I’ve been reading Supernatural fanfiction for a while now. When I first started, I didn’t know anything about fanfiction and the people who write it. I started by looking at m/m (male/male) romance and eventually found my way to Destiel slash (Dean/Castiel). I love Dean and Cas as a gay/bi couple especially because the TV show on which this pairing is based got so close to making them a canonical couple, stopping just short, and leaving the rest to the fan’s imagination at the ending of the show’s 15-year run. I hated and felt traumatized by the show’s finale (I wrote about that in a different post), and made my own ongoing attempts to write my version of the end of the show.
In investigating m/m romances and slash fiction, I discovered that it’s mostly written by women, not gay men. Some gay men write m/m romance, but the field is completely dominated by women writers, both the formally published m/m romance and unofficial slash fanfiction, including Destiel fanfiction. I discovered that the closely related genres of m/m romance and slash fanfiction were essentially created by women writers for women audiences. Gay men had very little to do with them. In fact, gay men produced a separate genre of fiction all their own that had little to do with what women were writing. Gay male fiction has a long tradition in its own right and grows out of literary fiction. Whereas, m/m romance grew out of slash fanfiction and has become a full-fledged sub-genre of traditional romance with all of its tropes. It’s important to make a distinction between m/m romance and gay male fiction. Failure to do so will lead to a lot of confusion on the part of readers, and anger and resentment between women and gay men over who has the right to speak and write on behalf of gay men.
The dominance of women in reading and writing m/m fanfiction is demonstrated in the Fansplaining Shipping Survey (conducted in April 2019) that focused primarily on m/m slash fans. Of the respondents, 72% identified themselves as female, whereas only 9% identified as male and another 9% as transgender. Respondents were allowed to select multiple categories, of those categories, 21% identified themselves as non-binary/genderqueer and only 20% identified as cisgender. It seems reasonable to conclude from these numbers that the vast majority of m/m slash fans are women, and of those women, they are generally evenly divided between women who identify as cisgender and those who identify as non-binary/genderqueer.
When it comes to sexuality (presuming that the vast majority of respondents are women) 43% identify as Bi/pan and 24% as queer. Only 13% identified as gay (I’m presuming that most of the men in the survey will probably fall into this category). Like with gender, respondents were allowed to select from multiple categories. Of the remainder, 19% identified themselves as straight and interesting 29% identified as asexual. What is most notable here is that of the women who make up so much of the m/m slash fanbase, the majority of them don’t identify as heterosexual and a sizeable minority identify as asexual. Women who do not identify themselves with traditional gender classifications make up a substantial portion of the m/m fanbase. (more…)
c. e. hammock 