SlashLit: When Geeks Get Sexy

I had the fortune/misfortune in high school to be half-geek/half-popular. Where I'm from, it's the popular kids who are sexy (read: "sexual," but I didn't know that then) and the geeks who are, well, gamers. That is, while the cool kids were out drinking and fighting and having sex, the geeks were taking part in role-playing games and reading Anne Rice/Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy/graphic novels. Which is not to say that these "geeks" weren't also drinking and fighting and having sex, they were just doing all that stuff while engaging in a rich fantasy life, and when time permitted, academic studies. These are the people who created and populated the world of "Slash," or "/": a subculture of fan fiction, or "Fan Fic" -- stories written by fans.

For those of you who have extensively browsed the Internet but somehow missed this genre, it's a subculture of its own. You might even have seen it and not known what you were looking at. It's both geeky and sexy, and sometimes very smart, and more than occasionally X-rated. "Slash" was derived from the slash mark used in referring to a story involving two characters -- like "Kirk/Spock" -- and is usually subdivided into sections according to the characters that are involved. Slash is written with characters from well-known network televison shows or movies that already have a cult following -- ranging from the notoriously fanatical and geeky tribes of Star Trek (all offshoots, all eras) to the conspiracy-touting "X-philes" (as they often refer to themselves) to culty, dykey Xena, to the shiny, wholesome Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- and everything in between. I've seen slash for the Cure, Smokey and the Bandit, The Lone Ranger, Laverne and Shirley, the Backstreet Boys, The Odd Couple, and the long-canceled Saturday-morning cartoon, The Real Ghostbusters.

Slash stories are, by definition, gay, which is to say they all feature a romantic or sexual relationship between two characters of the same sex. Although I'm sure there are exceptions I'm unaware of, these couples are rarely, if ever, coupled romantically, or even favorably on the actual show or movies themselves, so their interactions are wholly invented by the writer. If the stories are about a het couple, they fall into the Fan Fic category. For example, Mulder/Scully Romance (referred to as MSR -- these fans like to abbreviate everything!). There are hundreds of stories about Mulder and Scully getting it on in their own terse, dramatic way, sometimes with Scully as dominatrix. But not in Slash. In Slash fiction, you might read about Scully and Xena the Warrior Princess devouring each other hungrily, in a story-type known as "crossover" slash (which spans shows, networks, and decades). A hugely popular archive of stories involves the psychologically dependent Mulder/Krycek Romance, which, like some Slash, incorporates one of the characters getting hurt (emotionally, physically, sexually) while the other offers comfort. Another common theme is sex as a method of revenge, or as gratification with ulterior motives. Did I mention that Slash is written almost exclusively by women?

This genre takes itself VERY seriously. An offshoot of Fan Fic, it's kind of the Trashy/Queer Romance Novel Quadrant of the Geek Fiction Galaxy. There are hundreds and hundreds of Web sites with full-to-bursting archives of stories that are often illustrated, rated, and categorized for your reading pleasure. There are well-known authors, published fanzines, conventions, newsgroups, and chat rooms. There is a story for every kink, a fable for every double entendre uttered on the real show, and several endings for every cliff hanger.

Some Slash goes completely over the top, like this Mulder/Skinner/ Krycek polyamorous novel by Jo B. Here is a love scene from Book 4 of a series that seems to have culminated in Mulder's pregnancy: