Category: tv

stories, loss, and the power of what needs be done

When I talk about the Whoniverse, one of the things I tend to talk about it how it frames heroes and heroism. It’s all about the ordinary (all those shop girls and queer boys), who have a tremendous amount to sacrifice (e.g., their lives), and the extraordinary (like Jack and the Doctor) who have been deprived of the more obvious means of sacrifice. It’s one of the things I really love about the Whoniverse, even though it’s hard. I love it because because it takes a common trope and bends it; I love it because it speaks, effectively I think, to our societal tendency to overuse the word hero; and I love it because I’m wired for tragedy.

At least in narratives. Fictional narratives.

It’s kind of different when big, real, terrifying, impossible to miss tragedies are actually happening in a manner relentless, ongoing and actually beyond the previous scope of our imaginings.

So, if you’re still in a place where you’re actively able to engage the news, it seems like one of the only things I can do, beyond getting out my wallet, is to encourage you to read stuff about ordinary people, doing heroic things.

Miki Endo was a 25-year-old who worked in the Crisis Management Department in Minami Sanriko. Her voice led people to safety in the face of the tsunami wave. She died doing her job.

While we don’t know the exact numbers of workers remaining at the Fukushima Daiishi Nuclear Plant (numbers have fluctuated between 50 and 180), they are undoubtedly putting their lives at risk, if not this minute, then this month or this week or this year; radiation is funny like that.

Last night, I caught one of those non-scientific polls on the CNN website. It asked whether you’d be willing to risk your life the way those workers are. It made me so angry. Not, actually, because it had simplified the matter to a short, trite, and unscientific query, but because it is absurd to think you know what you would do in a moment like that.

No matter how much you’ve thought about it, no matter the degree to which your job or other circumstances of your life may require you to think about it, no matter how wired for tragedy you are in your fictional habits or whatever else, there are some questions we never know how we’ll answer until they come to us. I’ve faced some of the smaller quandaries on that continuum, and they were nothing like I could have expected.

I haven’t, in regard to all this tragedy and horror in Japan, been particularly calm. I am, as previously noted here and elsewhere, one of those people who had a childhood shaped by our collective nuclear imagination. We didn’t get a color TV until the late 80s; my father resisted the law (and fought with our building management) that forced us to have a smoke detector in our apartment — in both cases, he was concerned about the radiation.

Until today, I’ve always viewed that as part of the many frustrating, sometimes alarming, eccentricities that surrounded my childhood. But today I remembered that my father, born before WWII, knew the world before we split the atom.

The habits of fear from my nuclear childhood are not due to my father’s eccentricities or paranoias that often made the world of my childhood seem both cruel and arbitrary. They are due to the fact that he was a twelve-year-old boy and in love with television and radio and the idea of soldiers when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he, of course, just lived in New Jersey, in a perfectly safe life, in a blue-collar seaside town where his father was a shoemaker. If you read the comments here, or on my LJ blog, you’ve seen comments from people whose parents didn’t grow up in New Jersey, but instead lost friends due to the radiation that resulted from the those bombings my father listened to on the radio. It makes all the terror of my American 1980s seem absurd and crass, even as it makes it make sense.

All of this is why I’m so invested in fiction, because of the way it intertwines with non-fiction, because of the way non-fiction gradually morphs over time, becoming our myths, our lies, our stories, our fictions that ultimately, in times like these, force us back to the non-fiction truths from whence they came.

These stories, these truths, tell us heroes are real. And ordinary. And pay terrible prices, not because of what suits the story, or because the audience might be wired for tragedy, but because of what needs done.

The Red Cross | Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières | ShelterBox

life in these times

It’s sort of hard to blog about anything right now in the face of Japan.

Anything I have to say seems somewhere between inadequate and absurd (and that’s the best case scenario). Even critiquing the media right now doesn’t seem worth the trouble, if I even had the perspective to do it effectively. Which I don’t. I’m deeply cognisant of how really irresponsible much of the nuclear coverage has been (some of it’s been excellent, but it’s largely been the exception), but I’m also the age I am; I’m ashamed of how much will-power it takes not to feel like I’m 8-years-old and my best friend has to go to therapy every other day because of the panic attacks she has because of all the nuclear war books they make us read in school.

