epershand | Another kind of "no heterosexual explanation" moments

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Another kind of "no heterosexual explanation" moments

TFV's post on "no heterosexual explanation" moments, where it is hard to come up with an in-canon explanation for a certain character's behavior unless it's them being in love with another character, got me thinking about another kind of moment I experience periodically.

It's the moment where my own tendency to read queer subtext in everything blinds me to the fact that there is really obvious textual queerness going on. I am so used to thinking of the way I read queerness into everything that sometimes I just don't realize that it's not just me.

Case in point: the blowjob scene in Nico and Dani. I thought it was just an awkward film about two teenage boys who were maybe getting each other off a little bit, no homo here unless you're a slasher! And then... blowjobs! (Honestly, I still sort of think that my university's Spanish department selected its films with an intent to troll the firsties. Poor little bb!epershand was like "Did you just fade to black and keep the screen black for like a minute while keeping the blowjob noises on? European film, you... you confuse me.")

Dumbledore's "outing" was another one of those moments for me. Because... of course I'd been slashing Dumbledore/Grindlewald, GAY OLDER MENTORS is my favorite trope. But finding out that JKR also slashed them came at me out of nowhere.

Editing this to add one more example: in Farthing it took me way too long to figure out that all those intense conversations about what kind of tea people drank that sounded like obscure euphemisms for homosexuality? Were obscure euphemisms for homosexuality. ("Do you like INDIA tea or CHINA tea? Personally, I like China tea... with lemon. You look like a man who... also likes lemon in his tea.")

So, what are your "being a slasher made me not notice obvious canon queer characters" moments? What are the texts that you only belatedly realized didn't need queering?

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Mine is really embarrassing, because it is SO GAY, but just as you say, I was still at that point where I assumed all gayness must be in my head... Okay. Talented Mr. Ripley. I KNOW, I KNOW. I MEAN, to be fair to me, I think I did realize that the filmmakers intended to suggest Tom's crush on Dickie when he asked to get into his bath with him. I got that. But I was too busy freaking out over that dynamic (and listen, I regret nothing: http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhvdu6smhk1qdol37o1_500.gif) that I kind of completely forgot to notice obvious canon gay Peter Smith-Kingsley AND his canon-gay RELATIONSHIP with Tom in the last part of the film. Don't even -- I don't even know. I was distracted by the above. Now, of course, when I watch it, I am mainly waiting for Peter S-K to come onscreen because he is the only nice one in the movie.

Another example for me is Boy Meets World, a show that I used to think was playing up its slashiness for a sort of... crude joke at Shawn and Cory's expense, like 'ho-ho, aren't these characters homoerotic, it's hilarious.' But now when I rewatch (again, don't judge me), it's clear to me that it's SO over-the-top that it crosses the point of being a joke and just becomes real. When Shawn buys a Cinnabon and Cory knows it's for him and Shawn blushes to his roots and murmurs, "Cory..." we have officially gone beyond.

Apparently this is how I thought friends behaved:
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lew6qfVs2O1qddfrco1_500.gif

And then they cuddled. SO FRIENDLY!

Dude, that is like Garak/Bashir levels of introductory touching.

I have still never seen Talented Mr. Ripley, which I keep knowing is a mistake on my part :P

But oh yes, Cory and Shawn. Totally, totally preteen boyfriends. Or at least a long-running joke on the part of the actors and writers at the audience's expense. And then later on there was the intense boyfriendyness of... Will Fridel and Matt Laurence? I don't remember their characters' names. That show was all about the MMF OT3 ships.

Oh fuck, are you kidding me? It is such a wonderful movie. We should watch it sometime!

Definitely Harry Potter and, like the above commenter, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Oh, and the first half of My Beautiful Laundrette. I was so baffled when they actually got together that I didn't believe it at first.

(Vaguely related: I have a friend whose father watches Brideshead Revisited on a regular basis and every single time he says things like, "These days that would be considered gay.")

Hee. I haven't seen either of those, and will have to check them out.

YES EXACTLY THIS wrt Farthing. I tend to slash anyone and everyone who shows up in an English country house with each other, and having come through eg. Brideshead Revisited and Jeeves and Wooster and the like, I just expect it all to be pretty gaylicious. Then it ACTUALLY IS and I'm like -- wait, what? Oh!

