I think the first time I ever heard a remix of a pop song – at least one that I was aware of as such – was when I was very young, had to be around eleven.  My parents had gone out for the late afternoon and evening.  I don’t know where my sisters were.  I remember that for about the past year I had been slowly watching the original Star Wars trilogy, which was also a major moment in my geekish development.  That afternoon there was a marathon on television so I rewatched the first two and then saw Return of the Jedi for the first time.  The catharsis I experienced watching the triumph of the finale scene was extended and amplified when I then went into the kitchen and turned on the radio to underscore my chore for the night – unloading the dishwasher.  What I heard as I started putting away the dishes startled me.  It sounded like The Backstreet Boys’ “Quit Playing Games With My Heart,” but it also sounded different.  The tempo was faster, the bass was more powerful, there were extra instruments (or at least noises), and the track seamlessly transitioned into and crossfaded with others.  I vaguely remember that the set included Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting For Tonight,” but that’s the only other song that comes to mind.  From then on, though, I know that I would always try to tune in on Saturday nights to what is now called Open House Party, a nationally syndicated radio program with some songs airing remixed and some in their original forms.  I loved the remixes instantly, a taste that would go on to represent much of my aesthetic life.  As I learned more and got deeper and deeper into it, I fixated on the idea that a song and eventually moving-image media as well could be manipulated to say something or communicate a set of emotions different from what was originally intended.  Thinking about it now, this probably fits into my general (and fairly odd I think) taste for things that take the same base but express themselves in different styles or different colors.  I’ve long thought that may also be the reason I love collecting Fanta bottles from all over the world.

When my family finally got a computer and internet connection that could handle it, I immediately started downloading and hoarding different versions of my favorite songs.  I remember when I graduated from 8^th grade, I made my family listen to five different remixes of Ace of Base’s Europe-only hit, “Hallo Hallo,” in the car on the way to the ceremony.  My mom hated the repetition but grinned and bore it on my day, later commenting that she must be doing something right when I was honored with the “Ace of Base/Survivor Bad Taste in Popular Culture Award” for my class.  I felt deeply honored by the sarcastic title.  My tastes had certainly landed at the margins of my peers, but that sort of worked for me.  I knew what I liked.

I have a harder time placing when I first became aware of audio-visual remixes.  In my early years on the internet I know I became aware of AMVs and vids and eventually Mad movies, circulated mostly through peer2peer protocols.  I also saw them and heard from the creators at conventions my dad would take me to especially Anime Weekend Atlanta, but I really didn’t open up to the way these were linked to my music tastes or the parallel interpretive and critical power of the form quite so quickly.

All of this and particularly my middle school graduation day now seem prescient in so many ways not the least of which being that I now spend a great deal of time studying niche cultural production that is labeled by many to be in bad taste.

Yuri (百合): Today in Japan, yuri has mostly been replaced with the term Girls’ Love (ガールズラブ). Another even older term that is still in circulation in some places is shoujo ai (少女愛), which quite literally means girl love. In the US, these terms are used interchangeably in fan communities so they’re all pretty much indispensible. In Yuri, the sex-gender roles have tended to be less concrete than in yaoi though there is a somewhat analogous history of writing an older, more experienced and bolder woman with a younger, more timid one. Also, yuri stories have tended to draw on other forms of contemporary Japanese cultural production such as Takarazuka Revue (宝塚歌劇団), all women’s theatre established in 1914 in which there is a heavy presence of women’s cross dressing and butch gender expression, though this is never overwhelming or taken as a norm.

Class S (クラスS): Class S is a particular genre of fiction originating in the early twentieth century that explored highly emotionally- and sexually-charged relationships between schoolgirls, usually one being an upperclassman. These types of experiences have at times in Japanese history been considered by some to be normal parts of a girl’s maturation, ultimately ending in heterosexuality. This has been highly influential on today’s yuri narratives and is seen by some as the beginnings of Japanese lesbian literature. The earliest notable author is Yoshiya Nobuko.

X: In the U.S., we usually write fan-paired characters with a slash (/), but the Japanese convention is to note it with an x so one thinks of Excel x Hyatt rather than Excel/Hyatt for Excel Saga (エクセル•サーガ), for example.

Doujinshi (同人誌): Like the tradition of fanfiction in the United States (and elsewhere), the most common form of fan-produced media in Japan are comic books called doujinshi that are printed by small presses and sold at conventions and in stores for a small amount of money that covers their creation costs. They are typically created by groups of collaborators called doujin circles (サークル). The content ranges from humorous to adventuresome and even pornographic. A doujinshi is considered yuri (or other related term) if it highlights a romantic or sexual relationship between two female characters from a source work usually whose relationship did not appear in the original. For manga like Revolutionary Girl Utena or MAI-Hime where female-female relationships are already present or heavily implied, fan works may simply make them more explicit or bring them into focus. Doujinshi is not just produced taking Japanese anime, manga, and video games as points of departure. I have also seen doujinshi of foreign media including Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, Power Puff Girls, House M.D., Torchwood, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Prison Break, CSI, Master and Commander, 300, Teen Titans, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Supernatural, Dexter, Chronicles of Narnia, Numbers, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Iron Man, and, of course, Harry Potter. Part of the fun of doujinshi is the opportunity to play with many different possible pairings and art styles. The example covers from Sailor Moon doujinshi below show the diversity. In terms of yuri doujinshi, there may be a major difference in intended audience between what is produced to titillate a heterosexual or bisexual male audience and what is intended for straight and queer women, though obviously there is also considerable crossover in readership.

Yaoi (やおい): Today in Japan, yaoi has mostly been replaced with the term Boys’ Love (ボーイズラブ).  Another even older term that is still in circulation in some places is shounen ai (少年愛), which quite literally means boy love.  In the US, these terms are used interchangeably in fan communities so they’re all pretty much indispensible.

Bara (薔薇): In parallel to the current fashionable term, Boys’ Love, bara media in Japan is now often called Men’s Love (メンズラブ).  While yaoi is primarily produced by and for women, bara generally originates more directly from gay male communities.  It also has a particular meaning in terms of the kinds of men being shown.  They tend to be bigger, more full-figured, hairier, and all-around “manlier.”  This is, of course, not unproblematic as femme boys get coded as women and masculine guys become legitimized as gay.

Uke (受け) and Seme (攻め): Another major difference between yaoi and bara production is the assignation of unchanging sexual roles, which is far more likely in yaoi.  In a romantic pair, one is often assigned the position of uke, which literally means recipient, and one seme, or attacker.  These are roughly correspondent to our terms, top and bottom.  The problem comes when these tend to be mapped onto characters by way of gender expression so that femme boys are always bottoms with few exceptions.  To be fair, though, it should be stated that in response to this criticism, these categories have become somewhat less fixed.  Especially noteworthy is the introduction of the category of the Riba (リバ), for reverse, meaning versatile or switch.

X:  In the US, we usually write fan-paired characters with a slash (/), but the Japanese convention is to note it with an x so one thinks of Shinji x Kaworu rather than Shinji/Kaworu for Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン), for example.