Meanwhile, the rest of life continues. Whedonistas launched today, sold out on Amazon, and is back in stock now. Last night there was the reading at the Way Station, and despite thinking my head wasn’t in it (too many deadlines, too much news horror), it was tremendously fun and warm and good, and the thing I read seemed to amuse people and seemed to be meaningful and personal for one person in a way that was deeply gratifying and sort of intense. In a different week, I’d know how to write about that. This week, all I can say it was nice to see people.

Today I got that Sherlock thing done and out the door. Erica & I have been working on Dogboy & Justine; Kali and I are back on track with the novel; and I have another abstract I need to write and pitch and a friend I want to interview here about her film project. Oh yeah, and a couple of things to schedule – a podcast interview for one thing and a video interview for something else.

I’ve also spoken with Patty the last couple of days. She’s tremendous, and sometime in the next week or so, we should know when she’ll be home. So that, and the fact that she’s doing lots of neat stuff, is pretty exciting too. So is the approach of Passover, which means a sudden masses of gluten-free products I can’t get the rest of the year.

In a day or two I hope my head is screwed on enough to write neat stuff about neat stuff. Today the world seems a bit short on neat stuff, and I’m definitely a bit short on words.

Here are some ways to help Japan:

– American Red Cross.
– ShelterBox.
– Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
– Donation efforts and recommendations by members of the pagan community in the US.

We all have limited resources of time, money, and attention. Remember that Japan, and, in fact, all places affected by disasters at any time, tend to need help over the long term. Putting an alarm in your calendar to donate or boost the signal a few months from now is a valuable form of assistance.

the distance to Mars

In the midst of everything else that happened in this very heavy news week, Maryland sent its equal marriage rights bill back to committee. Despite what was initially thought, the votes just weren’t there, the state just wasn’t ready yet.

Equal marriage rights are a tricky topic for me as a queer person, and, believe it or not, one I don’t actually like talking about. There are huge issues of heteronormativity and queer culture erasure involved in the discussion, as well as issues regarding misogyny, and an ongoing hunch I have that much of mainstream heterosexual culture is characterized by such intense and unnecessary hostility and suspicion between the genders, that what really terrifies people about equal marriage rights is the option to opt out of that misery that doesn’t really work for them, as opposed to a parallel discussion about trying to fix the often toxic male-female dynamics in this country.

A lot of the gay couples I know are married. Some legally, some spiritually, some both. Some in states where their marriages are recognized, and some in states where they aren’t. The one thing all these couples have in common? Equal marriage rights didn’t exist when they were kids, anywhere, and so they’ve all had to adjust to being pioneers. For some of them, it’s easy. For some of them, it’s easy with a bit of peculiar on the side. And for some of them, they still feel like they have to mention their spouse like a question mark, as if they won’t be believed, as if no amount of paper in the world could make it make sense — not just to others, but to themselves — even as it’s actually happening.

One of the things I think we overlook in the discussion of equal marriage rights is the importance of narrative. Not political narrative or marketing narrative or campaigning narrative, but stories, fiction, the way what is possible often comes to us through the mechanism of what it is not actually a non-fictional fact in the world.

In one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes, “The Waters of Mars,” which I love because it’s about death and sacrifice and early space exploration, there’s a small, completely incidental moment (it’s character development only, not narrative advancement), where someone mentions another man’s husband. It’s completely without note of how notable that is to us in the non-Whoniverse here and now. I don’t have time to find it in the disc, but trust me when I tell you it’s “blah blah blah his husband blah blah blah.”

New Whoniverse stuff is, of course, filled with things like this (see: the lesbians in “Gridlock”) that often get overlooked in the face of stuff like Captain Jack Harkness. But as someone who really loves the Whoniverse and really loves both those small moments and the absurdity (and promise and hope) that is the idea of Jack’s 51st century, it bears noting that some of my sadness this week over the equal marriage bill being tabled in Maryland comes from stories seeming far too far away.

