Once Upon a Time . . . in 2000, I forget the month, I decided to write my first SG-1 story. But I wasn’t writing Gen or Ship, I was writing Slash.
For the uninitiated, I’ll explain the terms:
- Gen: General Fiction, where the focus is on the team or one member, plot-depending, and there is no semblance of romantic feelings from any character. The love they share is platonic. (ASIDE: ironic, given that platonic was named for Plato, historians and old world culture warriors had to do some fast re-wiring of the term. Plato was gay. And Platonic meant the love between men.)
- Ship: Relationship, specifically of a sexual orientation of established canonical characters. This includes bisexual or gay characters. For example, on a show like Queer As Folk, “Ship” would apply to a fanfic character behaving in their established canon. BUT, on a show like Stargate SG-1, Ship has always meant Hetero, as all characters are written that way.
- Slash: Bisexual or Gay relationship between characters whose sexual identity is portrayed as straight. Daniel and Jack have both been married. Doesn’t stop the writers of slash to put them together whenever they see sparks flying of one variety or another. Their canon hetero status has been re-affirmed several times by the writers/producers of SG-1 when they found out we slashers were putting Jack and Daniel or Sam and Janet together.
- About the “Slash” term: Comes from Star Trek fandom, when authors were writing K/S, for Kirk/Spock. All nomenclature regarding that K/S slash began to use that abbreviation in fandom ever since.
The story I wrote was called The Room. It was silly. It was childish. And Badly Written. I think I’ve improved somewhat. Most of my fiction is heavily laden with explicit sexual content. It directly correlates with my own libido, like it or not. As long as I felt something between the men, or Sam/Janet, it was written in to accommodate the story–and reader.
Back when I first started, and even to this day, there are writers of slash who are in the closet about writing slash. So they publish under a nom de plume. Damn shame. Literally. It’s almost an internal homophobia, however slight, if the authors are male. Most Slash writers are women, however. So the homophobia isn’t directed inward since they’re not gay. But it’s there under “embarrassment.” I wish that they’d come out into the sun, but some can’t, usually on pain of being ostracized or assaulted. Homophobia is a scourge.
Anyway, I’ve always been proud to be an amateur writer of J/D fanfic. Most of it these days isn’t sexually explicit, but I will always be a writer of J/D. They’re my boys.
