fiction – Page 3 – Letters from Titan

RPF: Sometimes the medium is the meta

RPF (Real Person Fiction) is one of those things I have lots of thinky thoughts about, but nearly always bring up tangentally in some broader FPF (Fictional Person Fiction) conversation such it doesn’t really get explored. But I’ve been sitting on a link of vague interest in this regard for ages, and since we’re still in this zone where Time magazine makes us talk about fanfiction a lot, now seems like the time to share.

RPF is a funny animal, in that is has a lot of different purposes if one’s going to argue for any agenda or intent beyond just telling a story. RPF shows up in satire (e.g., the Guardian on Clegg/Cameron), literary fiction (e.g., The Imagined Life of James Dean), historical fiction (e.g., The Other Boleyn Girl), professionally published erotica (e.g., Starf*cker), and, of course, unpaid, community/audience-oriented fanfiction (e.g., Bandom, PunditSlash, and more). And because I love backstage stories of all varieties, whether they be fictional (e.g., Kiss Me Kate, Moulin Rouge) or not, I’m completely fascinated by it.

This isn’t an abstract, look-at-the-bug-under-glass fascination. After all, I’m in fandom; and hence fandom and its foibles is not the Other. I’ve even run into RPF about people I know (an experience which has proved to be more bizarre than awkward) and have encountered many, many ethical discussions about RPF (which are important, if not always compelling). And yes, I am also perfectly aware of the “fanfiction authors write RPF about other fanfic authors” meme.

For me, the fascination is absolutely, positively about the process of fame and the nature of celebrity. How do people — fictional or fictional versions of real people’s already somewhat fictional public personas — navigate private life under public scrutiny? When I’ve read RPF, speculation and argument about that is generally what’s driving my interest. Hell, arguably, that’s what’s also driving some of my interest in Twitter: the ability to witness part of a process — actual, fictionalized or fictional — generally outside of my ability to access.

Anyway, while I know this is far from the only reason people read RPF, I have to assume it’s a reason I’m not alone in. That reason is also one that, if simplified, pretty much boils down to the reader asking questions like “Holy crap, how does that work?” or “If presented with this set of choices I can’t even comprehend, what ridiculousness would I commit?”

Which is pretty much why my eyes bugged out of my head when I heard that a fanfiction author who goes by Neaf wrote a piece of RPF involving Glee cast members in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” format. Thus the fic in question can be a friendship fic or a relationship fic or a porn fic or an angsty dramarama fic, and so involves a significant (yet unspoken) acknowledgement of the degree to which RPF may often be something read from the context of self-insertion, even without the overt presence of a Mary Sue.

Neaf’s story, no matter how you feel about the existence of RPF at all, is a pretty fascinating case of (to borrow a phrase clumsily) the medium being the meta.

That’s all I’ve got for you on this beautiful Saturday. But before you check the fic out: remember that this might squick you, remember to read warnings, remember I am not offering a value judgement on RPF good or bad, and please play nice in comments; I know RPF discussions can get seriously heated.

“The Boy Who Lived Forever”

To say it’s been kind of a surreal couple of days around here would be vastly understating the case. If I let myself think about it, it’s more like a surreal couple of weeks, but I sort of can’t let myself think about it. Forward motion, it’s all I got. There’s still plywood over our window.

Yesterday, when I wrote my post about fandom old home week, I wrote it expecting the Time article (“The Boy Who Lived Forever”) to drop today (when the print edition comes out). Imagine my surprise when I got a Google alert for it an hour later, and then saw that I was in the lead of the thing.

I think it’s a really lovely piece (I mean, gosh, I even told my parents about it), and that Lev captured the 101 of what fanfiction and fandom is both in content and tone. I laughed aloud reading the thing more than once (sex pollen!), and I’m really happy the article exists. It’s just an entirely random bizzareo-world bonus thing that I don’t really know how to process that I got to be in it too and that the company I’m keeping is sort of intense and includes some fandom friends (hi, XT!), Naomi Novik (who had a book release party I danced at), and Darren Criss (enough said). Seriously, I have been laughing about this whole thing on and off since I read the article.

For the record, I wound up in the piece pretty much the way anything happens — I was in the right place at the right time and put myself forward. In this case, that really meant being able and willing to have my real name in the thing. Despite the way I can be (which is something I actually have a lot of inner conflict with these days, but you don’t need to see my internal wank), I can really only speak for myself and my own dorky fannish life, so mostly I just hope I did okay.

Anyway, in the interest of living up to the Harry Potter portion of the piece, Kali and I unlocked a few pieces of fic from our co-written fanfic universe Descensus Facilis Averno: October 31, 1974 and April 15, 1978.

Both of these are PG-13, both of these are Slytherin backstory from around the time that Lucius, Narcissa, Severus and Lily were in or just out of Hogwarts. There’s probably a lot of context missing because these were part of a much larger arc with ridiculous amounts of world-building/additions, but they might amuse anyway.

From the stuff written all by my lonesome, I’ll inflict these two on you: Sometimes Knowledge, which is rated R and is also about Slytherins, and The Convenient Marriage, which is rated 16+, but is a really dark, post-Voldemort victory world where Snape and Hermione are trying to survive as collaborators.

