MESSAGE BOARD TOPIC #8

[Comicality]

Even out of all the variety and all of the quantity of really good stories out there, there are still huge gaps missing in terms of content and storyline. Everybody has a story, and some of them never get represented in the stories they see online. So the question for this week is...

 

=As readers, as writers, what concepts do you think are missing from the stories you read online?=

 

What is it that you would 'like' to write about, or would 'like' to see someone else write about? Maybe there are certain situations that you've been involved in, and have never seen anyone else do a story on it. Maybe there's something inside that you want to express, but shy away from it. Maybe it's something too depressing, or too angry, or just something that you think you wouldn't be able to write well. Who knows? Bottom line, readers and writers are looking for a shared experience, and it's important to konw what we're overlooking.

 

So tell us what you think! The board is open!

[Myr]

I love fantasy stories with wizard boys and teen Princes dealing with their burdens.

 

So I tend to write about those. I read anything that falls into that category, so long as it is half decent. Or rather, I do when I have time.

[Strangers]

I want a main character with the following attributes.

 

1) best friend is neither gay nor female

2) the mother isn't perfect, but reamins supportive

3) nonsuicidal depresion should probably, be looked at more in general in all meida formats.

4) I would actually like some character involvment in the world, I don't need a play by play, but the world should move wheather the mc does or not.

5) stories in general should be thought provoking. This isn't exactly somthing you can do if you think about it though.

 

In more specific terms

 

I have kicked the idea of a terminaly ill boy around in my head off and on for awhile. The boy would be a virgin, and basicaly on his death bed. But he would have fantasyes to show how much he was still alive in an already dieing body. Lost to the world but not to himself. If I could actually write anything for more then cathartic reasons I would piece somthing like this togeather. If sombody else would write it I could enjoy reading it. Though it proably isn't the funnist topic I can think of. I do envison the boy to have a very "strange" sense of hummer, and making readers giggle while they cry, would be a goal of the story, another to show the humanity of us all. Hehh someday sombody will get around to writing it and maybe I'll find it somehow and read it.

Edited March 1, 2004 by Strangers

[Taima Matsumushi]

I'd like to see a story in which the gay character(s) are allowed to be so without making half the plot a drawn-out lesson in homophobia. Some of the stories I've seen that do this can, unfortunately, be rather unrealistic in its application. For example, either everyone's gay (read- most HP fanfics) or it's set in a dream-like or fantasy setting where somebody explicitly points out that everybody in said setting accepts homosexuality. Admittedly, to pull this off without such an explanation would require a story to be set in the last ten or so years in an appropriate area of the world. This isn't to say that I don't want intolerance of sexuality to appear in a story (that's equally unrealistic), but I'd like to see a story where the intolerance isn't one of the main plot points.

 

I'm hoping to pull this off in Talents, although Myr has done an excellent job of putting together a world very similar to this idea in Psionic Corps.

 

Please note that I'm not against putting intolerant characters into a story (it's a sad fact of life), but I'm tired of the stereotypical "dumbass alcoholic troglodyte father" (who often has a southern accent for no good reason) who threatens to kick out/beat up/kill his gay son. Personally, I find this chiche' unfair to fathers because often the mother either doesn't exist in the household, or fills the role of "the understanding parent". Why not make the mother the crazy parent once in a while, while the father is the nice guy? Maybe both of them can deal with their child's sexuality in a reasonable fashion? This doesn't so much have to do with the idea of a homophobic parent so much as the cliche'd troll-like father figures that appear in a lot of gay fiction.

 

Particularly with stories set in more recent times, I have to wonder what happened to the people who marched with their gay friends in the pride marches of the 70's (like my best friend's parents who, oddly enough, are native Texans). It would be interesting to see how ex-hippies would react to having to deal with a "test" of their ideology, as it were, to have a gay child. Maybe they were sincere in their ideals and deal with it fine, or maybe they'll have a crisis of conscience when homosexuality arrives in their family. Once again, I'm trying to work with this idea in Talents, but we'll see how it turns out. It's possible I'll fail spectacularly, but hopefully that won't happen.

