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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?
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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.