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matrixrefugeeOr, How, with the Help of a Green-Eyed Love Machine, a Messianic Figure and His Opposite, and Some Handsome Death Gods, and Those Who Like to Write about Them, Along with a Writer whose Name is Pronounced Somewhat Like "Gay Man", I Learned to Stop Being a Rules Lawyer and Start Appreciating Some Pairings and/or the Writers Therof
I grew up Catholic with a more or less conservative bend and am still a practicing Catholic (albeit an angry one with some mild leanings toward Taoism, Buddhism and Shinto). Sexuality was something we never really talked much about, since my parents are a bit hedgy about the topic; understandable in my mother's case since she was sexually abused by her father when she was only four years old. I was homeschooled and given the fact that all three of us are somewhat introverted, I lived a somewhat sequestered life (this point will become relevant later on...).
I don't remember homosexuality being even mentioned until I was around age eleven, and even then it was spoken about with a certain air of discomfort and even fear. I remember listening to a pro-life radio program on a local Christian AM station, and at one point they featured several rather vitriol-laced talks on homosexuality, stuff of the "OMG! TEH GAY AGENDA!!111" nonsense that now makes my blood boil when I find the conspiracy nuts on the Catholic Answers forum slinging it around. Or the "Cure 'em all! Cure 'em all! Cure 'em all!" stuff that really pisses me off (since some people have the same attitude toward people with autism, but that's a whole other rant). Being an Impressionable Teen, I bought into it. I was, what you would politely call, a bigot, maybe even a homophobe.
But God, it seems, decided to pull a colossal cosmic joke on me. I'm minded of the part in the movie "Finian's Rainbow" where Petula Clark uses one of the wishes in the magic crock of gold to wish that an obnoxious, racist, good ol' boy white southern senator would turn into a black man so he can see what black folks are really like (of course, this movie being made in the 1960s, he becomes a gently caricatured black guy, but he has a change of heart in the end).
I was pen friends with "Melanie" (not her real name) the daughter of a homeschooling family out in California, a really sweet gal with a huge imagination, who was as big on fantasy fiction and the classics as I was. In September of 1997, they were taking the summer-long cross-country trip of their dreams, visiting as many of the famous sites all over the country as they could fit into three months, and that included visiting Boston. We offered to let them spend the night at our house; this included Melanie sleeping on a cot in my room, at the foot of my bed. I remember waking up early the next morning, peeking over at her as she snoozed, and just feeling attracted to her: I just wanted to reach over and kiss her awake and just cuddle with her. I had just turned twenty that year and she was about six months younger, so nothing really creepy there... except I felt really weird about what had gone through my head. It was probably just a proximity thing, but it was the start of a path of self-discovery. I somehow pushed these feelings back into a far corner of my psyche and tried not to think about them. The only person I ever revealed this to, until now, was a priest-friend in confession (and no, it's not breaking the seal of confession for me to reveal this: the seal applies only to the priest, not the penitent)
Also about this time, I read Morris L. West's novel "The Devil's Advocate", which dealt with an ailing Vatican official who's sent to a small town in Italy to investigate the life of a man whose cause for canonization had been proposed. One of the several side-plots involved a gay painter stalking the teenaged illegitimate son of the saint-in-a-state-of-becoming; the character managed to come across as both creepy and sympathetic, pretty much a human monster who really wanted to be loved, even as he desired to destroy one young man's innocence. This made me think a lot about gay people, and see them, for the first time, as humans like the rest of us and not as a problem to be solved.
Flash forward to 2000, when several things happened: I got my first Internet capable computer, amd I first started geeking out on fandom (starting with the Matrix series, or specifically the first movie). This is when I discovered fanfiction, and since I had heard that there was a projected Matrix trilogy in the works, I decided to tide myself over reading fanfiction and trawling message boards for any bit of news about production on the movies.
And that's when I first discovered slash fanfiction, in the guise of a horribly written Neo/Smith monstrosity: wonky descriptions, awkward anatomy, horrible OOCness. If I remember correctly, it included Smith turning into a complete weepy uke (usually it's Neo who does this in your typical Matrix bad slash). Now, while I can see homoerotic overtones in the characters of Smith and Neo and the way their personalities play off each other (even when I wouldn't admit to it), I certainly don't see *that* kind of dynamic; I can imagine Smith possibly "topping from the bottom", but I don't see him crying in Neo's arms after the act. I'm sorry to say, this caused me to roundly pan any and all slash writers and I remained that way for a long time. The vestiges of my "gays = evil at worst, perverted at best" way of thinking started to creep back into my psyche.