Anyway, all of this is not, actually, the only thing that’s been a part of that “RSN, I have stuff to tell you!” chant I’ve been doing around here lately, but it is a part of it, although probably the least important and yet most bizarre. If nothing else, it’s been a brilliant distraction from looking at all the pics from the London premiere of HP7.2, which seem to have been triggering a major waterworks for everyone. I watched a little bit of it yesterday until I finally had to turn it off. My heart was just a little too permeable to get through work with dry eyes, and I really needed to.

It is certainly remarkable, I think, to look at how important and poisonous the subject of immortality is in the Harry Potter books (did Christian send me a photo of a t-shirt yesterday that says “Make Love, Not Horcruxes”? Yes, yes he did) and yet also realize that Harry has achieved on an extradiegetic (sorry, favorite word!) basis what Voldemort could not on an intradiegetic one. But because we, as fans, continue the story, and because Harry Potter also extends our own stories as something that has marked time and events in our lives, there’s also a sort of victory over mortality for the character in and beyond (as opposed to outside of) the original context of the narrative as well.

On that note, I’m headed off to work now, and then Patty and I are going to continue our plan to eat fabulous food in Boston and environs (if you don’t all know Evoo, know Evoo), and do as little else as possible. After the weekend we’re back into our busy lives, our apartment hunt, our battle against the plywood, and just trying to do what it takes to be ready for whenever we’re in the right place at the right time.

Soon, hopefully, I’ll get caught up on Torchwood: Miracle Day and have time to write about another boy who lived forever; this one, because he was loved in a way he didn’t quite want.

Fandom Old Home Week: I’m not ready yet

I’m on another very early train to Boston (wrapped in my Slytherin hoodie, I might add, because it’s really cold on this thing) with very little sleep. In fact, four hours of sleep is sort of becoming my new six hours — i.e., less than I’d like but certainly enough that I’m perfectly capable of functioning. In a way, I’m thrilled. I need more hours in the day, and I’ve always been envious of micro-sleepers. On the other hand, the idea of crashing out for ten hours multiple nights in a row sounds really, really sexy right about now.

While this doesn’t count as a Friday trash day post (since it’s actually Thursday), I did want to sneak in here and mention that it’s sort of fandom old home week around here right now. The last Harry Potter film is coming out next week, and Torchwood: Miracle Day launches this weekend. And I have a bucket of feelings about both.

For Harry Potter all I can think is that this is the end. Again. I mean, we already did this right? There was that night the last book came out and small child came up and introduced itself to me because he wanted me to know that Severus Snape was his favorite (yeah, I was totally in costume), and then Kali and I stood on the street corner and squeed at each other about Lucius Malfoy’s albino peacocks.

No, really. Sure, I cried multiple times during the seventh book (and not just because of the tedium of the Endless Camping Trip of Despair), but for Kali and I, all the vindication was totally in those albino peacocks; they are so the same sort of ridiculous stuff she and I are always coming up with. Because Harry Potter was how she and I started writing together.

It was fanfiction at first (and sometimes still) — starting with Harry Potter and then moving on to Torchwood (200,000+ words of that on something called I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling, and it’s what the tattoo on my back comes from) — but as the question ranged farther and farther from the source material (“Okay, so how does a society that has a 2:1 male/female ratio work and what happens when it stops working?” “Right, now what does the evolution of Christianity look like in a world with magic? Does the formation of the CoE happen for more interesting reasons than divorce?” “All right, but, what if we take the European banking/sovereign debt crisis as a model for our magical system?”) we wound up working on our own original novel full of multi-generational intrigue, war and desire. About the only resemblance it bears to Harry Potter at this point is its length. One day we’ll finish it (in the midst of the gazillion other projects we both have our hands in together and seperately with other collaborators), and find a way for you to see it.

She and I are both too old to have grown up with Harry Potter, but maybe we found a way to be grown-ups in the decade plus we’ve spent being fans of it. Without the demarcations of high school and college to keep track of what happened when, I find I can often recall what year I was with which lover or worked on which show or lived in which apartment by mapping it to which Harry Potter book or movie had most recently been released.

Despite being the author of The Book of Harry Potter Trifles, Trivias and Particularities, I’ll admit haven’t been as close to Harry Potter in the last few years as I once was; I haven’t even been to a Harry Potter con since Terminus. I guess, at some point, I stopped feeling like Severus Snape and started feeling like Captain Jack Harkness, which is either a story for another day, or one I’ve already told.

These days, as you know, I’m sort of consumed with Glee, which is pretty much the definition of a bright, shiny object, and which harbors a character I identify with in some pretty uncomfortable ways. But just because my new relationship energy is all over that doesn’t change all the other people I’ve been and all the other stories I’ve loved.

Which means I’m not ready yet. I’m not ready for it to be the last Harry Potter movie anymore than I was ready for it to be the last Harry Potter book. And I’m really not ready to see Jack struggle with the consequences of realizing that there’s a good man in him somewhere that he’s really never quite going to be able to be.

We’re going to go to the last midnight Harry Potter opening together with our partners. And I’m sure that somewhere during Torchwood: Miracle Day she’ll call me and laugh sadly and say, “Are you all right, Jack?” while I pace on the sidewalk outside my apartment because I just can’t stand how much it all hurts.

But until all that happens and the tears come, I’m going to dig up my old wizard rock playlist, explain to Patty why Hermione Granger really is the most beautiful girl in the world, and be very, very glad for the very real adventures I’ve gotten to have because of a whole bunch of people who never were.