Doujinshi (同人誌): Like the tradition of fan-fiction in the United States (and elsewhere), the most common form of fan-produced media in Japan are comic books called doujinshi that are printed by small presses and sold at conventions and in stores for a small amount of money that covers their creation costs.  They are typically created by groups of collaborators called doujin circles (サークル).  The content ranges from humorous to adventuresome and even pornographic.  A doujinshi is considered yaoi (or other related term) if it highlights a romantic or sexual relationship between two male characters from a source work usually whose relationship did not appear in the original.  For manga like Fake or XXXHolic where male-male relationships are already present or heavily implied, fan works may simply make them more explicit or bring them into focus.  Doujinshi is not just produced taking Japanese anime, manga, and video games as points of departure.  I have also seen doujinshi of foreign media including Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, Power Puff Girls, House M.D., Torchwood, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Prison Break, CSI, Master and Commander, 300, Teen Titans, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Supernatural, Dexter, Chronicles of Narnia, Numbers, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Iron Man, and, of course, Harry Potter.  Part of the fun of doujinshi is the opportunity to play with many different possible pairings and art styles.  The example covers from Harry Potter doujinshi below show the diversity.

I really discovered the world of Doctor Who relatively late in the game.  Being a life-long science-fiction fan the series had always loomed large in my awareness of the overall fictive terrain, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t go near it until a couple of years ago.  When I finally did I discovered that there were two distinct series I could start from (now I know about others, but at the time I was working with two) – Doctor Who, the original show, and Torchwood, its spinoff.

Fans of the two shows could probably list and describe innumerable differences between them.  Who dates back to 1963, while Torchwood has only had three seasons.  Who has always been billed as a family show where Torchwood takes on more mature themes.  Etc. Etc.  But the real difference that has been the most meaningful for me is that Doctor Who revolves around a single character, The Doctor, who is usually joined by one or, at most, two companions, while Torchwood’s premise is based in a team dynamic.

I am obsessed with fictional teams, particularly ones that fight crime, have super powers, or otherwise protect the world or humanity.  With Torchwood, we get to track Gwen’s relationship with Owen as it goes from romantic to mutually-annoyed and eventually friendly affection, but we also get to see her relationship with Jack, with whom she has flirtations but also fears.  We see Tosh’s secret crush on Owen and eventually also find out Jack’s connection to her past and her family.  In the first season we unearth Ianto’s skeleton in the closet – a killer cyborg (ex)girlfriend – discover his bisexuality, see him fall in love with Jack, follow his coming out to his sister, and watch as he is instated as a full member of the team.  Every single relationship among the five characters is given development and screen time, and even when there are no aliens, even when there is no magic, and even when the special effects are cheesy and the overall feel is over the top (wait, that would be most of the time…), at the end of the day, the human connections are what I love.

The first time I became aware of this obsession with (fake) group dynamics was around the second grade when it became very clear that my preference was for X-Men comics over any of the other titles I also read like Spider Man, Thor, and Captain America.  Not coincidentally that was the same year I was introduced to the term gay by an educational documentary and I was finally able to articulate the feeling that I related to boys and girls differently than many of my peers.  I might be going a bit out on a limb here, but I think that in that moment and perhaps even before then, even as a very young child, I experienced a kind of mourning and a kind of disconnect that made me feel like I would never be able to be a part of most groups because of my difference, which, in turn, fed a ravenous craving for narratives of teams working together through thick and thin.

Of course when I left for college I anticipated having access to scores of queers, who, like myself, had always felt a little bit outside of straight society and perhaps who had even retreated into the same fiction that I did, but that’s really not what happened.  Not that I haven’t always had LGBT friends.  In fact I’ve probably had a great deal more than a lot of people, which has been a wonderful privilege, but, also like many others, I have experienced what it feels like to be excluded from this or that microcosm of The “Gay Community.”

Even today as I think about my life, I still find that groups both fascinate and repulse me.  They frequently seem to end broken like when the Love Rhombus of Woldverine-Jean Grey-Cyclops-Psylocke finally hit the fan in the early Nineties.  and still today I read X-Men and I value Torchwood and Power Pack and Wild C.A.T.S. and Star Trek and Glee and, of course, my beloved Harry Potter threesome more than ever.   As a tangential thought, this may also contribute to my interest in polyamory, particularly triads and quads, in (fan)fiction and in life.

I’ll close by pointing out a couple things that are very much wrong with all of this.  First of all, I’m usually pretty unwilling to boil down my interest in anything, particularly in media content, to such simplified explanation.  I do think that our desire for certain narratives, characters, and relationships are deeply personal and very much located in the id where we can’t easily get at them.   This belief colors my media politics around everything from pornography to violence and transformative fanworks.  In this case though, I suspect that it really might be this simple.  The other issue is, though, that I usually hate whiny blog posts like this.  I really am happy to be queer and if I were selecting attributes for myself in life prior to inhabiting my body, I’d definitely do it all again and be just as proud, but I do firmly believe that that doesn’t have to mean that we don’t have a critical relationship to ourselves as queers and see where it’s been a stumbling block.

It also gave its audience a lot to chew on. In fact, one of my biggest complaints about this film might be simply that there’s too much here to write about. But I’ve zoomed in on two topics to think through, reserving the disability angle for next time and here taking up the imperialist and environmentalist content.

Since the movie came out, the blogosphere has been abuzz with analysis of the ways it dealt with race. The article that I saw popping up most was Annalee Newitz’ “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” on i09, in which she suggests that the heart of the film is a rehashing of the white guilt narrative over the genocide of American Indians.

My own take is much in the same vein. The film is superficially anti-colonial, insisting that the human attempt to mine Pandora for unobtainium and ignoring the planet’s people and their culture in the process is patently wrong, but in many more subtle and insidious ways, it is still an imperial narrative. Firstly, the main character is a white, straight man, who “goes native” a la Dances with Wolves and, ultimately, saves the day. From the point of view of the audience, we are primarily given Jake’s perspective and asked to identify with his “discovery” of them rather than any of the actual Na’vi. In fact, the Na’vi characters mostly go undeveloped. We do spend quite a bit of time with Neytiri, and we at least know names for Tsu’tey, Mo’at, and Eytucan, but this compares rather unfavorably with the eleven human characters with specific names in the credits. However, it does jive with the general portrayal of the Na’vi as weak and generally unable to protect themselves. Although Neytiri is helpful in the final battle, the take away message is still that they needed the white dude in order to triumph.

Digging a little deeper, the classic colonial gender metaphors are also replaying themselves here. The human characters are all shown to be relatively masculine. It’s all army folks, scientists, and business people. Both the females – Trudy most notably but also Grace – and the males are butched up, while the Na’vi are feminized. Obviously there are warriors (including female warriors), but they are still shown as being primarily concerned with religion, interpersonal connections and group harmony. During much of the history of colonialism in our own Earthling history, similar dynamics were portrayed by dominant groups, from the British casting the people of India and Burma as mystical and focusing in the mysteries of “eastern” women to the Imperial Japanese Army literally raping countless local women as they penetrated into the Asian mainland.

