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.

[cleo]

Rock on!

[akte]

*jumps on board* I'm in!

[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!

[kindkit]

Cool! And thanks for the quick response.

[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.

[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.

[angevin]

Well, if anyone writes Little Shop of Horrors it's basically canon.

[lomedet]

::bounces. queerly::

This is *such* an awesome idea.

[telesilla]

Such a great idea! *pimps it like whoa*

[amadi]

That's not just queer for the dentist, it's queer and kinky for the dentist. So not quite gen. ; )

[queenbarwench]

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

[eruthros]

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

[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 ;)

[hily]

I love you. This is fantastic.