Broadly Speaking, Pride edition

The Pride edition of Broad Universe‘s podcast, Broadly Speaking, is now available for download. It features writerly chicks talking about queer stories we love and queer stories we’re writing.

The podcast includes Catherine Lundoff, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Elissa Malcohn, Cecilia Tan and me, and is hosted by Trisha J. Wooldridge.

life happens out of order; that’s how I know it’s real

Life happens out of order. It’s one of the only things I’m really certain of.

It’s a screwed up certainty, though, because it’s this thing in my head that comes solely from being too attached to story, where even complicated, unsettling events are neat and always driving towards a conclusion, or at least a pattern. Non-fictional life isn’t like that; hence that out of order feeling.

But if you have the relationship with fiction that I do, and considering how many of the people who read this come from fandom, you just might, there’s always a drive for narrative that distorts our non-fiction messiness into something neater and more elegant. It is, at its most basic level, why we play where were you when games. It’s how we make stories about the true things that happen in what is generally a clumsy manner.

A week ago, I was at a gig at Irving Plaza, half distracted by the NY Assembly’s passage of the marriage equality bill. When I got home, amped up and a bit tipsy and my voice hoarse from singing along with the show all night, and Patty was asleep and I knew I wasn’t going to get even four hours of rest myself, I emailed my buddy Christian and said: “This is a stupid thing man, but I want the Senate to pass the bill tomorrow, so Colfer can reference it in that stupid skit about the proposal at Glee Live.”

Christian has a narrative compulsion too, and we met through Torchwood fandom, so he got it immediately. It was a trivial desire in the face of a non-trivial thing, because it made for shinier narrative and thorough distraction. It was also a way to make fiction seem a little more real — although whether that was about the skit, or the bill I didn’t think would pass, it’s hard to say.

Of course, I actually saw Glee Live in New Jersey (it’s one of the cruel ironies of living in New York City, that many convenient stadium shows are in another state, that we hate, and the shout-outs are never for us), and it never came up. Then it did, in the reports from the shows on Long Island later that weekend.

There was just one tiny, embarrassing problem (other than this whole post) — marriage equality still hadn’t passed in New York; our congress is bicameral. But it sure didn’t stop the screams for Colfer giving a shout out to the law (supposedly) passing or delivering the most marriage-y of the non-marriage proposals the skit (in which Kurt asks Blaine to join glee club) had yet seen.

I sent Christian a link to a vid of it someone had linked me to. “When this doesn’t pass, I’m going to be gutted because of these fictional kids being dumbasses.”

“Maybe it’ll be okay,” he said.

“Maybe it’ll just be like how everything always happens in the wrong order,” I said.

Thank god.

My whole fixation with it seems stupid now, but I’ve been involved with the marriage equality story for twenty years now, and maybe I just needed a buffer from it that was young and optimistic and not all this life and death; a whole hell of a lot of people didn’t get here with us.

When I joined my LGBT student group in college, I was 17. And other than a lot of really bad crap happening to me and mine, the other thing that happened was we talked about marriage equality a lot. I knew people who were involved in some of the earliest court cases about it, and we all spent endless hours shooting the shit about how we could get a marriage equality case to the Supreme Court.

“Can we do it on a religious freedom basis? If a religion recognizes gay marriage, doesn’t the government have to?”

I was so young. And I was, and remain, of a generation that was taught (even if we didn’t believe) that marriage was not just a marker, but perhaps the only marker, of adulthood. A wedding, in my eyes, those 21 years ago, seemed like the only way I was ever going to be something other than the property of my parents, with whom, at that time, I had an extraordinarily difficult relationship.

21 years I’ve been talking about marriage equality, because I was precocious and wounded, because I wanted to be chosen, because I was a born a girl, because I felt like property. It’s never been anything but a bucket of screwy symbolism and pedestrian magic for me, and despite a profound, sometimes yo-yo’ing, ambivalence about the institution now, it’s been a huge part of my queer story.

Which is probably why I spent the last week, not just frantically tweeting about the New York bill and calling senators all the time, but also trying to insulate myself from my own history and from an expected legislative disappointment with stories about fictional kids who weren’t even a potential concept on the narrative landscape of my childhood.

See, this sort of painful, annoying drive I have to personalize everything and make everything a narrative? Well that was the only way I was ever going to get stories about people like me twenty, twenty-five years ago, because there weren’t any. I had to be self-involved because there was no one else to be involved with instead.

Marriage equality doesn’t change my life. It’s just a thing that makes it seem like the fight’s a little smaller, and I’m a little realer. It makes me feel safer walking down the street (although, in truth, anti-gay violence is expected to rise in the city in the wake of this), more comfortable calling the cops, and freer to say “my partner” without getting any damn backlash. With marriage equality in my state, the idea of being in any closet seems antiquated.

This morning, I’ve seen a flurry of emails and tweets along the lines of “did that really happen?” And that’s when I smile at my supposedly petty defense mechanisms of the last week. Of course it did.

You know how I know?

It happened in the wrong order.

But it happened. It really did. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t as happy for the idea of stories as I am for all the real people (myself included) who never should have had to fight to get here.

overheated trash day

Sorry I missed trash day last week folks. Housekeeping has never been my strong suit.

Around here life is quiet, but busy. I’ve just worked two 14+ hour days in a row, and Patty’s been recovering from an awful cold/flu thing. It’s also about a bazillion degrees in New York so we’ve been sticking charmingly close to home.

