Cimorene

I've been reading Stranger Things fanfiction the past few weeks, as previously mentioned. Season 4 is set in spring 1986, when I was four years old and temporarily in Toronto (between New Orleans, where I was born, and a few months in the Kansas City area with my maternal clan while my dad was jobhunting).

So of course, I remember the 1980s, although not quite as well as someone who was 11-20 like the main cast of Stranger Things are at the time. (waxjism was 10 in 1986, but she's also Finnish). Most of my memories up until about 1989 are a bit vaguer and spottier, but the era was still the recent past (and the setting of a huge quantity of children's and YA books and movies I read as a preteen) in the more vivid part of my childhood. Just... that's the nostalgia context for this post, I guess. (And I know the likelihood that anybody reading my journal DOESN'T remember the 1980s is slim, but... you know.)

Because most of the people writing Stranger Things fanfiction right now are absolutely tiny BABIES, obviously, in comparison, and it's really easy to tell because the fashion in fandoms right now is mostly to not use a beta and to loudly talk about that and about everything else in their authors' notes, bless their hearts*.

This fandom actually isn't as bad as I might have expected at first, though, based on the egregious violations of google/wiki-availability, logic, and cultural literacy to be found in most historical fandoms when research and betas aren't involved (and I mean even mid-20th century historical fandoms here too, not just the Victorian and Age of Sail stuff). Perhaps it's because it's just one generation away - and because of the current popular wave of 80s nostalgia and pop culture artifacts?

• Phones. Corded phones and period-appropriate cordlesses seem to be pretty well covered! There's lots of adorable lingering on physical description of the phones, as they're obviously exotic to the writer the way they wouldn't be to the character, like 'placing the beige plastic phone back on the wall' style stuff. However, there's also lots of calling people on these corded phones in the middle of the night, and that's not something teengers could get away with. Only rich kids (Steve, and Max in season 3 and earlier) have their own phone extensions in their rooms - that is, a separate phone number just for them. Otherwise, when the phone rang, every phone in your house would ring, so if you called your friend in the middle of the night you'd wake up their parents. (Unless their parents are absent or at work, which applies to Steve and Eddie generally, but not to the other kids.)



• Answering machines! Answering machines seem pretty unknown to this fandom. I haven't seen a single appearance of an answering machine. I have seen voicemail, which was a business-only phenomenon at the time. Guaranteed, absolutely, none of the families in Stranger Things have voicemail at their houses. They kind of fulfill the same purpose, but the answering machine has a miniature cassette tape in it and you can play back the messages, rewind, and then eventually overwrite them of course.



• Not everybody had VCRs in 1986, but it's probably fair enough to assume all the families in Stranger Things do.



• Almost nobody had CDs in 1986. I've seen them make a few probably-accidental dubious appearances. Rich people DID have them, though, so Steve's parents having a big stereo that plays them is perfectly correct. We didn't get our first CD player until 1993, and most of my bourgeois-er friends had them a couple years before.



• Jeans! There's so much wrong about jeans. First of all, "skinny jeans" is modern jeans jargon. Jeans in the 80s weren't "skinny", they were just tight. Furthermore, tight jeans in the 1980s were nothing like modern skinny jeans, because stretch jeans didn't exist. The first stretch jeans spreading through jeans-stores in the mall were in the late 90s (and they initially had a lot less spandex than now - more like 1%). Jeans were 100% cotton in the 1980s. Pure cotton jeans will stretch, but they stretch with wear (heat, moisture, and pressure). People did all kinds of tricks to get into tight jeans - when my mom was in high school in the 1970s, all the girls would lie on the floor after gym class to suck their stomachs in enough to button the high-waisted jeans. Wax tells me that in the 80s punks and scene people would put jeans on in a bathtub full of water in order to let the water stretch them out and then let them dry on their legs (this sounds extreme and I'd never heard of it though). And the end result of that didn't look like modern "skinny jeans", because the fabric just... wasn't stretchy. There was more give. There were more wrinkles. And it was more likely to tear or split. Also, if you look at Stranger Things, nobody has tight jeans: Eddie's jeans are ordinary Levi's, probably 501s, just like Steve's, and they're not tight. Which is pretty standard. Tight jeans were not a requirement or even all that common for metalheads in the 80s. Also I have to assume the access to scene styles is a little lower out in rural Indiana than it might be in a big city.



