not unique to slash fiction but is one of the things that defines it to me. The edge occurs when the story or series or movie contains one or more of three main elements:
Transgression, overcoming hurdles in an irrevocable manner and/or a radical change in one's self-image, also irrevocable. In most of the world, the social norm is to be heterosexual, or at least to act that way in public. This is as true in the varied universes of the series we watch and slash as it is in real life. It is so much true that for the most part, the characters we choose to pair are always, in the series, paired with a member of the opposite sex. This means that when we put them with a member of the same sex, they have transgressed the norms of both our world and theirs and they have also transgressed their normal behavior. They do so because their love for the other person is so strong that they do not care, at least at that moment, for society's norms and expectations. For some readers, the simple act of deciding to transgress, or of realizing what it means to be in love with this person, is enough.
On screen, it's when they transgress the norms of male behavior in a particular culture. Examples would be the way Jim and Blair can't keep their hands off each other or repeatedly invade each other's personal space. Another is Skinner crying when Mulder is abducted in front of his eyes. Starsky and Hutch sobbing in each other's arms, Vinnie and Sonny letting the music speak of their feelings for each other in that movie theater, Bayliss cupping Pembleton's face on the roof - these are all examples of "slashy" moments created when the characters transgress societal norms.
Even when they don't have society going against them, there are often other hurdles to overcome, usually with irrevocable results. If a superior falls for a subordinate, both risk careers and possibly even trials. If a police officer falls for his partner, they risk being separated on the job, provided they get to keep the job at all. The same happens if a teacher falls for a student - or a human falls for a vampire. There may be a very material or spiritual sacrifice involved in deciding to enter this relationship. And if the relationship is transgressive in other ways, such as being same sex here and now, the problems are multiplied and must be considered, because once such a decision is made and acted upon, it can't be unmade.
Let's go further. A man falls for another man. He thinks about him all the time, he wants to touch him, to kiss him, to make love with him. Except he's never done that with a man before. Maybe he's known he was bisexual all his life, but chose to live as a straight man. Maybe he's even gay but has chosen to repress this. Maybe he didn't know he was gay or bisexual but you can't choose who you love. He's about to take a big step into the unknown - provided his love object feels the same way. He becomes a nervous virgin again when he realizes he is going to do things, and have things done to him, that are entirely new. Touching another man intimately may be a bigger hurdle than anything else, and while slash stories rarely talk about it in that way, that's also tremendously slashy. All of a sudden, perhaps, the older man, the teacher, might become the taught.
A final ingredient to the "slash edge" is when a character starts to see himself in a completely different way. A good example comes from literature - Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair (read it. Even if you know nothing about baseball, read it.) The viewpoint character in the book, a husband and father, falls in love with a baseball teammate. During the course of the novel, he tests himself by comparing his lover to his former lust object, Pia Zadora. By the end of the book, he has reconceptualized himself as gay - he prefers the male form in general, his lover in particular and Pia does nothing for him. In slash fiction, Francesca does something like this in her Natures series, when Jim realizes that its Blair's very maleness that turns him on, over and above his love for and his bond to Blair himself. Again, not only is this change radical, it's irrevocable. Once a person admits to an attraction to the same sex, it doesn't go away, nor should it.
None of these things only apply to m/m stories or buddy series. I personally get similar rushes for all sorts of transgressions, hurdles and irrevocable decisions. A good example would be vampires - and this is well exploited by Anne Rice. When a human chooses to become vampire, they fulfill all three conditions - they transgress societal norms, they overcome tremendous hurdles and they change who they are permanently - but this only works when the human goes over willingly. If they are taken against their will, there is no edge. It may well still be sexual in nature - vampire feeding is very sexual - but there is no edge.
Another literary example is Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Sime/Gen series, which is also more or less vampiric in nature. In this case, the edge comes when a member of one group becomes a willing/permanent life force donor to a member of the other, even though the first was raised to hate and fear the second group. It feels exactly as if a child raised by homophobes finds himself in a gentle, loving relationship with another man. Other such edges is a character willingly sacrificing himself for another or for a cause, or making a vow that would take them away from their normal lives even if they don't want to do it, or willingly accepting a permanent physical change despite any ramifications. Anne Rice's book about the operatic castrati, Cry to Heaven, is an example of this.
