cimorene

melannen has collected data from various polls in different parts of fandom on the percentages identifying as queer, which range from 30-something to 70-something percent.

Science, y'all.

It's science, but this is not representative statistics. Sampling would be fairly impossible in online fandom, when even defining where to look for data is hard enough. That doesn't mean you can't get any information from the polls, of course, it just means you can't know how representative the data is of fandom as a whole. This doesn't show that between 30 and 70 percent of "slash Fandom" is queer, but it does show that in easily specifiable subsets of fandom spaces, significant minorities (samples of the individual polls are too small to be extremely precise for the smaller social networks they represent), or even majorities, are queer. And that is still enough to say that that tired old chestnut that slash is "mostly" by and for straight women is, at best, questionable and representative of only certain parts of fandom. When the demographics of fandom sub-groups vary so widely from each other, is it even appropriate to make any generalizations about (slash) fandom as a whole?

bluflamingo: Not all of us write m/m, or f/f fic because we think it's hot. Some of us write it because in our world, people are gay, and since we're not going to see gay space explorers or gay marines or gay FBI agents on our tv screens any time soon, we have to write it ourselves, so we do.

maryaminx: See, for me, being gay isn't just about how I prefer boobs over penis. It's how I see relationships. It's how I relate to everyone around me, how I lost friends when I was eleven and didn't know what the hell was going on, how I see myself and my future. [...] So to read slash, to see other gay people come together in relationships portrayed as normal, as good, was invaluable.

linkspam's GLBTQ tag