part-time-queer

[part-time-queer]

DNI lists on this website are fucking insane

[part-time-queer]

People I met for a few moments that live in my head forever.

[part-time-queer]

Baffled.

[part-time-queer]

Laputa pride

Rainbow iridescent pileus clouds filmed in Haikou, China, 08.23.2022

[part-time-queer]

Because sometimes we all just need to see a guy head-bump a beautiful Beluga whale

[part-time-queer]

“Everybody agrees we need to shame straight women for reading queer fanfiction, but–”

No. No, we literally do not need to do that. It helps no one, homophobes don’t care, people exploring their sexualities and genders will retreat back into the closet, queer people will be pressured to out themselves, there is no version of this that doesn’t do massive disproportionate splash damage to queer and questioning people, and moreover it hurts literally no one to let straight people read and/or fap to smutty queer fanfic in peace as long as they aren’t shits to actual queer people.

Just stop, for the love of Christ.

[part-time-queer]

As an additional argument in favor of using BL/Boys Love: internationalization is easy.

Slash doesn't mean much in my own language, nor has it really taken in Fandom spaces speaking that language. If you say you like slash, people are going to assume you mean slasher movies. Not quite the same.

M/M wouldn't mean anything either, not the right letters and we don't have a similar widespread shortened way of describing this concept. You most likely need more context to fully get it as well.

But when you say you enjoy ready Boys Love, it's rather transparent. While it's English, the words are very simple and basic that pretty much anyone even without English notions knows what they mean and can infer what that is with less context.

And it's nice to be able to communicate easily between languages and use common terms.

Plus it's the Japanese industry term, and it's value neutral (blabla insert here people complaining about "yaoi" while reading the exact same BL).

So yeah, that's a pretty cool term.

It's probably a dumb question, but you use it so often in your posts lately and it's driving me crazy that I can't figure it out on my own. I have a guess, but I don't want to say it, because if I'm wrong, I'm only embarrasing myself more. So, my question is what's BL?

--

LOLOLOL.

It is hard to google 2-letter abbreviations, isn't it? They drive me bonkers too.

BL = "boys love", which is the actual term for what dumbasses keep insisting on calling "yaoi".

Boys Love is a Japanese industry term for m/m content that is understood to be by and for women. We can get into a whole can of worms about how many of these creators and audience members are closeted trans men, x-gender (Japanese nb/genderqueer-like identity), etc. But the point is that this is m/m in the slash fandom kind of way, not in the cis gay men's culture kind of way.

'Danmei' is a similar Chinese term.

I like the term BL and would like to see it or something like it gain more widespread use in English when talking about Western original content because it solves certain terminological issues:

'Slash' usually refers to m/m fanfic, not original work*

'M/M' sounds like it's a basic content description, so new people will assume it applies to anything with two dudes in love rather than understanding it as a proper noun referring to a particular movement/genre/marketing category/etc.

Calling things 'gay' or 'queer' mixes this content in with serious ownvoices literary fiction and other unrelated content

Calling things 'gay' or 'queer' also conflates all flavors of queerness and demands their audiences be the same--which they are not!

* Also, The Youth don't even know what the word 'slash' is, and I think that's largely down to AO3, built by slashers, using 'm/m' as the tag and having no mention of this word anywhere. That's a decision I agree with, but I think it's one of the big drivers of the word falling out of use.

M/M-for-women is its own thing, just as F/F-for-men is, and I think they're both just fine! I don't mind all those pornos for dudes that are about "lesbians" at all... except for how they turn the word 'lesbian' into a porn tag and play merry hell with search algorithms for anything else to do with lesbians. Similarly, the kind of m/m that exists in those selfpub romance novels is fine in and of itself, but it's so numerous that it can overwhelm other types of queer content if labeling is not kept clear.