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” ~Audre Lorde

Finally and most importantly for me, one of the defining points of the Na’vi is their communion with the planet, and this is actually what I think the film was meant to be about. Certainly the white guilt element is at play, having surfaced perhaps as a Freudian slip on screen, but what I think Cameron set out to deal with was global warming and the green movement. In Avatar, he meant to tap into the growing societal search for an alternative to our present relationship with the Earth.

Starting from that point of inquiry, it’s easy to see how imperialism quickly gets wrapped up in all this. It is a long-held American assumption that “tribal people” – American Indians, various nations of Africa, or the so called “Hill Tribes” of Asia – are deeply in touch with the Earth. And it certainly is not my contention that there aren’t cultural differences, but what I am saying is that seeing them as radically different in this way is yet another way of making them “The Other” even when it’s seen as a positive.

As much as I think that cultural differences are important to recognize, it’s also important to allow for cultural similarities. I generally follow the rule of thumb that we all have both radical differences and radical similarities and to miss the latter is as much a crime as the former. Of course anytime one goes looking for these things there’s danger of projecting cultural assumptions, but, having an awareness of that possibility shouldn’t keep us from searching for common ground.

The other major problem, here, is the lumping together of an extremely diverse set of traditions. Of course in this case we’re literally talking about fictional aliens, but it is reasonably clear from the myriad visual cues from the beading on the Na’vi clothing to the descriptions of the non-Omaticaya nations (the horse tribes of the plains, yeah…) that what’s being signified is an amalgamation of actual Earth peoples. So even thinking simply about American Indians, the movie largely glosses over the dramatic diversity in the way different native nations have related to their surroundings at different points in history, and merging them all into a single idealized and over-simplified package, is, quite simply, racist.

If all of this has largely been said elsewhere, what I hope to add to the discussion is that we do have to take the next step and look further to see what this racism is in service to in order to really learn anything from the piece besides the fact that Hollywood is still not prepared to represent indigenous people in a strongly positive way to blockbuster audiences. I think it’s instructive that major news outlets have noted a phenomenon of depression following the film due to people’s strong desire to visit Pandora. To me, this reads simply that people don’t have enough plant and animal presence in their lives, which seems to be part of the intended message. How I see this mapping onto my work as a full-time social justice organizer is that the Green Movement is really gaining steam. This particular fantasy has touched enough people to gross $1,110,401,000, but I’m not sure the rest of us are on board this particular train. What I mean is that I don’t always see people thinking about the environment, animal rights, and global warming engaging in meaningful exchange with people thinking about civil rights around race, sexuality, gender, class, etc. Of course this is for a variety of reasons, I’m sure, with strikes on both sides, but it is my fondest hope that we can bring the two closer together or else I fear that these kinds of blunders will only continue as the push to be green comes more and more to the fore.

When we were waiting in line on Christmas day, my sisters were already accusing me of reading my own sexuality between the lines when I described my expectation that Holmes and Watson would have some sexual tension, but there really is some evidence to suggest that Doyle’s heroes were coded queers. Sherlock was a quirky, old confirmed bachelor and a user of specific suggestive drugs and although Watson was married, his wife is a mere shadow in the stories, getting no more than a mention here and there and eventually being killed off.

But what’s turned out to be a more interesting possibility is a reading that cropped up in a livejournal community I follow, in which a fellow member suggested that they had always identified with Holmes because he seems asexual.

For those in need of Asexuality 101, I will happily point you to the online resources of the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). One short answer is, however, that community formation around this particular identity is relatively recent – AVEN was founded in 2001 by David Jay – and therefore most everything about it is still heavily contested. For example, the generally held definition is that asexual people do not experience sexual attraction. Some masturbate, others do not. Some form long-term intimate bonds with partners, some do not. Likewise, many asexual people still also identify as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or another sexual orientation in terms of the gender of the emotional partners they seek out, but some also simply represent their sexual identity as asexual. The upshot of all of the confusion and discussion is that the community is very welcoming to any number of people who may share all or some of their experiences.

The person who reported reading Holmes as asexual issued the statement amidst general discussion of the trailer for this film that was released last summer, in which it became evident that regardless of one’s particular queer reading, this manifestation of the Holmes story would feature a straighter, more sexed up hetero Holmes. And for me, having spent much of my life whining about LGBT representation, it begged closer examination of what it would be like seeking out a media space for someone who did not experience arousal.

It’s become cliché to point out that our media is awash in sex, and most of the time when people say that, it’s born from a sex-negative politic that I am not behind. But what if it was simply another group looking for their own experience in films and television programming. In my own definition of sex-positivity – the belief in everyone’s rights over their own bodies and the pursuit of happiness through individual sexual decisions with consenting partners and/or alone – certainly people deciding not to pursue sexuality in resonance with their lack of impulse to do so (or for any other reason for that matter) is as legitimate as anything else, and, by extension then, they have the same claim to consume media which best reflect their experiences as I or anyone else does.

In terms of gender expression, this Holmes is much more butch than others.

The case of Sherlock Holmes is also an interesting one because of its history with same-sex sexuality and how that relates to the public’s response to asexuality. It seems one response asexual-identified people encounter most often upon coming out is an assumption that they’re “actually” gay and either not ready to accept it yet or just not ready to tell everyone. Of course this runs contrary to the basic progressive principle of taking seriously people’s self-identification, and it’s interesting to see how sharing a character like Sherlock Holmes, whose apparent lack of sexuality comes across as gay, falls into that same pattern.

Also mixed up in all of this is the portrayal of women in the film as well as the novels and short stories. From the preview that got released this summer, I actually thought this was going to be a lot worse and that the two female characters were going to be used only as sexual props to straighten out and sex-up the flick. But actually Irene Adler turned out to be pretty awesome (though she was still written into a “damsel in distress” situation, which was really unnecessary). Mary, on the other hand, reads as something of a tragic figure, shunted to the side by the Holmes/Watson relationship regardless of how one reads it, but she certainly seems to get more screen time than she did in the old stories.

I was disappointed that the movie didn’t pass the Bechdel test, which requires that there be at least two female characters who have at least one conversation with one another about something other than men, but it could have been a lot worse. In fact, neither really stands in the way of the homoerotic undertones (Mary’s line about Sherlock loving Watson in the same way that she did was pretty poignant), nor to oversex them in a way that completely destroys the asexual reading (the scene in which Sherlock is left naked tied to a bed, clips of which led everyone to believe one thing about the film when showed in the preview, turned out to mostly be about embarrassing him rather than him and Irene getting it on). They were basically two strong, albeit supporting, characters.

In the year 2000 my favorite book (besides the four Harry Potter novels out then) was Louis Sachar’s Holes. Like most things I loved then, I still hold it quite dear.

In the past half a year that I’ve been producing this column I’ve discussed a wide variety of geeky things from specific shows and films like Torchwood and Twilight, to video game culture, fan activist efforts, and representations of geeks (even when those shows are consumed by the mass audience). I’ve also gotten even further afield at times, but I won’t try to think those columns into the greater project here… Anyway, I thought what I might do to wrap up the year then, is lay out a kind of preliminary definition of what I think constitutes geekery as both a guide for myself as I look to next year for this column and a challenge to all my readers to think about the multiplicity of ways geekiness may be active in your lives.