• Safe sex: Safe sex has been pretty popular in fanfiction - that is, conversations about consent and condom and lube use and prep have all been pretty common - for more than a decade. A lot of this probably resulted from a sort of cultural reaction to the unrealistic portrayals of gay sex in early slash, which provoked a lot of discourse and some heated battles. But part of it also resulted from a general higher awareness of safe sex, culturally. Condoms existed hundreds of years ago, yeah, and there was some historical awareness of the sexual spread of some diseases, but the idea of "safe sex" - the discourse of "safe sex" - is pretty much a post-AIDS-epidemic phenomenon. Not entirely: there was also a huge fight for birth control and pregnancy prevention awareness, and that played a huge role!
  
  But basically, the reason the AIDS epidemic was such a big epidemic, and so deadly, was that all the sex people were having WASN'T safe. At the beginning of the epidemic, it wasn't known how it was spreading. As it continued to spread, the idea of a gay disease (religious undertones) got a lot of cultural weight, but the government continued to do nothing, and that includes nothing about public health or sex education. As gay men started increasingly using condoms to protect themselves, the education was spreading within the community. People who had sex with men AND women spread HIV outside the gay community because safe sex wasn't particularly popular in either situation. The idea of an "STD panel" of multiple tests all at once came later - the encouragement for everyone (and not just gay guys) to get these tests came later too. All this is to say that I appreciate that there's typically a higher than average rate of condom usage in this fandom, mostly without discussing AIDS, because that would understandably open up an unwelcome can of worms. I can buy this, although it should be noted that Steve having a concept of condoms as anything other than birth control is vanishingly unlikely. Eddie is often written as having contact with some form of gay community in this fanon, which is like... I don't think super likely actually, but it's possible, he has a car, there are cities... I can buy it.
  
  And all this is to say that the multi-fandom popularity of a conversation about safe sex where two people agree to forego condoms for romantic reasons because they both know that they're "clean"? Nope. No way. They don't know. They have no way to know that. They might assume it if they're both virgins, but otherwise... no. You would only know this if you had been specifically exposed to the risk of HIV and been tested as a result. That's not impossible for someone in an urban gay subculture, but... for a poor teenager in a rural area? HOW? There are no clinics. There are doctors' offices. You have to have health insurance, or you have to pay out of pocket; you have to call for an appointment.

 



*I'm not actually southern, so "bless their hearts" is not part of my native dialect. My dialect doesn't have an expression that fits the circumstances this perfectly, though.

I was looking for more award-winning murder mysteries, trying to find new authors I like again. This time I accidentally ended up reading two novels written in 1990 and set in Spain in 1990, just like... by accident.

The funniest part of them was definitely the detailed descriptions of what people were wearing.

But aside from that, we have GIANT HOMOPHOBIA YIKES FAIL in one and an interesting lesbian novel with a window back into 1990 queer politics in the other.

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte was originally Spanish, and I read it in translation. The mystery revolves around a medieval painting by one of the Dutch masters and the protagonist is an art restorer, and the book is art and antiquities dealing and art restoration, medieval history, and chess. In spite of some of those "Oh I see a man wrote this female POV" moments - several were a bit eyerolly but none were too offensive - and a few more moments where I failed to believe the heroine was being so dumb, this book and its plot was just a lot more fun and engaging. It would be hard to find a setting/context more exciting and interesting to me, though - this one combines several of my areas of interest without any of the specific things that I know more about, so the stuff was recognizable and interesting but not things I already knew. As a result, up until the end twist and the solution, I was enjoying this book HUGELY. The problem is that the solution was ( offensively homophobic and also sexist and also just yikes, and also stupid, in a way that was very Oh 1990 and also very Oh, that definitely was written in Spain yep )