I also know from long experience that there's a type of AFAB person who resonates with this particular type of media. Plenty of us are cis women who date other cis women, but we have Gender Complications of some sort. (Perhaps from being butch, perhaps just from being queer, perhaps from being neurodivergent or nonwhite or something else that fails at "default" gender.) The majority of us are women. A large chunk are nb/genderqueer/etc. A smaller minority are trans men. This pattern holds true across ye olde slash fandom, current m/m romance novelists, Asian media industries and fandoms, etc. This Thing deserves a name and a cohesive identity so that we can talk about it and so that we can defend it from the constant "all m/m content should be for men in all cases" garbage. (Are drag queens for women? Should they be? Well then!) Plenty of individual men like, consume, and create BL type content and are in these spaces, but BL is a distinct media category deserving of its own designation.

So, anyway, that's why I've upped my use of 'BL' even when talking about Western things.

[part-time-queer]

Would you Smooch a Hyena?

A.)Yes B.)Yes! C.)HECK YES!!!?

[part-time-queer]

just gonna leave this here

[part-time-queer]

on the validity of recognizing emotions

[part-time-queer]

I love this cat. Like, I love him, but also, he’s stupid.

[part-time-queer]

For the people who are out there “fighting the good fight” and “trying to make fandom a better place,” I have two important questions for you:

1. Is the author dead? x

2. Is your baby in the bathwater? x

What do I mean by those things? Let’s start with #1. The Death of the Author is a type of literary criticism, the extreme cliff notes version of which is that art exists outside of the creator’s life, personal background, and even intentions. I’m using it slightly differently than Barthes intended, but that’s okay, because the author is dead and I’m interpreting his work through my own lens.

In fandom, the author is dead. In fact, the author was never alive in the first place, not really. The author has only ever been the idea of a person, because unlike published fiction, the only thing we know about a fanfic author is that which they choose to tell us about themselves.

Why is that important?

Because it might not be true. Hell, that happens in real life with published authors, who have SSN’s on file with their publishers, who pay taxes on the works they create and have researchable pasts. If the author of A Million Little Pieces could fake everything, why can’t I? Why can’t you? Why can’t the writer of your favorite fic in the whole wide world?

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “you can only write about [sensitive subject] if [sensitive subject] has happened to you personally, otherwise you’re a disgusting monster that deserves to die!!” Or maybe “you can only write [x racial or ethnic group] characters if you’re [x racial or ethnic group] otherwise you’re racist/fetishizing/colonizing!”

You can play this game with any sensitive subject you can come up with. I’ve seen them all before, on a sliding scale of slightly chastising to literal death threats.

Now, I could tell you that I’m a white-passing Latina whose grandmother was an anchor baby. I could tell you that I speak only English because my family never taught me to speak Spanish, something which I’ve been told is common in the Cuban community, though I only know my own lived experience. I could tell you that I’m mostly neurotypical. I could tell you that I’m covered in surgical scars. I could tell you lots of things.

Are any of these true? Maybe! I could tell you that my brother has severe mental development problems, so uncommon that they’ve never been properly diagnosed, and that he will live the rest of his life in a group home with 24-hour care. Is that true? Am I allowed to write about families struggling with America’s piss-poor services for the handicapped now?

Am I allowed to write about being Cuban? After all, I did just say that I’m Cuban. But is it true? Can I instead write a character that’s Panamanian? Maybe I really am Panamanian, not Cuban. Maybe I’m both. Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m really French Canadian. Should we require people to post regular selfies? I can’t count the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me speaking Arabic, and I’ve been told that I look Syrian. What’s stopping me from making a blog that claims that I am Syrian? Can you even really tell someone’s race and ethnicity from a photo?

Am I allowed to write about being a teenager? Am I allowed to write about being a college student? Am I allowed to write about being an “adulty” adult? Can I write a character who’s 40? 50? 60? How old am I?

