We call it fiction, but make-believe is written by people living real lives. In turn those people share in their stories words about what that real life is like, and boy can those words change you.
Through fic some of us discovered we're not alone in our love of a show, a pairing, a trope. And some of us discovered that sexually we're maybe, just maybe, not who we always thought we were. We're more.
Read on to find how fandom and fic can sometimes offer revelation, support, and the knowledge that we're surrounded by people like us. —Atlin Merrick
Spark Spoke: This newsletter, podcasted by Lockedinjohnlock!
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It's Fucking Liberating
By Anonymous
As soon as I became aware that I was a sexual being and sexually attracted to other people, I knew that I wasn't exclusively attracted to the opposite sex, to men. I was a girl, and I found women strangely, shockingly attractive as well. I could picture myself with women in a way that—according to my understanding back then—only men were.
I was confused. Did I want to be a man and sleep with women? No, not really. I wanted to be me. Did I want to be a woman and sleep with women? And men? Yes, absolutely, but somehow that didn't feel right, either, it didn't comply to the image of women I had in my mind. Do women do that? Am I going to be that kind of woman? What kind of woman do I want to be? What kind of relationship do I want to have?
I asked myself these questions a lot. I found different answers at different stages of my life, and sometimes I was too scared to acknowledge that I'm bisexual, sometimes I dared be more open about it and to try things.
Sexuality is very close to the core of our personality, of who we are. For me, thinking about my sexuality always was connected to thinking about my gender, about being a woman. I have very rarely been at a point where I was ready to say, Yes, this is who I am. This is who I want to be. I got close a few times in life, mostly I found a pragmatic place where I’m comfortable enough live with it. And although I absolutely love being a woman and mostly love being me, I often was searching and struggling.
In my mid-thirties I read the first piece of slash fiction and I was hooked immediately. It took me a moment to understand what was happening to me (mostly because I was so drunk on pheromones that I couldn't think straight at all). One thing I find incredibly freeing about reading love stories about two male characters is that you don't have to bother about who's the woman and who's the man. Take all the understanding of gender and society's mostly useless ideas about role models and stuff it into the next bin and set the whole thing on fire.
I knew that I wanted to be seductive and sexy, but that I sure as hell wouldn't want to see myself reduced to a 'cute girl,‘ eager to please their man. I don't have a cock, but sometimes I want to fuck my partner (against the wall, if available). Sometimes I want to be cherished. Sometimes I want to cherish.
Reading fan fic I learned not care too much about the fact that I am a woman. Instead I learned to care about my wishes and desires, and to abandon thinking about what women should be like—in general, and when it comes to sex. It's fucking liberating.
And apart from that, the icing of the cake, so to say, I found out that I’m turned on by quite a lot of things I didn’t dare think about before, or that I didn’t know existed.
And you know what? I don’t have to do each and every bit of them. I just read a fic. I keep discovering new things about myself. And maybe I’ll try them one day. Being me.
This is a reminder that you can always contribute to Spark anonymously. Send an anon on the Spark Tumblr or email Atlin and tell me your contribution is anon.
More Complicated Than Either/Or
By ElizaJane
As a bisexual feminist, it's been important to me from the beginning of my participation in fandom to write bisexual characters, particularly bisexual male characters. I do this for two reasons.
First, because bi erasure—particularly dismissal of bisexuality as a valid form of desire for cis men—is an ongoing problem in queer spaces.
Second, because it is a way of taking men with canonical m/f relationships and queering them without invalidating their past intimacy with women.
Currently, I'm working on a piece of Jimmy Perez/Duncan Hunter fic (Shetland) where I am navigating the fact that both Jimmy and Duncan have lost a wife and lover who was a woman, who was an important relationship in both of their lives, and figuring them both as bisexual means I can honour her place in their sexual histories while also bringing the two men together. I really like having the chance to make a narrative more complicated than either/or.
I also take particular pleasure in writing stories where older people discover that as they age their sexual desires shift in new ways—not in the sense of long-denied desire surfacing, but in the sense of recognised but marginalised desires taking on new salience, or surprising new desires taking shape.