The litmus test I have come up with consists principally of three factors. Geekiness is centrally about interests so one must have interests (1) that are at least somewhat outside of the mainstream (2), and they must be pursued with vehement passion (3).

Of course I know right off that this raises the question of what constitutes mainstream. The term is, after all, right next to the dreaded “normal” and nobody wants to give that word any credence these days, but lets be real for a second and admit that some interests are socially approved and some are not. Regardless of one’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports, football fans are not geeks nor are the vast majority of music enthusiasts or even some kinds of movie buffs.

The second objection I foresee (especially from my friends in fandom) is that geekiness is not simply about interests, but rather a form of engagement. This is what I’ve tried to get at with the third criterion, but it is true that a small minority of people take their geeky engagement to very mainstream cultural production. For example, I am willing to admit exceptions to my definition for the women of tennis and baseball fandom who write epic romance fanfiction for their favorite sports stars. In that case, the engagement does win out over the content, but, for the most part I think the stigmatized areas of concern are important.

So then what are the strengths of this definition? I like these criteria because it sets up a kind of big tent. Some people come immediate to mind – Trekkers, gamers, and all other lovers of speculative fiction, East Asian dramas, manga, and English-language comic books. But there’s also room for avid followers of soap operas, musical theatre, and old timey fiction. I even know two different geeks who are intensely fannish about public transportation, an interesting couple passionate about commercial airlines, one fellow who spends a great deal of time thinking about laundry detergent. Plus, I, myself, have an admittedly strange fascination with the soft drink, Fanta.

I don’t really know that many people whom I would describe as average, but I have often wondered if everyone doesn’t have a little bit of geek in them for something, and as cliché as this is about to get, I guess I think the world would be a better place if we could all tap into that at least a little bit and examine the eccentricities of those interests so that we don’t unnecessarily point fingers at the freaks who spend their leisure time actually pursuing those offbeat passions. I guess ultimately that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this column because, unfortunately, despite our communal marginalization, gay culture hasn’t done a significantly better job than everyone else at alleviating our internal eye-rolling. What I would like to do in 2010 then is open up to even more different manifestations of LGBT geekery and really test the limits of this expansive definition in a kind of celebration of this particular kind of diversity that I don’t think gets discussed nearly enough. Anyway, Happy New Year – may we have a new decade full of pursuit for our strange and proliferating queer quirks and interests!

In browsing through the stories tagged ‘mtf’ on the list, I encountered several authors who were seeing the possibility of trans maleness in a number of existing stories about female warriors. The idea had crossed my mind occasionally before. Eowyn from Lord of the Rings cries out to Sauron’s army that she is no man, but it’s not hard to see where her circumstantial crossdressing and non-normative gender behavior might feel like a space amenable to a trans male narrative.

My first reaction was an unqualified love for this repurposing. It’s a very appealing idea to take a character like Final Fantasy XII’s Fran in a new direction, a direction that seeks to fill the gaping hole in a media landscape utterly bereft of trans masculinity. But I wondered too what implications this type of thinking might have for non-trans women.

Without reading them as trans per se, movies like Mulan do already have a kind of gender liberative tone. When the young warrior steels her father’s armor and horse and rides off to join the army, she’s bucking the expectations of her as a woman and being able to fight for her family and for her country without losing a sense of femininity is in itself something to be celebrated.

So it feels like there are two possible readings of Mulan’s musical number, “Be A Man,” which I must say is one of my favorites in the entire Disney animated canon. The first is celebratory, trans-affirming and operational on a level just below the surface of the text: be a man if that’s who you are, Mulan, because being a man is not limited to people born with penises. The second is more ironic: we, the army dudes, shall tell you, Mulan, to be a man because we have a fixed idea of what masculinity is, but you’ll eventually prove us wrong by embodying our own gendered values while remaining comfortably a women.

The question I want to ask of all this is, then, can we share these stories? Does the existence of one reading diminish the other? And does it take away one group’s possibility for seeing a role-model when the other group may also lay a claim to that figure?

Brandon Teena as portrayed by Hillary Swank in the Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film, Boys Don’t Cry

This problem is very much mirrored in real life in figures like Brandon Teena a.k.a. Teena Brandon who was raped and murdered in 1993. Brandon represented himself variously as a transman and a butch lesbian at different moments in his life and following his death, he was claimed as a martyr by both groups. On the trans feminine side of things, a similar phenomenon is starting to emerge now following the recent killing of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, whose self-identification cannot be ascertained with full surety now that he has sadly passed.

Some people try to get at this by drawing a distinction between “being transgender” and “doing transgender.” It is this kind of discursive maneuver that allows authors like Leslie Feinberg to offer a kind of big-tent historical analysis of gender transgression that makes room not only for transsexuals like Venus Xtravaganza and crossdressers like RuPaul but also for people like Dennis Rodman and Joan of Arc, who contravene(d) the rules of gender in significant ways without specifically articulating a transgender identity per se. The drawback is, of course, that it might be seen as watering down the more specific experiences of people who want to establish themselves as explicitly trans in order to make society at large more accepting.

As an aside, I am struck by the similarities between Tolkien’s Eowyn and warrior women like Joan of Arc and Franklin Thomas, the latter of whom Feinberg discusses as being one of the nearly 400 Civil War soldiers discovered to have been assigned female at birth. In fact, I was surprised, looking back in the index of Feinberg’s Trans Gender Warriors, not to find any references made to the historical literary Hua Mulan, my other major example above. Incidentally, Feinberg and Mulan also raise the question of how all of this may play out differently in dramatically different cultural contexts, another question for another day perhaps, but a crucial one to consider in relation to what’s discussed here.

I don’t have an answer to any of these questions that I feel particularly confident about. Part of why I love fanfiction is the way it calls attention to the fact that texts can mean dramatically different things to different people and how this can be an area for pleasure and play. On the other hand, I am also keenly aware of the role media has in political mobilization and the violence enacted by the silence around some of our queer experiences.

Ultimately, perhaps the biggest thing I take away from all of this is that the tags we use to articulate ourselves as gender non-conforming people, trans people, lesbians, gay men, crossdressers, transsexuals, bisexuals, drag performers, queers, butches, femmes, and other Others are frequently no easier to sort out in our heads and among ourselves as the characters in the stories we produce. It may be cliché among some to point out the limits of identity, but it’s a lesson worth remembering especially at this crucial moment of political organizing for queer people in the United States. For me this is only more evidence that we must maintain a social movement for civil rights and freedoms of expression that embraces our multiple identities, behaviors, quirks and kinks whenever we can.

Despite the awkward stereotyping that, to be fair, is completely in-character for Sue, this moment inspired cheers from many progressives. We’re not used to seeing such diversity on a major network program, and I, at least, have come to expect that these kinds of roll-calls will be limited to racial minorities and maybe queers. For Glee, then, I was thrilled the producers included Artie, a white straight male character, because of his disability identity around his use of a wheelchair.