All of this is to say: you can’t base what someone is or is not “allowed” to write about on a background that may or may not be real. No matter how good your intentions. And I get it - this usually comes from a place of well-meaning. You’re trying to protect marginalized groups by stopping privileged people from trampling all over experiences that they haven’t suffered. I get that. It’s a very noble thought. But you can’t require a background check for every fic that you don’t like.

If you say “you can only write about rape if you’re a rape victim,” then one of three things will happen:

Real survivors will have to supply intimate details of their own violations to prevent harassment

Real survivors will refuse to engage and will then have to deal with death threats and people telling them to kill themselves for daring to write about their own experiences

People who aren’t survivors will say “yeah sure this happened to me” just to get people to shut up

Has that helped anyone? I mean really - anyone??

So now let’s get to point #2: is your baby in the bathwater?

If your intention is to protect marginalized people from being trampled upon, stop and assess if your boot is the one that’s now stamping on their face. Find your baby! Is your baby in the bathwater? Which is to say: find the goal that you’re advocating for. Now assess. Are you making the problem worse for the people you’re trying to protect? Does that rape victim really feel better, now that you’ve harassed and stalked them in the name of making rape victims feel safe?

Let’s say you read a fic that contains explicit sex between a 16 year old and a 17 year old. Is this okay? Would it be okay if the writer was 15? 16? 17? Should teenagers be barred from writing about their own lives, and should teenagers be banned from exploring sexuality in a fictional bubble, instead of hookup culture? Is it okay for a 20 year old to write about their experiences as a teenager? Is it okay for a 20 year old to write about being raped at a party as a teenager? Is it okay for a 30 year old? How about a 40 year old? Is it okay so long as it isn’t titillating? Is it okay if taking control of the narrative allows the writer to re-conceptualize their trauma as something they have control over? Is it okay if their therapist told them that writing is a safe creative outlet?

Is your author dead?

Is your baby in the bathwater?

Now let’s take a hardline approach: no fanfiction with characters who are under 18 years old. None. Is the 16 year old who really loves Harry Potter and wants to read/write about characters their own age better off? Should they be banned from writing? Should they be forced to exclusively read and write (adult) experiences that they haven’t lived? Will they write about teens anyway? Should they have to share it in secret? Should 16 year olds be ashamed of themselves? Should we just throw in with the evangelicals and say that the only answer is abstinence, both real and fictional?

Let’s say that no rape is allowed in fiction, at all. None. What happens to all the hurt/comfort fics where a character is raped and then receives the support and love that they deserve, slowly heal, and by the end have found themselves again? Are you helping rape victims by banning these stories? Are you helping rape victims by stripping their agency away, by telling them that their wants and their consent doesn’t matter?

Is your baby in the bathwater?

Fandom is currently being split in two: on one side, the people who want to make fandom a “safer” place by any means necessary, even if that means throwing out all of the marginalized groups they say they want to protect - and on the other, people who are saying “if you throw out that bathwater, you’re throwing the baby out too.”

The whole point of fandom is to be able to explore all kinds of ideas from the safety and comfort of a computer screen. You can read/write things that fascinate you, disgust you, titillate you, or make your heart feel warm. This is true of all fiction. People who want to read about rape and incest and extreme violence and torture can go pick up a copy of Game of Thrones from the bookstore whenever they want. Sanitizing fandom just means holding a community of people who are primarily not male, not straight, not cis, or some combination of those three, to higher and stricter standards than straight white cis male authors and creators all over the world.

There is nothing you can find on AO3 that you can’t find in a bookstore. Any teenager can go check out Lolita, or ASOIAF, or Flowers in the Attic, or Stephen King’s It, or Speak, or hundreds of other books that have adult themes or gratuitous violence or graphic sex. The difference is that AO3 has warnings and tags and allows people to interact only with the types of work that they want to, and allows people to curate their experiences.

Are these themes eligible to be explored, but only in the setting of something produced/published? Books, movies, television, studio art, music - all of these fields have huge barriers to entry, and they’re largely controlled by wealthy cishet white men. Is it better to say that only those who have the right connections to “make it” in these industries should be allowed to explore violence or sexuality or any other so-called “adult” theme?