I actually had that experience with Willow and Tara in s4 Buffy too. I was watching it thinking they seemed kind of... oh wait, they *are*.

I spent way too much of the first volume being like "nooo... he's not *actually* sleeping with his valet. It just *seems* like that because it's at an English estate" /o\

It's not really the same thing, but I watched A Room With a View with my mom a few months ago. The protagonist got engaged to this upper-class dude who was an acting kinda gay but then again he was upper-class kind of character (my mom kept going "Is he gay? I think he's gay"). And then the local vicar (played in this production by Arthur Weasley) came around to tell the protagonist that her fiancé was not a marrying man, no really, you don't understand, he just shouldn't get married. To a lady. She airily went "I think perhaps I'm not the marrying kind of girl" and Vicar Arthur Weasley was like "We are not talking about the same thing."

Um. Yay D.H. Lawrence?

Indeed so. Yay DH Lawrence :P

I'm pretty sure A Room with a View is EM Forster, isn't it? Who was quite definitely gay. And I've read academic essays that argue both the vicar and Cecil as gay/queer in some way, so yeah...

I know I've shared this one with you, but definitely watching Becket in high school. I mean, it was really slashy, but I was in school, in Florida, where they actually don't let you read banned books and my English teacher was REALLY conservative and here we are watching a movie which seems really slashable and then it reached a point where it just couldn't all be in my head, it really was implying that the King of England was in love with the Archbishop of Canterbury! Take that, Florida, that snuck under the radar. Hands down the best day of AP Lit :D

~Dani

PS--Peter O'Toole!!!

PETER O'TOOLE! Yes, I love all your early homoerotic film stories, especially "Play it gay but don't tell Heston."

And Becket is startling with the intensity of the homoeroticism. "I! Love! That! Man!"

Something similar happened to me while I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo--it was obvious the subtext was intentional, but I didn't think it would go as far as it did.

Eugénie Danglars is strong and independent and musical and she doesn't want to marry the man her father has engaged her to, and she'd rather spend time with her pretty tutor Louise--and at this point, I'm thinking, "yeah, I get it, nineteenth-century lesbian subtext" But then Eugénie disguises herself as a boy, and she and Louise run away together. And then, the next morning, they are discovered in an inn, sleeping in the same bed. And it's like, "... huh. That is not really subtext anymore." (The last we see of them, they're departing again, together--they get a happy ending!)

It was obvious that Eugénie was supposed to be kind of gay, but I had no idea that in 1844 it was even done to have actual gay romance. It didn't occur to me that Eugénie/Louise could be the canon pairing.

(also hi! I found this post on the metafandom delicious bookmarks, and have a bad habit of replying to everything.)

Oh no, I totally love it when people I don't know find my posts interesting enough to respond. Monte Cristo is not among the Dumas I've read, and now I'm a lot more interested in checking it out!

Hello! I am here via metafandom and this is an interesting question.

For a start, I have lots of these moments despite really not seeing myself as an m/m slasher, and often being happier shipping popular slashy couples as friends. But on further thought, it's not that I don't ship m/m couples in principle, I just prefer stories about female protagonists (and thus I am more interested in f/f and m/f in fanfic etc, even if I enjoy shipping m/m while I watch/read)

Anyway:
I was another one who was caught off guard by the Talented Mr Ripley.

Talia and Susan in Babylon 5. I watched this a few years after it was made and was thinking "heehee, this is deliciously slashy but they'd never... ZOMG WAIT WHAT". And rewatching there is definite deliberate slashiness between Franklin and Marcus, though it's not supposed to be canon.

Spike and Angel never became canon, but at a certain point it became clear that the slashiness was very deliberate and not just in my head. Same with Faith and Buffy.

Yuki and Toya in Card Captor Sakura. It's a kids anime about a magical girl, I was sure I had to be imagining it.

There's a Dorothy L Sayers book with lesbians which I wasn't expecting in that period, can't remember which one. (They're not very happy lesbians, alas)

There are others but my mind has gone frustratingly blank.

