Soon, this place is gonna be a party, and you're all invited.

[fiercelydreamed]

Within the next couple of weeks, this community will be hosting a festival of gen fanworks featuring sexual and gender minority characters of all tasty flavors -- queer, trans, gay, lesbian, intersex, bisexual, genderqueer, questioning, flamingly ambiguous. In short, the kinds of characters who are often marginalized or erased in fanwork festivals, in mainstream fiction, and in family-friendly tv shows and movies. It's also an opportunity to let these characters get out of the bedroom for once (or the supply closet, or the Canadian shack, or the alien holding cell, or wherever it is they've been having all their please-view-with-discretion fun).

Oh, and please tell the straight characters they can come play, too.

Here's the thing. For many of us who are queer, we're queer all the time. We're queer when we're grocery-shopping. We're trans when we're at the library. We're bisexual when we go on camping trips. We're questioning when we kick ass at kickball tournaments. We're intersex when we face off against our thesis defense committees. We're lesbians when we show up at our straight friends' houses after they've been brutally dumped by some jackass. And we're gay at (and quite possibly for) the dentist.

Drawing a line in the sand between "slash" and "gen" erases the fact that many of us live our daily lives aware of our identities and experiences as queer or genderqueer people. It's not something we only think about when we're falling in love, getting our hearts broken, or getting off. And we, like the queer and genderqueer characters we write, are done being told we can't come to your fan awards, your workplace chili cook-off, your seminary, or your transcontinental backpacking trip. So we're throwing our own, because we're tired of waiting for you to figure out we're the best shortstop who lives on your block.

There's a lot of details I still need to figure out. I'll probably need some advice on how to make this a really good party, and maybe some help getting it up and off the ground.

- I'll probably put up a few discussion posts, to help generate ideas for how to structure this festival or come up with prompts for those who want them, but I'm not planning on hosting intense debate or discussion here. That's already happening elsewhere, and frankly, I'm personally just not looking for it. I'm going with the premise that queer and genderqueer characters are just as welcome in gen fanworks as straight characters. If you want to argue about it, I respectfully ask that you choose another forum to do so.

- There are mirror communities on LJ and Dreamwidth. They probably won't be fully redundant, and I'm working on a good weigh to report the activities at the primary community on the secondary community.

- The type of fanworks and time frame will be relatively unstructured and as inclusive as possible. I'd like everyone who's interested to be able to come play. If you've already got ideas, feel free to get cracking, because I'm pretty sure they'll be able to find a home here.

- What "gen" means for the purpose of this festival has yet to be determined. Please feel free to comment if you've got a definition you like.

Questions, comments, concerns, hell yeahs? Weigh in below.

Comments

For lack of more coherent thought at the moment...

[amadi]

Hell yeah!

[trouble]

Hell yeah!
*is queer at everyone*

[brewsternorth]

Found out about this through my friendsfriends on LJ - after reading thingswithwings' post, a very definite HELL YES over here.

[hazelhawthorne]

What a wonderful idea for a com!

[lady_ganesh]

This is brilliant!

[dine]

oh, how awesome! this community promises something I quite enjoy, but not-so-often come across - queer people living a daily life.

I'm fine with porn in fic, but it doesn't need to be the entire focus of a story. I know my life (and most everyone else I know) revolves more around daily chores, money worries, and family/friends than getting off sexually

[brewsternorth]

OK, hope this is a pertinent question: will original fic be permitted too, or only transformative/fanworks?

[fiercelydreamed]

That's a very pertinent question! I hadn't given it a lot of thought, but my immediate reaction is that I can't imagine any benefit to excluding original works. (I'm generally not that fond of exclusion.) So I'm going to say, bring it on, because I can't imagine why we'd be better off for having fewer queer-conscious stories to read, you know? I'll adjust the comm description and post to reflect this later tonight.

Thanks for bringing it up!

[kindkit]

Very cool idea.

I have a question: is this only for characters who are LGBT in canon? Because that would limit the options quite a bit, sadly. I suppose technically one could argue that writing characters as LGBT when they're not shown to be in canon is slash, but I think it's possible to write such stories in a gen (i.e., not focused on romance/sex) sort of way.

[fiercelydreamed]

Oh, no, not at all. For the purposes of this festival, it only matters that the characters be queer or genderqueer within that story. I'm really not interested in anyone policing whether fictional characters are "actually" a given orientation or gender. Differences in interpretation is what makes fanfic fun!

[cleo]

Rock on!

[akte]

*jumps on board* I'm in!

