I realized recently that on the average day
I spend about five hours with a computer in my lap, at least four of
which involve using the Internet in some capacity or another. Some of my
friends, particularly the computer science majors, would mock my
average, but I must admit that I find it somewhat unsettling. I’d like
to say that I spend much of my time doing Serious Academic Research and
reading worthy news articles, but that would be a tangled web of lies.
My favorite Web sites are geared towards entertaining bored college
students using as little intellectual stimulation as possible, and I
must admit that I like it that way. When I’m not busy reading comics
that feature homicidal rabbits or sadistic milkmen, I occasionally spend
time looking at queer things on the Internet. It is vastly entertaining.
Take, for example, fanfiction—truly one
of the queerest things to be found on the Internet in every sense of the
word. For those of you not familiar, this is a kind of writing wherein
devotees of a particular television show, movie, video game, or other
sort of entertainment write stories that feature their favorite
characters in various adventures. And by “various adventures” I mean
that it can get quite lurid—the historical roots of fanfiction center
around heterosexual housewives writing stories involving Kirk and Spock
using the captain’s chair for things it was never designed for.
Apparently soap operas just aren’t working for the masses,
particularly since they rarely feature pointy ears or death grips.
(There are approximately 20,000 sites devoted to Star Trek fanfiction,
by the way. Yikes.) As might be expected, science fiction shows tend to
have the largest fanfiction followings. Probably to the relief of the
religious right, erotic tales featuring the characters of 7th Heaven and
Touched by an Angel do exist, but they are a wee bit less common.
The appeal of fanfiction is easy enough
to understand—looking at most popular entertainment today, I find
myself wishing that someone, anyone else was taking a crack at
screenwriting—but unfortunately there are severe limitations to the
art form. By that I mean that one of the best and worst parts of the
Internet is that basically anyone with computer access can put stuff up
on it, and this has the predictable mixed results. While I enjoy
rewriting the last few seasons of Buffy as much as the next person, the
fact that one can easily find stories that depict, say, a homosexual
orgy featuring NBC’s Thursday night lineup, Pokemon characters, and
the fourth cast of Dr. Who. . . well, this is the sort of thing that
makes me want to eat my own brain in horror. This is often compounded
with bad spelling and anatomically impossible acts. Forget about the
children, I just want to save myself.
I find myself wondering what deep-rooted
need in society fanfiction fills. Is what we really need as simple as
“more hot sex scenes between the men of Friends?” One wonders if the
screenwriters have been informed of this. (Or, for that matter, what the
actors would think.) And going back to the apocryphal example, what
exactly do legions of heterosexual women get out of reading about hot
Trekkie homo loving? As I am lacking for answers, I posed the question
to several friends of mine. It turns out that dirty books are fun. Who
knew?
One of the most engrossing things about
fanfiction is that it’s illustrative of the larger power of the
Internet. Not only did bored people in past times have to do productive
things like quilting and cheesemaking to occupy the hours, they had a
difficult time of finding any sort of non-standard community,
particularly if they were in rural areas. The Internet has made all
sorts of minorities, including us queers, know that we are not alone in
the ether. And, more importantly, to those even smaller
minorities—say, those who are devotees of love scenes between various
Saturday morning cartoon characters—it shows that no matter how fringe
you are, your people have a Web page. I find this to be a beautiful
thing.
Kristen Minor is a member of the class
of 2004 at Dartmouth College, where she has recently decided to major in
studying women, which is not to be confused at all with women’s
studies. She would like to say that the world can evolve into one of
peace and harmony if we all would just worship llamas and can be reached
at Kristen@youth-guard.org.
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