fic that convinced me it's ok to be gay
Apr. 30th, 2020 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kumquataka a lightly annotated reverse chronological foray into my ao3 bookmarks for as long as my attention span will allow. it's honestly embarrassing to reveal how much of my gender/sexuality self-actualization was shaped by reading fic so i won't share the full extent but sometimes you read something by a rando on the internet and become convinced you might actually live past 25.
in the process of writing this i realized that there have been a lot of fics that were dear to my heart that i've just lost :( because i didn't record or bookmark or comment in time, or because i did and they've now been deleted.... i want to keep a better record of the fic i'm reading that's meaningful from here on out.
Echoing Chamber by nisakomi
seventeen, wonwoo/jun, 15k
i read this one during one of my late mornings a few weeks ago and i was not expecting it to go so hard but it did. i mean all gay fic inevitably deals with (internalized) homophobia in some way or another, but what was special about this one to me was that it wasn't a tortured coming-out narrative but about living with your partner in the aftermath of realizing you can't be any other way... and the inevitable anxieties that texture that life, even when it's an imaginary that is deeply loving and hopeful. jun worrying about stealing away wonwoo's mother's perfect doctor first son is really the brainworm that will never quite fade even for those who will be fully loved/accepted by their families, and like – this is a fic about the maturation of a college relationship into a real life together, which i guess is what i need at this point to imagine anything beyond my current situation. it's just simultaneously realistic and completely ideal. how wonwoo and junnie can't get married officially in south korea but wear each others' names on their skin and take care of each other in different ways (one is a logistical nightmare and one is an emotional nightmare) and navigate each other's parents.... ok i mean there's good wonhui fic but then there is good wonhui fic that shows you it's possible to grow up and be ok.
tweet from 4/16/20 about this fic: yes i’m buoyed by the idea that you can be gay and live past 25 and move in with ur soulmate and take care of each other every day for the rest of ur lives even though the world is FALLING APART.
also i keep joking that i've come full circle and overcome my internalized fear of chinese men because i'm jun and minghao stan now but it's kind of true. i am getting_closer.mp3.
a hundred years of summer by plutonicfriend
seventeen, mingyu/wonwoo, 19.5k
i wasn't going to put this one in this list originally but then i remembered the line that just brought me to my knees. plutonicfriend your PROSE!!! and your nuanced confession scenes that manage to capture the terrifying unmapped zone between best friends and soulmates and how excruciating it is to find your heart living there: "It’s, it’s not one small thing or even a big thing, like being kind or smart or whatever. Loving anyone, it’s like, everything gets to you. Everything becomes the reason why. You’ve been my best friend my whole life and I don’t need a reason. Haven't for a long time." i do not think anyone has ever given words to this feeling before plutonicfriend did it and i have to honor that.
light blue and gentle by figure8
seventeen, wonwoo/jun, 29k
this made me feel like i was experiencing gay panic for the very first time even though i never really had a moment the way wonwoo did in this fic, and also because it was like, maybe it's ok for your parents to know you're gay, and maybe you will be loved and accepted. (i try not to be fixated on the parents thing but it seems like it is cropping up all over the place. no thoughts....)
Wish I'd Known You Then by mattepinkallshades (deleted)
rupaul's drag race, trixie/katya, ?
it's really a pity that i can't link this or really go back and re-enjoy it since the fic has been deleted... but i do have an email receipt of a long rambly comment i left about the impression that it made on me. this fic was one about second chances for trixie and katya as older lesbians, and as i grow older and have to seriously think about the future i guess i find that these are the ones that open up my world the most. for a long time being gay was something that felt really abstract to me, and then for a long time after that it was a fantasy that i could only really achieve through some idealistic gender expression that would always be foreclosed (i.e. i primarily understood gayness through m/m relationships and only felt like i could be fully and agentially in love and with a future if i were a boy), and then finally it was trixya fic of all things that taught me there could be a real future for lesbians.