[sqbr]

I think this is an awesome idea.

I don't know if it'll be helpful in figuring out what stories do and don't count, but a while ago I made a poll trying to map the edges of gen partly to poke at some of the heteronormative assumptions people make.

[fiercelydreamed]

Thanks for the link! Some interesting patterns there -- I noticed the people who replied had a stronger double-standard for canon/non-canon than for slash/het.

[executrix]

I'm in! Although...queer for dentists? THAT'S JUST SICK.

My quetion is, will there be an Archive section for stories (or links to stories) we've already written, or does everything have to be New For the Fest?

[fiercelydreamed]

Oooh, excellent question. Part of my thought with this comm is that it'll be a resource for people looking for this kind of work, so at the very least I think a post where people can comment with links to older works would be in order. Thanks for bringing this up.

[wintercreek]

This is a super idea! Re: prompts - I have a whole passle of unused multi-fandom (and some with no fandom specified) prompts which could be used by anyone looking for inspiration for a fic over here. Er, please forgive the overt heterosexuality of the theme of that post. But the prompts are all gen/flexibly interpretable, so perhaps they could be useful.

[lomedet]

::bounces. queerly::

This is *such* an awesome idea.

[telesilla]

Such a great idea! *pimps it like whoa*

[queenbarwench]

And we're gay at (and quite possibly for) the dentist. Heh! You could be right - my dentist is very pretty.

[akte]

My pretty dentist with a sexy scottish accent made it easy to not notice the shoddy dentistry, which landed me with a root canal a year later.

So yeah...I'm very gay for the dentist ;)

[eruthros]

This is awesome. I look forward to it a lot!

[hily]

I love you. This is fantastic.

[theleaveswant]

I'm really not trying to kick over an anthill because I think the idea is fantastic and I'm giddy-eager to participate, but I would like to provoke a little more contemplation of what exactly we're doing when we set boundaries to decide who is and isn't queer.

amadi's reply to angevin's reply to executrix above raises a practice vs. identity question with regard to kink and, more subtly, to queer, and a definitional question about how what kinds of non-normative sexualities are included or excluded from the giant rainbow umbrella of Queer. Sure, for many people kink, especially BDSM and fetish, is "confined to the bedroom", something only done for the purposes of turning on and getting off, but (perhaps unfortunately) so is same-gender sex for many people who do not or cannot identify as queer. But there are also BDSM practioners, fetishists, furries, and poly people who do accept or embrace non-normative sexualities as identities--who are kinky on the subway or while ordering vegetarian pad thai in restaurants--and who view ourselves as or ally ourselves with queer activists because we do experience oppression because of our sexualities. I'm not demanding that every possible alternative sexuality be accepted in this challenge/community, that's not and doesn't have to be the mandate; a focus on the fields of sexual and gender minorities discussed in the very eloquent post above is already a wonderful, radical, necessary move. I just want to draw attention to where the lines of power get reinscribed when you fence off boundaries of queerness.

[theleaveswant]

Practitioners. I do know how to spell. And I'm basically asking whether when I get together with one group of mostly bi, poly and kinky friends to knit or cook and watch movies or with another to sing folk songs and learn how to spin poi, have I somehow crossed an invisible railroad track out of gendom just because on other occasions when I get together with the same friends there might be rope or spanking?

[amalnahurriyeh]

This is totally excellent. And I don't write enough gen.

(And just a quick thought: will you be making clear which comm [LJ/DW] will be primary? Because I can follow it both/either place, but knowing which one is primary will make my addled-ness less.)

[fiercelydreamed]

Official post going up soon, but this'll be the primary comm, LJ the mirror.

[xavie]

What a great idea! Thank you for creating this!

[stultiloquentia]

Woohoo! Dropped a link on fandomcalendar.

[firefly124]

This is an absolutely excellent idea!

[turlough]

I'm not a writer but before I pimp this to my reading list I need to know if RPS is going to be allowed in the festivities too? I know you say you want to keep things as inclusive as possible but since there are still people who have Views about RPF I thought it was best to ask :-)

[fiercelydreamed]

I had no plans to exclude RPF from the festival. I respect that some people aren't comfortable with RPF, and they're welcome not to read/view any RPF works posted here.

[quinara]

This sounds fabulous!! (As long as asexual people can come too - they can, right?? We're almost automatically gen!) I'm also trying to work out if lumping in queer OCs with straight canon characters is OK?

[fiercelydreamed]

Asexuals more than welcome to come join the party! And queer OCs with straight canon characters is just fine.