I tend to write relationship-first stories, wherein the characters are more invested in nurturing relationships that feel right to them than they are in ensuring their relationships neatly map onto some sense of fixed orientation. And that, too, is a political decision (for me as a writer) because our culture is so strongly invested in "born this way" notions of sexual identity.
Such an understanding, requiring fixity of desire across a lifetime, does not accurately reflect the full range of human relational possibility. So I use fic whenever I can to advance a more fluid understanding of desire that focuses less on identity and more on individual people and the joy they bring to one another. And then I let the identity of each character grow out of those encounters.
ElizaJane has written fan fic in over a dozen fandoms, including Grantchester, The Bletchley Circle, and Foyle's War. She's on AO3, Twitter, and at FeministLibrarian.
Fan Fic Saved My Life
By NovaNara
I discovered fan fictions at the height of my depression, alone in a country not my own. I’d been battling suicidal urges for a long time, and it seemed that nobody would care if I lived or died at the time.
I didn’t consciously want to survive, or get better, but my brain had its own ideas about self-preservation, clearly. First, I got hooked on fan fics. Then, I started writing.
Stories where my favourite characters killed themselves. Stories where they died. Stories where they were as miserable as possible. I picked a pen name from an anime character which is half of a soul, busy (attempting to) murder everyone her other half loves, so she’ll have no one else to play with.
Lastly, I started writing chaptered stories—and used them as an excuse not to kill myself. “I have to finish this story first, my readers are waiting, I’m enough of a disappointment as I am, no need to disappoint more people."
Did I get better? Not exactly. Not entirely. But I don’t need all my characters to die anymore. (They suffer plenty all the same.) I still have way too many ongoing stories, though. Just in case.
There are no words enough to thank you all for being there.
Elena writes as NovaNara and you'll find her Sherlock and other stories on AO3 with stories also on Fan fiction.net.
A Powerful Statement, Simply Put
By Sighing Selkie
I’m terrible at remembering fic names so I can’t reference but I feel that fandom (of all sorts) has helped me become more accepting of my depression and anxiety-ridden self by showing me that it is perhaps not normal but everywhere and, more importantly, there is no blame to have a mental illness of any description.
Although I intellectually knew this—I can read statistics after all—it was fandom that gave me a more concrete view that apparently ‘normal’ or even heroic types can be struggling with all sorts of issues behind their facades. I feel that this acceptance from so many authors has enabled me to be more compassionate with myself and perhaps with others, just by depicting the struggle and the ‘reality' of living that way. This is particularly true of BBC Sherlock fandom, but also MCU Loki and Tony Stark, Harry Potter and Severus Snape, and Eggsy of Kingsman.
Similarly, although I have not had any grand epiphanies in relation to my sexuality, there have been many small realisations, particularly in relation to BDSM (which, although largely not for me, I feel I now understand better). The mainstream depiction of BDSM has always left me cold, and I never felt I could see what people got from it. Now I see perhaps a little more, and my previous distaste (which I have always felt disappointed with myself for) is now perhaps more a case of ‘each to their own.' And perhaps if I ever found a person I trusted enough, a little of that bondage might in fact be for me after all. *laughing*
Kinks are wide and varied, and I still find myself surprised at what appeals to me and what doesn’t. If I can’t bring myself to experience many of them in real life, reading them is an acceptable substitution.
Another area where I feel that fandom has educated me is in the sheer variety of sexuality—I was somewhat familiar with bi, straight, and gay, but ace and demi were unknowns. Queer and the variety of gender identities are still mysterious, but I feel I am learning. I never really needed to learn acceptance of these larger groupings, as I have always regarded it as ‘not really my business’ who someone was or wasn’t attracted to (unless it was me!), but knowing more about the spectrum of possibilities is, somehow, empowering. “It’s all fine”—such a powerful statement so simply put!
I suppose my point is this: I have, through fandom, been exposed to a wide and accepting community of all sorts of people who tell me more about interior worlds than I could ever meet in my semi-suburban milieu.