Look, I don’t get a TARDIS. I don’t get the Doctor. I don’t get Jack. I don’t get Torchwood. I don’t get the wonder of the stars as we’re busily retiring the space shuttles. I don’t get all the things I’ve written and dreamed about my entire life. I don’t get to save the world. But wow, if people could just say “his husband” and “her wife” all the time without pause or uncertainty or question, that wouldn’t just be equal rights, that would, for me, be spaceships and dinosaurs and time travel and hope.

news, agenda setting, and you

Since the beginning of this year, the news cycle has gone from what we call a 24-hour one (i.e., around the clock) to what I call an instantaneous one. Critical events happen, and there is no time to cover them with the weight and detail they deserve, before other critical events, often in unrelated areas, occur (in the 24-hour news cycle there isn’t necessarily new news, it’s just that we never stop talking — what’s been happening is something else). We went from the Arizona shooting, to MENA uprisings (which continue), to the union situation in the US (which is continuing), to today’s earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

And that’s leaving out other critical stories: WikiLeaks, the treatment of Bradley Manning, anti-bullying initiatives from the White House, equal marriage rights debates in multiple states, the appalling hearings on Islamic radicalization in the US, the war on Planned Parenthood, and the retirement from political life of the Dalai Lama. And I’m sure I’ve left out other critical stories. And that’s not even counting the stuff that’s really dropped off the radar. Like Haiti.

So what’s a person to do, when trying to do a Friday link roundup other than throw their hands up in despair?

The easy answer, the terrible answer and is my instinct to say, is I don’t know. Despite being a generalist, someone who works well on deadline, who’s very quick on the uptake, with a background in journalism and a career in media analysis, it all feels like too much, even to me, as someone whose job it is to never feel like it’s too much. But the first thing I do every morning when I wake up, is check the news on my Blackberry before I even get out of bed (something that drives Patty up the wall). I get up faster on days terrible things have happened. Today’s been one of those days.

The harder answer is, that as much as I talk about news selection and agenda setting as regards what the news puts out there, news selection and agenda setting also happens at home. It happens in what media any of us choose to consume. And, when stories get big, bad, and difficult, the impulse is often to consume less to preserve our own sense of well-being; or to consume more as if data helps us have control, as if more is always better.

But what we really need to do is be editors for ourselves. Am I annoyed ABC isn’t really covering the union crisis in the US? Yes. But I’m also annoyed when it’s all MSNBC covers, because I also need information about the MENA region (for which I’ve been relying on CNN out of the domestic options, and Al-Jezeera online for the international option). Meanwhile, I get my queer news headlines from The Advocate, but they never go into enough depth, and rely on my Twitter feed to point me to the news I need about WikiLeaks and Manning’s detention.

Of course, you aren’t me. You don’t need or want to watch two, five, or ten hours of news a day. So I’m not going to tell you to consume more news (unless you aren’t consuming any). And I’m not going to tell you what delivery technology to use. But I want to emphasize how news selection affects the information you get, especially on a day where a lot of us probably flipped on a 24-hour news channel and have left that channel on all day.

Haiti didn’t stop needing help because the media stopped covering it. The protesters in Egypt didn’t go home because the war reporters went to Libya. The right to collective bargaining isn’t safe in the US because state-level politics stories don’t often make national news. And queer people aren’t suddenly not in a civil rights battle for their very lives because you didn’t hear about a transwoman’s murder or a gay teen’s suicide or yet another damn couple who can’t get married.

The only way to get around the reality of agenda setting (which is sometimes about political agenda; sometimes about racism, sexism or homophobia; sometimes about dollars; and sometimes about an evening news program only having thirty minutes or a newspaper only having so many pages) is to do your own agenda setting which means varying your news sources as much as possible. You won’t catch everything, but you’ll catch a much broader view.

Meanwhile, I? Have dozens of issues I want to write to you about here, but I’m struggling a little at finding the interval to do so today.

London dreaming

For about four hours last night there was a 50% chance I was going to have to fly to Bucharest for three days next week. Morning brings the news that I am not, in fact, flying to Bucharest, and I’m a little sad. Not because of Bucharest though, but because of the possibility of 3 hours in Heathrow, or, if I were really creative, a night in London.

London, and the UK in general, but mostly London, have this hold on me that’s, well, complicated. I feel a bit tortured about it, because it’s so boring and typical for someone to the US to be all, Oooo, shiny, British things even if I don’t think I’m doing that.