In television, there are several "het" series that have slashy edges to them. They don't tend to have the transgressive part, since men and women are supposed to fall in love, but they do have the hurdles at the very least. Remington Steele, Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Moonlighting come to mind immediately. The couples in these series don't want to fall in love, in fact they fight hard not fall in love, or to admit it to themselves - the other person is completely wrong or the relationship is inappropriate or even, as in SMK, must be hidden from everyone - just like a slash relationship in a sensitive situation.
So why isn't QAF slashy? The series is certainly transgressive - it's a sexually explicit soap opera about gay men and women, its had to over come the hurdles of prejudice in its viewership and in those who wouldn't watch it and while it won't change its own image, it will change television itself just by existing. The problem is, these things apply to the series as an entity by itself. They do not, as of yet, apply to the world *inside* the series or to any of the characters.
In the world inhabited by the main characters in QAF - the gay community of Pittsburgh, and, by extension, of the US and possibly of the world - same sex relationships are the norm. In this context, it is expected that men will sleep with men and women will sleep with women. Therefore, there is no perceived transgression, either by the characters or the viewers. All the various behaviors that exist in this series - young boys going after older men, men sleeping with a series of anonymous "tricks", two members of the same sex living together as if married and treated as married couples by everyone around them - these are just the way things are. Watching David and Michael or Brian and Justin kiss is barely more titillating (to me, at least) than watching two straight lovers kiss because these kisses violate nothing in that universe.
The most inappropriate relationship is between Justin and Brian, because Justin is so young. However, he's very self-possessed and sure of himself, more so than the average seventeen year old and it is legal for an adult to have sex with him in the US state of Pennsylvania, where this takes place. It's also more uncomfortable than any thing else.
There are some examples of major life changing decisions on the series. However, one is in no way sexual or edgy - Melanie and Lindsey decided to have a baby and enlisted Brian, so among other things, they now all see themselves as parents. This is slightly transgressive even in the gay context, but even if they didn't employ the usual means, reproduction is still a normal human thing. The others are the beginning or ending of marriage equivalents - and as these do not have transgressive elements in this universe, it is no more shattering than if Melanie and Lindsey or Michael and David were straight couples. In the QAF, they are simply couples having "couple" problems that are really not much different from anyone else with new relationships or a new baby - well, the third party in the baby is different, but not in a slashy sense. They do not end up with a major change of self.
This can be compared to the other major cable series with m/m content: Oz. Oz is extremely slashy, with both an overt relationship and subtext for others. It is normal for men to have sex with each other in prisons, even if it's against the rules, so one might assume that the context would be the same as QAF, but it isn't. Most of these men see themselves as straight, for example, but bowing to the situation, and we don't see most of these men in sexual situations anyway - other than subtexty looks. And we all know that subtexty looks can create a lot of fan fiction.
But then you have the overt pairing - Beecher and Keller - and it feels like a slash story. Not like a standard romance, which is how the David and Michael relationship feels, but like a slash story. They are transgressive because it disobeys the rules and because while m/m sex is permitted in prison, although not officially, m/m love is not, unless it's between two admitted gay men - and even there it's situational. Keller did deliberately set out to make Beecher, a heterosexual husband and father, fall in love with him, which succeeded too well in that he got caught, too. It's full of hurdles because Beecher had to accept that he could fall in love with a man - with *this* man, and Keller had to realize he could think of someone beside himself.
Keller is not a good man. He kills. He's killed college boys who let him have sex with them. He's killed every man who had sex with Beecher after they broke up. There is nothing good, healthy, nice or normal about their love. Both have hurt each other badly with words and deeds and violence. They don't want to be in love. But they are. And it was immediate. Almost from the first moment they met, after the series' narrator refers "boy meeting boy", all of their interactions are filled with sexual tension. Every word, every touch, every look they exchanged screamed it out, and the fact that it hurt as much as it did anything else only made it better. If Keller puts his hand on Beecher's shoulder, I melt. This is love despite everything, and sex because of passions they don't want but must embrace.
If a naked Justin licks ice cream off an equally naked Brian, I just smile and think how cute.
A "slashy" series will have an edge consisting in part of transgression, of leaping hurdles and of changing one's self image, or of the possibilities of all of these. QAF, by showing us gay as normal and natural, is an important and valuable series, as well as fun to watch, but those very things eliminate slashiness. Now, if it were up to me, they'd bring in some guy who was in the place David was - an adult man at a point where he realizes he's been living a lie - or better yet, before that point, when he's still at the "I was so drunk last night" stage. Just a suggestion.
The End
Copyright 2001 Debra Fran Baker and NightRoads Associates.
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