The Slash Closet
I've been thinking lately about the closeted nature of slash fandom.

It's something I've been running into particularly often lately, but what solidified it in my mind as something I wanted to post about was my trip to DC.

On back to back weekends I went to DC Gay Pride and a slash con and the juxtaposition of attitudes between the two events really brought it home to me how closeted slash fandom is.

And more to the point, it really struck me how normal we seem to think that is.

I am not closeted in any aspect of my life, neither my sexuality nor my hobbies. My parents, my sister and my oldest niece as well as my best non-fannish friend all read or have read this journal. 95% of my fannish content is unlocked. Mostly they ignore it. Although Holly, bless her, reads my rare attempts at fiction, even though she's never seen any of the shows I write. I don't insert slash into conversations it's not appropriate in, but I don't hide it from or lie about it to my friends and family either. It just seems ridiculous to me that I would be open and honest about who I sleep with but take pains to hide what I read about.

Work is slightly different. I don't talk about slash at work for the same reason I wouldn't talk about my SF fandom or my family issues, it's none of their business and I've learned the hard way to keep my personal and professional lives well segregated.

***But for the sake of this conversation I want to leave work out of it and specifically focus on how open we as slashers are with our family and friends. For most people our co-workers are not our family or close friends, and it's those close relationships I really want to focus on if possible.***

I know -- have had it hammered home to me repeatedly of late -- that I am unusual in my openness. The default assumption in fandom seems to be "entirely closeted until proven otherwise," and I am regularly met with surprise, disbelief and doubt when I talk about my parents reading my livejournal or my marathon session of printing out Yuletide fic from my dad's computer when I was home for Christmas a couple years ago.

Instead, this is what I see on my friendslist and friendsfriends: The fan who lies to or misleads her spouse as to what kind of fiction she writes. The fan who panics and deletes or locks down her journal because a real-life family member found it. The fan who has an "arrangement" with a friend and fellow slasher, to delete all the fic off her computer in the event of her death, so her family won't find it. The fan who has two completely disconnected internet pseudonyms: one she uses for slash, and one she uses for everything else.

And this behavior is encouraged and supported and portrayed as the normal and expected thing to do and I just blink and go "bzuh?" and think "who does that." What other hobby is there were the participants go to such great lengths to hide their participation? "My wife doesn't know I collect stamps. She thinks I'm at a business meeting." I mean, huh??

Yet, the assumption that slashers will be in the closet is so ingrained in fandom that we don't even talk about it.

Fandom, is a complex pattern of repeated conversations. The same topics come up again and again, with the dominant perspective of them shifting and changing over time. We talk about incest. We talk about RPS. We talk about appropriate boundaries with actors/creators. We talk about plagiarism and sockpuppets and BNFs. But we never, ever talk about the closet so many of us live in.

So, here we go. Why is slash such a closeted sub-group? What is it about slash that makes so many fans convinced they have to hide it and lie about it, even to their near and dear? And the real pernicious question. Is this attitude in fact good for slash fandom?

I have my own thoughts and theories on these questions, and I'll talk about them in the comments, but I want to start by opening the floor to hear what the rest of you think about this.

Thanks to commodorified, isiscolo, guede_mazaka and mzcalypso for helping me hash out my thoughts over IM. You all rock.