A Life-Changing Fandom: A Reminiscence
As long as I had even one episode of QAF unseen, I stayed away from all Queer As Folk-related web sites. I hate to be Spoiled, and after the horrific ending of S1, I knew that there was always the possibility.... So I stayed clear. Then I watched Brian tell Justin that he wanted, "Your drawers in my drawers," and all bets were off.
Oh, I'd cheated a little before that. I went on IMDb and read everything I could find there, I Googled Queer As Folk, I Googled Gale Harold, but I never clicked on a link. I knew there was a fandom out there, I knew I'd love you all, I was sure I'd be sucked in and you all would eat up whatever life I had left, because I'd been in another fandom. I was experienced.
When Jill and I read "Stalky and Co.," we tried to create a fandom, but we didn't know what we were doing and the main tool...the internet...was almost half a century away. Besides, Rudyard Kipling was dead. Our fandom stalled at two.
When I read Dorothy Dunnett twenty years later, she was very much alive, so I wrote her. She put me in touch with two other readers. The three of us wrote each other obsessively, but it remained a fandom of three until the 1980's, when some fans in Chicago started to publish a quarterly letterzine. From the letterzine grew a meeting of about 200 readers in Edinburgh, complete with tours of Dunnett sites and talks by experts on the Renaissance and from Dorothy herself. Many Dunnett readers are techies, and one of the techies started an internet list in 1993. That was my first experience of the intersect of fandom and the internet, and a powerful intersect it is. In my experience, without the internet, fandoms struggle. With it, they flourish.
Once I watched the last episode of Season 2, I spent, oh, say, a day flailing around the internet, looking for a home. I never looked at any of the social networking sites...this was 2004, remember...and if I had heard of such a phenomenem, it would have been MySpace, and everybody knows that that's just for kids. Right? Right. Instead, I came upon Showcase's boards and was pretty sure I'd found what I was looking for.
First I had to pick a screen name. I sat staring at the screen until 'FanSee' bloomed in my mind. I'm a fan, and my fan-ishness...especially in this fandom...results from looking and watching. Perfect.
Once on the Sho.boards, I started a second search for my people. I encountered the self-loathing QAF-man and resolved never to respond to any of his posts again. I was totally in awe of ducdebrabant and terrified to have his glance fall on me. I kept looking and I found...chering and pepino21786's Episode recaps, and I knew I was home. They recapped, and I made sure that I always responded, at length. Friendship happened, and with friendship, a huge gift.
When I watched QAF, the background music was just that: background music. Oh, I loved the street scene in New York City, and I sang along with "The Boy from New York City." "Save the Last Dance For Me" made Episode 122 even more poignant, but in general, if a song was popular after 1962, I knew nothing about it. Once I got into my 20s, I stopped looking for music and went with the flow. The flow in my house was mostly classicial, leavened by show tunes and a little...very little...folk music. No pop. No rock. Definitely no disco and no country and western. A large and definite cultural lacuna.
chering saw my educational gap and filled it. She sent me CDs: mixes of QAF music, a mix that Justin would give Brian, and a mix that Brian would give Justin. Then, as I started to express preferences and she saw how much I had missed, she sent more mixes, some of them devoted to a single artist or group. For instance, I knew only two of Queen's songs: "YMCA" and "We Are the Champions," and them only because they were played at hockey games.
I'm not sure I've entered the 21st century yet, musically, but I do notice the sound track on movies and TV shows now, and when I hear something I like, I look for it. And I know many more Queen songs, as well as Rufus Wainwright and Jason Mraz and Great Big Sea and many many others. Thank you, chering, and thank you, fandom, and thank you, most of all, QAF, for giving me the motivation to find the fandom.
During the seemingly unending months of hiatus between S4 and S5, I overcame my snobbery and started reading fanfic. I read wonderful writers who made me laugh and cry and fan myself while drinking ice water, and I read writers who made me want to get out my red pencil and mark their fics up. Somewhere along the line, before the sho.boards met their untimely end, killed by an unsympathetic Showtime, I beta'd a fanfic. I corrected spelling, punctuation, and a whole lot of grammar, and my efforts were not appreciated. I thought, "I could do better."