i mean this sounds so stupid because i was reading sarah waters and all the lesbian literature i could get my hands on but it was drag race rpf that gave me all these ways to imagine real, quotidian futures. i wish i could go back and read this one through all the updates because i fell off in 2019, but from what i can remember it was the epitome of that kind of richly imagined slice-of-life longfic that opens up your world. i honestly am very thankful to have gotten to read/know these drag race rpf authors who were wlw in their late 20s/30s and making possible futures that i couldn't yet imagine, even if they were only a little older than me. i can confidently say that lesbian trixya fic did more for me than any other kind of representation...
this woman's work by Whenyourhairisalsoahood (deleted)
rupaul's drag race, trixie/katya, ?
omg this is so sad because i'm realizing some of my absolute favorite and most transformative trixya fics have been deleted and i can't even remember their titles or authors because i never commented.... that's the nature of rpf when you're like fully an adult with a real job and wife i guess. this one was set during the UK miner's strike (1984) and had trixie as a welsh miner's daughter with a boyfriend and katya as a leather dyke from london (and ofc the lesbian awakening in question). i loved this fic the moment i read it and i wish i'd gotten to read it through again also TT_____TT the setting was so richly imagined (i'm pretty sure the author was welsh herself) but it was also the kind of longfic that gives you a whole person and all their interiority. and it was close enough in history, i guess, that it wasn't impossible to relate to, and set in such a specific time and place that i felt like i was learning a history i never would have experienced otherwise!
i think this might be my favorite lesbian awakening arc in all of fiction (don't hold me to that though). i think gay (male) panic is often pretty well portrayed in fic but it's not always easy to find something that describes how impossible it feels to realize for the first time that you love women and have no idea what that means for the rest of your life.
blessed be the mystery of love by palisadespalisades
it (2017), richie/eddie, 3.5k
of course this list could never be complete without julesfic, and while i love all julesfic i think this oneshot really captures the intensity of all the confusion and turmoil that i was experiencing at the point in my life when we met and became friends. the first julesfic i ever read was mostly fluffy (one wave short of a shipwreck) but it's like the wild origin story of our friendship which i've told so many times... which is that i was so frustrated over the whiteness of the stephen king it fandom (as though i should have expected anything different) but then i read shipwreck, and was totally blindsided by richie on the phone with his mom halfway through the fic, talking to her half in KOREAN and assuring her that he'd eaten his FISH OILS because he was KOREAN! becoming jules' friend and getting to commiserate with him about transmasculinity and asianness was such a powerful force for good in my life, maybe the best thing that happened to me in 2018. it seems so silly because i thought i had stopped thinking about being asian years before, but then korean richie was like hey........ you can be gay and asian..... because in truth i had no idea how to imagine or be that at the time.
i'm really rambling now but what i love most about this fic is the pain of separating from someone you love so much, in words you don't even know how to say yet: "There was so much to be said, but nothing that they could say in public, or to each other; they wouldn’t be able to talk for weeks after that." and "he wouldn’t be able to listen to that song without his heart squeezing, his stomach swan-diving." no one gets it like jules.
you trip me up by ssstrychnine
it (2017), richie/eddie, 7k
this fic is years of eddie's gay panic, sublimated into an entire lifetime of anxiety. i guess you could say that reddie fic as a whole taught me a lot about gender and masculinity, in the way that trixya fic as a whole taught me about actually living in the world as a lesbian. (god this is so embarrassing to have all written out like this but whatever.......) so julesfic and oneangryshotfic will have to stand in for the rest of the reddie canon that is maybe not as gorgeously written/emotionally textured, but nevertheless made me feel particular gender feelings. i don't even know how to describe where i was in my life when i was reading this – because i was abstractly "gay" for so long as a teenager but i never had to really contend with it or confront how alienating it actually was until sophomore year when my life fell apart and i realized that i would never date or marry a man. that really doesn't encompass it, but reddie fic was first and foremost a way to put into words the deep heartbreak and despair of being gay.... and also the related crisis of only being able to feel like i could have a future in the body of a cis man. reddie fic certainly did not give me a way out of that problem but it was a first step ok.
in the process of writing this i realized that there have been a lot of fics that were dear to my heart that i've just lost :( because i didn't record or bookmark or comment in time, or because i did and they've now been deleted.... i want to keep a better record of the fic i'm reading that's meaningful from here on out.
