In honor of the Organization for Transformative Works’ October membership drive, I thought I would devote a column to the organization, why I support it, and how it is meaningful for LGBT culture. It’s also an excellent lead-in for a multi-part series on intellectual property and queer remix geekery that I have coming down the pike.

For those who are unfamiliar, the OTW is a US-based non-profit organization whose mission is to support and advocate for the varied forms of transformative creativity by fans that take extant media as points of departure. These commonly include fanfiction, fanvids, and fanart, but might also cover wider-ranging possibilities like costume play, online role-playing, and filking. The specific projects that have already taken off include Fanlore, a wiki for the preservation of fannish history, Transformative Works and Culture, an open-source academic journal on Fan Studies, the Vidding History project, and the crown jewel (in my opinion), the soon-to-be-in-open-beta Archive of Our Own, a non-profit multi-series fanfiction archive that will protect our work from the volatility of corporate hosts. The group is also already providing crucial services for endangered fanworks such as those currently hosted on the soon-to-be-defunct Geocities, media support for fans who find themselves of interest to news outlets, and testimony to the FCC on remix culture and legal regulations.

To most people, this all probably sounds pretty good. People immersed in certain activities or media have often banded together for such purposes – Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, National Gardening Association, etc. – but for many fans, this kind of work can feel like a jarring departure. The contemporary phenomenon of fanfiction dates back to at least the 1960s when mostly female fans started writing their own stories based in the worlds of Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. But for much of the time since then, it’s been a truly underground creative movement, and not just because of trademark and copyright concerns.
Because so many of these stories involved male-male romance and diverse forms of sexuality, the history of American homophobia, sex-negativity and the systematic silencing of female sexuality have converged to attach profound stigma to these activities.

For me then, my desire to be more visible and to support those who seek to speak for fandom from within, as the OTW has, is directly linked to my politics around queer liberation and sexual freedom. But even beyond that, I want people to know that what we do is truly meaningful artistic work. For me to be able to stand up and say that it’s unacceptable that the character of Chuck Bass was straight-washed when the Gossip Girl books were adapted to television, fix it in my own fiction and find an audience of peers to share that with is a really powerful corrective for a medium like TV that mostly operates as one-way communication. And that’s just one example. I’ve seen great things done in recuperation of the character of Bella from Twilight that stand as powerful feminist manifestos (see my last column here). And even just fun things like explorations of what the Harry Potter universe’s version of China might look like or how a lesbian love affair between the Disney princesses might play out. What I find people often miss even when they’re working in a broad diversity framework is that the things that give me pleasure to read and pursue aren’t always the things that work for everyone else, which rather than be poopooed, ought to be celebrated and advocated for just as the OTW has sought to.

With all that said, of course, I also have to say that I have all the respect in the world for those who have come before me and who don’t share my politics of visibility. My own position in the world is very different from theirs not least because I enjoy male privilege and need to offer less explanation for my interest in stories involving gay love. For me, though and for many others of us, I’m glad the group is here.