And because of this, it is indeed all fine.
Selkie is an avid reader and has published one small fan fiction on AO3.
So, has fic helped you understand your own or another's sexuality?
Bel M. Either
I already thought I knew a bunch about my sexuality and gender and all of that, I've run LGBTQIA clubs and had a lot of exposure to the queer community, I've had both public and private debates about the intersection of diverse faiths and sexuality and gender all through college. All to say that I am nearly 40-years-old and the process of reading and writing fan fiction has helped me to understand things about myself that I don't think I could ever have come to realise any other way. I have been exploring what it means to be genderqueer/genderfluid. I have come to realise that I write m/m almost exclusively as a way to explore my maleness in deeper ways, which in turn has given me courage to express it more openly when my headspace switches.
Burning_up_a_sun @Burning_Up_
I was 51 and long-time married when I found fic. For the better part of the prior 20 years, my husband and I were too exhausted to do much more than exist. I was shocked to hear how many times a week my friends had sex; in some cases, their weekly total was more than my monthly total. Reading fic combined with other facets of our lives easing up (kids getting older, etc) ratcheted up our sex life. I look forward to my husband's flirty texts, quick kisses, and of course, time we spend together. It's more relaxed, less of a chore. I will forever be grateful to fic for teaching me how to give blow jobs and to be (a little) more adventurous.
Glass-Oceans @seaglassoceans
I don’t know what I expected when I first starting writing fan fiction. I’d read it before for various pairings, but never thought to write any until I encountered my first and current pairing: Kylux.
So I guess I started reading with a very open mind. And it’s thanks to fan fiction that I first encountered the term “demisexual,” namely from the fic series Kylux Animal Welfare AU that starts with Madame, That’s Not A Hedgehogby GenerallyHuxurious, one of my favourite writers. Their depiction of demisexual Hux helped me to realise that the world had many more combinations of sex, sexuality, and libido than I had previous encountered, and looking into demisexuality helped me find a term that really felt like it fit, that I could call it mine.
Hippiechick
As for my sexual identity, just reading fic and authors' stories on Tumblr has let me be good with my attractions to whomever it is that attracts me. Still not good with the "labels" so I think that's pansexual? Doesn't matter. The heart wants what it wants.
IshtarsDream
Fandom, specifically fan fic, has been my self-medication for depression and anxiety, especially during the period when I couldn’t afford professional treatment and medication (thank you, U.S. health care system and high deductibles). Mostly I read, for the depression stole my ability to write. I filled my Nook with 1,500 stories. I discovered AO3 about the same time I got into Sherlock, and I’ve been trawling through that ever since. In the process, I’ve started reading things I never would have given time to before: MCU. 00Q. Buffy crossovers on TTH. MLP. Worm. Now I’m collecting plot bunnies again and writing scenes in my head at night to occupy my mind instead of letting it hamster-wheel. Eventually I’m sure I’ll be able to actually write again and finish some of my damned WIPs!
Lucretia the Perverse
Yes, I have found fandom to be incredibly useful for exploring my sexual self. I currently don't have anyone to discuss sexuality with, so fan fic gives me a chance to try some things out mentally. Fan fic has confirmed that I am very much heterosexual, and that I love men and their bodies. I have also learned that I am interested in more than lingerie, roses, and sweet nothings, but not at all turned on by pain and humiliation. In particular, the Pretty Kitty series in the Sherlock fandom has made me aware of how much I desire to be spoiled and pampered—perhaps even to the point of becoming someone's pet? I don't know, but I wouldn't even have gotten this far without fan fic.
Phage
It definitely helped me understand being ace better. I couldn't even tell you which authors/stories/etc helped. It was more a gradual, thing. But it was probably ace!Sherlock that drew me in. (Maybe a little ace-or-demi!Sam Winchester.) And fandom definitely helps with my anxiety and depression, usually just by opening me up to the viewpoints of others who are just like me (depressed, anxious, gray-ace, poly...any or all of them or more). I'm not alone out there anymore.