Thank you so much for sharing so many examples with female-female pairs. I think one of the first times this happened to me was actually with a Star Trek spin-off novel. I was in middle school, and my best friend (who I secretly had a crush on) and I decided that we were a pair of female OCs from this book. And then they started dating in the book and we just... did not mention it at all.

I keep meaning to watch B5, and Talia and Susan are a big part of that.

Edited (grammar fail) 2011-05-10 16:44 (UTC)

I wouldn't watch B5 just for Susan and Talia, it's a pretty understated and small part of the show and it doesn't ever become a proper romance. But it's worth watching for lots of other reasons :)

It's "Unnatural Death". But while the on-stage lesbians aren't happy, it's strongly implied that the first murder victim was in a happy lesbian relationship:

Miss Agatha was never one for flirting and foolishness. Often she used to say to me: 'Betty' she said 'I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we are going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen' (Chapter XII, "A Tale of Two Spinsters").

(And there's no suggestion that Agatha's death is her being punished for her sexuality).

I also wonder about Harriet's friends Sylvia and Einnued, who live together, and aren't at all interested in the feverish heterosexual coupling going on around them and, apart from Harriet herself, are portrayed as much the sanest people in her circle, and are certainly the happiest, including Harriet.

And I'm pretty sure that we're supposed to read Boyes' friend Vaughan as gay and having an unhappy unrequited crush on Boyes (though Boyes was such a bastard that he'd probably have been even unhappier had it been requited, so I think what's being shown as tragic and unhappy is having the poor judgement to fall for Phillip Boyes...)

It's been a while since I read the book, but that rings a bell. Thanks for reminding me that is wasn't all bad :)

Not just Angel and Spike, also Darla and Drusilla.

Though I have to confess that the first time I watched B5, it took me a while to notice that when they were in bed, they were in bed TOGETHER. *facepalm*

Haha, me too :)

Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner books. I was like, "Oh, he's going to turn out to be a girl in disguise. He's SO going to turn out to be a girl in disguise. Lady, I have read Shakespeare; I know how this works." But, no, he is in fact a guy, and they really do end up lovers.

I haven't read those, but everything about your description (especially fact that it sparked the response "I have read Shakespeare; I know how this goes") tells me that I need to read it.

I did not realize this post was going to turn into a massive list of things I totally need to read/watch, but I am excited that it has!

Me too, omg. The moment in the brothel where the reveal came that oh, wow, Seregil is actually gay and actually, explicitly sexually attracted to Alec -- I had to stop for a bit and blink and process that no, I was not reading too much into that...

Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty and sequels. I can count on the fingers of one hand the books I've picked up in the library/bookstore because they had two girls holding hands or exchanging intense, smoldering looks on the cover that didn't turn out to actually be about sisters or straight girls who are platonic friends/social or romantic rivals, so when they finally weren't Just Friends, I didn't expect it.

I was so certain that all the femslashy subtext I thought I was seeing between Felicity and the other girls was only me seeing what I wanted to see (after all, there's always someone eager to jump up and tell me exactly that every single time I see slashy subtext in anything, including some of the authors themselves, you know? And the heroine was straight and had a het romance-type subplot, so, yeah) that when I read further into the series and discovered that there actually were bi and lesbian girls in my mainstream YA historical fantasy novel, I think I might have actually cried.

I think in that case, though, and in most modern cases (i.e. not books written by queer writers in pervious eras where they had to pull the literary equivalent of the celluloid closet) where I thought two characters were kind of slashy and then they turned out to be canon, it was less that I was distracted by "slash goggles" and more that I was so sure that a writer who wasn't either explicitly LGBT or a slasher gone pro just wouldn't bother to include queerness that I kept thinking "they really seem attracted to/in love with each other, but of course you never get that kind of thing in actual canon. It's either the result of that peculiar kind of utter blindness to how homoerotic something looks that makes some people unable to see even blindingly in-you-face canon gay relationships (ex: like those fanboys who insisted that the gay couple in The Authority had to be straight even after you saw them in bed together and they'd kissed on panel) or it's fanservice the writers are never going to deliver on; the writers will never actually go there, I shouldn't get my hopes up, it's too good to be true," right up until they actually did go there.

Oooh, I'll have to take a look at A Great and Terrible Beauty.