[stew]

I was thinking this morning it would be nice to see a story where the main character has a nice dad who is very understanding and they would be able to talk about pretty much anything. It would be really cool to read in a story about a teen who asks his dad about relationship and sex advice, how to find out if the cute boy in class likes him too, that sort of thing. Most fathers in stories are either abusive arseholes or absent in some fashion, this would make a really nice change.

[fear1980]

I'm currently writing a story with an Asian male love interest.

 

There are very few stories about two men, one being white and the other being Asian, that don't have traces of that "mmmm boyishly smooth asian butts turn me on!!!!11" rice queen fetish. This was inspired by a guy at my gym that is sexy, nice, smart, funny, and everything one would want but at the same time, of Asian ancestry.

 

That whole "all the Orientals look the same" feeling in the gay community has bugged me for quite a while.

[Taima Matsumushi]

That whole "all the Orientals look the same" feeling in the gay community has bugged me for quite a while.

 

AMEN, fear1980. I find the same thing happening with "giant d*ck black slave/gangsta" stereotypes. It's only lately that I started to realize just how anglo-centric the gay community really is. @_@

 

I'm trying to do something similar with my story (Talents) as well with a white/asian pairing that doesn't have a creepy racial fetish attached to it.

[Myr]

I'm thinking that one reason that the gay community is so anglo-centric is because of the predominant anti-gay gansta culture in the black community. The Asian community on the whole tend towards beting highly antigay. The Indian (dots, not feathers) community is stridently anti-gay. (Most of the students other than me in my Masters degree program are Indian)

 

I admit to one reason I stick fantasy or sci-fi is because I don't want to deal with today's issues. I have to see enough of them that I just don't want to think about it when I'm writing.

[Taima Matsumushi]

I'm thinking that one reason that the gay community is so anglo-centric is because of the predominant anti-gay gansta culture in the black community. The Asian community on the whole tend towards beting highly antigay. The Indian (dots, not feathers) community is stridently anti-gay. (Most of the students other than me in my Masters degree program are Indian)

 

That may be true, but just because minorities don't have a huge voice in the gay community doesn't mean that it's okay to pigeonhole us into objectified categories. I mean, are you really going to help warm the aforementioned communities up to the idea of homosexuality when the gay community treats us with so little respect? The latent racism of the white-dominated gay community is part of the reason I have a difficult time warming up to it sometimes.

 

For example, Queer As Folk, aside from being one of the worst shows I've ever seen, is also one of the whitest in terms of cast. In the first season, the only minority character that appears is a one-shot Japanese male prostitute who DEFINES "rice queen". It certainly doesn't help that he doesn't speak a word of English and is treated like a practical joke by most of the cast (Emmitt, who thinks he's dating him, doesn't know that "Kane dayo" means roughly "pay me, I tell you" instead of "I love you", as the other characters lead him to believe).

 

As a result, the gay rights movement often (to me) takes on a character of being a bunch of whiney middle-upper-class white people trying to "play minority". Half the time, its methods and/or goals completely contradict the lessons other minorites learned long ago about discrimination. For example, the all-gay high school in NY. Black people (of which I am one) learned a long time ago that segregation is never a good idea. All it does is diminish contact between groups of people, which allows stereotypes and bigotry to grow at a much faster rate. This is basically the arguement for diversity. The all-gay high school is, in my opinion, one of three things. It's either a misguided attempt to build up gay solidarity, a misguided attempt to make dating for gay teenagers easier (PLEASE don't pretend that this isn't a lot of the appeal of this school), or a well-planned perpetuation of issues that will keep those who make their livings on gay rights issues in power.