Does banning women from writing MLM erotica make fan culture a better place?

Does banning queer people from writing about queer experiences make fan culture a better place?

Is M/M fic okay, but only if the author is male? What if he’s a trans man? What if they’re NB? Who should get to draw those lines? Should TERFs get a vote? What if the author is a woman who feels more comfortable writing from a male character’s perspective because she’s grown up with male stories her whole life, or because she identifies more with male characters? What about all the trans men who discovered themselves, in part, by writing fanfiction, and realized that their desires to write male characters stemmed from something they hadn’t yet realized about themselves?

How can we ever be sure that the author is who they say they are?

Who is allowed to write these stories? How do we enforce it?

Is it better for none of these stories to ever exist at all?

Have you killed your author?

Have you thrown out your baby with the bathwater?

[part-time-queer]

You know, this isn’t the thing that fucks me up the most about BL/“yaoi”/fujoshi discourse, but it’s high up there so I’m going to say it.

It took me my whole lifetime to accept the fact that I’m a feminine guy. Every time I was laughed at for being girly, nonviolent, called a sissy, bitch, or worse, it hurt like hell. And when I realized I was attracted to boys, that was when I started to question whether I was a real man. It felt like a stab to the gut.

I was there, little teenage me, reading BL, because I couldn’t connect with anything else I knew of. Straight romance didn’t do anything for me. I watched Brokeback Mountain and liked it, but I couldn’t relate to almost any part of it. Gei Comi (“bara”) wasn’t my taste back then — I wanted to see boys who looked a bit like me, not big hunky adults with facial hair! So I fell back to BL.

And you people on here complain about “straight girls squeeing and saying ‘my sinful gay babies!!!’” — guess what, I was around when you actually DID see fangirls say this type of thing. I was there consuming BL and slash by the truckful, ignoring the occasional homophobic comments from the author/uploader. I saw all the hate every other corner of fandom threw at BL fans, and you know what.

None of that hate was because they had homophobic attitudes.

It was purely because “yaoi is for stupid girls”, and they were “ruining the source material with their dirty gay hands”.

If girls touched anything that was “meant for boys”, including male characters themselves, it was “dirtied”, “ruined”. (Sounds familiar?)

And the boys who liked BL? Who preferred a romantic manga about androgynous guys slowly falling in love, with cherry blossoms being swept by the wind in the background, rather than just watching gay porn featuring masculine men? We weren’t “real men”.

If you thought there isn’t a fuckton of toxic masculinity in the gay male community, boy do I have news for you. Feminine, camp, flamboyant men, they all “made gays look bad”. Because of us, cishet people wouldn’t accept gay men as “real men”, so there were attempts to exclude us to protect the reputation of the unoffensive, masculine macho gays.

Obviously, it didn’t work, but damn if it didn’t make me and guys like me feel horrible that even other gay guys hated us.

It took me a long time to accept myself. Little mid-to-late-teens me, with light hypogonadism that stunted my growth and made me look very feminine. Before I started taking hormones per my endocrinologist’s advice, I barely had appetite to eat decently. I only lost my baby cheeks and started gaining muscle mass a year or so into hormone treatment.

Me, still flaming gay.

As I grew up, came out, and made queer friends, I became less and less dependent on BL for self-esteem and entertainment. But BL fans were slowly being more accepted in animanga fandom (or at least, people made peace with the fact that we weren’t going anywhere). Same for slash shippers in western fandoms. I was so happy to see all the M/M content. I was so happy to see a space where girls could share their passion (including erotica) and support each other.

When they learned that a gay guy liked the same things as them, they were ecstatic. They never shamed me for sharing their “girly” interests. I had serious conversations with them when they said insensitive or ignorant things, but it was becoming less and less necessary to do so. Fans were becoming progressively more conscious of queer issues.

And now.