Echoing Chamber by nisakomi
seventeen, wonwoo/jun, 15k
i read this one during one of my late mornings a few weeks ago and i was not expecting it to go so hard but it did. i mean all gay fic inevitably deals with (internalized) homophobia in some way or another, but what was special about this one to me was that it wasn't a tortured coming-out narrative but about living with your partner in the aftermath of realizing you can't be any other way... and the inevitable anxieties that texture that life, even when it's an imaginary that is deeply loving and hopeful. jun worrying about stealing away wonwoo's mother's perfect doctor first son is really the brainworm that will never quite fade even for those who will be fully loved/accepted by their families, and like – this is a fic about the maturation of a college relationship into a real life together, which i guess is what i need at this point to imagine anything beyond my current situation. it's just simultaneously realistic and completely ideal. how wonwoo and junnie can't get married officially in south korea but wear each others' names on their skin and take care of each other in different ways (one is a logistical nightmare and one is an emotional nightmare) and navigate each other's parents.... ok i mean there's good wonhui fic but then there is good wonhui fic that shows you it's possible to grow up and be ok.
tweet from 4/16/20 about this fic: yes i’m buoyed by the idea that you can be gay and live past 25 and move in with ur soulmate and take care of each other every day for the rest of ur lives even though the world is FALLING APART.
also i keep joking that i've come full circle and overcome my internalized fear of chinese men because i'm jun and minghao stan now but it's kind of true. i am getting_closer.mp3.
a hundred years of summer by plutonicfriend
seventeen, mingyu/wonwoo, 19.5k
i wasn't going to put this one in this list originally but then i remembered the line that just brought me to my knees. plutonicfriend your PROSE!!! and your nuanced confession scenes that manage to capture the terrifying unmapped zone between best friends and soulmates and how excruciating it is to find your heart living there: "It’s, it’s not one small thing or even a big thing, like being kind or smart or whatever. Loving anyone, it’s like, everything gets to you. Everything becomes the reason why. You’ve been my best friend my whole life and I don’t need a reason. Haven't for a long time." i do not think anyone has ever given words to this feeling before plutonicfriend did it and i have to honor that.
light blue and gentle by figure8
seventeen, wonwoo/jun, 29k
this made me feel like i was experiencing gay panic for the very first time even though i never really had a moment the way wonwoo did in this fic, and also because it was like, maybe it's ok for your parents to know you're gay, and maybe you will be loved and accepted. (i try not to be fixated on the parents thing but it seems like it is cropping up all over the place. no thoughts....)
Wish I'd Known You Then by mattepinkallshades (deleted)
rupaul's drag race, trixie/katya, ?
it's really a pity that i can't link this or really go back and re-enjoy it since the fic has been deleted... but i do have an email receipt of a long rambly comment i left about the impression that it made on me. this fic was one about second chances for trixie and katya as older lesbians, and as i grow older and have to seriously think about the future i guess i find that these are the ones that open up my world the most. for a long time being gay was something that felt really abstract to me, and then for a long time after that it was a fantasy that i could only really achieve through some idealistic gender expression that would always be foreclosed (i.e. i primarily understood gayness through m/m relationships and only felt like i could be fully and agentially in love and with a future if i were a boy), and then finally it was trixya fic of all things that taught me there could be a real future for lesbians.
i mean this sounds so stupid because i was reading sarah waters and all the lesbian literature i could get my hands on but it was drag race rpf that gave me all these ways to imagine real, quotidian futures. i wish i could go back and read this one through all the updates because i fell off in 2019, but from what i can remember it was the epitome of that kind of richly imagined slice-of-life longfic that opens up your world. i honestly am very thankful to have gotten to read/know these drag race rpf authors who were wlw in their late 20s/30s and making possible futures that i couldn't yet imagine, even if they were only a little older than me. i can confidently say that lesbian trixya fic did more for me than any other kind of representation...