Atlin Merrick @atlinmerrick
What fic and fandom did for me is to show me I'm not singular in my desires. The world is full of people who love male/male stories, who find a freedom in the equality often inherent in same-gender stories, and who share a delight in the messy, sensual, wondrous things humans can enjoy with one another's bodies. In a world where the conventional media focuses almost exclusively on the sexuality and desires of straight white men, fandom and fic were and endlessly are a delight and a revelation to me that I'm not alone. Also lactation fic exists and Kylo Ren has six nipples. Wheeeeee!
Watson's Warrioress @watsonswarrior1
Well @EmmaGrant_01’s fic A Cure for Boredom helped me understand the level of abuse I’d suffered from my (now ex) husband and deal with everything I’d experienced in various clubs. It also helped me understand why there were things I’d enjoyed despite not having consented to any of it and accept that I am queer.
Living Out My Secrets
By Kameo Douglas
It went like this:
I watched Sherlock.
Watched it obsessively with the transcripts of Ariane Devere.
Read the asides about Johnlock.
Checked out AO3.
Read hundreds of fics. No, really, hundreds.
Admired hundreds.
Wondered if I could write one.
Wrote one.
Ran away and hid from it.
Found actual fic authors on Twitter and friended them.
Tweeted them--they actually tweeted back!
They encouraged me to post.
Shivered in terror.
They prodded me to post.
Jumped into the breach with my nose held and posted.
Got love beyond anything I ever would have dreamt possible.
Became a proud author and kept writing and posting and getting love.
Made real-life fandom friends who wrote porn just like I do.
Realised some of what might make my fic resonate with readers is because it is fueled by long and deeply buried fantasies. Like 47 years long and Mariana Trench (35,814 feet below sea level) deep. Things I had been so ashamed of that I had never spoken of them to anyone, not even in 40 years of therapy.
Entered a phase of life that liberated me in too many ways to address.
Wondered, pondered, agonised over how I could be so proud of my fics and the good things they’ve brought me and still be so ashamed of the fuel that drove them.
How could I hold these two ideas in my head at the same time? How could I still be so afraid of what lived in my own head? I didn’t like living with that fear and decided to chase it down and run it out of Kameotown.
So in the most dramatic way I could think of, I faced it head on and started to look for people who were living out my secrets. I started chatting with people on Fetlife and going to sex-positive events, where people were celebrating every kink imaginable. Everyone I met was friendly and welcoming. And guess what? They were just like me. They started out being afraid of who they were, of the things they kept stuffed down inside.
When I shared the path that had brought me out into the light, there were men who were fascinated by fan fiction and the idea of women writing gay male porn. They were eager to read what I had written and began offering insight into their own experiences, physical and emotional. They confirmed and refuted notions I’d written and read about. They were generous with their help and wondered about the same issues we as fic writers do, issues of gender and sexuality and power exchange.
It turns out that when you bring those scary, squirmy things out into the light, they shrivel up, dry out, and blow away. In their place they leave bright open spaces where new, healthy things can grow, things like friendships, comfort, acceptance, and love.
In my experience, fandom is a place where people are Having Conversations. People are discussing the hard stuff. People are talking about their own sexuality openly and freely and without shame—which helped me come to terms with my own bisexuality—but they are also discussing their mental health, their physical health, their personal lives and struggles that they can't discuss with anyone in their day-to-day lives. Fandom opens up the veil of taboos and lets us be a little more honest with ourselves for a minute.
The first fic I began writing in the Sherlock fandom was if nobody speaks of remarkable things, about miscarriage and pregnancy loss, based on personal experiences.
It was the best therapy I could’ve asked for at the time: examining myself, my feelings, my reactions, and putting them down into concrete form. And in the years following the writing of it, so, so many people have commented on that fic to say that yes, this is it, yes, this is how it felt. Me too.
People have commented to say thank you for putting it down into words, or thank you for helping them to understand what their loved ones have been through. I have heard stories about partners and lost children, about parents and lost siblings, and about the children they themselves had lost, about guilt and grief and being turned away from the hard conversations they needed to have but no one wanted to have with them, and so burying this piece of themselves instead.
