How Queer Fandom Took Control of Our TV
On a recent episode of HBO’s Euphoria—currently one of TV’s most talked-about shows, a Skins-esque teen drama about... angst, basically—I watched as a cartoon Harry Styles went down on a teary, sweaty cartoon Louis Tomlinson. Then I asked myself: how did we get here? And how has Internet fandom won? It’s not as though I hadn’t seen the former One Direction members locked together in (fictional, but beautifully rendered) agonizing, sweaty ecstasy before. I’ve seen Photoshopped images of splayed legs and tangled muscles; Styles’s and Tomlinson’s faces convincingly superimposed onto the bodies of gay porn stars. I’ve seen a lot (the work of a scholar is never done). But this was the first time I’d seen such a thing on a major television show watched by millions, one executively produced by Drake, one that airs back to back with the prestige drama Big Little Lies. And it’s all because today, queer fans have taken over television.
Several years ago, my Tumblr feed, and Wattpad, and Livejournal, all had me desensitized to horny depictions of Styles and Tomlinson; Harry Potter and Draco; Sherlock and Moriarty; even Cinderella and her wicked stepmother. But it took a strong, untapped desire, and hundreds of hours worth of lonely after-school nights, to find them. Just as I’d once played “mommies and daddies” in my schoolyard in an attempt to explore and perform the adulthood I felt destined for, once adolescence came, I found myself playing with my true, and mostly hidden, desires in the form of fan fiction.
I was among many. Unable to fulfill our desires through representation on the streets or on screen, we took heterosexual-identifying characters and stars and made them puppets of our latently gay desires. It’s a practice known as slash—or more accurately in my case, femslash—and it’s existed long before me. And it’s changed the TV landscape for good.
What you probably know as fan fiction takes established heterosexual characters from TV, movies, books, and warps them into alternative universes and situations imagined by the titular fan;. Slash fiction takes canonically straight male characters and rewrites them into a homosexual romance. Likewise, femslash, a later iteration of the form, converts canonical gal pals into girlfriends.
Slash and femslash differ tonally and substantively from straight up fan-fiction. Compare Fifty Shades Of Grey, which originated as Twilight fan fiction, and the Euphoria scene I mentioned, and you’ll begin to appreciate slash and femslash as an altogether more intense genre. Fem/slash takes yearning to the point of urgency—where just a kiss can feel like the difference between life and death. Fan fiction needs whips and chains and a whole playroom full of torture devices to even come close.
Scholars tend to pinpoint Star Trek as the beginning of TV’s relationship with slash; femslash came a few decades later with the arrival of Xena Warrior Princess, a show that was pivotal in shifting the fan/producer relationship from non-existent to collaborative. Airing from 1995 to 2001, Xena’s rise ran concurrently with the mainstreaming of the Internet and web forums, where fans immediately seized on the opportunity to encode their queerness onto the show’s female characters.
Most encouragingly of all, it didn’t exist purely in the fans’ heads. Producers of Xena, according to Ohio University’s School of Media Arts & Studies associate professor Eve Ng, acknowledged fem/slash writers for the first time “in a friendly, positive way,” as the show’s producers were often known to lurk on the Xena fans—also known as ‘Xenites’—web forums, and actively encouraged fan fiction.
Actress Renee O’Connor, who played Xena’s sidekick Gabrielle on the show, confirms the producers’ engagement with early slash fiction. “We were very aware of the Internet chat rooms,” she says. “That was a new way for fans to interact with [us] directly, and it definitely influenced the show.” The producers even brought in femslash writer Melissa Good to pen two episodes, which pushed Xena and Gabrielle’s implicit queer relationship ever so gently from subtext into text. “[Melissa] and I still remain friends today,” O’Connor says fondly.
Catherine Tosenberger, an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg who’s written extensively about fem/slash fiction, believes that “the nineties [marked] a watershed moment” for slash fiction. It was largely being penned by the queer and marginalized—those who didn’t necessarily have the same access to official production settings as say, cis white men. And, as Tosenberger remarks, they weren’t just using fan fiction as a way to “tell the stories we want to tell,” they were also using it to talk back to a media and publishing landscape that has so often privileged heterosexuality, and sidelined anyone who doesn’t identify as such.
At the same time, producers were becoming increasingly aware of an emerging queer market, who were keen to find themselves represented on the screen. This hasn’t changed. Not counting Euphoria, or the addition of Star Trek’s first gay characters, nor the delightfully slash-primed Gentleman Jack, I’ve watched an awful lot of bad TV just for the sake of my own representation. As a lesbian who just enjoys seeing other lesbians, it won’t take much to sway me towards some pivotal girl on girl action. But for those who need a little more convincing, fem/slash has given producers a template to woo a queer audience, as well as a liberal heterosexual one. Derek Johnson, a scholar who’s been examining the relationship between TV producers and fandom for several years, confirms as much: “As far back as the ‘90s, the television industry recognized that programming with queer content appeals could be used to attract young socially liberal audiences regardless of sexuality.”
Towards the end of the twentieth century, “television began moving away from a mass market model,” Johnson says. “The logics of target marketing and narrowcasting meant that smaller but more intensely engaged audiences became more valuable.” So as the new century departed from a broadcasting model into one that fragmented into more and more channels and niches—the Weather Channel, the Golf Channel, the Global Wrestling network, to name a few—“the competition for more viewers got more intense.” That intense competition demanded intense viewers, who, like me, would cling onto every touch, twist, and kiss. Cue the gays.