2001 came, bringing with it the release of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence". I heard the premise of this movie and since, at the time, I was undergoing counseling partly to cope with my horrible break-up with my fiance in 1999, and partly to try and nail down just why my brain worked differently, thus, David's journey reminded me of my own and I was drawn to this movie from the start. I read every article I could get my hands on about it -- and that's when I discovered Gigolo Joe, a certain green-eyed love machine played by the divinely beautiful Jude Law. Of course since I had missed the movie in the theatre (:: Shakes fist at the critics for dropping the ball with the reviews, which possibly caused it to vanish from the the multiplexes in my area:: ), I decided to tide myself over by -- yep! -- reading fanfic.
And that was when I discovered the masterful Laurie E. Smith (Stand up and take a bow, sis!) and her "One Degree of Separation" stories featuring the at first glance odd pairing of Joe and Dr. Hobby. Now, I didn't really cast any judgment on Joe, even though he twigged my latent "gay-dar"; I just chalked it up to being "part of his programming", plus he has this weird amount of street-wise innocence about him. I wasn't sure what to make of this pairing, and the first time I read the fics I skimmed over some parts of it (more out of a sense of "reading explicit sex = omg a mortal sin!111" than any judgment on the writer; these days I think of it more as "reading explicit sex = reading part of the story. Come on, the Bible isn't exactly G-rated, unless it's a kiddy Bible story book; never read the Song of Songs?"). The second time around, after I'd seen the movie, I read it with a much more open mind -- and this time I didn't skip over ye naughty bits.
2002: I went to WorldCon with Mark and I discovered the writings of Neil Gaiman, read everything I could get my hands on, starting with "American Gods" and as many volumes of the Sandman Comics as I could get ahold of. One thing that struck me was Gaiman's sympathetic and realistic portrayal of characters of all different forms of gender expression and sexual orientation. More of my latent suspicions started to strip away and I even chuckled over the story Neil has told about the time he received an award from a gay rights advocacy group (for "Death: The Time of Your Life") and he got a standing ovation just for the proper pronunciation of his surname. I'd also gotten into playing an chat-based RPG inspired by "A.I." in which I created one of my most bizarre and oddly likable anti-heroes, namely Halloran "Hal" McGeever, a short, unattractive crime news photographer, technological jack-of-all-trades and self-defined "pan-sexual"; I'd initially created him for one of my "A.I." fics featuring Cecie Martin, and Hal was a lot more sinister and even a bit evil, but he re-emerged as a somewhat more sympathetic character. This in contrast to the evil (and somewhat cartoonish) Montressor, another Depraved Bisexual character I'd created for a fanfic that was a kind of extended epilogue to "The Truman Show", though there again, Montressor was supposed to be rather extreme since he wasn't even supposed to be a real person in that world. Also, this guy was contrasted yet again, by the tough yet kind-hearted detective Dietrich Hohenzoller, who was quietly crushing on Truman. I've gotten some interesting comments on these two, from folks who found Montressor "disturbing" (which was my intent) and from those who cheered me for creating Dietrich as "a gay man who's also a *man*." There weren't really any slashy overtones (though I've joked that if this story were a real epilogue to the movie, some fans would be slashing Dietrich and his friend Jerry).
Flash forward to 2003, the year of the Matrix sequels, and the year when I finally stopped lying to myself about how my own quirks run. This came about during the second or third time I watched "The Matrix Reloaded" (my favorite of the three) and I realized I was drooling over Monica Belucci as Persephone, as much as I was drooling over Lambert Wilson as the Merovingian. I also became something of a heavily closeted Merv/Neo 'shipper, though this manifested itself initially in seeking, but not always finding, decently written fics. During the winter of 2005 to 2006, the heyday of the "Degrees of Separation" Matrix AU RPG which spun off from Laurie Smith's Neo/Smith fanfics of the same title, we introduced this very pairing, with Laurie playing Neo and yours truly playing His Excellency the Red King of the Exiles. There was also a subplot involving Neo's parents Michelle and John Anderson coming to terms with their son's emerging identity, which in some ways was a commentary on my own inner turmoil as I came to terms with my own identity and with having an appreciation for slash pairings: Michelle was more accepting, while John was angered and disgusted, but in time came to a quiet acceptance. I had to learn up on the techniques involved, and that included reading the indispensable site Minotaur's Slash Tips: not work safe by any stretch of the imagination and I had to hide this particular page from any parental units passing by the monitor, but full of a lot of insight into the physiology and psychology involved.