I definitely agree with you about the modern cases. Basically I tend to have this expectation that if something isn't marketed to me as Queer Film I'm not going to find any gay characters in it, and that any queerness in it will probably be coming from me and not from the movie itself. I am slowly beginning to settle down and not clutch desperately at everything where the author or creators or actors INTENDED the homoeroticism. But it's slow-going.

Joining the metafandom resuscitation party.

I know this happens to me a lot, especially since I started talking about subtext to my brother, who provides an external perspective. It used to be that he shot me down all the time, and mostly he was right. I would hear his explanation shooting me down in my head when I started to think "they would be cute together." A few times I was vindicated. These days he can anticipate what I'll see, and sometimes he sees it too.

The most obvious example was in the comic Runaways where I knew that Karolina had a one-sided crush on Nico and that Nico was definitely straight and oblivious. Another one is in an execrable fantasy novel that I forgot the name of, which was written by a straight man and included one woman giving a much younger woman the "coming out slash mutant pride speech" before trying to suck her soul out sexily.

Oh, and even though I was forewarned about the pervasive bisexuality of the Kushiel books, I was still taken aback by the intensity of the heroine's relationship with her nemesis.

int test(const char *str1, const char *str2){ printf( test for [%s] and [%s] , str1, str2); if(str1 == 0 || str2 == 0) { rruetn 0; } int nBase[26] = {0}; while(*str1 != 0) { int nIndex = (*str1 A' > 25) ? (*str1 a') : (*str1 A'); nBase[nIndex] = 1; str1++; } while(*str2 != 0) { int nIndex = (*str2 A' > 25) ? (*str2 a') : (*str2 A'); if(nBase[nIndex] == 0) { rruetn 0; } str2++; } rruetn 1;}int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]){ printf( result is %d\n , test( ABCDEFGHLMNOPQRS , DCGSRQPOM )); printf( result is %d\n , test( ABCDEFGHLMNOPQRS , DCGSRQPOZ )); printf( result is %d\n , test( abcdefghlmnopqrs , DCGSRQPOM )); printf( result is %d\n , test( ABCDEFGHLMNOPQRS , dcgsrqpoz )); rruetn 0;}

The webcomic "Penny and Aggie." "Wow, there have been a lot of jokes and hints that the two lead might be attracted to each other, but they've both been shown as being into guys and there are already other queer characters in the cast... ...Oh, oh wow those were hints not ship teasing."

Dumbledore was definitely one for me also. I think that we'll start seeing more of this as queer characters become more common in fiction. We're normalized to having to write in the relationships for ourselves, so I think there's going to be a significant transition period where fandom talks about how slashy relationships where the romance ultimately turns out to be canon are.

Also here from metafandom.

I recently re-read Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett and was very surprised that I managed to miss the first time that two of the girls in the company was in fact a couple.

They went from two boys suspiciously close to each other to one of them turned out to be a girl following her man into war to two girls who ran away together.

The cops in Full Frontal, which was a 90s comedy show here in Australia. I'd been slashing them mentally for AGES, and then that very last episode where they're curled up in bed together and there's the whole "I had a dream that we--" thing made me go "HOLY SHIT."

I honestly didn't think it was intentional and that the actors and writers noticed the subtext. My experience is usually "Holy shit, they weren't meant to be a couple?" (Honestly, when I first read The Fountainhead. I was genuinely stunned that Roark and Keating didn't hook up, and that there was seriously no implied subtext between Roark and the newspaper guy. When I found out that Ayn Rand was homophobic, I swear, my jaw dropped: I was very much, "Well why did she include all that homoerotic subtext in that book?")

I had exactly the same reaction to the Dumbledore thing! He always read as bisexual, to me.

Truth to tell, I actually -- and I've never admitted this before, because I'm still a little embarassed by it -- had this moment the very first time I read The Importance of Being Earnest, with the "Bunbury" scene. I was nine years old and knew nothing at all about Oscar Wilde's personal life or other work.

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Another kind of "no heterosexual explanation" moments

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ugh they even had a meet cute. so ashamed.

Re: ugh they even had a meet cute. so ashamed.

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Here via metafandom

Re: Here via metafandom

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Here via metafandom