this woman's work by Whenyourhairisalsoahood (deleted)
rupaul's drag race, trixie/katya, ?
omg this is so sad because i'm realizing some of my absolute favorite and most transformative trixya fics have been deleted and i can't even remember their titles or authors because i never commented.... that's the nature of rpf when you're like fully an adult with a real job and wife i guess. this one was set during the UK miner's strike (1984) and had trixie as a welsh miner's daughter with a boyfriend and katya as a leather dyke from london (and ofc the lesbian awakening in question). i loved this fic the moment i read it and i wish i'd gotten to read it through again also TT_____TT the setting was so richly imagined (i'm pretty sure the author was welsh herself) but it was also the kind of longfic that gives you a whole person and all their interiority. and it was close enough in history, i guess, that it wasn't impossible to relate to, and set in such a specific time and place that i felt like i was learning a history i never would have experienced otherwise!
i think this might be my favorite lesbian awakening arc in all of fiction (don't hold me to that though). i think gay (male) panic is often pretty well portrayed in fic but it's not always easy to find something that describes how impossible it feels to realize for the first time that you love women and have no idea what that means for the rest of your life.
blessed be the mystery of love by palisadespalisades
it (2017), richie/eddie, 3.5k
of course this list could never be complete without julesfic, and while i love all julesfic i think this oneshot really captures the intensity of all the confusion and turmoil that i was experiencing at the point in my life when we met and became friends. the first julesfic i ever read was mostly fluffy (one wave short of a shipwreck) but it's like the wild origin story of our friendship which i've told so many times... which is that i was so frustrated over the whiteness of the stephen king it fandom (as though i should have expected anything different) but then i read shipwreck, and was totally blindsided by richie on the phone with his mom halfway through the fic, talking to her half in KOREAN and assuring her that he'd eaten his FISH OILS because he was KOREAN! becoming jules' friend and getting to commiserate with him about transmasculinity and asianness was such a powerful force for good in my life, maybe the best thing that happened to me in 2018. it seems so silly because i thought i had stopped thinking about being asian years before, but then korean richie was like hey........ you can be gay and asian..... because in truth i had no idea how to imagine or be that at the time.
i'm really rambling now but what i love most about this fic is the pain of separating from someone you love so much, in words you don't even know how to say yet: "There was so much to be said, but nothing that they could say in public, or to each other; they wouldn’t be able to talk for weeks after that." and "he wouldn’t be able to listen to that song without his heart squeezing, his stomach swan-diving." no one gets it like jules.
you trip me up by ssstrychnine
it (2017), richie/eddie, 7k
this fic is years of eddie's gay panic, sublimated into an entire lifetime of anxiety. i guess you could say that reddie fic as a whole taught me a lot about gender and masculinity, in the way that trixya fic as a whole taught me about actually living in the world as a lesbian. (god this is so embarrassing to have all written out like this but whatever.......) so julesfic and oneangryshotfic will have to stand in for the rest of the reddie canon that is maybe not as gorgeously written/emotionally textured, but nevertheless made me feel particular gender feelings. i don't even know how to describe where i was in my life when i was reading this – because i was abstractly "gay" for so long as a teenager but i never had to really contend with it or confront how alienating it actually was until sophomore year when my life fell apart and i realized that i would never date or marry a man. that really doesn't encompass it, but reddie fic was first and foremost a way to put into words the deep heartbreak and despair of being gay.... and also the related crisis of only being able to feel like i could have a future in the body of a cis man. reddie fic certainly did not give me a way out of that problem but it was a first step ok.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-05 02:34 am (UTC)also the wonhui bit about wonwoo's mother's perfect doctor first son... the way navigating asian gay domesticity is fraught in a way beyond linear notions of coming out and coming to terms with urself and ur identity. thank u 4 sharing jess.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-05 03:13 am (UTC)also thank you for always understanding my huge ball of emotions related to asian gay domesticity lmao.... i can disappoint my parents all i want but i couldn't bear to disappoint the parents of my significant other
no subject
Date: 2020-05-07 11:40 pm (UTC)