And so many people have buried these experiences, but they still burn a little bit, and finding one another in the comments section of a fic—discovering, after all the silences, that we are none of us alone—has been and continues to be the most profound experience of my life.
One bookmark on this fic used to read: “For when I can’t find the words.” That bookmark is gone now, but I still think about it, and the person who left it. I hope they found their own words to work through their own grief.
And for me, that is so much of what fandom is about, so much of what fandom does. Fandom lets you speak, and helps you, through the stories or through the community, through creation and conversation and everything else in between, to find your words.
When people complain about new terms like asexual, genderqueer, trans, asking "Why do we need made-up words, what's wrong with what we have?" the answer is easy: what's wrong with the old words is that they left too many people invisible.
The people complaining loudest have probably never been invisible. All-inclusive terms aren't. I read a study once. They tested a group of people with the term mankind. Despite the presumption that it includes everyone, turns out that to all who heard it, that term meant men.
So instead of using a word that keeps half the population invisible, why not use humanity? Making such changes isn't hard. Heck, we learn new terms all the time, from frapuccino to OMG to internet, and so I wonder if maybe what these grumblers are really worried about is that they'll get things wrong. I know I do.
The solution, it seems, is that we must get things wrong. I said transexual when transgender was the word I needed? It's okay, usually someone somewhere will kindly correct me if my error was the result of effort.
What we have to remember is that this isn't really about you or me. The burden here is not ours. The burden belongs to people who've grown tired of being invisible and who simply want to be present at the human table. They aren't asking for much. That we remember their name. That's all. We do that all the time. One at a time. This is the same.
Someone introduces themselves to you and asks for the pronoun "they" instead of her or him and you don't get it? Well that's easy peasy. Say "I'm sorry, can you explain?" And guess what: it's likely they'll explain. Cause you saw them. They're not invisible. You made an effort.
Please keep doing that. And hey, let's go get a frap. Complain about the boss—I mean like OMG.
Atlin Merrick is acquisitions editor for Improbable Press and she encourages you to help IP represent humans in all their facets. Submit a book idea to us.
Just for What They Were
By Johnlockismyreligion
I've never put too much thought into my sexuality, in the end I mostly go with: "I like what I like, and it's fine."
Then fandom educated me.
Before entering fandom I just knew that there were gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in the world, but I had never stopped to think about them, and I was totally ignorant of the existence of pansexuals, non-binary, and asexual people. I don't remember making fun of a person for their sexuality or using "gay jokes," but I was indifferent.
Then in fandoms and reading fan fictions, I understood there was a large community of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities out there.
And, by reading stories where the characters had trouble coming out or couldn't come out, or were oppressed, I realised these people weren't free to love each other, they didn't have full rights, they were labeled as wrong, and often they were persecuted, just for what they were. The thought was unacceptable to me.
Through fandoms, reading the life experiences of other people, I became more aware, conscious of how wrong the persecutions of the LGBT+ community is, so I have taught myself a lot, I have read essays, and in the end I have become a more active member of society, taking part in debates and marches, fighting homophobes online and in real life, and showing my support to the community every time I can.
You can find Johnlockismyreligion on Tumblr, and also read their Sherlock, Marvel Cinematic Universe and other fics on AO3.
The Priceless Gift
By Claudia Colin
The first contact I’ve ever had with fan fiction happened when I was maybe nine-years-old.
It had nothing to do with sex but already everything to do with love and romance. I had no idea what UST was at the time (obviously fan fiction later taught me that too), I don’t know if the acronym even existed back then. All I knew was that I wanted the two main characters from Remington Steele to get together and be happy, not dance around each other flirting, advancing, and backpedaling constantly like they were doing on TV.
So I thought I would do it: if nobody got them together on screen (and this was before the terribly pathetic ending of the series), I would get them together on paper!
I never finished that childish little story, but looking back, almost thirty years later, that doesn’t matter much, because I had found fan fiction as a means through which I could discover new things about myself, the rest of the world, and how the two could interact.