It’s more that London is what New York City used to be like, in the 80s, when my parents would take twelve-year-old me out to the Odeon at 2am and Madonna would be at the next time. It seethes and teems and pulsates; there is a reason why all the aliens on Doctor Who talk about how humans clamber over this world like insects. London’s a hundred neighborhoods layered on each other and grown in upon themselves like hives.

It’s also that Brick Lane feels like home.

And that huge chunks of my really weird education are only normal, or even useful, in the UK.

And that I really, really like the supermarkets.

It’s that there are women with hair as short as mine in ads for lingerie shops, that men know more than one knot for their ties, and that people aren’t revolted because my teeth don’t glow.

It’s St. Katharine’s Dock. And that I can look up and navigate by that awful bullet building, like I used to with the World Trade Center, before it came down. It’s that “the City” means something there, just like it does here, only different. And that I am somehow more acutely aware of everyone’s striving there, than I am here, which doesn’t really make any sense at all, but then, I suppose, these things rarely do.

For years, Sydney has been my long lost city, even as my time there was filled, not inappropriately, with journal entries about how far from everything it was, how exiled. But London’s, arguably, from where it was exiled.

So London’s all mythology for me, and nothing like anything I was told when I was ten and had to go on school trips each May 14 to lay daffodils at a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, before the teachers told us about the British girls we boarded during the War and then served us pineapple cake because it was Miss Hew’s favorite.

I know I seem, very easily, pretentious and lost. A lot of the time I’m playing and people don’t get that. But a lot of the time I’m not, and people don’t get that either. I grew up in this other world that doesn’t really exist, which may be why so much of my work is about defictionalization. My mother chose the school she did for me because, “All the little girls wore white gloves, like in the 1940s movies.”

I was five. I didn’t ask for that. It’s just what happened. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. It is also one that I am supposed to regret or feel shame about or guilt, but I just can’t.

But London, at least, recognizes the lies of my childhood. And better, doesn’t care.

I bet Bucharest is just lovely this time of year too.

actors, playing gay, and the perils of Twitter

Lots of things about being an actor can be less than fun. Anyone who does this sort of work will tell you that there are some parts of the job that just suck: weird working hours, unsteady pay checks, unpredictably long days, filming summer scenes in the dead of winter (how to know if you can really act: can you look happy about wearing a tank top and a mini skirt in 30 degree weather?). But few things inspire quite as much dread as love scenes.

As a performer I’ve largely been spared this, but not enough not to know that yeah, it sucks. It’s one of those things that falls somewhere between ludicrous and boring and embarrassing. Why it’s awful varies with the project and the people involved. Sometimes it’s worse when you’re genuinely attracted to the other performer; sometimes it’s worse when you can’t stand them; or when you’re buddies with their spouse. All of it’s pretty anxiety producing. For me, I get this running loop of terror in my head about how I need to give a good performance and look into it, but if I look too into it, will my partner in the scene mock me (this, for the record, has never happened, but it’s the neurosis I bring to the table — everyone has at least one).

One thing that can be, or can be assumed to be, tough for a lot of people, is doing love scenes with someone of a gender they’re not attracted to in their off-screen life. Because my tastes are wide-ranging, that’s not an experience I’ve had, but I can see how it would be super weird. And I don’t find it problematic that people find it weird. There can be a lot of social taboo going on there, no matter how progressive you are and no matter how much you get paid to pretend to be someone else.

Now, knowing, in fact, that it’s super weird for a lot of people, and that there are still way too many social stigmas out there about homosexuality (let’s face it, no one ever worried about whether a lesbian is comfortable making out with a man on screen), if you’re going to be playing gay on screen, especially in a love scene, casting will seriously, seriously ask you if you’re okay with that. Your agent will talk to you about the pros and cons of the choice. And sometimes, you’ll even have to sign something saying you won’t sue anyone if this playing gay thing leads to reputational damage (for the record: I’ve been questioned by casting more closely about my willingness to play gay, even after I’ve informed casting about my own orientation, than I have been about my willingness to have live insects placed on my body).

I’m not joking. I know we all wish I were.