Which leads me to the winter of 2008 into 2009, in which I fully came to terms with my own orientation and started designating myself as "bicelibate": ie. bisexual, but celibate. It's not something I expect other people to embrace, and it's not always the easiest way to live, since I do get pressured by well-intentioned people trying to hook me up with someone, when I'm happier as my geekish singleton self, to say nothing of occasional pressures from within. This came about as the result of a long talk I had with a very kindly priest from the Fraternity of St. Peter and from several sessions with my therapist. Considering that I didn't have any gay friends until I started tooling around on the Internet, I'd say the whole "having gay friends will make you gay" canard is bogus. Granted, I was able to resolve my identity issues via chat-based RPGs and slash fiction, I'd say my exposure to good slash was a form of therapy.
And it was about this time that I first watched Yami no Matsuei, which pretty much obliged me to start getting over the last of my hang-ups. While I won't say it's a great anime/manga series (the manga can be a bit unevenly plotted, and I suspect there's some glitches in the translation for the anime dub), it annoys me that some people dismiss this series as a mere "gateway drug to yaoi"; while the male love elements are all over the place -- contextual and subtextual -- it seems to me to be more about the personalities involved and the way they bounce off or slam into each other, than about the romantic elements. I'm generally not big on 'shipping (due to being scared off it by things that happened in the Harry Potter fandom, as well as just simply Not Being Into It), but this is literally the first fandom I've let myself be honest with myself about shipping a pairing or two (or three...)
Now... As a result of coming to terms with things in my own self and being drawn to things in fandom which my previous conditioning had taught me to otherwise avoid. I may be accepting of the presence of slash, but not necessarily of every pairing that's out there, but I'm not about to flame anyone for writing Pairings That I Just Don't See, and trust me, I've been "Buh?" over more than a few pairings I've seen applied in more than a few things I've been a fan of. There are some pairings I mentally put my foot down on and try to avoid. This is the reason I tend to avoid fanfic based on the series "Supernatural": there's so much Wincest, that I just go by recommendations (I love the episode where they Lampshaded this aspect of the fandom, and I have to wonder if the squicked look on Jensen Ackles's face when he says, "They know we're brothers, right?" was More Than Acting). Incest -- unless it's canonic/part of the mythos (viz. Storm Constantine's Grigori trilogy and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series), and then I just forbear with it -- is a Don't Go There for me, but again, it's a personal thing: I have a close family member who was molested by a male relative in the extended family, so it's put me off it since it's Too Close to Reality. Same goes for slashing Harry Dresden and his half-brother Thomas Raith: I can see Thomas being bisexual, but not Harry; a few lines in "Turn Coat" where Harry asserts where his proclivities run (after he gets ogled by some other guys in a White Court owned underground club) pretty much put paid to that pairing or any slashing of Harry. And don't get me started on Muraki and Hisoka portrayed in a relationship, unless somehow it's an AU where Hisoka is suffering some form of Stockholm Syndrome; even then, it's still Too Close To Reality. For the rest, the "Don't Like, Don't Read" rule applies (it's a legitimate rule of thumb, even it has been abused by fanbrats in a flouncy fit). Same goes for any pairing with an underaged partner (and I define "underaged" as "under sixteen if the other party is over 18; sixteen and up is passable. Application becomes hazy if the older partner is an immortal/supernatural being of some kind who looks younger than their chronological age"). I may on occasion rant (sometimes noisily) about pairings that I Just Don't See, but it's a matter of opinion and I would never confront someone about it.
However... if the writer is someone whom I know is going to get the dynamics of GLBT relationships right, and/or if it's a pairing that I can totally see happening, I'm more than happy to give the fic a read. If I like it, I'm likely to comment; if not, I'll quietly hit the back button, maybe post a grumble on this LJ and Move On. I've learned to accept a well-written story as a whole piece of literature, even if the sum of it's parts includes a male/male or a female/female relationship.