That said, we’ve been enjoying ice cream from Jeni’s. It’s an Ohio thing, but us New Yorkers can find it at Dean & Deluca. The price will appall you, but trust me, worth every penny. Honey pistachio? Brown butter almond brittle? Goat cheese and fig? Yes, please.

The week ahead promises to be sillier than I’m necessarily comfortable admitting. Friends are in from out of town; Marci and I are going to Glee Live, and just to own the concept of a week without any dignity at all, somehow I’m going to both the Darren Criss concert and the Charlene Kaye gig the night before (look, she does a jazz version of “Mad Tom of Bedlam,” so no matter what you think of the rest of this paragraph, you sort of have to admit that’s made of win).

Sometimes I think I’m in fandom because I was so bad at being twelve when I was twelve; I’m much better at it now. And speaking of the fannish experience, Patty’s got me watching Yami no Matseui which is so fandom’s id I don’t know what to do with it. It’s an education, and I’m enjoying it more than I would have expected.

All of that aside, I’m still doing stuff and some of it I’ll even talk about here!

First up, I just recorded a podcast as part of an amazing panel of women for Broad Universe that was super fun on LGBT themes and writing. I’ll link to it when it’s up.

Also from the department of the sound of my own voice: if you want to hear me talk about gender identity, bullying and be sort of loopy before getting on a plane to Los Angeles, the recording of the Livestream I did with the Harry Potter Alliance is up. There are things on there I wish I’d done better or said more clearly or judiciously (this is always true), but overall, I think it’s decent and hopefully useful to someone. It was a valuable learning experience for me and really fun.

Meanwhile, someone quoted a bit from my essay in Whedonistas as the lead-in to a discussion/poll about the “Xander gives Buffy advice about Riley” scene. I find that scene appalling. But other people don’t. I’ve already said my bit in the essay and am not engaged in the convo, but you can chat about it on LiveJournal.

Nearly finally, I have a story coming out in an anthology edited by Joselle Vanderhooft. The anthology is called Bitten by Moonlight, the story is called “Sanquali,” and it involves lesbian werewolves (as the whole antho does) and an alternate mannerpunk Rome. It’ll be out from Zumaya Books super soon, and when I have a link, I will update/share.

And last but not least, while I’ve already blogged this on LJ, my awesome nerd buddy of awesome, Christian, needs some help taking his top off (totally safe for work; he’s a transman working hard to afford some expensive surgery; and you can help by buying his stuff).

Have a great weekend, and remember kids, no matter how fannish you are about someone, unless they’re trying to crowd surf, don’t pull them off the stage.

Glee: Why is Kurt Hummel dressed like a flying monkey?

While Glee often causes me to ask somewhat bizarre questions, I never really anticipated that one of them would be Why is Kurt Hummel dressed like a flying monkey? And yet, this is the first thing I thought when filming stills started to leak weeks ago from the season finale finally broadcast this past Tuesday night. Even more surprising to me than the question, however, is that the question actually has an answer.

While that answer is obviously embedded in Kurt and Rachel’s performance of “For Good” when they break into Wicked‘s theater; there’s a lot more going on with Kurt, the Wizard of Oz (and Judy Garland) and its place in gay culture, and magicianship than I noticed, or would have expected, at first glance. It’s why I keep writing about this show, even when the other questions it evokes are often inane things like “Wait, Quinn swore vengeance and executed that vengeance by… getting her hair cut?” Alas, I don’t have an answer for that one.

When Kurt and Rachel get to the Wicked theater, break in, and are not chased off by a security guard (who gives them fifteen minutes on the stage to confront their dreams), Kurt tells Rachel that the only way for her to solve her dilemma (a career vs. love conundrum that is both annoyingly conservative and relatively common) is to sing. As they stand in front of the Kansas set background and Rachel protests the lack of orchestra, Kurt tells her to imagine one, and then, with a wave of his hand, not only is there an orchestra, but the set has switched to the black and green of Oz, at which point Rachel launches into the song with the lyrics, “I’m limited,” which go on to say that Kurt (who is cast here in the Glinda role), can do all the things she can’t.

Which leads us to wonder, what are those things? After all, Rachel gets far more solos than Kurt. His voice may be beautiful, but no one knows what to do with him half the time, and as much as the glee club is happy to have him back, his song choices, performative styling and apparent gender variance are still a sticking point, albeit one that’s fonder than it’s been in the past.

The thing is, Kurt does have a skill, a magic, that Rachel doesn’t have. And it is an imagination that wills things in the world. It’s no accident that Kurt’s imagination transforming the stage comes a week after “Funeral,” an episode in which he leads the glee club in “Pure Imagination.” Nor is it an accident that this performance also follows closely on the heels of his return to McKinley with “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” re-purposed from its original meaning into another moment where Kurt makes what is unreal (sets, stage craft, performance) real.

Kurt, of course, has always been doing this, but until his adventures at Dalton (which is explicitly faerieland in Glee — even moreso than McKinley. At Dalton there are no classes, no teachers, no sense of home or context or place. One of the first things Kurt asks once he meets with Blaine and the Warblers council there is “is everyone here gay?” And let’s not forget, once having consumed food (okay, coffee) in faerieland he winds up staying so much longer than previously anticipated), Kurt’s imagination has been a site of toxicity for him. This toxicity, and failure, was highlighted particularly strongly in his pursuit of Finn, a situation in which Kurt tried to use the force of his imagination to will his desire into the world — and fails with significant consequences for multiple people. He later tries the same thing with similar results, to a lesser extent, with Sam.