Unfortunately, this didn’t mean Artie was a fully fleshed out character. At that time, we knew virtually nothing about him. It wasn’t until last week that viewers finally got an episode focusing closely on Artie’s story and, to many fans’ squealing delight, his romantic entanglements. The only problem that emerged, then, was that as the character came further into focus, so did the fact that Kevin McHale, his actor, does not actually have any mobility-related disabilities. This brings up the question, if a show is going to feature a diverse set of characters, is it also obligated to employ a diverse set of actors?

Although I’m frequently met with resistance on this point, my answer is generally a resounding yes. Of course, acting is all about getting inside someone else’s head and I would never say that minorities are so different that it is impossible for others to come to identity with their experience and channel that into their work. Rather, I am more concerned about the actors out there who, in this case, do have disabilities and the challenges they must face in finding roles. I can only imagine that even the most talented actors who use wheelchairs face the constant problem of casting directors who say that a role wasn’t written for a person with a disability. Similarly, though I think more in-roads may have been made over the years, I think we can all imagine actresses receiving the comment that a character wasn’t written to be butch or Black or Arab-American. For minorities in Hollywood, then, being repeatedly forced into identity boxes should at least mean that they get dropped into the few roles that really are written to be them.

Beyond the issue of allowing disability-identified actors to pursue their dreams, I also do think that actors who have experienced minoritization have a special insight into these characters and may be able to better embody their experience in subtle ways that others don’t see. I wonder what the reaction of the gay community would be, for example, if Kurt Hummel were portrayed by someone known to be straight. It would probably not be cause for too much alarm (Eric McCormack from Will and Grace was never the one causing controversy in that show), but would his performance lose something, something even vaguely affective we can’t quite put our fingers on? Incidentally, I do not profess to know Chris Colfer’s sexuality, but I do know that I take deep pleasure in his gender performance and feel connected to him through his femininity where I often feel, instead, concerned about being ocked. And although this is operating on a strange and emotional level, it is none the less true that this prompts my belief that he is acting from his own experience of queerness.

For Glee, the racial and ethnic minority kids are all played by actors of color, and it’s great to see a Latina, two Asian-Americans of either gender, and two black characters, even though Matt has yet to get a line. Outside of Glee, though, the unfortunate reality is that even appropriate racial casting, which one might take for granted is not always so. Recently, the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender has caused controversy because the clearly Asian and Inuit-inspired civilizations of the animated show were replaced largely by white actors and actresses. The recent Dragon Ball film did the same as have innumerable other geek-oriented moving image texts – King of Fighters, Chun Li , The Weapon. The forthcoming video game-based Prince of Persia will reportedly feature no actual Persian actors or actresses, and this week’s big release, New Moon, the second installment of The Twilight Saga, will see Taylor Lautner’s reprisal of the role of Jacob Black, a non-American Indian playing a Quileute boy.

The level of offensiveness is variable. When producers cast Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese actress, in the lead role of the American film adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, a Japanese story, many read their decision as a clear indication that they thought all Asians looked and sounded alike and were therefore interchangeable. On the other hand, in a case like Artie’s, it may be easier to see it as a missed opportunity. Having written the character, the Glee creators had an excellent chance to highlight a young actor’s talents that may have been over looked, but they didn’t. They may or may not have aided in the creation of a fierce community advocate on the level of Chris Burke (Life Goes On, Touched by an Angel), but either way they have done a small disservice to the disability community and to all of us as fans and viewers, which is really a shame set against all the great work being done with this show.

Actresses and actors from left to right, top to bottom: Naya Rivera, Kevin McHale, Chris Colfer, Jenna Ushkowitz, Harry Shum, Amber Riley, and Dijon Talton

• One possibility for those of us who have grown up with far more exposure to porn than our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, speculative porn might be a way to shake things up in an otherwise bland porno landscape that we’ve trod on far too many times over the years. TheNewGay has actually covered this possibility before.

• By that same token, speculative porn sometimes offers us more narrative to situate the sex in, which definitely has its appeal. Everyone knows erotic movie scenes are super hot primarily because we’re invested in the characters despite the fact that we rarely get as much sex out of them as we really want. As a sidenote here I’d like to point to the upcoming X-Files porn tribute, The Sex Files, has many x-philes excited because the trailers have indicated it may be far better plot-wise than last summer’s filmic clunker, Fight the Future.

• For geeksters like me, I think scifi porn may simply be one more manifestation of the sexualization of everything. From school to sports, public transportation, the workplace, the armed forces, libraries, bathrooms, kitchens, mini-golf, the national park system, bowling, pizza delivery – everything can be porned. Therefore, since I like science fiction and science fiction is in my life, there can be porn of it. Incidentally, this is also how I rationalize the popularity of tokusatsu porn in Japan. For my non-geek, non-Asiaphile readers (do I even have any of those? I suspect not…), that would be porn in the style of Power Rangers and Godzilla, using oddly similar unrealistic costumes and special effects. Yeah….

Hustler's This Ain't Star Trek XXX features the fan-favorite villain, Khan Noonien Singh

• It was suggested to me while talking to people about this column that in the case of porn specifically targeted for consumption by LGBT people, science fiction provides a venue for the breaking out of rigid heteronormativity, which I think is very interesting. In other words, if one of the involved sex partners is a robot or computer program or an alien for whom sex and gender are constructed in radically different ways from us, do the same categories of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual still have any meaning?

• Perhaps the most interesting explanation though is the idea that on some level all porn is speculative in that it is a fantasy we’re not actually living. The obvious examples might be the straight male jerking off watching a woman-woman sex scene, the lesbian woman masturbating to NC-17 Sam/Dean fanfic, or just about anyone getting turned on by images of people tangled up in crazy sexual positions that aren’t at all comfortable in real life, but really all pornographic scenes are lived vicariously by their consumes since they will never experience those exact scenes with their own bodies. Perhaps scifi porn then just takes that reality to its logical extreme by foregrounding the implausibility of the scenarios and feeding on the voyeuristic surreality kink that most of us seem to have developed these days whether we know it or not.

In conclusion, for anyone whose interest I’ve peaked but don’t know where to turn to dip their toe into the speculative porn world, I would suggest The Nifty Erotic Stories Archive as a jumping-off point. There are “Science Fiction or Fantasy” sub-sections under “Bisexual Stories,” “Lesbian Stories,” and “Gay Stories.” Under “Transgender Stories” there is a “Mind-control” section and a “Magic & Science Fiction” section. There is also a large area of the site devoted to bestiality stories but I have to draw my personal boundaries somewhere even in the name of investigation….

I know this makes me sound like I’m about three years old, but it’s no exaggeration to say I still do this. In fact, when I moved to my current apartment in Columbia Heights from my old house in Georgetown, I couldn’t find one of my bears, Baby Bear, who was handmade by my mother when I was two years old. This inspired in me perhaps the worst meltdown of my life until my boyfriend located him.