I grew up Catholic with a more or less conservative bend and am still a practicing Catholic (albeit an angry one with some mild leanings toward Taoism, Buddhism and Shinto). Sexuality was something we never really talked much about, since my parents are a bit hedgy about the topic; understandable in my mother's case since she was sexually abused by her father when she was only four years old. I was homeschooled and given the fact that all three of us are somewhat introverted, I lived a somewhat sequestered life (this point will become relevant later on...).
I don't remember homosexuality being even mentioned until I was around age eleven, and even then it was spoken about with a certain air of discomfort and even fear. I remember listening to a pro-life radio program on a local Christian AM station, and at one point they featured several rather vitriol-laced talks on homosexuality, stuff of the "OMG! TEH GAY AGENDA!!111" nonsense that now makes my blood boil when I find the conspiracy nuts on the Catholic Answers forum slinging it around. Or the "Cure 'em all! Cure 'em all! Cure 'em all!" stuff that really pisses me off (since some people have the same attitude toward people with autism, but that's a whole other rant). Being an Impressionable Teen, I bought into it. I was, what you would politely call, a bigot, maybe even a homophobe.
But God, it seems, decided to pull a colossal cosmic joke on me. I'm minded of the part in the movie "Finian's Rainbow" where Petula Clark uses one of the wishes in the magic crock of gold to wish that an obnoxious, racist, good ol' boy white southern senator would turn into a black man so he can see what black folks are really like (of course, this movie being made in the 1960s, he becomes a gently caricatured black guy, but he has a change of heart in the end).
I was pen friends with "Melanie" (not her real name) the daughter of a homeschooling family out in California, a really sweet gal with a huge imagination, who was as big on fantasy fiction and the classics as I was. In September of 1997, they were taking the summer-long cross-country trip of their dreams, visiting as many of the famous sites all over the country as they could fit into three months, and that included visiting Boston. We offered to let them spend the night at our house; this included Melanie sleeping on a cot in my room, at the foot of my bed. I remember waking up early the next morning, peeking over at her as she snoozed, and just feeling attracted to her: I just wanted to reach over and kiss her awake and just cuddle with her. I had just turned twenty that year and she was about six months younger, so nothing really creepy there... except I felt really weird about what had gone through my head. It was probably just a proximity thing, but it was the start of a path of self-discovery. I somehow pushed these feelings back into a far corner of my psyche and tried not to think about them. The only person I ever revealed this to, until now, was a priest-friend in confession (and no, it's not breaking the seal of confession for me to reveal this: the seal applies only to the priest, not the penitent)
Also about this time, I read Morris L. West's novel "The Devil's Advocate", which dealt with an ailing Vatican official who's sent to a small town in Italy to investigate the life of a man whose cause for canonization had been proposed. One of the several side-plots involved a gay painter stalking the teenaged illegitimate son of the saint-in-a-state-of-becoming; the character managed to come across as both creepy and sympathetic, pretty much a human monster who really wanted to be loved, even as he desired to destroy one young man's innocence. This made me think a lot about gay people, and see them, for the first time, as humans like the rest of us and not as a problem to be solved.
Flash forward to 2000, when several things happened: I got my first Internet capable computer, amd I first started geeking out on fandom (starting with the Matrix series, or specifically the first movie). This is when I discovered fanfiction, and since I had heard that there was a projected Matrix trilogy in the works, I decided to tide myself over reading fanfiction and trawling message boards for any bit of news about production on the movies.
And that's when I first discovered slash fanfiction, in the guise of a horribly written Neo/Smith monstrosity: wonky descriptions, awkward anatomy, horrible OOCness. If I remember correctly, it included Smith turning into a complete weepy uke (usually it's Neo who does this in your typical Matrix bad slash). Now, while I can see homoerotic overtones in the characters of Smith and Neo and the way their personalities play off each other (even when I wouldn't admit to it), I certainly don't see *that* kind of dynamic; I can imagine Smith possibly "topping from the bottom", but I don't see him crying in Neo's arms after the act. I'm sorry to say, this caused me to roundly pan any and all slash writers and I remained that way for a long time. The vestiges of my "gays = evil at worst, perverted at best" way of thinking started to creep back into my psyche.