Gaudí Afternoon by Barbara Wilson, on the other hand, is the first in a queer mystery series where the sleuth is a globe-trotting freelance translator and lesbian free spirit who can't stand to be tied down to a country, job, residence, or romantic relationship, and just has a lot of one-night stands and flings and exes around the world and stumbles into sleuthing by mistake when a friend of a friend offers her a lot of money to go to Barcelona with her and interpret while she tries to track down her estranged husband. This book has several trans characters in it, and being written in 1990, the terminology is different from how it is today, but the author and the protagonist are both well-meaning and accepting of it, but that isn't the case for all the characters. As a result the book is also full of Gender, but in a much more self-aware way, albeit nothing groundbreaking if you've engaged with queer and trans and gender issues before. Respectability politics and queer culture, drag and transvestites, shitty terf talking points, the meaning(s) of motherhood, the architecture of Gaudí, and some weird erotic foot massage show up, but one thing that does not show up is murder. I can't remember the last time I read a mystery that didn't have a murder: I was completely shocked by the absence here. Also, while the laidback meandering of the story was entertaining, it wasn't particularly mysterious in any other way either (though there were definitely things she didn't know as a result of people lying to her, and a kind of mission that had to do with stuff to find out and she did 'solve' the mystery - ie figure out what had been going on - but it was more like a melodramatic interpersonal situation she got caught up in with some exasperating people, less like a case she decided to pursue). I doubt I will read any more of this series. I recognize the realness of the bits of queer culture I'm seeing here, and particularly the narrator herself, who is of the same generation of lesbian as our tenant; and I'm fond of this character type, but I ultimately find it a bit bewildering and tough to empathize with as a protagonist, though I'd love to hang out with her and listen to her stories for hours and hours. Anyway, I could definitely happily recommend this book to lots of people who would probably love it - although trigger warning for the terf talking points and other scattered transphobic behavior from fictional characters, which isn't endorsed by the text or the protagonist but also isn't really told off the way you'd like it to be - but it still wasn't as fun or engaging at any point as the beginning of the horrible one.

I've reread a bunch of SGA fic in the last two days, and every time I'm reminded about Don't Ask Don't Tell and marriage inequality, I get a little jarring moment of 'WEIRD!' Even though I lived through that reality, and that fandom, and the concerns were contemporary at the time!

I was rereading Highlander a bit a couple of weeks ago, and it's set during the period where the AIDS crisis was a thing! (Not that it's relevant to the magically healing characters really, but I guess the movement to make a big deal about condoms & lube was gaining quite a bit of steam around the late 90s to make up for all the years where no lube or condoms in fic was the norm.) Now I'm thinking... does the crisis make an appearance in Sentinel fic, where at least the characters are both human, or is it late enough (and AIDS enough of a downer) that it only appears indirectly, in the form of condom hygiene? I haven't reread a bunch of Sentinel fic in years.

Verizon, who recently bought Apple and then killed off a third of Tumblr's userbase by turning on a blunt and draconian anti-porn banbot, have now put Tumblr up for sale, so that's a good reminder to not post my thoughts there because who knows what will happen. This post was actually from April 26 and has a lot of notes, mostly people fleshing this out with anecdata. The best one was the person who tagged it "#stupid doo doo heads can't even queerbait right".

The funniest thing about this Magicians clusterfuck to me is that they didn’t even wait long enough between making the queer couple canon ( spoilers for the recently-aired season 4, although I'm betting with the current levels of buzz nobody could've missed it )

If anyone missed the context, cleolinda has written about it from inside the fandom on April 22, The Magicians S4 Finale Aired Five Days Ago And I'm Still Mad As Hell

... and the changes made to the gay (/bisexual) content when converting book to movie, in both directions:

...oh. Yes, I see. Well, I think it was well meant and the change to Guillam was all to the good, but... if they thought that a change from text into subtext wouldn't make any real difference to the meat of the story, I don't think I agree.