So at the point that you are an actor and you’re booked to do a love scene with another actor of the same sex, and you’re straight and thinking “Oh shit, I hate filming love scenes and OH MY GOD, I’ve never kissed another dude before,” you’ve already had plenty of time not to sign up for this. I get that you’re stressed. I get that it’s weird for you. And I’m not asking you not to feel that way. Because filming love scenes SUCKS.

But in this age of constant interviews and the ill-considered opportunities for general crankiness Twitter provides, please think very carefully before you speak on the record about this experience. Because when your anxiety about this process reads as “playing gay is disgusting, and I’m worried about getting the gay cooties on me,” you look like a bit of an arse. At best. And it’s really hurtful to gay fans of a given property to hear that someone can’t stand playing a character that might be someone we can actually relate to.

This happens, unsurprisingly, all the time. It’s recently happened through some now deleted tweets in one of my fandoms of choice. And it’s happened before regarding other actors and properties that are important to me. Seriously, if you’re going to be in a film (no matter how terrible) about Alexander the Great, don’t make snide comments about the gay. Ditto for Torchwood. Double plus ditto for anything that is inherently and overwhelmingly a gay narrative.

So, “Hey, I have to do this thing that’s uncomfortable for actors in general and is new to me in this particular situation ’cause I’ve never kissed a dude before and I’m feeling a little strange about it; acting is so weird” — totally cool; it’s a weird job!

But, “Any hot chicks want to help me get the gay off?” Not cool, man, not cool.

Whedonistas reading in Brooklyn

WHEDONISTAS AT THE WAYSTATION
Readings from Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them
Featuring Elizabeth Bear, Teresa Jusino, Racheline Maltese, NancyKay Shapiro, and Priscilla Spencer.

Brooklyn Waystation
683 Washington Ave
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
MONDAY, MARCH 14TH
7:00PM
Reading to be followed by signing

Why you want to come other than the pure awesome that is Whedonistas and the fact that we should have books on hand for you to buy before you can get it anywhere else (unless you were at Gally)? The bar’s bathroom is through the TARDIS. I mean, just think about it. Jack has totally shagged someone in the TARDIS bathroom, right? Live vicariously, people, live vicariously!

The brutality of being chosen

One of my creative associates (who may have words with me at that particular phrasing in the name of identity plausible deniability) has a discussion piece up on Friends of the Text today about the premise of being chosen within texts and the idea of being chosen by texts. Thematically relevant to the stuff that interests me? You bet.

But also, of course, thematically relevant to my life. It’s easy to say, I think, and Balaka says as much in the piece, that everyone wants to be chosen. It is, she notes, like winning in the passive voice. But I wonder. Do boys want to be chosen as much as girls? Is the chosen part of the narrative what makes Harry Potter and Star Wars exciting to the male segments of their audiences? Do men have a Pygmalion narrative in their fantasies, one in which they are the transformed and not the transformer? Are women more socialized to this idea of being chosen? Is that why Twilight flies off the shelves? What’s it like, I wonder, to grow up, wanting to choose. Who is that person? And how are they formed? Were they once waiting to get chosen and finally got sick of not having magic powers or not becoming a star just for sitting at the table in the window of some diner?

It’s a sticky, nasty, uncomfortable question. At least for me. Because it touches, potentially, not just on ideas of gender, but also on ideas of dominance and submission and of leadership. It speaks to the troubling idea that chosen just means, “you’re good enough to be transmuted into gold.” It’s not just that you’re nothing without being chosen, it’s the suggestion that you’re nothing without acquiescing to the consequences of being chosen, and they are legion.

For me, this whole chosen business also speaks to ideas I have about the directorial imagination and my fears about whether I have enough of one. And it speaks to the doubt I have about the idea that the best thing anyone can do for themselves is get over that fantasy of being chosen, even though I know that waiting isn’t how to do life, poetic, rigorous, and narratively enticing though it may sometimes be.

Of course, I work in industries that largely are about “winning in the passive voice.” I write something, and then someone snatches it out of a pile of slush and publishes it. Sure, sometimes I get asked for things up front, and sure, I have to write things (which is an active endeavor) before waiting for them to get chosen, but “winning in the passive voice” is definitely the right description of the experience of it. At least for me.

