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Article about how slash has helped how gays are viewed by society.

Likewise, the popularity of slash also surely played a big role in the break-out success of 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, which quickly found a massive and enthusiastic female audience. 2008’s Milk didn’t find that same break-out success, but maybe that’s partly because the latter film wasn’t as good a fit for an audience primed on slashfic, which often features doomed and tragic gay male love.

Um, he didn't notice all the fans who were like "Yeah, it's a good story but WHY THE CRUEL STEREOTYPICAL ENDING??!!" Eor's theory is that the younger fans produce more fic because they have more time to write (high school and college) and they're more into the angst, therefore people reading think ALL women love angst.

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. . . Huh. That's a really interesting article, but I don't think it's necessarily true. I think slash and the popularity of gay movies are both phenomenons that are symptomatic gay men being more culturally acceptable/culturally interesting to people, just in general.

Oh, lord, another outsider's view of slash. Or possibly an insider trying to present an outsider's view to people who just have no clue about slash.

I sort of feel about this stuff like I felt about earthquakes, growing up: when you're a kid in SoCal, you get told that someday there will be The Big One, the catastrophic quake that makes the state fall into the ocean, or at least makes you need your emergency backpack. But in the meantime, you encounter actual earthquakes and go, "Eh, I give it about a 4.5 on the Richter scale - nothing to get out of bed for."

I always feel like there's going to be a Big One of mainstream media discovering slash fandom and going apeshit. But in the meantime, there are all these little tremors that are more annoying than anything else, though you have to figure that they come as a complete shock to some poor innocent out there.

On the other hand, maybe they're just more like the articles that get published every year before San Diego Comic Con, going, "Breaking news! There are lots of geeks out there! LOTS! Some are even female! Some are even ATTRACTIVE females! Who woulda thunk it, right?!" IDEK.

I would've thought Milk didn't find that same popularity with the slashers because the lead wasn't uber-hot. On a brutally honest level, the hotter the guys you cast as leads, the more likely it'll get a slash following.

I thought both Milk and Brokeback were very high quality movies regardless of slash, though.

Mmmm I think one has also to consider that the novella had been hugely popular among slashers beforehand, one of those Psst! SlashInnaRealBook-Pass It On things that people went out of their way to hunt down and let other slashers know about... at least that's how it seemed to me. (Guess what everyone got for their birthday that year :) IIRC there was a guaranteed (and invested) slasher audience rooting for someone to pick up the rights way before the actual film was made. I don't recall having seen a lot of fic before the film - but that wouldn't necessarily surprise me, largely because a lot of us were so wowed out that here was an "us" sort of story, in print, and well received respectable print at that.

I agree, though, that the movie and its casting got a lot of actual ficcers into the fold :) and are probably responsible for a good 90% of the slash out there. It's always harder to slash a literary text than a visual one, IMHO, because questions of authorial voice become so central to what you're doing - movies, you don't have to worry (not that the often young(er) writers who are driven primarily by hotness tend to bother with that sort of thing, IME, but logically there must be exceptions).

and are probably responsible for a good 90% of the slash out there.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of - not that it was the *only* reason for people to slash BBM (I'm a fan of the novella myself), but that it was probably the most widespread one.

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