Wikipedia had failed to inform me that Peter Guillam (played by Cumberbatch) wasn't gay in the book! A deftly-chosen alteration that increased relevancy to the present while also enabling it to illuminate an issue that was quite a bit worse in the time it's set in. I admit, when I saw the publication date I was a bit surprised about that at first (but since his narrative ends in misery I figured it was still regressive... though more 80s-90s than 60s).

I went back to look at Wikipedia just to check, and there's no space dedicated to adaptational choices or differences or anything, even though the book and the movie both have their own articles and the book's has a subheading about the movie.

The book's Guillam has the same unconscious casual misogyny as the not-a-hero protagonist of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, I think, although we see that one form an attachment to a woman eventually while still being both completely awful and completely earnest (that might be where this is going too). This is obviously not sympathetic, but it's also obviously on purpose, because we can see what le Carré's ideas of not awful attitudes to women are elsewhere in his work. So while I'm not enjoying it, I can give him credit since it's what he was going for, like when someone does a successful job of making a food you don't like, or of painting something really disgusting. Like "Yep. That worked, that's doing what you wanted it to."

So far Guillam is a womanizer, which is even more tiresome than just basic misogyny, from my point of view. I mean, I'm still going to finish the book, but since that keeps putting me off it's definitely slowing me down. I might've just stayed up and finished it last night already if that weren't the case. (And also if in addition to not being offputting a character had actually been gay, I might've finished it days ago, since after I first picked it up I set it aside and read Full Fathom Five and about 100,000 words of fanfiction before coming back to it yesterday.)

Well, the Finnish gay movie with an immigrant dude wasn’t BAD, but it ( Read more... ) and was composed with ample portions of (a) ultimately unalleviated social awkwardness and second-hand embarrassment and (b) nudity. Not like porn - more like Queer as Folk style sex scenes. So ultimately it was very Finnish and no doubt exactly what its mumblecore-loving auteur was intending to create. Not exactly to my taste, but still within the range of movies that I had to see because of the gayness quotient, and as far as that goes, much more watchable than some.

It's called A Moment in the Reeds and is doing the festival circuit currently, and it's mostly in English, not Finnish - in fact they accidentally sent the festival reel instead of the one with Finnish subtitles on the English to our theater and so they had to go around personally apologizing to everyone and gave us coupons for free snacks to make up for it. Nice.

I liked it a lot more than I liked Love, Simon, which was also watchable but not to my taste, but (a) romantic comedies aren't just not to my taste, I actively loathe them, while secondhand embarrassment is just sort of medium-level not to my taste; and (b) Love, Simon, due to the nature of its plot, had moral and ethical issues that rendered some characters too unlikable for me.

I can't say I'm a fan of improvised naturalistic dialogue in general, but one plus to that was that the characters' non-fluent English was more realistic (hilariously or painfully so). There were a string of scenes near the beginning where I was laughing so hard I was worried about the noise and had to sit there covering my mouth preemptively for a while just in case.

And outside of all that, the out gay Syrian immigrant actor who is one of the leads is, of course, a Big Deal.

Wax's main fandom for a couple of months, in the sense of reblogging, following, and even voluntarily wading into the Tumblr-wide tag and actually reading the extremely distressing people being Wrong on the Internet therein, has been Call Me By Your Name.

We've been waiting for this movie forever, which is always the case with a gay movie of course. This one having a well-regarded book made it a bit special though.

She read the book ages ago and has been checking the tag and reading the articles and things since then; I myself didn't read it until before Christmas, but I then made pages of notes on it and then we had a lot of discussions about it. She's also been following every step of the publicity tour and every gifset and every miniature wankstorm because some people on Tumblr were offended that Armie Hammer's wife Elizabeth smoothed a piece of Timothée Chalamet's hair back on the red carpet and she read multiple posts of well-intentioned citizens futilely arguing with said offended Tumblrites.