Dalton changes all that. Not because it is a safe environment, but because it is part of the ordeal. There is initiation (“Teenage Dream”), apprenticeship (his failed audition with “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” where his giftedness is a flaw because it is untrained and unapproved; this is then followed by his misery during “Soul Sister” where he must accept a place of smallness that’s alien to him and feels cruel even in its necessity), acceptance of powerlessness (present not just in the events that drive Kurt to Dalton, but include that whole mess with Jeremiah and Blaine), evolution of perception through events related to altered states and sexuality (Rachel’s car crash of a party and the events of “Sexy”), and, ultimately a reclaiming of power (challenging Blaine about all his solos) before being elevated to various statuses long sought through group (the Warblers granting him the duet with Blaine) and personal acclaim (Blaine’s “You move me.”).

That Kurt is finally able to make himself seen, not just professionally, but personally, because of a performance regarding a dead bird (yes, it’s ludicrous and actively ignores the original context of the Beatles song “Blackbird,” but that’s nothing new for Glee) in which he is dressed in black and wearing an animal skull brooch (Kurt, in fact, has a collection of brooches in the theme of “dead animals,” even if most of them are little plastic replicas of the mounted heads of much larger beasts), clearly portrays Kurt as a magus, newly arrived and stating his desire to be recognized.

Death is transformation and alchemy, and as Kurt chooses to take control of his situation by moderating everyone else’s interaction with that death by being chief mourner and mortician for Pavoratti (okay, I know, I know… dead bird, just stay with me folks), Kurt is finally able to will what he’s been wanting for a while (a boyfriend, Blaine, and center stage) into being. It’s also the start of the path that gets him back to McKinley (because he makes people desire his presence — Santana may be self-serving, but she’s also serving Kurt and his gifts), New Directions and eventually New York. All of these are, as mentioned above, locations and situations in which we see repeated demonstrations of Kurt’s power to make what he imagines real, and, thanks to Rachel, in the season two finale we see that power recognized externally on an overt basis for the first time.

Which gets us back to Why is Kurt Hummel dressed like a flying monkey? (a phrase, which, I’ll admit, is just really fun to say over and over again). In the land of Oz, the flying monkeys were free creatures who did as they pleased until they were enslaved. In pop-culture (and political cartoons), they often appear as minions and irritants, powerful only in their ability to serve and to be disruptive — that is, they cause decay to what already exists, but do not transform or create newness, at least not in their abused state.

So, Kurt arrives in New York in that guise (Kurt’s clothes, while always outrageous, are rarely actively ugly, at least to my eye, but the furred epaulets on that jacket from Lip Service are truly ridiculous and both it, and the hat, are sort of out of the range of Kurt’s more typical fashion vocabulary, even if he wears a lot of stuff from Lip Service); sheds it when he gives Rachel her magic moment (in which she points out that he’s actually the magic — she sings to him, and he sings out to the audience); and then returns to Lima, Ohio, to declare victory, dressed in Oz’s colors — silver and green — having been liberated and having brought the magic home. This possession of magic is here confirmed to us both with Blaine’s “I love you” and with Kurt then declaring that, all in all, he really has had a pretty good year.

Giving Kurt a “hero’s journey” on Glee was always going to be a daring choice, because he’s a gay kid and because he performs gay in the particular way he does. But to take a gay kid who the world too easily wants to read as weak and make him a magician — that is, someone with the power to change others and bend reality to his will — is a truly risky and starling choice. It makes Kurt powerful, threatening, and seductive. It normalizes his gender presentation through function (because in a dichotomous system magicianship requires a union of the genders and an ability to step outside that union); and it confronts, side-steps and perhaps even embodies Glee‘s awkward preoccupation with the “predatory gay” stereotype, with a sort of enviable power.

Kurt, like most of Glee‘s main characters, has another year in Lima, but his season two arc shows us that he’s already gotten out.

Fiction, fan culture, and the unnatural acts we engage in to protect the heart

I sort of lost any New York cool cred I had today by getting up at 5am to go hang out in front of The Today Show in the name of Glee fandom. Weirdly, this turned out to be interesting, not just because I’m relatively unabashed about my fannishness and not just because it was fun (even if it was both early and cold), but because the experience was a completely weird lens, not on the act of being a celebrity, but the process of becoming one.

This strange little window into the celebrity moment perhaps hit me especially hard in the wake of seeing Sleep No More with Patty on Saturday night. It, like most environmental theater I’ve encountered (such as WILDWORKS’s The Enchanted Palace), wound up being about celebrity, albeit, in the case of Sleep No More, through the lens of Macbeth.

Hanging around The Today Show also is invariably about celebrity, and today’s experience had a lot of moments both of exposing the backstage moment (e.g., peering into the studio as performers rehearse) and of performing them (e.g., performers coming out in the cold to greet the crowds), which also, weirdly, gave it an environmental theater-type quality beyond the obvious “we are here to see the in-studio performance” aspect of the audience experience.