Acting can be even more bizarre in that regard. You get a call; someone likes how you look; can you come in now and show us what you can do? It’s “winning in the passive voice” before there’s even a chance of winning in the active voice, and trust me, when they say you’ve got it, and it’s a contract, it doesn’t, in that moment, feel like you did anything, other than get plucked out of a crowd. A week later, you might recall how damn hard you worked for that opportunity, but the first flush of reaction is, at least for me, and I suspect for many other performers is “They picked me! Me!” Chosen.

“Winning in the passive voice.” It implies all of the benefits and none of the hard work of this success thing, doesn’t it? Seems snazzy. But there’s a real brutality that underlies it, one of clay in the kiln, and the insidious possibility that it might have actually been a certain peculiar and shifting inadequacy that brought you to attention. To be fair, I grew up as a dancer, and being chosen meant being told how you were wrong and being pressed harder and further into shapes to which you did not yet conform. But I suspect, regardless of background, that for a lot of people, it is this idea of brutality that appeals.

To return us to matters of the text and this idea of being chosen by the text, it makes me think about the work I’ve done regarding death and mourning. Or, at least, the tangential experience I’ve had in having done that work of seeing a lot of anger and distress from audiences in which beloved characters do die. Does this speak, I wonder, to this idea of being chosen by the text, and then finding out — for those who have had negative reactions to these fictional deaths — that this was really not what you signed up in that moment where you felt the text chose you. Conversely, for those of us who have felt vastly satisfied in those losses, is it because of the relief of encountering the expected brutality in our selection by the text?

And it’s not just on death that texts can brutalize us. Look at Bella in Twilight and look at our reactions. Is not the inspired longing for that type of impossibility a brutality of the text? Is not what Bella experiences in the face of the love she endures another brutality of the text, this one intradiegetic, instead of extradiegetic?

What, ultimately, do these narratives of being chosen suggest to us about the ethics of favor and brutality in our relationships with texts and in texts’ relationships with us? And how much choice do we have about those relationships, when the narratives themselves are, at base, about not having choice, and the supposedly great good fortune of that condition? Nobody ever asked Harry Potter if he wanted to save the world.

Thinky thoughts are a double thumbs up. Please make sure to give Balaka’s post some love too, especially if your reactions are more about her work than my little digression/extrapolation here. I would also particularly love to hear here from men on the subject of Pygmalion narratives and anyone who feels they are instinctively wired towards being the one who chooses.

On the tangible realities of absence

On July 10, 2010, I presented a paper, “Tangible Reality of Absence: Fan Communities and the Mourning of Fictional Characters,” (which you can now retrieve to read in its entirety at that link) at an academic conference in Bristol in the UK. It’s something of which I’m quite proud; it’s also something that was quite difficult, and was, and remains, complex in ways I could not have anticipated going into it.

I didn’t really think of myself as an independent scholar before Bristol. Sure, I had a (not scholarly) pop culture book out and had presented some papers on the academic tracks at Harry Potter cons, but that was just me enjoying some attention for thinking and talking about stuff I really dig. I didn’t know what to call it or what it said about me or how to integrate it with the fact that I am a fan and I’ve never really understood why I should be ashamed of that.

Submitting a paper to the conference, Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception, felt like something of a moral imperative to me when I read the CFP, which circulated fast and furiously around LiveJournal for its inclusiveness of fan studies and desire. But for me, the magic phrase was, “Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters,” because that was me.

That was me in fourth grade when I spent all my time daydreaming about having tea with Alexander the Great. And it was me every time I’ve had to go on a trip alone, and there was no one there but characters I’d loved and made friends with to hold my hand when the plane took off. And these anecdotes, although largely unspecific and chosen for their romanticism, aren’t just stories to me. Maybe it’s because I’m an actor, because I’m trained to pretend, but I know the feel of all those different hands that have soothed me as we’ve hurtled down the runway.

Because I live in the world with my partner and my friends and my colleagues, I know to say these experiences aren’t real. But because I’ve experienced them, I also know to say they aren’t not real either. And until I read that CFP, I didn’t know that I was really allowed to talk about that, not the love, not the connection, but the embodiment of it that has been with me my whole life, as a type of magic and as a form of ghosts and as an instrument of shame.