She watched it last weekend without me, but I couldn't go because I had to get up at 5 am to take the government Finnish exam the next morning. We finally saw it together today, though! I liked it a lot (though my experience was somewhat spoiled by a person nearby wearing enough perfume that I had to watch with my scarf over my face and every time I took it down I started to choke again). I did cry at the end, which I hate to do in public, but at least it was a small theater full of gay people, so not too bad. I was thinking I didn't cry when I read it although just now I remembered that I actually did, but only a little bit. The book didn't have as many sad closeups of eyes glistening with tears. Anyway, I was intrigued and impressed by many of the directing choices and it was all pretty great. I will enjoy watching it again and making even more notes (yes of course I made notes).

I'm waiting with impatience for more people to see the movie so that (I hope) the fandom gets bigger. With fertile ground like the early 1980s as a setting, there are all kinds of fun things that could be done besides the obvious, which as far as I can tell has still only been done a little tiny bit so far (probably because the movie hasn't been out long enough).

~

Continuing with the related subject of Gay Shit:

And then after the movie the person in front of us stood up and said "HEY!" And we both just stared blankly for a minute until eventually I recognized Wax's old coworker Aki, the baby gay. We haven't seen him in YEARS.

I said "Oh shit, I didn't recognize you! You went from a twink to - well, not exactly a bear, but maybe... almost a bear cub? A beardy guy!" The cute, still-twinky man of color he was there with (but didn't introduce us to, that was weird) snorted.

Aki's greatest hits include:

• He grew up in a rural area and until Wax told him, he nonetheless believed that sheep and goats were the same species. He thought goats were the male sheep.



• After she'd known him for a few years he introduced a super cute tiny baby gay boyfriend to us who was an American and they had long-distance dated I think and the boyfriend was some kind of weird language genius who had taught himself Finnish from books, for fun, as a high school student, and wanted to come to Finland to study it. They were together and then the bf got depressed and moved back, and then Aki moved there to be with him and went to college in America, and then they broke up but continued to cohabit and Aki continued to go to school there.



• And he came back for Christmas there and met up with us and was talking about how they were still living together and then somewhere in the anecdote they were sharing a bedroom or a bed or something and we were like, "You're broken up but you're still sharing like an actual ROOM? Isn't that awkward?" And he was like, "What? No! Of course we didn't stop SLEEPING together. We're still having SEX, we're just not TOGETHER." Oh. Of course. (The gay man forgot he was talking to lesbians and the lesbians forgot we were talking to a gay guy there I guess? Culture clash!)



• One time we met up with them in town and were talking about watching a movie together and Aki was like, "But it can't be like last time, right? There won't be any laundry? Because the other time I was in your apartment, there was laundry, and I SAW BRAS." And we were like "What...? You... are afraid of bras?" And he was like "It's GROSS. BOOBS go in there." And his boyfriend agreed. (I still can't believe this is normal, even for gay men. Like... BOOBS... what's not to like?)

So that was a nice, fun, and surprising blast from the past. We haven't had any contact with him since he moved away from Turku to live in his hometown like 4? years ago or something? But he said he's moved back to town ages ago.

I was recently introduced to the Philo Vance detective stories of S.S. Van Dine by an article about how T.S. Eliot (I think?) was a fan of detective fiction. I was surprised to learn that these stories, written pseudonymously by literary critic and NYC cultural avant-garde elite W.H. Wright, were all bestsellers at the time of publication, but have since faded so far from modern cultural awareness that I'd never heard of them in spite of having been close to several big-time golden age detective fiction fans. (If you read them, you'd probably also begin to feel you understand why they haven't stood the test of time as well as ACD, Christie, and Sayers, but I haven't quite applied myself to articulating my speculation yet.)

These novels feature a genius sleuth and a narrator-biographer sidekick, are set when they were written, in the 1920s-30s, and in some ways seem to bridge gaps between the above-mentioned writers, and to exist in conversation with them, in a fandomy, remixy way. (I also detect playful dialogue flourishes reminiscent of PG Wodehouse, although I have to note regretfully that the narrator is never Jeevesy.) But... gayer? I mean, of course, that foundation is unquestionably there in the rest of the genre, but here an overwhelming homosociality of the main cast combines with a definite coded gayness for the sleuth.