On The Today Show front all of this was weirdly complicated by the strange beast that Glee is: The Warblers aren’t a real singing group; the guys you see in The Warblers on TV are all singers, but largely aren’t doing their own singing for complicated production reasons; and Darren Criss (who plays Blaine, effectively the front-man for the Warblers) has become enough of a break-out star because of this whole thing that you get these bizarre moments like when The Today Show introduction wound up being “Darren Criss and the Warblers.” Between that and their being in their (fictional prep school) Dalton blazers, the whole thing runs back and forth over the fiction/non-fiction line in a such a bizarrely incoherent way that it’s a little jaw-dropping, especially when you consider that a major Blaine-related plot point is how he gets too much of the spotlight from the rest of the group.

Of course, stuff that tramples all over the non-fiction/fiction divide is the stuff I love as a scholar, and often the stuff that feeds fandom interests (mine and everyone elses). It’s also the stuff that can make fandom weird: like the chick screaming at Criss outside The Today Show this morning that she wished he was straight. He is; the character he plays isn’t, and in that jacket, who knew which one of them she was talking to. Or what object and perspective any of us were singing to/from when we started an impromtu crowd sing of “Teenage Dream” a little while later.

For that matter, what the hell was going on in any of our heads when we all started singing along with the studio performance of “Raise Your Glass?” Because that song, which I’ve already talked about as a victory anthem both personally and in the context of the show, adds another layer of weird when we’re in this murky fact/fiction place and it’s happening on The Today Show and the fans are singing along: Who’s celebrating who? Who are the dirty little freaks or the underdogs here (and remember that line is “all my underdogs” – the possessive matters keenly)? What are the power dynamics? Are we all getting elevated in that moment or does someone need to call bullshit?

In something resembling a contrast to all of this, Sleep No More, being a play, is obviously and explicitly performative. We meet the actors, not as actors, but as characters, and the lines should, on the surface, enforce much clearer boundaries than those at The Today Show and around the The Warblers phenomenon. The surface, however, lies.

All audience members are required to wear identical bird masks going into the show. We become, perhaps, a parliament of rooks, a collective noun I reference here for Neil Gaiman’s take on the behavior of rooks in The Sandman, where rooks fight for their survival on the basis of the quality of stories told before their peers.

While the masks serve to delineate audience from performers, it immediately also establishes audience members as part of the narrative. This becomes more clear as more audience members enter the play space and encounter actors. Most audience members, upon encountering actors, begin to follow them, leading to moments where two actors coming from two different directions meet at the center of a long corridor, an army of bird-audience behind each of them, ready, it seems, for war, or, at least, a competition based on the scale of their fan following, to see which character (or perhaps which actor) will survive the telling of their tale.

This, combined with moments of peering into “private” chambers within the set (much, like being intentionally allowed to peer at rehearsal while waiting outside of The Today Show) and moments where actors pull audience members into private locations to remove their masks and tell them stories (I saw one girl in a phone booth in tears, after a bellhop who had lip-synched a song about the triviality of tragedy cornered her in there) suggests that the fact/fiction line at Sleep No More is equally, if more convolutedly, blurred. This further suggests to me that the very nature of celebrity may be less about a real person who rises out of a crowd in some fashion and more about a real person whose non-fiction identity is partially obscured or even erased by the act of being witnessed by a crowd.

Temporal distortion also struck me as central to these two, admittedly weird-to-juxtapose, events. At Sleep No More I found a murder scene before the actors did: for someone who once played The Lady in Macbeth, it was strange to have that blood on my hands again because I stumbled, both physically and out of time.

Similarly, because there was a rehearsal for camera that was projected on the screens outside of The Today Show we thought we were seeing a live performance when we were seeing a live rehearsal, and then when the live performance happened, thought for a moment that we were seeing tape. This sense of the correct order of events feeling out of order wasn’t just a part of the audience experience, either; before the show, Criss made a crack on Twitter about having performed on “the Tomorrow Show” yesterday.

While largely unabashed about my fannishiness, being a fan is often weird for me. There are all these different types of things I’m not supposed to do because I’m a professional in all these different types of ways. Sometimes I break the rules in ways that are good, and sometimes I break the rules in ways that are bad; mostly I break the rules in ways that matter less than anyone thinks.

Sleep No More and the complete destruction of my New York coolness factor this morning don’t say a lot about whether these types of lines are good or bad, but they do say a lot about how profoundly artificial lines between audience and performance are, as well as the lines between fact and fiction that we are often so insistent about. When we talk about these lines blurring, we often talk about the discomfort inherent in that blurring, and then mistake that discomfort for implying something unnatural about those acts of blurring.

I think the blurring is instinctive. And natural. And sort of fundamental to how we experience performance and audience-to-performance object love. I think it’s also fundamental to the instincts people on the performance side of the fence have towards fans; the gut says — at least in the process of rising to the previously mentioned obscurity or erasure — to let them in, even if wisdom and custom say otherwise.

In turn, I think these fences and lines are established to impose order — not just against all the stuff I’m sure we can all cite in the annals of bad fan and audience behavior, but against the heart, instinctively public and defensively misunderstood.

Ultimately, the link between these two experiences comes back to the wisdom of New York for me. I don’t know or even talk to my neighbors, because I can hear them having sex through the wall. I don’t look at people on the street, because then I’d never get to stop saying hello to strangers all day long. These barriers are artificial, and even toxic, but they allow us privacy in a place, in the place, without.

Fact/fiction and audience/performance barriers serve the same function, and are there to protect not just performers and the fictions they execute on, but to also protect audiences and fans from the permeability of all our extraordinarily vulnerable, easily bruised, relentlessly public and so very human hearts.

Glee: what’s with all the death fics?