While our stories have only recently come to the fore, modern fan fiction doesn’t differ much from its Star Trek roots. After reviewing several decades’ worth of the stuff—including some from my own girlfriend, to my utter delight—fem/slash remains just as achingly romantic. The dynamic often involves one party in pain, and another who’s there to comfort or redeem. That’s a trope you’ll see played out on Xena and even Euphoria. Between these two shows came the rise of social media, which has given queer fans more value, and their stories more influence, than ever. Outlets like Twitter and Tumblr have since become vital for producers to win over queer viewers.
“We’ve been in an era of ‘peak TV’ for the last few years, so the producers of any particular show will be eager to win not just casual viewers, but dedicated fans,” Ng says. “Viewers who have historically been under-represented are particularly engaged fans, and queer viewers have demonstrated that in their viewing and social media practices.”
Take the relationship between Glee (which began airing in 2009) and Tumblr (which was founded in 2007) as the perfect case study. As a website that encourages fan practices, including fem/slash fiction, Tumblr advanced the goals of Wattpad and Livejournal, to the point where fans were getting unprecedented access to producers. The blogging website not only helped queer fans to gain influence, it helped make that influence transparent. Today, knowing that the lesbian relationship between the show’s Brittany and Santana was willed by Tumblr’s femslash writers isn’t uncommon knowledge—it’s further evidence that neither the writers nor the producers are responsible for TV’s boom in queer representation, owing it instead to the fans at home.
That doesn’t mean producers have been entirely respectful of this relatively new queer, participatory fan culture. There’s a direct correlation between shows that bring in a large amount of fan labour, and something we now commonly refer to as queerbaiting. Thought to have been coined on Tumblr, that term refers to the ways in which producers lure in queer viewers with teases of same-sex chemistry, without ever following through on the promise. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s hit BBC series Sherlock, which attracted and invited a huge queer and marginalized fanbase throughout its run, is the most notorious example of late. Essentially all of the characters who surrounded Sherlock and his assistant John Watson believe they were dating. Their landlady made a coy “are you sure you’ll be needing two beds?” remark, and John’s girlfriend had a sneaking suspicion that her boyfriend was boinking his boss behind her back. It’s not unreasonable of Sherlock’s viewers to have suspected the same.
“Plenty of shows started throwing scraps to queer fans once they realized those fans existed,” Tosenberger explains, citing Supernatural as an example of modern-day queerbaiting. As Sherlock’s vital, vocal queer viewership dwindled in its later seasons, a once dedicated Tumblr fandom loudly aired the grievances with the show, and petitions to end the show were subsequently penned. It became a lesson in how to treat and keep queer fans. Recently, the David Tennant and Michael Sheen Amazon series Good Omens, a TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel, has been exemplary. The book enjoyed an active slash fandom upon release, which then went on to transcend its Internet origins and inspired the intimate relationship between Tennant and Sheen’s characters. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Sheen admitted that he’d consulted early fan fiction for inspiration. “It's no wonder he's become fandom's new boyfriend,” Tosenberger says. “He is literally One of Us.”
Now that we’re so deeply entrenched in this era of so-called peak TV, it’s become far harder to find a show lacking in queer representation than it is to find one that’s entirely heterosexual. “Instead of the writers beginning with unspoken assumptions that all characters are straight, some at least can start off with indeterminate sexuality and then become canonically queer down the line,” Ng explains. That’s the tact many creators seem to be taking today, including Riverdale’s, who wrote the seemingly spoiled and straight Cheryl Blossom into queer canon during the CW show’s second season. “I believe the producers commented that they were aware of fan enthusiasm for this to happen,” Ng adds. So if Euphoria really is just Riverdale with a load of dicks thrown in, don’t be surprised if the series culminates in a big, queer pants-on orgy.
As The Verge reported in 2017, like Glee, Euphoria, and just about any teenage centered show you can think of today, Riverdale “was written and conceived around the idea of a fan community, incorporating fan service into its scripts before there were fans to appreciate it.” Britta Lundin, who wrote for Riverdale in its first three seasons, attributes Twitter for this change. “In the past, TV creators had very few metrics to see how fans of their show were reacting to it,” she says. “They would get ratings, of course, and they could read the published reviews. But there was a thick wall between those who actually made the show and those who watched it. [But] the barrier between fans and creators is thinner than ever. A show runner has only to click on the trending hashtag to see what fans are saying about the show. And fans can show up en masse in a writer's mentions to let them know what they thought of their episode. No one is making TV in a void anymore.” True, though I’ll take it one step further—you won’t find many TV shows who aren’t seeking the aid of their queer fans anymore.
While it’s still a bit of an inside joke, the relationship between queer fandom, fem/slash writers, and TV producers has been acknowledged to the point of parody. There’s the troubling Styles/Tomlinson scene on Euphoria for starters, but before that, there was Sherlock and Moriarty’s near kiss, which show runner Steven Moffat culled straight from slash. “No one really does three-act structure, but just trying to put words that make somebody else turned on, that’s going to teach you more about writing than any writing college you can go to. It’s creative and exciting,” he said of his slash fiction reading in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Just before that, Supernatural aired an episode literally called “Fan Fiction.” It premiered in 2014 and finally pandered to fandom’s desire to see the two male leads depicted in a similarly sweaty ecstasy. But this did all happen in a dream sequence so as not to disturb the main arc of the show, of course.
Years ago, fan fiction became my first point of queer contact. Sitting alone at my family desktop computer, writing about girls kissing girls—something I truly believed I’d never see in life, let alone on my TV—I had no idea that I might have been taking part in a silent revolution. By taking a heterosexual text and stripping it apart in order to project our own desires, I and everyone else writing fem/slash was unwittingly challenging TV’s long heterosexual history. We weren’t only projecting new points of view; we were predicting TV’s future.
Originally Appeared on GQ
