You’re not listening when I tell you that you’re being hurtful.”ĭiscussing these accusations with fellow straight women slash fans resulted in a degree of real anger from women who felt that their sexuality was being judged or that men were yet again trying to control them. “The worst thing,” one gay friend said, “is that aren’t listening to me. Specifically, these men indicated that straight or bisexual women had repeatedly asked overly personal questions about their sex lives, treated them like adorable puppies instead of humans, and attempted to co-opt the gay male experience or even elevate allies over actual gay men. Some personal friends echoed these complaints. I briefly mentioned this issue in something that got passed around Tumblr a couple times, and I received a number of private and public messages from people claiming (it’s the Internet, so who knows) to be gay men who had wanted to share unpleasant experiences from their participation in the slash community. To many people, it often seems that women in the slash community have decided that “gay sex” is always sexy, that queer is always cute, and that we can take ownership of the gay male experience by writing about it and reading each other’s writing. I don’t believe that any single fantasy is innately wrong, but my little departure into those boys’ private lives was indicative of a dangerous pattern of thought. Inside my head, a voice was singing, “They’re so cuuuuuuuuuute!” I haven’t considered college boys sexy since junior high, thank you very much, but those hickeys set something off in my brain, and suddenly I was wondering things about these boys’ sex life together. They were holding hands and making plans for the day and sharing dumb Internet jokes, and one of the boys had love bites all around his neck. I had breakfast in a hotel a few months ago and saw two college-aged guys at the next table talking, like young people do, loudly enough to grab my attention. Something about gay men made their brains go funny. That’s a phrase that I’ve heard several liberal, intelligent women say without shame: “I love gay guys.” I know that these women understand that gay men are not homogenous, so what the hell do they mean by that statement? It’s certainly not something they’d say about any other non-dominant group. You’ll also find women who are furious that anyone might have a problem with them “loving gay guys.” Search the Internet, and you’ll find loads of people who understand the issue better than I do. I’m not the first woman to worry about this. It was one of very few times in my life that I really felt like part of a group.īut something about the screaming bothered me, too: were these women specifically squeeing over Cecilos, an absolutely adorable couple that could make anyone’s eyes turn into pink hearts, or were they losing their minds over the simple idea of two men being in love? And if they were just excited about men being in love, was that a bad thing? I left the performance giddy, watching strangers in Glow Cloud tees skip down the street giggling and shouting.
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That night, though, was freaking magical, because those fangirls were screaming about something that I wanted to scream about, too.
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As much as I love fandom, a throng of screaming fangirls is basically my nightmare I hate high-pitched noises and get anxious in crowds. I can get extremely excited about my ships, pacing around and flailing and spitting references like a kid, but I very rarely get to engage in that kind of behaviour in a group. Once the shock wore off (and I found my earplugs), I was exhilarated. Seeing it live made it clear that a good portion of the audience was shipping Cecil/Carlos. I’d been listening to Night Vale for a while at that point, but I hadn’t really thought about it in a sexual context. The Night Vale episode focused heavily on the romantic relationship between two male characters, Cecil and Carlos, and half the audience would absolutely shriek every time anything remotely romantic happened between them. About a year ago, I went with friends to see a live reading of Welcome to Night Vale and was shocked by the amount of screaming coming from women in the audience.