One of my preoccupations since discovering the world of Glee fandom, is how many death fics there are. At first they all seemed to kill Kurt (prettiest corpse!), but now I’ve read a mix of pretty much everyone dying. And I can’t stop reading them. Which is a little weird and morbid, but I do a lot of my scholarly work about death, and these fics do feel adjacent to that — if we read a sad fic about loss (and the magnitude of the loss is defined by the intra- and extradiegetic love that precedes it), we get to be all smitten with this fiction without having to be big dorks going on about our obsession in all caps.

More than that, though, I think the death fics are a response to the show being about high school. When folks kill off characters, they are mourning, if not innocence (it is Glee, after all), then at least the luminosity of youth. Although we rarely know it when we’re 16 ourselves, we’re often beautiful at that age in a way we will never be again, even if we go on to be stunning in other ways.

US TV is bad with endings. We put shows on and run them until no one cares anymore. British TV shows, by contrast, often have expiration dates when they start, and certainly no one expects the original cast to stay forever. Spooks (MI-5 in the US), is my eternal example of this. Is any of the original cast still there? It’s all death all the time and makes Torchwood look like happy fun times.

But Glee is a show where the cast is going to have to turn over. Sure, Puck can be a super-senior, but Kurt’s probably going to graduate on time and run for the coast the day after. So we’re losing these folks even now (I’m wondering what the powers that be are going to do around this — How many characters can they justify keeping at a local Lima community college? Who will fail to graduate? Are they thinking college spin-off? Will we see a return of stuff like the Acafellas?).

If we’re grownups about it, we also have to acknowledge that many of the things we love about these characters — which are often their relationships — are also temporary. Maybe Kurt and Blaine will get a happily ever after; I actually know quite a few high school sweetheart couples that have made it a couple of decades and counting. But they’ll probably hurt each other pretty terribly somewhere along the way even if they do make it (and I am so hoping they do). As the audience, it’s what we live for. But it’s also going to suck.

So I think that’s what the death fic is about. I think it’s about beating the show to the punch even more cruelly than the show will eventually and necessarily wound us (plot twists aside, it won’t run forever, even on US TV). It’s like how pessimism makes you ready. We’re ready, dammit. We’re ready.

But I also think, maybe just a little, we’re mourning our own luminosity. And not, so much, the luminosity of the teens we once were, but rather, the luminosity of the teens we weren’t. We’re mourning that our lives weren’t neat. That we weren’t beautiful while being outcasts. That our high school boyfriends or girlfriends were sort of assholes. That we never stood up to that bully. That we never got to be a cheerleader. Or sing the solo.

So the sadness, perhaps, isn’t for what we’ve lost, but for what we never got a chance to lose: our fictional pasts become objects of grief (as a way of delineating unmentioned/unacknowledged love), much in the same way that these fictional characters, with whom we do have these identificatory or receptive/responsive relationships, become objects of intra- and extradiegetic grief in these death fics.

Christian and I were talking briefly about Glee this morning, and he was saying how little work it is to watch the show compared to other programs we both favor. After all, Glee really telegraphs its plot points. But while the work is definitely optional, I do think the show gives us a lot to chew over. Admittedly, that, at times, is about its inconsistencies and flaws (or the really bizarre quirks of fandom. Google canniblaine, I’ll wait), but for me, who is sort of relentlessly Watsonian, it’s like candy. Beautiful, sad candy that leaves a nice corpse, but still, candy.

Glee: Hats in church and Kurt Hummel’s gender identity

Yesterday, Deconstructing Glee raised the issue of whether or not Kurt Hummel is cisgendered. Having just watched all the episodes in a week (I know, I know, didn’t I write an essay here about how the show is not for me? Well, something happened, that I think has something to do, actually, with the BIg Gay Kiss and the Patty is Far Away intersection and now here we are), I have an opinion. Sort of.

It’s an entirely tricky thing to have an opinion about on a lot of levels. For one thing, you have to define cisgendered, which is all fine and easy if we’re dealing with a quasi-binary model; it’s less fine and easy if you’re genderqueer and don’t necessarily feel okay about including that identity in either the cisgender or transgender category, but know other people who may feel otherwise in a myriad of different ways (hi!).

For another, answering the query means you have to assume not only that production’s choices are deeply intentional and made of coherent messages, but that the character’s choices are also intentional and made of coherent messages. The kid’s 16 and in one hell of a set of difficult circumstances that he deals with through performativity. So really? I think it’s fair to say that no one probably knows what’s going on here, including not just the people writing Kurt, but Kurt himself.

That said, intentionality aside, there are all sorts of cues and clues on this lurking all over the show, and I do think there’s sort of an answer. I think Kurt has maybe had to spend a lot of time wondering if he’s trans, but I also think he’s come to the conclusion that he isn’t.

Somewhere, someone reading this is going, “Wait, if you’re the person in question, how the hell can you wonder about something like that?” Life, my friends, is very complicated, especially when you live in an environment where the theoretical reflectiveness of gender (i.e., my gender presentation serves to seemingly define the gender presentation of those around me) is highly emphasized. Kurt’s environment is totally like that. His queerness is constantly being called out by those around him not as just potentially reflecting on the sexuality of those he interacts with, but on their gender in a way that highlights some pretty intense misogyny (because, dude, it’s a show about really crap high school kids in Lima, Ohio).

