fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #1866 ]

[ SECRET POST #1866 ]

⌈ Secret Post #1866 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS. #18 is a flashing/blinking gif.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 08 pages, 190 secrets from Secret Submission Post #267.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 2 3 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeats ]
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.

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OP here, agreed that the "interested in gay people" was badly worded and really should've read "interested in homosexuality". I personally know gay people, respect them like everyone else and vote/petition for their benefit, I just don't find myself particularly fascinated by slash or any other media with LGBT themes.

Fandom had given me the self-doubt that I might be homophobic because most LGBT people/characters/pairings don't get much of a "squee" reaction out of me (even though I'm perfectly OKAY with the whole thing, let me stress this). Reading the comments so far, though, it seems that this is not as bad a thing as I thought, so thanks for that F!S.

My dear, I don't feel that a person is homophobic unless s/he has demonstrated actual homophobia. E.g., dedicated to spreading lies about LGBT folks (they're out to destroy marriage and corrupt the children!), preventing queer marriage, killing gay people or encouraging other people to do so (seems to be trendy with American pastors travelling to Africa), harassing gay children to suicide, etc...

Basically, what I am saying is this: in a world of very real discrimination, I'd think most queer folk have a pretty high definition of what constitutes homophobia. Your not having a preference for fictional slash pairings is not going to offend your average queer. I would personally only be offended (for example) if there was a canon gay relationship, and someone went out of his or her way to bash that pairing publicly because of the characters' genders (not for example, "I don't like their chemistry.") (The people who tend to do this are also those who IRL speak out against gays, I found. If you are supportive of LGBT folks IRL, well, actions count).

Yeah, this. Finding out that one of my straight friends doesn't get titillated by reading slash is pretty low on my list of LGBT related concerns.

I'm a gay and I get a little upset about mildly homophobic attitudes (this does not include whether people enjoy slash). I try to talk about it gently instead of yelling like a SJW, but it still bothers me.

Still a real queer person.

I didn't say all queers felt the same way. But yeah, I get where you're coming from. Even if the attitude is just a little homophobic (and not intentionally cruel), it can really hurt if it's someone you respect like a friend or family member.

My main point was that not preferring slash doesn't make a person homophobic.

Agreed.

If you're generally more interested in het, you're just someone who's generally more interested in het. It doesn't mean you're homophobic.

But if there's not even one LGBT character you care about, or pairing you ship, then that's a little suspect. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means that you might have some prejudices to work on getting rid of. I don't know you, but a lot of straight people have this thing where any gay character/relationship is characterized first and foremost by it being GAY, while straight characters/relationships get to be defined by the character's personality or the way the people in the relationship interact.

I get if your favorites are always going to be het, but I don't understand why a gay character that's the same "type" as a straight character you like, or a gay relationship that's the same "type" of relationship as a het one you like, is so different. I mean, I'm gay and I dislike het generally... but if there's a het ship that has the dynamics I like, I'll still like that particular ship, you know? So I just don't get it.

I'm sort of the same, if I read you right, and dynanic >>>>>> gender by a long long way (except, my pairings tend to stick vaguely to what canon would consider possible, because... I dunno. I like playing inside the box or something.)

But I get why some people prefer one type over another. I mean, I intellectually understand "I'm a straight woman so reading about a woman's arousal isn't for me and that's why I like slash" in the same way that I understand "I'm a woman therefore I need a woman to be part of the pairing to really get it so my ships are predominantly het and none of them are slash" - because a lot of fandom pairing is fancying one half and putting yourself in the shoes of the other. And lesbians - no, actually, multiple female characters - are often a rarity.

(What about gen, I hear you ask, or being in a character without being interested in their romantic attachments? This is fandom, I reply, and laugh in your face at your innocence. Because it's all about the porn.)

+1
Sharing the same sexuality is very shaky ground to "relate" to. I'm pan, but I do not "relate" to every queer, straight, gay, or whatever girl. Assuming OP is a straight girl, by their logic they must relate to Bella/Edward more than Kirk/Spock.

I agree.

"But if there's not even one LGBT character you care about, or pairing you ship, then that's a little suspect. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means that you might have some prejudices to work on getting rid of."

WTF? If you can't accept that some people have no problem with LBGT in real life but just aren't interested in reading about them in fandom, then maybe YOU are the one who has some prejudices to work on getting rid of.

NAYRT, not the way I'm reading it.

ayrt

I think you're misinterpreting.

I have no interest in reading about heterosexuality. (No, I'm not straight myself.) Het itself, for virtue of being het, is not my thing. However, no het relationship is ONLY a het relationship. There are sweet, cute het relationships, angsty het relationships, het relationships as an awesome partnership between two badasses, rivalry het relationships, etc. While het isn't a draw for me, badass/badass ships and rivalry ships are, and some of mine happen to be het ships. Even though the gender configuration isn't my favorite, it doesn't mean that there's nothing there at all to like about the relationship.

Do I ship those het pairings as hard as I do the queer ships that I love? No. Do I ship them at all? Yes. Do I read fanfic just for sexual reasons? No, and if the OP does then it's reasonable if they only like one sort of ship.

But the reason I think it smacks of unconscious homophobia is that there are all kinds of het ships and all kinds of queer ships, and if the OP finds nothing likable about any ship that is between two people of the same gender or even any character that's LGBT, nothing likable at all, then the OP probably sees any gay character/ship as nothing more than "gay". I don't think the OP needs to prefer queer anything to het anything, but the point is that it looks like the OP doesn't like anything involving gay people.