I’m guessing at this point readers are wondering where this is going and probably what it has to do with gayness or geekery. No, I’m not trying to infantilize geekz nor am I saying that gayz are particularly attached to their stuffed animals. I don’t identify as a plushophile, nor do I wish to take that up here (although I think it’s interesting). What I do think is interesting, though, for queerz and geekz alike is the rules that I established to govern the lives of my Babies as a child, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and which have led me down a path of examination of a deep seeded totalitarian impulse despite my outward desire for less restriction on sexuality in particular and personal expression more generally.

Here are the rules for my Babies:

1. Babies cannot see any violence whatsoever. Over the years, they’ve watched a lot of television and several movies with me at various points, but they can’t see any of the violence that flashes across the screen.

2. Babies know nothing of sex or sexuality. They cannot see sexual parts of films and they don’t see me masturbating or having sex though I am always very careful to put them where they can’t see anyway.

3. Babies cannot feel any pain. They don’t get hungry or tired though they can sleep just to relax.

4. Babies do not remember where they came from meaning mostly factories in other parts of the world. They don’t remember if there was pain involved in their creation and they don’t remember being in stores nor being sold or gifted.

All of these rules have been in place for a very, very long time; none of them are recent additions. Now, what’s interesting to me about this (and maybe only to me) is how incongruous these are with my actual political beliefs.

In terms of censorship, I feel pretty strongly that more diverse representations of sexuality are necessary for fostering a healthy and safe, open society. On the other hand, violence is certainly less my thing, but I tend to think that people take viewing pleasure in all kinds of material for all kinds of reasons and they should be free to make those decisions for themselves. After all, even if genres like torture porn really are a symptom of something greater, I would tend to think that simply censoring it would do very little to ameliorate the actual problem. And especially as someone who has very little violence in my own life, I very clearly recognize that many people have a different relationship to the subject matter than I do.

In terms of the politics of source, it almost makes me cringe to think about my former attitude towards the origin of my babies now. Snuggle was made in Seoul, South Korea, and many of them also hail from places like Vietnam and Cambodia, all of which I’ve visited. While working at a feminist NGO in Phnom Penh, I even had occasion to visit several factories while doing sexual health trainings for workers and the idea that I wanted to turn a blind eye to the way these places operate really turns my stomach. Although it could never make me love my Babies any less, I would ideally wish to keep the memory of the source alive and understand that they may have been created under less than respectful working conditions, acknowledging that fact out of deep respect for the laborers. This also makes me think of (LGBT but also hetero) transnational adoption and how I hate to think that I might’ve once raised a child without guidance about the culture they came from and an awareness that their ethnic identity might be different from mine.

Finally, the issue of pain seems to encapsulate what I’m trying (and perhaps failing) to say here. I designed the system such that my Babies can’t feel pain, because I didn’t want them to feel anything for themselves or make their own decisions. I basically thought I knew better than them how life ought to be. Now clearly in the case of stuffed animals, this might be accurate (I say might, because I kind of really do believe that there’s something alive at the core of my Babies and that probably puts the last of my readers over the edge here, but it’s a weird day and I’m going with truth), but what I’m trying to say is that even I have that impulse to tell other people how to live and I think we should all turn inwards and find those feelings so we can examine and uproot them.

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.

I want to say upfront, here, that unlike most of the other media I’ve written about in this column - X-Men, Harry Potter, Torchwood, etc. – I don’t claim to be an expert on Twilight.  I’ve read the first book and the first few chapters of the second, and I’ve seen the first movie on DVD.  I do fully intend to make my way through the rest of the series, but I haven’t picked the story apart, and I haven’t talked to a diverse sampling of the fans.  In short, I haven’t lived this phenomenon.

But before we get to that, let’s be clear on a few more points.  First, this book is poorly written by most anyone’s standards.  Meyer’s word choices give the impression she sat at her computer, literally consulting a thesaurus to spice up her language to an incredibly awkward effect.  She also blows the book’s big reveals in ways that offer very little arousing payoff to the reader, and she wraps up the story in a terrible rush (from approximately the vampire baseball scene to the dénouement).   Second, I will never waiver from my position of protestation that her central metaphor – the substitution of Bella’s potential loss of virginity for the painful and violent end of her life – is anything but disgusting.  But I am willing to concede that Meyers’ Mormonism and my own Sex-positive outlook were never going to resonate with one another on that point.  Thirdly, beyond what I will say below, I do also suspect that part of the series’ appeal is, in fact, the vampires and the mythology she builds around them.  I feel very strongly in general that people in the US media market are craving a little more imagination from the culture they consume, and I think that thirst is definitely at play here.

But what’s far more interesting to me, here, is the emotional response Bella and Edward’s relationship seems to evoke for people, and the utterly shocking degree to which I found myself identifying with the protagonist.

Of course, it didn’t start out that way.  At first, I really hated Bella, perhaps because of pre-conceived notions, but mostly, I think, as an honest reaction to her insipid whining.  This girl has really got it bad.  The story opens with her doing what she does for most of the book, putting other people before herself.  The stage is set by her move from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington to live with her awkward, estranged father in a less desirable location with a worse school system so that her mom and step-dad can more easily be together.  The kicker here is that she’s not doing this out of love or selflessness, but rather because she doesn’t see herself as being worthy of anyone else’s sacrifices.

Her self-loathing starts very immediately to come out in other ways as well.  She informs the reader and the people around her repeatedly that she’s a klutz and a plain-looking girl, both of which seem to function as her primary identities more than descriptors.  Even when she shows herself to be incredibly intelligent, she goes to great lengths to explain the intellect away, saying that they had already covered most of the same material in her old school.

As one might imagine, this self-deprecation becomes ever-more magnified as Bella begins to fall for and eventually date the male protagonist, Edward.  She can’t imagine that he is actually attracted to her because she doesn’t find anything about herself likable, which results in a willingness to risk her life to date a vampire and, more importantly, inspires her to avidly take and internalize all the sexist, degrading and just plain mean shit that he says to her.  If I ever reread this, I’ll keep a count of how many times he tells her it’s difficult being responsible for her, how hard it is to keep her alive, and of each time that he makes decisions about her well-being without consulting her.  I’m told that this spiral of destruction only gets worse moving forward as well with its highlight involving repeated attempts at suicide.

The longer I followed her, though, reading the thoughts that Edward can’t access, the more I started to remember my own adolescence, drudging up moments of Bella-ness in my history.  By this I mean the obvious things like how my moods could turn dramatically on the acknowledgment of attractive guys even if they were mostly awful, but also much more disturbing moments of eagerness to please the men I eventually found romance with.  I’d tell them things straight off the pages of Bella/Edward dialog – don’t ever worry about offending me, don’t ever stifle things you want to express because of my feelings, our activities for the evening are completely up to your preferences, etc.  And I’d totally take their criticism just like her.  I dated one guy who insistently degraded the things I wore and what I did with my hair in ways that make Edward seem like a nice guy, and not only was I okay with this, I was ecstatic, eager to take another guy’s shit because that’s what I had been waiting for and dreaming of for most of my life.  As long as I got a few minutes in his arms every couple days, nothing else really mattered to me.