Sleuth Philo Vance, fundamentally a mixture made of largely Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey (maybe a dash of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, not least because of how his narrating biographer is handled), is coded gay in that early-20th-century asexual way. It's introduced with a pointed comment about a green carnation in the first scene with dialogue in the first novel, but never becomes actually relevant to the plot. He would read as asexual otherwise, but it isn't belabored or emphasized in contrast to anyone else, the way ACD did with Holmes, or Christie did with Poirot; it's just that sexuality would have been a complete non-issue if not for the green carnation remark and later, subtler hints. (Although ( spoiler ))

And though I don't discern any coding in their characters, his entire cast of regulars - or trio of backup singers, you might say - are also bachelors, evidently leading existences free of any assumptions of heterosexuality and heteronormativity. The author-narrator, S.S. Van Dine, referred to casually as "Van" by Vance, is his live-in man of business or secretary or personal assistant, a lawyer by trade whom he picked up when they were together at Princeton, but who is now devoted full-time to his correspondence, financial affairs, and art collections.

Their connection to the world of police is through district attorney Markham and homicide detective Sergeant Heath. Markham is typically present with the narrator and Vance, either at home or dining out, for what seems like one meal in three and a portion of every day, even when they are at leisure, and the readers are treated to the narrator waxing poetic about the dynamics of Markham and Vance's relationship, history, feelings for each other, and the nature of their banter, which he seems to find mysterious or ineffable at times.

Heath is a friendly and respectful subordinate of Markham's and shares with him the role of unimaginative policemen who want to pursue the wrong suspect or clue and have to have everything explained to them by the genius, but they're also both friendly with Vance. Heath doesn't hang around with them in his off-hours, but he's still what one might call a Bachelor's Bachelor.

The upshot is a highly homosocial cast that I think would make a great candidate for an update into a modern queer female foursome. (They wouldn't really need to be solving mysteries: as mysteries go these are not remotely realistic anyway.) (Yes, this was one of those shower thoughts that starts with "Wouldn't I like X better if all the characters were female?" I don't know why I have this conversation with myself so much, because the answer is always yes, but imagining it is always fun anyway I guess.)

Just picture this:

1. The sybaritic gastronome genius classical translator, art historian and collector, unarmed fighter and dog breeder, a sharp-dressing perfectionist diva who makes a point of delivering all her genius statements as if she couldn't care less, when in fact she feels a deep empathy for everyone that she covers up with coolness. A huge vocabulary, excitable tangents about art, history, and cool science stuff that sounds like it comes from an encyclopedia, a tendency to occasionally quote literature in a foreign language and then pretend not to hear when people try to ask her wtf she's talking about.

2. The narrator of the books is so transparent you often forget he's there, so it's hard to tease out a characterization. But that mystique could be played with interestingly, like maybe the character could be a long-distance bff who is in communication via texts and Skype.

3. The genius's older, tolerant friend who is serious to a fault and acts like putting up with the tangents and flights of fancy is a chore, but secretly finds them charming, and also will always melt at any direct request. Responsible, busy, on time, could be conquering the entire world one-handed off-screen. Is getting gray hairs. Always protests that she's busy, but then the genius is like "But this new restaurant has KILLER (esoteric dish) that I want to feed you," and she's like, "Okay." Says things like, "It sounds like you can handle things," and then goes along anyway just because the genius wanted an audience for her brilliance. Obediently provides the appropriate straight-man line whenever needed, and also instantly and commandingly takes charge of any situation and/or group of people with sheer force of charisma.

4. Brash, confident, likable lady who is presentable but insists on dressing comfortably and less formally. Has been doing her job competently a while and knows everybody in the field, and is friendly with them. Great at delegation. Stubborn, never afraid of an exhausting, difficult or tedious task, patient. Has a fairly optimistic outlook and is fond of one-liners and snarky asides. Prone to getting fired with frustrated righteous anger; yells about it until requested to please tone it down because her vigor is exhausting. Literally always falls for (practical) jokes: will fall for anything. Has probably been flicked on the nose after looking down when asked "What's that on your shirt" hundreds, if not thousands of times.