 

The reasoning behind the third possibility is thus: eventually, something bad is going to happen as a result of the all-gay HS being built. Either they will experience some kind of homophobic display at/concerning a sporting event (as we all know, HS rivalries can get quite vicious), or someone who attends that school will be harassed/beaten/killed. Think about it. If you were someone with such a hatred for homosexuals that you would wish to kill them (we all know that such people exist), with the introduction of this school, they would know precisely where to find some "faggots" who are likely too young to defend themselves (a gay-bashing Columbine comes to mind, as well). Sure cuts out the middle-man of having to out someone locally, doesn't it?

 

Of course, the real kicker is that once something bad inevitably happens either at the school or to one of its students, the gay rights people can turn the event around and say "See? This is why we need this school, and this is why you still need to give us your money." Ignoring, of course, that the school was their bad idea to begin with.

 

I've seen the same kind of "engineered oppression" happen with the black community (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc), and it's a shame to watch the gay community fall into the same trap. The black community's freedom was stifled for decades through Jim Crow laws, separate schools, and other means of segregation. Does the gay community really think that their freedom will be increased by it? I may be WAY off here, but I don't think it's a good idea to send the message to the straight community that we consider gay people and straight people so different that they can't go to school in the same building.

 

Yes, I'm aware of kids whose school lives are really messed up because they were outed (of course, there are other alternatives to going to the same school), but since when is segregation a viable alternative? Somehow, I can't help but see a link between the mistreatment and stereotyping of minorities in the gay community and its inability to learn from minorities' experiences in some regards.

 

Sorry about the rant, I really hope I didn't offend anybody...

 

So I'm not exclusively bitching, I would like to point out a counterexample; the interracial gay couple in Six Feet Under. I applaud the writers of that program, because it is the only time I've seen an interracial male/male couple on television that was handled appropriately and realistically. It is also the only time I've seen a religious gay character portrayed with any degree of respect. I would highly recommend to anyone interested in gay-themed media to pick up the first season of Six Feet Under on DVD.

[fear1980]

My main point was that to many members of the white gay community, the Asians are treated as a non-entity. It's not BAD to find an Asian guy sexy but it's certainly not treated as being as acceptable as other attractions. In my experiences, you get a group of white gay men together and they talk about celebrities they find hot, it goes a lot like this:

 

Guy #1: Yeah man, that Brad Pitt is a fox! He has such sexy eyes!

 

Guy #2: Pshhhh, Brad Pitt is nothing compared to Shane West! Yummy!

 

Guy #3: Those guys are hot but I like Ichiro Suzuki. I don't normally like baseball players but man, he's got a great ass!

 

[silence except for crickets chirping]

 

Guy #1: Uhhh.. yeah, he's okay I guess...

 

Guy #2: If you're into that kind of thing.

 

And scene.

 

Too much of the time, the reaction for a gay guy to find an Asian man attractive is to look at it similar to finding Cindy Crawford or Rebecca Romijin Stamos hot. It's not looked upon with distaste necessarily but it's looked at as something weird. I'd like to read more stories that feature an Asian-White interracial couple but without the fetish. Hopefully if more people that see the attractiveness in people of different races on a purely physical level write romance stories about it, this sort of reaction will become less prevalent.

 

I agree that the minority anti-gay sentiment isn't helped by this sort of majority distaste towards their gay population. A few years ago in The Stranger, Dan Savage took a letter from a young gay college student who would flirt with guys and they would talk for a while, but when he said he was Asian, they'd lose interest. I don't know if this is an ingrown biological trait but I've seen way too many happy, healthy, and fulfilling interracial relationships to really believe so.

 

In closing, I personally am attracted to certain physical traits that Asian men possess but I don't enjoy or believe the stereotypes. My stories are really the way I can try and change the tide and I will definitely do my best.

[stew]

A few years back when I used to use chat rooms regularly, whenever I chatted with an asian guy probably 9 times out of 10 one of the first things they'd say is "I'm asian do you mind?", like I might be offended by it or something. I've never understood why it is there is this 'weirdness' (for lack of a better word) that some guys have about asians, it would certainly make an interesting theme for a story.