Of course, for me, this all sprang from the fact that I was growing up an obvious faggot in a homophobic country, but something similar, I suspect, holds true for many women coming up in patriarchy.  And what I think is somewhat unfortunate is that we push the idea that Twilight should instead have been about a totally empowered protagonist who demands self-respect without also acknowledging the fact, sadly, that Bella’s characterization is completely realistic, and part of the books’ success may hinge on the nerve they’re able to touch by showing these dynamics as they are.

Ultimately, I still think the books are bad for whatever that’s worth, and I definitely believe the message I’m taking from it could have been communicated in a way that didn’t seem so complacent.  But I also think that stories by and about women and minorities need to be told even when they involve realities we’d rather not face ourselves, and when we critique them, we would do well to bear this in mind.

Still, for the uninitiated, I would describe Torchwood as the slightly more mature offspring of British family favorite, Doctor Who, which debuted all the way back in 1963. It’s sort of a campier, crazier, and, yes, queerer X-Files that follows a team of government agents in Cardiff who investigate alien activity and other paranormal happenings.

A lot has been said both inside and outside of the science fiction and LGBT communities about the show’s queer content especially with the increased focus on the character Ianto’s identity development and family relationships this season. Some have gone so far as to herald it as the “coming out” of sci-fi TV. Series creator, Russel T. Davis, who is himself gay, has stated that he wanted every character to be omnisexual to shake up the audience’s ideas about whom various characters can and should be dating. This obviously has been a particular boon to advocates of bisexual visibility who see a great deal of their potential media representation marred by stereotypes perhaps even more than lesbian and gay people. (Katy Perry, anyone?)

But so much has been said about all this that it’s given me pause. After three seasons, I think it’s time to take a moment to rewind and look closer at this idea that all of the characters are omnisexual. Let’s take it one character at a time…
Rhys- There’s never any indication whatsoever that Rhys might be anything but straight. He even asks Gwen about Ianto’s sexuality during “Children of Earth” in a rather indelicate manner that, while not offensive, hardly seems to betray any identification.

Gwen- Gwen also really never shows signs of queerness. She does spend most of the three seasons in a long-term relationship, but there’s quite a bit of emotional and physical cheating and none of it’s with gals. What we do get with Gwen, though, is a scene in the second episode of the first season in which she is seduced by an orgasm-energy-eating alien in possession of a female human body resulting in a short girl-on-girl scene. The fact that it’s largely against her will, though, makes it significantly less cool and probably negates any bi representation it could have signaled.

Owen- There is one scene in which it’s hinted that Owen might have some interest in guys. In the pilot episode, he steals an alien-created lust-inducing perfume from the Hub and uses it on a woman in a bar. When her boyfriend tries to stop them from leaving together and threatens Owen with physical harm, he redeploys the spray on his assailant and the three happily depart for a threesome. It was, admittedly, an eyebrow-raising moment, but there are a couple of problems. First, it’s not clear that Owen’s actions were taken for any reason other than simply to save himself from getting beaten up or, second, just to keep his plan of hooking up with the guy’s girlfriend alive. Also, two guys and a girl having a threesome really doesn’t say anything much about Owen’s sexuality. After all, during the course of it, they may not physically interact at all. Finally, it seems important to point out for a second time in this article that there are some pretty serious consent issues here. It’s really not okay that he would manipulate anyone into sex against their will even in a zany sci-fi scenario. That’s called rape.

Toshiko- Tosh pursues three love interests during the show. Two of them are guys and one is a woman, which makes her, in my estimation, the first clearly bi character on the list. Sadly her same-sex liaison only lasts one episode, “Greeks bearing Gifts,” in the first season, and it’s not one-hundred percent clear that she feels really good about it or that she isn’t under a kind of alien mind control spell. But despite its brevity, how often do we see queer Asian-British or Asian-American women on English-language television? Right, almost never. Actually, AfterEllen has a great list here, to which I would add the occasional but notable televisual presence of Margaret Cho.

Ianto- This is where we get into the heavy hitters. In Torchwood’s first season, before he was really a main character, Ianto is shown to have had a girlfriend named Lisa who was turned into a cyborg automaton leaving him desperately searching for a cure. She, of course, goes on a rampage attempting to kill the entire team and ends up unplugged. But just as Ianto’s mourning process begins, so does the protracted romantic and sexual build up between Ianto and team leader, Captain Jack Harkness, which lasts through the entirety of what’s been broadcast. So with Ianto, we get two relationships, one with a woman and one with a man, with his attitude towards the two being much the same.

Jack- Jack is truly the character that most embodies the idea omnisexuality. From his very first appearance in the first season of the new Doctor Who, he is shown flirting with girls and guys, androids and aliens. As noted, during the three seasons we’ve seen, Jack develops a serious relationship with Ianto and has some level of sexual tension with most everyone the team comes across. Many of his old flames make guest appearances as well including two human women and a particularly pesky rogue Time Agent, whom many geeks will recognize as James Marsters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s notable too that the actor who portrays him, John Barrowman, is queer, himself, perhaps aiding in his ability to fully draw the audience into his character.

Really for as loud as this has been trumpeted, I have to say that I’m not fully satisfied with the final checklist, and, without spoiling anything for people who haven’t watched yet, I will say that it looks like we’ll be seeing even less queerness in coming seasons. But the less cynical side of me says that not only is this quite a good showing, it may even be the most appropriate for what Davis is trying to do. Bisexuality, after all, connotes a range of experience including the no-holds-barred Jack-type, the occasionally attracted to girls Tosh-type, and even the incidental contact Owen-type, among many others. Authors and activists like Robyn Ochs, Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka’ahumanu have championed the anthology genre of bi writing for just this reason – no one ‘B’ person represents the totality of the sexuality. With several different characters across two genders and two races, falling all over the sexuality spectrum, perhaps what we have seen is, in fact, the best of all possible shows.

I’m told it’s recently become hip not to care about genre.  Apparently, the people professing this outlook fancy themselves sophisticated enough to see movies and read books that are recommended to them or that have enticing trailers, regardless of the tropes and motifs used in the story.  Now I don’t really want to knock that outlook, nor do I think it’s completely disingenuous.  Certainly, I know a lot of people who would never have expected to be engrossed in a vampire story but now can’t get enough of True Blood, and last year a superhero movie, The Dark Knight, defied expectations of comic-book-adapted media to become the fourth highest grossing film in world history.  And that’s cool.  I’ll be the first to support openness and trying new things, but the truth is that it’s a foreign feeling to me.  I am very concerned about genre and as geeks, a lot of us really have to be.

I am forced to think about genre, because getting the media I want is rarely certain.  Enthusiasts of speculative fiction, in particular, which is generally considered to include alternate history, horror, fantasy, and science fiction, always start with fewer options and even those stories we have are constantly assailed with the threat of not being told.  The fall television schedule has us scraping through miraculously to the final fifth season of Supernatural, but we’re losing Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a female-dominated plot-driven cyborg thriller that was, in my opinion, one of the best shows on any channel over the last two years.  It’s not just a television problem either.  It’s fairly certain now that enough money will not be raised for the third X-Files film, Chris Carter’s final chapter dealing with the invasion that was foreshadowed for the entire series.  In the end, we’ll be lucky to see a novelization of his screenplay concept, and as a long-time fan, I can’t even express how much that hurts me.