2001 came, bringing with it the release of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence". I heard the premise of this movie and since, at the time, I was undergoing counseling partly to cope with my horrible break-up with my fiance in 1999, and partly to try and nail down just why my brain worked differently, thus, David's journey reminded me of my own and I was drawn to this movie from the start. I read every article I could get my hands on about it -- and that's when I discovered Gigolo Joe, a certain green-eyed love machine played by the divinely beautiful Jude Law. Of course since I had missed the movie in the theatre (:: Shakes fist at the critics for dropping the ball with the reviews, which possibly caused it to vanish from the the multiplexes in my area:: ), I decided to tide myself over by -- yep! -- reading fanfic.
And that was when I discovered the masterful Laurie E. Smith (Stand up and take a bow, sis!) and her "One Degree of Separation" stories featuring the at first glance odd pairing of Joe and Dr. Hobby. Now, I didn't really cast any judgment on Joe, even though he twigged my latent "gay-dar"; I just chalked it up to being "part of his programming", plus he has this weird amount of street-wise innocence about him. I wasn't sure what to make of this pairing, and the first time I read the fics I skimmed over some parts of it (more out of a sense of "reading explicit sex = omg a mortal sin!111" than any judgment on the writer; these days I think of it more as "reading explicit sex = reading part of the story. Come on, the Bible isn't exactly G-rated, unless it's a kiddy Bible story book; never read the Song of Songs?"). The second time around, after I'd seen the movie, I read it with a much more open mind -- and this time I didn't skip over ye naughty bits.
2002: I went to WorldCon with Mark and I discovered the writings of Neil Gaiman, read everything I could get my hands on, starting with "American Gods" and as many volumes of the Sandman Comics as I could get ahold of. One thing that struck me was Gaiman's sympathetic and realistic portrayal of characters of all different forms of gender expression and sexual orientation. More of my latent suspicions started to strip away and I even chuckled over the story Neil has told about the time he received an award from a gay rights advocacy group (for "Death: The Time of Your Life") and he got a standing ovation just for the proper pronunciation of his surname. I'd also gotten into playing an chat-based RPG inspired by "A.I." in which I created one of my most bizarre and oddly likable anti-heroes, namely Halloran "Hal" McGeever, a short, unattractive crime news photographer, technological jack-of-all-trades and self-defined "pan-sexual"; I'd initially created him for one of my "A.I." fics featuring Cecie Martin, and Hal was a lot more sinister and even a bit evil, but he re-emerged as a somewhat more sympathetic character. This in contrast to the evil (and somewhat cartoonish) Montressor, another Depraved Bisexual character I'd created for a fanfic that was a kind of extended epilogue to "The Truman Show", though there again, Montressor was supposed to be rather extreme since he wasn't even supposed to be a real person in that world. Also, this guy was contrasted yet again, by the tough yet kind-hearted detective Dietrich Hohenzoller, who was quietly crushing on Truman. I've gotten some interesting comments on these two, from folks who found Montressor "disturbing" (which was my intent) and from those who cheered me for creating Dietrich as "a gay man who's also a *man*." There weren't really any slashy overtones (though I've joked that if this story were a real epilogue to the movie, some fans would be slashing Dietrich and his friend Jerry).
Flash forward to 2003, the year of the Matrix sequels, and the year when I finally stopped lying to myself about how my own quirks run. This came about during the second or third time I watched "The Matrix Reloaded" (my favorite of the three) and I realized I was drooling over Monica Belucci as Persephone, as much as I was drooling over Lambert Wilson as the Merovingian. I also became something of a heavily closeted Merv/Neo 'shipper, though this manifested itself initially in seeking, but not always finding, decently written fics. During the winter of 2005 to 2006, the heyday of the "Degrees of Separation" Matrix AU RPG which spun off from Laurie Smith's Neo/Smith fanfics of the same title, we introduced this very pairing, with Laurie playing Neo and yours truly playing His Excellency the Red King of the Exiles. There was also a subplot involving Neo's parents Michelle and John Anderson coming to terms with their son's emerging identity, which in some ways was a commentary on my own inner turmoil as I came to terms with my own identity and with having an appreciation for slash pairings: Michelle was more accepting, while John was angered and disgusted, but in time came to a quiet acceptance. I had to learn up on the techniques involved, and that included reading the indispensable site Minotaur's Slash Tips: not work safe by any stretch of the imagination and I had to hide this particular page from any parental units passing by the monitor, but full of a lot of insight into the physiology and psychology involved.