That dynamic gives Kurt an option to find allies. No matter how many times he tells us — and he tells us often — that being gay doesn’t make him a woman (“I am a guy, Dad,” he says when Burt talks about how much he loves doing “guy things” with Finn), one of the few relatively positive pre-Dalton choices he has is to ally himself with the girls. Then, instead of being the one gay kid, he’s one of the girls. It’s not an ideal fit, but wow, it’s better than the alternative. And it’s also not a terrible fit, because Kurt is performing a very specific type of queerness (there’s a reason he’s the one in the Leigh Bowery heels in the Lady Gaga episode) that is about playing with feminine archetypes and gestures.

That performance of queerness is complicated in itself. Certainly, many, many older viewers of the show (that would include me; I’ll be 39 this year) recognize the type of queer kid Kurt performs from our own lives in the 1980s (and earlier, or a little later), but also wonder how often teen queerness really looks like that today. Meanwhile, others make noises about stereotypes, while some of us make noises about how grateful we are that Kurt’s a kid that can’t pass as straight. Some queer people just can’t pass. Kurt can’t. Santana can. Brittany can. Blaine can. Karofsky can (oh my god, is everyone on this show queer all of a sudden? Rock on). If you’re going to have a show with multiple queer kids on it, one of them kinda has to be like Kurt.

But the central item, I think, in discussing Kurt’s gender identity, has to, as the original piece I linked to did, talk about wardrobe. That piece, however, didn’t talk about the thing that I think makes solving this little puzzle the most complex (note: it’s a puzzle because it’s a TV show; actual non-fiction humans are not and should not be solved in the same way; therefore, as someone whose work is about lowering the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, I actually should note I feel slightly sketchy about this entire exercise). That’s the “Grilled Cheezus” episode.

You’re groaning. I know. Because it was kind of almost awesome about atheism or diversity of belief and then it was… well, the way it was. Also, it gave us Kurt singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which is one of the best uses of song in the whole series (where, as I’ve noted before, I often think the uses of song don’t serve the genre correctly). But, the point is, in “Grilled Cheezus,” Mercedes ultimately seduces Kurt into joining her at church by telling him he can wear a fabulous hat.

Kurt knows all the rules of fashion. Kurt talks about all the rules of fashion all the time. Kurt notes that one of his only gifts in addition to his voice is his uncanny ability to spot menswear trends. And Kurt loves old-fashioned things and classic films. Which means Kurt knows damn well that a man simply cannot wear a hat indoors, especially in a church, especially in a church where the women still mostly wear hats. And then he does it anyway.

This, far more than Kurt’s insistence on being with the girls in so many of the singing challenges (which really, can speak to self-preservation as much as anything else), is what makes me go, “Hrrrrr, maybe Kurt does see his gender as very complex or queer in a addition to his sexuality,” because it’s a gesture that breaks the type of rules that Kurt doesn’t usually break, in a set of circumstances Kurt doesn’t usually break rules in.

Despite the fact that I don’t identify with Kurt, somewhere, this essay had to get personal in order for me to make the point. When other people tell me I am not a girl, it’s infuriating to me, (see Kurt and “I’m a guy, Dad”), but I often find it just as hurtful, or at least puzzling, when people tell me I am one, and the more fraught and formal a circumstance, the more likely I am to deviate from my gender as assigned and find a profound armor in choices that may seem weird to other people and really, really comfortable to me. I often say that if I were assigned as a guy, I’d probably wear dresses about as often as I do now. Therefore, is it somewhat easy for me to imagine that Kurt lives somewhere in the same country as I do? Sure. And, yeah, it’s all because of that damn hat.

But, at the end of the day, I think we have to come back to the previously mentioned gender reflectiveness of the show’s environment and the opening spoken word bits to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like to Be a Girl.”

Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
‘Cause it’s OK to be a boy
But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
‘Cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like
Wouldn’t you
What it feels like for a girl

Kurt (in one of the best deliveries the always excellent Colfer gives us) gets the end of that little segment, starting with “But secretly.” Here’s this queer kid, with the high voice, who has to constantly remind everyone around him that he’s a man, and who wants to be romanced like in an old black & white movie delivering a line that, coming from him, is about nearly too much stuff to analyze.

It’s about his own identity. It’s about how he suffers for being gay because of the ways in which that makes people around him perceive him as being female in addition to characteristics he has that just makes it all hard (it’s no accident that a lot of the episode in which he tries to “be a man” for his dad, focuses on him trying to speak in a lower register — and he can’t really, because that’s not his voice).

But there’s also a wistfulness in the delivery. Kurt tells us a lot across the series, and with a bit of pain, that being gay and being gay like this isn’t something he chose, that it was a roll of the dice and one that he thinks sort of sucks. In this line, I think we also hear him wondering if his life would be easier if he were a girl. It’s also so blatantly filled with his longing to be loved (emotionally, sexually) the way he wants to be loved, and it’s presented in a gendered framework, because that’s all he’s got to work with.

So do I think Kurt is trans? Not really. Do I think Kurt is cis? Maybe, maybe not. Do I think Kurt has had to think about it until it’s run him into the ground with exhaustion and that he’s still frustrated by his own answers even if the show never meant for us to wonder about this at all? Yeah, I kinda do.

[Side note for new readers: two weeks ago I started watching Glee. This week, I totally noticed that their football team is called the Titans. My world is a world of deeply absurd circles, but this wacky bit of wackiness has nothing to do with the title of this journal, musings on which can be found in the first post here].