Completely different anon who is late to this party and will probably be overlooked anyway, here...

I just wanted to point out that some people have lives and just don't have the fucking time to experiment with every goddamned shipping possibility out there. Yeah, incidentally, all of my ships are het. But by "all of my ships," I mean the total number of "my" ships can be counted on one hand with some fingers left over. Does the fact that there are no slash ships on that hand make me a homophobe? Sorry, but I don't fucking think so.

ayrt

If you like <5 ships and they're all het, then no, that doesn't say anything about your feelings on queer people.

However, most people in fandom, at least the ones I've known (and who knows, the pool of people I know is probably not very representative) have many more than that. It's not always a case of having no life outside fandom, so get off your high horse. You are not superior to people who spend more time on the internet than you do.

(no subject)

hiyami.livejournal.com - 2012-02-12 11:34 (UTC) - Expand

I think the biggest issue with this isn't the OP themselves but the portrayal of queer people in fiction in general. How many central gay characters have you know whose sexuality has nothing to do with how they are treated and/or portrayed as just a normal person who happens to be gay? I'm not much into movies but in my experience with shows I have encountered a grand total of one, and that's George Huang from Law and Order: SVU. He's not even really a main character of the show.

I've said this before but I'll keep repeating myself. I would much rather see a story about a cop who happens to be gay than a gay man who happens to be a cop. Until we're able to do that, I'm afraid non-hetero couples just won't be accepted as anything but "other" in the general public mind.

Really interesting way to put it, and maybe that's a hint as to why slash is so popular in fandom - you get to see characters who are aready fully fleshed-out in canon, who just happen to also be gay for the purposes of the fic.

But see, that's kind of the thing. In my (admittedly slightly limited) experience with slash, the fact that they're gay almost always overpowers all their other normal attributes we see in canon. One of my least favorite offenders is the whole idea that gay = nymphomaniac. Seriously, I can't count how many times a dude couldn't even wake up in the morning without having to jump into InstaHorny mode. Seriously, if the majority of gay men got as much ass as gay guys do in fic, they'd all need asshole reconstruction surgery at some point in their life. That's why if I do read slash I prefer it to have limited-to-no sex unless the plot calls for it.

I generally agree with what you said, but I very much disagree that OP should feel "suspect" if he or she does not ship or care about any LGBT characters. I'm bisexual and none of the characters I'm interesting in are LGBT, and neither are any of my OTPs. This does not make me homophobic - it's just because my favorite characters just happen to not be gay, or because there isn't a large representation of diverse queer characters/couples in the media.

This is the way I feel about it too. I can understand having a preference but if you don't ship ANYTHING that isn't het regardless of whether they have the same character dynamics that you like in your het ships... yeah, you might want to examine why that is.

Porn is one thing, I can understand only being interested in the sort of porn that gets you off, but... if a het ship and a gay ship have exactly the same sort of dynamics and you only like one and not the other, that's a little odd.

Just echoing a bunch of people who have already commented, but I think it's fine to not be interested in slash. I'm not a huge reader of it. I have a couple of slash/femslash ships but my major ones all tend to be het.

I'm very interested in gay rights in RL though. I'm a massive lurker/occasional poster on comms/blogs focusing on the 'isms'. I think this all dpeneds on how social justice/politically motivated a person is. And, again, it's fine not to be motivated in that way. :)

I think to an extent, it can be normal not to be as interested in media that deals with themes that aren't about "us." I think it's what we learn, too. I think it's easy to get the idea that things about or geared toward people who aren't like you won't appeal to you. It's not a...nice thing to realize, I guess, but I don't think it means you're homophobic so much as that you like things that pertain to you.

I gravitate toward LGBT fiction because I relate to it and find it fascinating. But I know on a subconscious level, I gravitate away from fiction dealing with groups and experiences that are very different from mine. I often enjoy it when I do read it, though, so I think it's largely a perception thing. It's not actually that I can't relate to those people or find them interesting.

If you didn't watch a movie because you learned one of the characters was gay or something, I'd kinda find that questionable. But I can understand why as a straight person, you might feel that something like "The L-Word" (to think of a random example) isn't for you and wouldn't be interesting to you.

So basically what I'm getting out of this is that you wouldn't ever watch or read anything with LGBTQ themes because they don't ~interest you.

That is kind of sad, tbh. And I mean that genuinely. Why would you want to watch only stuff about heterosexuals all the time? I mean, I'm a lesbian, but even I find it both boring and unbelievable if every character is gay as a purse full of rainbows. IRL, you encounter lots of people with sexuality different than your own, so why wouldn't you want to see that in media too?

OP here and nope, you're making some pretty colorful assumptions there. People have identities beyond their sexuality and I'm perfectly capable of liking a LGBT character even if their love life doesn't feel particularly relatable or titillating to me. The lesbian cop from The Wire is a good example. I'm glad she's happy with her wife(?) but I'm not digging up fics about it.

What? When did they ever say that they didn't want to see, or weren't interesting in seeing, homosexuality represented in the media? This secret basically said "I feel like a bad person for not being into slash even though I support the LGBT community IRL". You are really jumping to a lot of conclusions here. Not everybody saying "I am not interested in slash" is secretly really saying, "AND IT'S BECAUSE I HATE THEM GAYS!!!!1".

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