Slashie Fiction: The New Cult of the Superheroes
Jordan Pascoe
Like
most of us with 9-to-5 desk jobs, I spend a lot of time online, surfing for anything
interesting. And like many of us who are underemployed and oversexed, I spend
a lot of that time looking for something dirty to read at work. And lately, I’m
completely obsessed. It’s not porn, exactly, and it’s not your run-of-the-mill,
corset-ripping erotica, either. This erotica is for the comic-book and cartoon
generation, those of us raised on Flinstone’s Fruity Pebbles and the omnipresence
of television and subversive sexual identities.
“Lex
holds the hand that wants to pull away, twining their fingers, tight, hard, promising.
He slides a hand behind Clark’s neck, leans up enough, and that mouth—that
impossibly soft mouth and warm tongue and the way Clark doesn’t hesitate,
though maybe some part of him still wants to….And Clark kisses the same
way he does everything—giving into it and going with it, completely and
wonderfully and God, so *hungrily*.”
(http://seperis.illuminatedtext.com/smallville/thewasteland.html)
That’s
right. Clark Kent and Lex Luthor. It’s hotter than you’d think, and
more tender than you’d expect. Of course, in the world of fan fiction, Clark
and Lex have been lovers for almost 25 years now, since the Slashie genre took
off in the late ‘70’s. Named for the punctuation mark between the names
of the characters involved, Slashie fiction is erotica penned by fans who pit
their favorite TV and comic book characters in lascivious situations. The genre
originated in England in the late 60’s with stories about Star Trek’s
Captain Kirk and Mister Spock, and the majority of Slashie stories take existing
heterosexual characters (usually men) and place them in homosexual situations.
And almost all of these man-on-man stories are penned by straight women.
It
may, of course, seem obvious why gay men might be drawn to these plotlines: queer
culture has long appropriated the comic book superhero as a symbol of its own
vision of masculinity, and erotic pairings of men in spandex seem like an obvious
next step. But why, you ask, would straight women find such pleasure in fantasizing
about these spandex-clad duos? First of all, it’s hot. Second,
it puts a woman in the driver’s seat as the author of this story in which
men of incredible physical prowess find themselves being tender, being submissive,
being penetrated. Often it’s the first homosexual encounter for both men,
and in many ways the seduction scenes take on the familiar patterns of heterosexual
seduction scenes in erotic TV shows and comic books, but the old dominating-male,
submissive-female paradigm has been replaced by two men both made submissive
by their uncertainty as to what is about to take place. These scenarios allow
women to literally rewrite masculinity – and to do so while appropriating
characters that have historically been largely the icons and role models for
young boys. Here, the 1970’s slogan of the NY Public Library applies aptly:
“It’s fun… and it’s free.”