Now,

“Yaoi is for cishet girls.”

“You must be lying about being a gay man. You’re obviously a straight girl.”

“Nasty fujoshits.”

“If you have more m/m than m/f or f/f ships, you’re fetishizing mlm.” 

Good fucking lord.

It’s so transparent. You feel so self-righteous expressing hate for women (plenty of whom are queer, but yeah, straight women too!) having interests, and god forbid, sometimes sexual interests (gasp!).

You dress it up as “concern for MLM” in the hopes that people will sympathize with your campaign to shame and harass women, men and gender non-conforming folk for daring to like content “not meant for them”, just like 2ch and 4chan dudebros in the mid-2000’s.

It makes me sick to the stomach.

Don’t pretend this is about homophobia. You don’t go after the exact same content if it’s made by “real men” featuring masculine macho “real men”.

You’ve heard of seme/uke tropes? Get ready for aggressive tops and “bottom bitches”! “Fetishizing Asian men”? Well, good thing that gay dudes have rice queens, and on the other end of the spectrum, “no fats, femmes or asians”. Transphobic themes? Some men consider “sh*male” or “tr*nny” to be porn categories! But neither anti-fujoshi nor transphobic gay men will talk about trans men — they’re “not real men”, after all, just “straight women invading gay spaces”.

And let’s not get into the rape, abuse, incest, racism, sexism, violence, and plethora of other problematic things that cis gay men portray in gei comi, original fic and fanfic — it puts dark BL and fic written by anyone else to shame.

But it’s okay, because it’s “real men” creating and consuming it, right?

Look, I get it. You want to seem like you’re doing good and fighting for queer men. I’ll hazard you even were fujoshi/fudanshi before and are ashamed of how you acted back then.

But all that you’re doing is misusing terms of a language you don’t know, from a culture you’re not part of and fandoms you don’t participate in, speaking over gay men and Asian fans, othering Asian people, and fostering an environment in which harassment of innocent fans is encouraged and marginalized people are used as scapegoats.

I feel for the trans guys, who go to fandoms to escape the hate and transphobia from the world, only to be misgendered and send hateful messages in the spaces they wanted to have fun in. Who are already accused of “faking it”, of not being “real men”, by bigots in the real world, and now have to face the same horrible things in fandom.

I feel for the queer girls, some of whom may not even be attracted to men, but to whom BL and/or slash means a lot. Who often don’t even have female characters to relate to, much less queer female characters, or simply can’t relate to them very well for a variety of complex reasons. They seek refuge in fandom, only to be misoriented, called “cishet”, having their identity erased to push an agenda.

And I feel for the straight, cis girls, who put genuine effort into educating themselves on queer issues, for whom fandom was a welcoming space where they could finally share their interests and be themselves, be allowed to have sexual interests… and now are being called perverts, deviants, and being told that they taint everything they touch.

And as much as it pisses me off to be called “basically a cishet girl”, it doesn’t get to me. At present, I’m secure in the knowledge that I am a real man, despite being gay, despite being feminine, despite liking BL. I am comfortable with myself and my identity.

But little teenage me would have been devastated.

Hey, anti-fujoshi? I don’t need your faux-activism. Kindly take your misogyny, efemmiphobia, transphobia and identity politics and leave us alone. Or —OR! Listen to the people you’re supposedly trying to protect.

Sincerely,

a gay, Asian, fem, queer as fuck fudanshi.

[part-time-queer]

such a handsome little lion

[part-time-queer]

(If you ever need help with translation, hit me up OP, this is an amazing comic)

Comic I made at the beginning of quarantine for a collab! The theme was queer in quarantine and I might translate it in English if people are interested :3

[part-time-queer]

Saying that queerplatonic relationships are "just" friendships has the same energy as bi/panphobes that think your relationship is only queer if you're dating someone of the same gender.

[part-time-queer]

Going v*gan isn’t sticking it to corporations lmao it’s just giving them a new demographic to market to