Sadly, genre does still matter and it matters a lot in terms of who will invest in a project and how much, how it will be promoted, and, as much as people might like not to admit it, who will see it. As much as it might be cool to dip into new things here and there, there’s still a certain privilege of the majority associated with that outlook when one can still rest assured that there will always be media they want to consume.

But as much as I am heavily invested in these things called genres, I’ve also recently been forced to confront the big purple elephant in that room, which is: What actually are they?  And, to my surprise, I actually don’t know.  It’s one of those murky concepts that I tended to know when I saw it, but couldn’t actually define, all of which came to a head last year when I had the pleasure of seeing Lizzie Borden’s 1983 science fiction film, Born in Flames.

The film follows four women’s organizations around the tenth anniversary of the War of Liberation.  The first two are public radio cohorts, “Radio Razza,” run by white lesbian, Isabel, and “Phoenix Radio,” led by black feminist, Honey.  The third is a socialist newspaper written by three white feminists, the most apologetic for the failings of the government, and at the center is the Women’s Army, a direct-action group who defends women being harassed on the streets, provides child care, and seeks to uncover the injustices of the sham democratic socialist regime.   The thrust of the film is the varying reactions these women have to the assassination of activist, Adelaide Norris, and the groups’ learning to work together and not work together towards common goals.

If very little of that sounds very science-fictional, except maybe the War of Liberation bit, it’s because it isn’t.  Borden doesn’t include aliens.  She doesn’t build cyborgs or androids or simulate super-natural occurrences.  There is neither time travel, nor super powerful weapons.  In fact, the only technology that plays any part at all is communicative – television and radio – and even this is limited to that which was developed long before the movie was created.  In short, there’s not much science in this science-fiction.

Not only is the science part questionable, but, looking closer, so is the “fiction.”  Flo Kennedy, for example, plays herself and the framing device for the narrative is that of documentary, integrating archival footage of actual protests and direct-action activism.  And Borden wanted to highlight this slippage between truth and tale.  In an interview she asked of her own work, “Are these people real or are they actors?  Are you seeing just the surface or are you seeing something to fall into as fictive space? And similarly at the end: Is this a solution or is this not a solution? ”

Nevertheless, Borden has consistently identified the film as sci-fi.  Finally opening up on the topic to The Independent, Borden said, “There are two science fiction points in the film.  One, it takes place in the future, and two, women work together across race lines quicker than they would work with men of their own racial background.”  It’s still not really much in that constellation of traits that one might think of as genre, but I’ve decided I can take that.  After all, my view of what’s science fiction is still only that of a queer college-educated biracial boi, and when a female bisexual anarchist wants to subvert norms I didn’t even know I held sacred, I guess I should listen.  She at least got me to think about this stuff.

If there’s a moral to this story, and maybe there’s really not much of one beyond the fact that Born in Flames is the best anarcho-lesbian feminist science-fiction 80′s film and more people should watch it, it’s that my queer side taught my geek side something here.  Like personal identities, the stability of which are important to question, so too is it good to question the genres we take for granted.  This doesn’t have to mean throwing them to the wind – some of us will always be extra-invested in the pleasures of certain stories – but when we hunker down too much in strict definitions of these things, not only are we missing out on potential new fun, we’re also simply living in a fantasy.

Yesterday, I went to see the IMAX release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which, for DCites, is playing with 3D segments at the AMC Hoffman Center in Alexandria, and without at the theater in the Natural History Smithsonian.  This was my second viewing – the first being the midnight show, obviously – and having already been stunned by the visuals and angered by the plot changes, I spent this round paying particularly close attention to the way Michael Gambon (and for that matter, the director, David Yates, and screenwriter,  Steve Kloves) portrayed the character of Albus Dumbledore.  Half Blood Prince is, after all, the first major release for the franchise since Jo Rowling outed the character at a Q&A panel in October of 2007, so I was keen to see how the revelation might be subtly integrated into the actor’s performance, or otherwise apparent on screen.

For a riff on the Merlin archetype, I have long thought Dumbledore was pretty whimsical, even – dare I say – flamboyant.  His taste for confection comes to mind and the fruity passwords to his office.  His name, “Dumbledore,” even hints at this attribute.  The word is apparently old Devon meaning bumblebee, which Rowling assigned to him because she pictured him strolling the halls of Hogwarts, humming merrily to himself.   In this film that characterization is definitely present.  One of my favorite moments was after he magically cleans up the house Slughorn which had been in hiding towards the beginning of the film and then chirrups, “That was fun….!”  Also notable was his sudden interest in Muggle knitting magazines and that fabulous scarf he was wearing in the flashback when he first met Tom Riddle.

Foremost though, I was struck by the two scenes in which Dumbledore shows a distinct interest in Harry’s burgeoning sexuality.  The first was when he comments on the woman flirting with Harry in the train station coffee shop and the second when he asks about Harry’s relationship with Hermione.  Obviously, I am quite biased, but I rather felt like both could be seen as small, endearing attempts to inquire if Harry might actually be like him.

Of course, all of this begs the question of whether one can ever effectively code a character as gay without falling back on a lot of stereotypes.  On the one hand, we want representation, but on the other, we don’t need every character to be a Tinky Winky (though I personally feel quite positive towards that particular little gender non-conforming monster).  Even the ideal of showing a range of LGBT personalities is unhelpful if it’s too ambiguous such that people can easily filter out the queerness altogether.

For Dumbledore, these stakes are even higher on two counts.  First, the character is one of the few examples of a high-profile LGBT elder in a media landscape mostly populated by gay club-going young adults and (appropriately) angsty queer teens.  This particular intersection is especially relevant in the contemporary political moment as the Baby Boomer generation is entering older adulthood and the unique challenges faced by LGBT older people begin to affect so many more in areas ranging from healthcare to housing, retirement plans that don’t benefit unrecognized spouses to assisted living facilities whose staff aren’t trained to respect gender identity.  Similarly salient is Dumbledore’s in-story vocation as a professor.  I have to believe that Rowling was making a strategic statement by casting the wisest, most nurturing teacher in the wizarding world as a gay man in light of the frequent flaps of gay panic over LGBT teachers in our own world.

With all of this potential riding on one character, perhaps it’s unsurprising that what I found in this film didn’t live up to my expectations nor did it answer my question about coding.  Ultimately, I don’t feel like we got much more gayness from Dumbledore in this flick than we’ve ever gotten on screen or on the page.  But the best may yet be to come.  Many have commented and Rowling has confirmed that the most telling textual indications of Dumbledore’s orientation lie in his past relationship with Gellert Grindelwald, which will certainly be explored in the next two films based on the seventh book.  It is my fondest hope then that Dumbledore’s sexuality, however subtextual, might make an impact on the broad audience Harry Potter has captured in the forthcoming final installments.