fannish babbling

1. I am seriously starting to wonder if I did something horribly wrong with my last couple fics, since no one appears to have anything to say about them :/ My egocentric "pity me" whining, let me show you it.

2. I've been pretty closely following this post about "stage gay" in phaballa's lj (I link this with an official statement: she's pretty clearly sick and tired and fed up with the massive wave of unexpected comments, so keep that in mind before commenting :) ), and I'm having a horrible time collecting my thoughts.

It bothers me when people fake being gay to get attention. I've always, always hated it, with men and women alike. My sexual orientation isn't a publicity stunt, and it pisses me the Hell off that people will use it like that. And not only that, but to hold on to that safety net of being able to point to their happy heteronormative life and then get APPLAUDED for their attention stunts.

I'm not, by the way, talking about just-between-friends affection, but outright sexual imagery.

I'm not saying you have to be "out and proud" to mess around with the same sex. Experimenting is fine, great, awesome; being confused is way less awesome but still totally fine. Deliberately skirting the issue or avoiding the questions to keep from admitting one way or the other? Not fucking cool. And maybe it's different because they're friends, whatever.

But teaching anyone that it's okay to be deliberately opaque and vague and misleading about it IS. NOT. COOL. It is never, EVER okay to mislead someone who may be making an emotional investment. Ever.

And that's what I worry about. I worry about people seeing a guy making out with boys, being obtuse about his actual orientation, and only having serious relationships with women and thinking that it's okay to fool around with whoever you want with no disclosure.

THAT is where my problem lies, the lack of disclosure. Be experimenting, be confused, be bisexual, but SAY THAT. Don't play around at being gay and then run back to your happy heteronormative life.

I'm not talking about anyone specific, btw, before any fangirls hop on my case. I'm talking about a culture and movement in general, a culture where it's becoming more and more okay to play around and leave people who didn't know it was a game really fucked over.

One more thing that struck me in the comments to that post: the flat-out denial of the presence of marketing amuses me so much. Maybe it's because I'm so used to JBJ who is so clearly a marketing scheme unto himself, but...for serious. Marketing exists and your favorite emo bands have marketing schemes and yeah, some of them WILL extend offstage.

And no matter how closely you follow a band? You have no idea what their actual motives and thoughts are. Interviews and such are STILL part of the public persona - of course Gerard Way is gonna be all "Rah Rah Gay People Rule! Homophobia is bad!"in interviews, because they're PUBLIC.

Of course, unless he's actively perpetuating homophobia in his actual private life, he can lie about that all he wants :)

ETA: silicondreams and I just had a pretty awesome conversation about this:

( 10:31:34 PM heavvymetal_queen (Lia): oooh man, that post on 'playing gay' is making me feel sooooo shallow )