LGBTFest thoughts

The lgbtfest is up and running, and it's where I'll spend a lot of my fic-reading hours, for the next weeks. I love this fest, I wait for it every year, I've been reading from the beginning, and I wrote two stories last year, and will be putting up one this year as well. I flatter myself that my stories aren't half bad, though perhaps they are, and certainly they aren't anywhere near as brilliant as some of the fic that comes out of this fest. Which is all to the good, which means I can wallow in great fic, and save them to my hard-drive and bookmark them, and send links to everyone online.

The lgbtfest is a huge deal for me, always. I came into fandom at thirteen, though at the time I only read, and wrote stories in my diary to show my friends. My first proper fic was Sirius/Lily, but that didn't last, it became Sirius/Remus, then Sirius/James in huge, drawn-out rp with my classmates, crouched on a bed one vacation, talking, talking, making them the masks we could don to sort out our own problems. My ex was one of the people I played with, and we were Padfoot and Prongs before we were actually a couple, and even during, and even now it's easier to think of Padfoot than to think of G. It isn't that I transferred my life to the characters, not that, never that, my life is too boring and I like story-weaving far too much. But it helped, certainly, especially since I was so sure that Sirius was queer, and not even really trying to pass, but passing simply because he wasn't obviously gay: he wasn't effeminate, he didn't swish.

It was a big deal, the way Willow was this amazing person to me, because she was a geek, and she read, and she was a witch, and she had a girlfriend. It was a big fuckling deal, because seven, eight, ten years ago, when I was groping towards a knowledge of myself, there were no role-models, there were no Bollywood movies that included queer characters, not even just for a laugh, and I wasn't old enough to read queer literature, not yet, not then. I bought and read the Iliad when I was twelve years old, and that was another of my fallbacks. My kid sister's growing up in a culture that's grown, if not tolerant of, at least with the idea of homosexuality, and I am happy that she has, that she can name, if pushed, so many 'real' people who are queer, where I had books with oblique references. If you can't fix it, to quote Ennis del Mar, you gotta bear it, and I've borne it silently, all this while, though there’s something wrong with Caliban. Is it her shape? Is it her size?

I'd always thought I wanted to be the hero, and rescue the princess, but my queer rolemodels are Hephaistion and Patroklos, and my female rolemodels are Clytemnestra and Pramila and Draupadi and Medea. I love strong women, but I've not really read much or any lesbian lit, which is sad, and my fault, sure, but I'm a slasher, and pretty boys go well with pretty boys, and writing women together would be cutting too close to the bone. My lgbtfest story this year was going to be a Padma Patil story, but ended up being about Blaise Zabini, who I love, certainly, but who's male and black and British, and writing whom does not involve cutting pieces out of my self, which writing Padma apparently does.

But all of this sounds too drear, and that's stupid, really, because the lgbtfest always fills me with this low-level joy, because this is about me, and people like me, and people unlike me who I can still connect with and think of an analogue to, and though I know 'real' people who are queer, for me the best people are people in books and films, still and always, and my friend Zephyrus will never fill me with the same glee that Ralph Ross Lanyon or Izzie&Ruth or even Bunny or Clive will, simply by the very fact of existing, of being in print, and reel, and on my computer and on the silver-screen. I've been reading A Song of Ice and Fire, and I was angry, at first, that Renly/Loras was being brushed under the carpet where Jaime/Cersei was not, but then I realised that Ned/Catelyn was being as easily (dis)regarded, and nobody was paying much attention to the gay couple because it was normal, and then I was practically jumping around, I was so happy.

And that's what the lgbtfest happiness is, that someone wrote queer characters, (or didn't write queer characters) and fen care enough about them to craft stories for them that are real, and hard-hitting, and wonderful, and despairing, and reduce me to tears and hysterics and unreasoned laughter. Thank you.