sweeetkerosene

[sweeetkerosene]

Queer idealism, conformism, and fanfiction culture

Recently I’ve been thinking about how music fans seem to favour cishet artists that they 'headcanon' as queer over those who actually are queer. At a surface level that makes sense, the society we live in isn’t always accommodating or accepting of queerness. But it seems to go way deeper than the classic homophobia that we usually think of, in fact, music and queerness have a history so intertwined that it deems the two inseparable. As early as the 1890s, music has been used as a means of expressing queerness and celebrating sexuality. Blues artists such as Lucille Bogan and Ma Rainey were amongst the first to incorporate LGBT themes into their lyricism, singing about their sexual encounters with other women. Since that time, many of the world’s greatest artists have been openly queer, most notably Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, but this isn’t the point of this discussion. Music has always hosted a space for queerness and freedom of expression, which is why it seems unusual that recently we’ve been going in the opposite direction.

Musicians have been coming out as queer more frequently since the world has started to become more accepting of their identities, but weirdly the people who are most involved in music culture have been some of the least accepting. These people may not be homophobic in the traditional sense, but they’ve begun expressing their prejudice differently, using the concept of queerbaiting to argue invalidity. The term ‘queerbaiting’ has existed for a couple of decades but only became popularised in the 2010s through social media.  The original meaning of the term refers to queer themes subtly being added into film and TV purely for the sake of attracting an LGBT audience while still maintaining plausible deniability. Obviously, this is a real thing that many TV show producers have even admitted to doing, but the term ‘queerbaiting’ has been taken out of context and spread beyond just fiction. The intent of queerbaiting in film and TV is to attract a queer audience, while simultaneously keeping the ‘bait’ subtle enough not to drive their cishet audience away, usually just upholding and never resolving sexual tension between characters. However, the way that the word has been used in recent times is far from the original definition, as it’s now being used to describe genuine queerness as ‘bait’.

There are plenty of examples of musicians who have been open about their queer experiences, just to be shut down and criticised by other queer people. Some of the most popular modern artists including Billie Eilish, Rita Ora, Cardi B, and Chappel Roan, have been accused of queerbaiting, despite being involved in same-sex relationships or even openly labelling their sexuality and identifying as queer. A lot of queerbaiting accusations have been made against female artists, which is part of a whole separate discussion about why WLW relationships aren’t taken seriously, especially by men. However, the recurring theme I’ve noticed is that the artists most often accused of queerbaiting are those who don’t follow a set of unspoken ‘rules’ that have been created in the LGBT community. Artists that don’t look queer or act queer aren’t treated the same as those who do, which I’ve always found weird considering that as a community we pride ourselves in going against stereotypes and expressing our individuality. The best way I can describe this is as a horseshoe effect; we went against heteronormative stereotypes so hard that instead of creating a space where self-expression is valued and encouraged, we created a new set of stereotypes that queer people are expecting other queer people to adhere to. This links right back to the idea of queerbaiting, as a community we have begun to invalidate the identities of queer musicians not because we think it’s wrong to be queer, but because they don’t meet the expectations of what a ‘true’ queer person should look or act like. Or to put it shortly, conformism in the name of anti-conformism.

Of course, there is more to this seemingly never-ending discussion. Fanfiction and ‘slash fiction’ have also been a huge part of music culture for decades, with music-related fanfiction starting to gain popularity in the 70s and focusing on bands such as Led Zeppelin. The most relevant aspect of fanfiction to this discussion is the way it’s commonly used to project these self-assigned stereotypes onto real people. There is a lot of fanfiction written by young queer people, who more often than not don’t have a role model that feels representative of their own identity. By writing fanfiction about their favourite musicians, they can create a sense of comfort and belonging by putting a person they already look up to in a situation that is relatable and reflects their experience with queerness. This by itself seems quite innocent and harmless, but there is a point at which the fiction starts to affect their real-life perception of these artists. In specific music subcultures and communities where fanfiction is most common, it’s easy for a fanbase to start idolising this fictional version of an artist rather than their actual self. This is even more prominent in communities where bands or artists don’t engage with fans often, or generally keep to themselves rather than publicly sharing information about their lives. With less information being confirmed to be true, more information can be assumed which leads to a major mischaracterisation of a real person. The ‘headcanon’ version of a musician is often very different to how they are in real life, to the point where some fans disregard or insult artists’ relationships with other real people as they don’t align with the fictional love life they created for them.

This is where things start to get unusual because, on one hand, we have music fans who are so desperate for queer representation in their subculture that they fill that gap by writing fanfiction, while on the other we have those same music fans dismissing genuine queer experiences of musicians because they don’t express their queerness in the way they believe they should. The music community appears to be very accepting of queer musicians, as long they match an idealised image of queerness that they deem authentic and acceptable, which typically only exists in fiction. While no one is outright saying that an artist isn’t queer enough or is expressing their queerness incorrectly, they seem to gravitate towards fictional and often unrealistic depictions of queerness rather than supporting artists in their community who are already openly queer, and I think as both a music enjoyer and queer person that our support for real-life queer artists should come before worshipping someone's fictional queerness.