We Will Always Have Paris Slash

- A Personal Story by Lou Harper -

It all started with Star Trek. It's a well-known fact that the term originates from the slash mark in "Kirk/Spock" – the designation of fan fiction pairing up those two protagonists of the 1970s TV series.

While those early stories were published in fanzines^[1], these days slash lives mostly on the Internet. What hasn't change is that the writers and readers of the genre are still predominantly women. The self-professed reasons for it are numerous: gay man trapped in a woman's body, more even power exchange between romantic pairings, two men are better than one.

My pet theory is that we women who love men who love men are the product of a pop cultural conditioning. When we watch films and TV shows it is natural to identify with the (male) protagonists – after all, the story is told from their point of view more often than not. The more we immerse ourselves in the story, the more we identify. Women learn from an early age to identify with men. Out of the eight main crewmembers of the original Star Trek, only two were women, and the men had all the fun. Identifying with the men on screen and sexually desiring them at the same time provides a strong motivation for slashing them together.

For me personally it started with Star Trek too. Not, with the original series, or even one of the spinoffs, but with J.J. Abrams 2009 cinematic reboot of the franchise. I liked that movie a lot – it takes Gene Roddenberry's vision of a bright, heroic world, and puts it in a shiny new package. It was exactly what I needed at that moment. The summer of 2009 was a difficult time for me, and I needed a little cheering up. I developed a minor temporary obsession with the film. Watching interviews of the cast on Youtube, especially of those of Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto^[2] (Spock) who so obviously had a bromance^[3] going on (intimate but nonsexual relationship between two men) reminded me of those rumors of slash I had heard of. So I decided to check them out.

However, it wasn't Star Trek fiction I went for. The summer of 2009 was also when I discovered Torchwood. For those many who never heard of it, Torchwood is a spin-off of Doctor Who. I didn't see it when it originally aired, but I caught the reruns. Watching some episodes on TV and others on iTunes, I got a concentrated dose of the show.

Torchwood is about a ragtag band of alien hunters based in Wales, and led by the "omnisexual" Captain Jack Harkness – an alien himself. The main appeal of Torchwood to me, the thing that elevated it above its uneven writing was the unabashed sexual tension that runs through the whole series. All the team members get some action at one point or another, both opposite and same-sex variety.

The "one true pairing"^[4] of Torchwood is Jack/Ianto, aka Janto. Some don't consider them a true slash pairing because they are actually paired on the show itself. To me that's splitting hairs. However, their same-sex relationship being canon^[5] possibly made it easier for me to be drawn into slash.

Janto was my introduction to slash. I didn't expect to like it. I had low expectations of fan fiction, period. I was prepared to be horrified. Instead I stumbled upon some pretty good stories early on, and some really good ones soon after. I was a goner. Soon enough I wasn't only reading, but also writing them. Slash and fan fiction in general, is subversion born out of love. Fans take the established world and characters of a movie, book, or TV show and spin them into countless number of different tales. There are unique characteristics to fan fiction, and slash within it:

1. Shared world. In regular fiction sometimes authors share a world, but it's a rare occurrence. In fanfic anyone can jump in at any time. It's truly fascinating to watch how writers all starting from the same point end up going in so many different directions. Some Torchwood fanfiction was better written than the show.

2. Obsessiveness. By definition, readers and writers are all fans. Consequently, emotions can run high over the "correct" interpretation of events and protagonists. In Torchwood, when Ianto was killed on the actual TV show, it split the fandom right down in the middle between those who accepted it, and those who couldn't.

3. Writers and readers have a peculiar, often love-hate relationship with the creators of the film/TV show/book their stories are based on. Writers tend to spend a lot of their time and creative energy on filling plot holes in the official work, writing missing scenes, or even re-writing the official story. After killing Ianto in season three of Torchwood, creator Russel T. Davis became reviled by a segment of his fandom, whom he in turn disparagingly called "nine hysterical women." The fans in question took the name up, and fanfics bringing Ianto back abounded.


I made friends in the Torchwood fandom, and most importantly met my beta partner Josephine Myles. Jo was the first one who made the jump from slash to M/M fiction. I wasn't going to follow. I didn't even want to read it. Stories that didn't have the characters I knew and loved held no interest to me. However, Jo kept sending me her shorts, and recommending writers. It was her First Impressions that made me think there might be something to this after all, and I should take a closer look at the genre.

Again, I didn't expect to like it, but I stumbled upon some real good stories almost immediately. Down the m/m rabbit hole I went. I became a rabid reader of the genre, but had no plans of contributing to it. Then I came across a story that left me dissatisfied and frustrated. And thus I set out to write the story I would like to read. That became Hanging Loose.


In my experience slash makes it easier to enter m/m. I probably wouldn't have gotten here without slash, mostly because I wasn't even aware of the existence of the m/m genre.

I used to be a lonely, awkward kid, living in my fantasies most of the time. Whenever a book or TV show caught my fancy, I kept reliving it in my head, getting into the skins of the different characters, taking them to new places, exploring things the original story didn't, continuing their tales. I could get lost in their world for weeks. I had no idea I was writing fanfiction in my head.

For a list of fanfiction terms check here.

Tomorrow here on Chicks and Dicks, my old Torchwood fandom friend Josephine Myles will give her account of the challenges and delights of moving from writing fanfic to publishing original m/m romance.

Lou Harper's Bio:

Under a prickly, cynical surface Lou Harper is an incorrigible romantic. Her love affair with the written word started at a tender age. Lou's favorite animal is the hedgehog. She likes nature, books, movies, photography, and good food. She has a temper and mood swings. Lou is a loner, a misfit, and a happy drunk.

http://louharper.blogspot.com http://louharper.com

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¹Fanzine: non-professional publication produced by fans. Before the internet age they were distributed through mailing lists and on conventions.

²Quinto outed himself in October 2011, saying that ""that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it, is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality."

³Bromance: close and intimate but nonsexual relationship between two men.

⁴"One True Pairing," aka OTP is the couple fans or fan groups prefer over all other.

5Canon: events, statements that happen on the show, thus considered as facts. Some creators intentionally or unintentionally introduce contradictory canon elements, causing fanfic writers to tie themselves into knots to resolve them.