Which leads me to the winter of 2008 into 2009, in which I fully came to terms with my own orientation and started designating myself as "bicelibate": ie. bisexual, but celibate. It's not something I expect other people to embrace, and it's not always the easiest way to live, since I do get pressured by well-intentioned people trying to hook me up with someone, when I'm happier as my geekish singleton self, to say nothing of occasional pressures from within. This came about as the result of a long talk I had with a very kindly priest from the Fraternity of St. Peter and from several sessions with my therapist. Considering that I didn't have any gay friends until I started tooling around on the Internet, I'd say the whole "having gay friends will make you gay" canard is bogus. Granted, I was able to resolve my identity issues via chat-based RPGs and slash fiction, I'd say my exposure to good slash was a form of therapy.
And it was about this time that I first watched Yami no Matsuei, which pretty much obliged me to start getting over the last of my hang-ups. While I won't say it's a great anime/manga series (the manga can be a bit unevenly plotted, and I suspect there's some glitches in the translation for the anime dub), it annoys me that some people dismiss this series as a mere "gateway drug to yaoi"; while the male love elements are all over the place -- contextual and subtextual -- it seems to me to be more about the personalities involved and the way they bounce off or slam into each other, than about the romantic elements. I'm generally not big on 'shipping (due to being scared off it by things that happened in the Harry Potter fandom, as well as just simply Not Being Into It), but this is literally the first fandom I've let myself be honest with myself about shipping a pairing or two (or three...)
Now... As a result of coming to terms with things in my own self and being drawn to things in fandom which my previous conditioning had taught me to otherwise avoid. I may be accepting of the presence of slash, but not necessarily of every pairing that's out there, but I'm not about to flame anyone for writing Pairings That I Just Don't See, and trust me, I've been "Buh?" over more than a few pairings I've seen applied in more than a few things I've been a fan of. There are some pairings I mentally put my foot down on and try to avoid. This is the reason I tend to avoid fanfic based on the series "Supernatural": there's so much Wincest, that I just go by recommendations (I love the episode where they Lampshaded this aspect of the fandom, and I have to wonder if the squicked look on Jensen Ackles's face when he says, "They know we're brothers, right?" was More Than Acting). Incest -- unless it's canonic/part of the mythos (viz. Storm Constantine's Grigori trilogy and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series), and then I just forbear with it -- is a Don't Go There for me, but again, it's a personal thing: I have a close family member who was molested by a male relative in the extended family, so it's put me off it since it's Too Close to Reality. Same goes for slashing Harry Dresden and his half-brother Thomas Raith: I can see Thomas being bisexual, but not Harry; a few lines in "Turn Coat" where Harry asserts where his proclivities run (after he gets ogled by some other guys in a White Court owned underground club) pretty much put paid to that pairing or any slashing of Harry. And don't get me started on Muraki and Hisoka portrayed in a relationship, unless somehow it's an AU where Hisoka is suffering some form of Stockholm Syndrome; even then, it's still Too Close To Reality. For the rest, the "Don't Like, Don't Read" rule applies (it's a legitimate rule of thumb, even it has been abused by fanbrats in a flouncy fit). Same goes for any pairing with an underaged partner (and I define "underaged" as "under sixteen if the other party is over 18; sixteen and up is passable. Application becomes hazy if the older partner is an immortal/supernatural being of some kind who looks younger than their chronological age"). I may on occasion rant (sometimes noisily) about pairings that I Just Don't See, but it's a matter of opinion and I would never confront someone about it.
However... if the writer is someone whom I know is going to get the dynamics of GLBT relationships right, and/or if it's a pairing that I can totally see happening, I'm more than happy to give the fic a read. If I like it, I'm likely to comment; if not, I'll quietly hit the back button, maybe post a grumble on this LJ and Move On. I've learned to accept a well-written story as a whole piece of literature, even if the sum of it's parts includes a male/male or a female/female relationship.