Of course this last part, the most important one as far as I am concerned, only truly happened when the internet arrived ten years later. It was then I found out that a lot of people were doing in English what my nine-year-old self had started doing in Italian and I could read it all! Happy dancing all around!
It was more or less then that fan fiction taught me that someone like me was quite possibly not exactly bisexual, as I had figured in my teenage years, but might be something else. Pansexuality and demisexuality are the first two definitions that come to mind, and while for the first I have no proof but quite a strong suspicion that it may apply, for the second, as soon as a piece of Sherlock fan fiction introduced the concept and I looked more into it, I knew that it did apply….and a lot of stuff then made sooooo much more sense.
Apart from fine-tuning my orientation, fan fiction introduced me to aspects that little naïve me had no idea existed. And by that I mean sexual kinks, both real-life ones like medical kinks, and what I call ‘literary’ ones, that I don’t even know if one can call kinks or just tropes or what—like virgin!Sherlock (and Atlin, dear, I do love you for introducing me to that one ;> ).
Also sexual practices I never would have thought of on my own in a million years.
I tell you, the first time I read about fisting, it blew my mind! And other kinds of non-sexual but still romantic tropes, like friends-to-lovers, or ways to play around with writing, like freeform or 221B.
Then there's the hugeness of getting to know the people behind the stories and the computer screens. That not only blew my mind, but in time, as I explored and discovered and learned, I realised that among the many great services fan fiction had rendered to me, this one was possibly the greatest: it had shown me what was totally up my alley and what was maybe a little bit less, or not at all.
That gift, to me, is priceless.
Claudia Colin publishes Sherlock fan fiction on AO3, can be found on Tumblr, and on Twitter, too.
Something Unlocked in My Head
By Narrelle M Harris
I've learned a lot about sexual identity through fandom—not only my own but the broader palette of what it is to be human, how individuals experience their bodies and love, how there is never only one way to be a person, and how you are not necessarily one thing all your life either.
I have written Sherlock Holmes everywhere on the spectrum to aromantic and asexual in my Blood Brothers and Guitar Man series, and demisexual in Unkissed, to an enthusiastically passionate lover in Captains of Industry and Lock and Key. I've explored bawdy sexuality and deep, non-sexual intimacy.
A big thing I learned about myself was partly from reading and writing so much about bisexual John. One day I had my epiphany about how realistic it was that he could reach his 30s before realising he was bi. But folks, I am 53 and it's only in the last few years the penny dropped with a resounding clang that I am not a straight woman who 'would turn for' some women.
For years I'd been saying, "If I was a lesbian, I'd really fancy Alex/Lucy/Gwendoline" when I saw Gwendoline Christie's smile, Alex Kingston, Lucy Lawless. Then the absolutely fucking obvious smacked me in the back of the head and I realised that all along I was thinking "I really fancy Alex/Lucy/Gwendoline."
I feel like something has unlocked in my head. Understanding that I am as attracted to women as to men has made sense of a lot of things from my past.
I feel like a bit of a twit not realising for fifty years what those moments and relationships and feelings have meant. I didn't live in an environment where such a thing was even suggested as possible.
For a long time I've read fan fiction where it was, but it took forever to turn that lens on myself and see a different picture. But there it is, and there it always has been, and now that I see it, I don't struggle to accept it, because I know that it's fine, it's all fine, and everyone is also very fine and I feel more me than I ever have before.
A Study in Velvet and Leather
By K. Caine, illustrated by Avid Branks, 135 pages; 6 illustrations
Sharing a flat with Sherlock Holmes should not have posed a problem for John Watson—after all, Watson is gay, Holmes is a woman, and the arrangement is financially convenient.
But when Holmes takes a complex case involving Irene Adler and a scandalous photograph, she turns to Watson for assistance.
The case leads them everywhere from the opera to a secret Victorian BDSM club, and Watson soon finds himself questioning his partnership with Holmes, his sexuality, and his understanding of himself.
∞
Next up we talk about unexpected fandom experiences out there in the great wide world. Share yours! Send in essays between 250-600 words by 29 November 2018 please, via Tumblr or email below!