What to write about became clear pretty fast. Ianto Jones had just died on Torchwood and everyone I knew kept asking why every once in a while they felt like they had to pop into the bathroom at work just to have a good cry, weeks and months after the fact. I knew I couldn’t answer that question, but I thought maybe I could answer why it was happening about this character and why it always seemed to happen about certain types of characters and yet not others; it wasn’t the degree of fannish love that seemed to generate this mourning, but something else. I’d seen it with Severus Snape, too. I’d heard about ways “the ecstasy of grief” had consumed various Whedon fandoms. And thought I knew, like everyone thinks they know, that people once wore black armbands to mourn the death of Sherlock Holmes.

So I submitted an abstract, got a yes, and then began this completely ridiculous journey that I couldn’t possibly have expected at the time, one that involved being a receptacle for other people’s grief, a great deal of defending fannish love, too much anger (on my part and a lot of other people’s), several trips to the UK, and a tattoo. It’s a story I’ve intended to tell since I first started working on this project, but I’m still not sure it’s one I know how.

I first went to the UK in April 2010 with Patty. She was speaking at a conference in London and had business in Cardiff. I would visit the Ianto memorial site while she did that, because it seemed reasonable that I see the thing that was going to account for a full third of the paper. That experience didn’t really turn out how I expected, and then we got stuck in London besides, due to the volcanic ash event. There was a point where I was in tears of frustration, sitting on the Internet, tweeting: “I am stuck in the UK due to a volcano with a non-working vortex manipulator. Doctor stuck in the US. And Ianto’s dead.” It was, frankly, completely hilarious, but the whole situation was also super strange. It’s funnier if you’re a Doctor Who fan.

By the time I touched down in the UK a few months later for the Bristol conference (presenting the paper, I might note, one year and one day after the episode of Torchwood in which Ianto died was aired), I’d already survived a heated panel on character death responses, that was both wonderful and awful, at Gallifrey One. I’d discovered that the act of morning for Ianto which I personally was the most emotionally responsive to was committed by someone with whom I had argued in a mutually ungracious fashion on- and off-line. I’d watched both creators I admire and people I’m friends with endure ongoing harassment and threats over this thing. And I was holding, somewhat unexpectedly, a hell of a lot of secrets.

These secrets were told to me along the route of this project by people of all genders, ages and sexual orientations. It happened more often in person, confessions over drinks, than online, but it happened a lot. It included fans, people who hadn’t thought to characterize themselves as fans, and professional creators who in some cases had at least distant ties to the property in question. It included people I knew well and people who were essentially strangers to me.

The secrets fell into two clear and simple categories. The first, “When Ianto died, it felt like I’d been the one that had been killed off.” The second, “It felt like I’d lost my lover.” And lest you think I am in any way outside of this experience, let me be clear in that my response was only ever two things: “I know,” and “Me too.”

That’s not really something I’ve wanted to admit, but not because of the stigma associated with fannishness in the general world, or the stigma associated with this type of transgressive, embodied fannishness amongst fandom itself (see the paper for a discussion of Snape’s Wives), nor even because acafen are suspect enough for the love we bring to the table of our scholarship. Rather, it was an experience I’d had that was agonizing and private, and lacking beautiful words for it, I did not wish instead to offer words that were merely adequate, or worse, inadequate. That overall feeling, while now a gentle and passing regret as if for a joy I once had, remains.

It’s not something I think I have much else to say on, but the reason I’m saying it at all is important. One of the themes that emerged out of the Bristol conference was that of exile and secrets. It was very powerful to me as a human being and as a scholar and as a fan. It was very powerful to me as a queer person. And when I got back to my hotel that night, I posted to LiveJournal and asked people to keep fewer secrets about their experiences of the world. Which is why I think I owe this conversation this particular, arguably absurdist, truth, regardless of what it makes you think of me.

Long before Russell T. Davies killed off Ianto, I did. Well, Kali and I did in a 200,000+ word fanfiction epic, I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. I’m sure you can Google and find it on the Internet with great ease. I’ll warn you that it’s chock full of porn, has a very narrow doorway and will absolutely, positively make you cry. But, because it’s important to me not to value original work differently from transformative work, because I believe they are two deeply distinct exercises, I want you to know that I’m really damn proud of this story and that I reread it sometimes, in part because we learned a lot of stuff, some of it about life, while writing it.

One of the things I think we learned, looking back, is that death is often about despair, but it can also be about hope. This isn’t about heaven or any codified spirituality, but rather, about a way of facing the world, a world that, necessarily, eventually, leaves us all behind. And I suspect that mourning is one way we attempt, as humans, to try to reinject hope into that experience of despair.

The last two words of the story come in a sign off to a letter. They are, Be grand. Kali and I, on principle, will rarely say who wrote what part of our stories and often we can’t remember ourselves, but this was mine, something I’d written jokingly about halfway through the project, that then became our focus and our target point. When Ianto died months later on Children of Earth, I told her I was going to get those two final words of our story tattooed on me and that it would cause fandom drama and that I didn’t care, because it wasn’t about Ianto, it was about me.

So when I landed in the UK for the Bristol conference, on July 8, having (in a case of the worst timing ever) spent the previous day in the emergency room with a kidney stone, I thought maybe it was time to get that tattoo. It was about so many other things by then — being in the UK, becoming a scholar, and the very way that I’ve really always chosen to live my life, the costs be damned — that, combined with the source narrative anniversary and the conference, made it seem like the timing was perfect. It was perfect. But the truth was, I also wasn’t sure.

I looked up Into You, one of the most well-regarded and difficult to get an appointment at tattoo shops in London. I knew it could sometimes take months to get an appointment there, but I decided that if they could squeeze me in, in some fluke during my 36 non-consecutive hours in London, I would get the tattoo.

It turns they’d had a cancellation and they could. So I took the tube to Angel and put a 40 quid deposit on the work that day, fresh off the plane. I left for Bristol the next morning, did the conference the day after, and then returned to London the day after that. The next day, with just hours before my flight, I had the words Be grand carved into my back in black ink, before boarding a flight from Heathrow to JFK. Some days, I hate that I can’t see it without a mirror, but it remains fundamental to this narrative and important to me that people see it when I am going.

Later that year, at the opening night party of the 2010 New York Musical Theater Festival, a stranger asked me if the tattoo was a command to others or a reminder to myself. I was there on a fluke, one related to another strange and risky international pilgrimage from another time in my life, and I smiled, knew the world was right, and simply said, Yes.

Other than giving a related presentation specifically on illustrated media (comics, manga, anime, etc.) at the 3rd Annual Comics & Popular Arts Conference at Dragon*Con in September 2010, I’ve taken a bit of time off from working on the death and mourning stuff since Bristol. I needed the break. It was hard. I didn’t realize how much it meant I was holding, but my desire to continue and broaden this work is immense.

Since the initial paper, which you should really go up to the first link in this thing and read if you haven’t because this post is kind of a box set with that, I’ve stumbled on some more criteria that seem to inspire this mourning response to the loss of fictional characters. I’ve also become acutely interested in people’s personal stories about the intersection of grief and fiction — mourning acts they engaged in secret and as children; mourning for fiction happening, or not happening, contemporaneously with non-fictional loss, etc. There’s so much here on both a scholarly level and on a level that speaks to personal essay and anthology about these very strange, supposedly secret, embodied and emotional experiences of love and loss.

So I don’t know where all this goes next, although I’ve clearly got some ideas. And I don’t know when it goes there, because I do have my own joyful and grand life to be living. But I know that it does. I’ve got two words carved into my back that say so, and everything’s already happened anyway.

Be grand.

sartorial absurdity

You all know I love suits right? On me, on other people. Pretty much on everyone if they’re good suits. Yum suits. So, while my all-deadlines-all-the-time life continues (but don’t worry, some real content is coming here soon; I’m just waiting for something to go live so I can link you to it and talk about it), I need to pause for a second to share with you this sartorial absurdity highlighted on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight:

Personalized pinstripes.

While I have to go do some statistical analysis at the moment, I ask you to please, please, weigh in below. Awesome? Horrifying? Both? What would your pinstripes say? More importantly, my fannish friends, what would fictional characters’ pinstripes say? Because I really, really need to know.