One day I was vacuuming my living room and thinking about...surprise!...Queer As Folk. I thought, "Brian Kinney. My kids called kindergarten, 'kinneygarten.' Brian must have thought kindergarten was named after him." I stopped vacuuming, went up to my office, and wrote "Kinneygarten," which turned out to be the first of 13 chapters that took Brian from kindergarten to high school graduation.
chering beta'd "Kinneygarten," and that was the start of a partnership that lasts until today. Sometimes I write, and she beta's. If chering writes, I beta. Often we write as a team, switching authorship section by section.
When I clicked on that first episode of QAF, I knew that, once I went out looking for you lot, I would find friends because that had already happened for me with my Dunnett fandom. I never guessed that I would also be introduced to, and love, an almost limitless volume of music. I didn't think I would discover a literature...yes, literature...that would bring me emotional highs and lows, as well as moments of wisdom and truth. I certainly never, ever thought I would write fiction myself. Truly that click changed my life.
Thank you all. FanSee
Oh, I'd cheated a little before that. I went on IMDb and read everything I could find there, I Googled Queer As Folk, I Googled Gale Harold, but I never clicked on a link. I knew there was a fandom out there, I knew I'd love you all, I was sure I'd be sucked in and you all would eat up whatever life I had left, because I'd been in another fandom. I was experienced.
When Jill and I read "Stalky and Co.," we tried to create a fandom, but we didn't know what we were doing and the main tool...the internet...was almost half a century away. Besides, Rudyard Kipling was dead. Our fandom stalled at two.
When I read Dorothy Dunnett twenty years later, she was very much alive, so I wrote her. She put me in touch with two other readers. The three of us wrote each other obsessively, but it remained a fandom of three until the 1980's, when some fans in Chicago started to publish a quarterly letterzine. From the letterzine grew a meeting of about 200 readers in Edinburgh, complete with tours of Dunnett sites and talks by experts on the Renaissance and from Dorothy herself. Many Dunnett readers are techies, and one of the techies started an internet list in 1993. That was my first experience of the intersect of fandom and the internet, and a powerful intersect it is. In my experience, without the internet, fandoms struggle. With it, they flourish.
Once I watched the last episode of Season 2, I spent, oh, say, a day flailing around the internet, looking for a home. I never looked at any of the social networking sites...this was 2004, remember...and if I had heard of such a phenomenem, it would have been MySpace, and everybody knows that that's just for kids. Right? Right. Instead, I came upon Showcase's boards and was pretty sure I'd found what I was looking for.
First I had to pick a screen name. I sat staring at the screen until 'FanSee' bloomed in my mind. I'm a fan, and my fan-ishness...especially in this fandom...results from looking and watching. Perfect.
Once on the Sho.boards, I started a second search for my people. I encountered the self-loathing QAF-man and resolved never to respond to any of his posts again. I was totally in awe of ducdebrabant and terrified to have his glance fall on me. I kept looking and I found...chering and pepino21786's Episode recaps, and I knew I was home. They recapped, and I made sure that I always responded, at length. Friendship happened, and with friendship, a huge gift.
When I watched QAF, the background music was just that: background music. Oh, I loved the street scene in New York City, and I sang along with "The Boy from New York City." "Save the Last Dance For Me" made Episode 122 even more poignant, but in general, if a song was popular after 1962, I knew nothing about it. Once I got into my 20s, I stopped looking for music and went with the flow. The flow in my house was mostly classicial, leavened by show tunes and a little...very little...folk music. No pop. No rock. Definitely no disco and no country and western. A large and definite cultural lacuna.
chering saw my educational gap and filled it. She sent me CDs: mixes of QAF music, a mix that Justin would give Brian, and a mix that Brian would give Justin. Then, as I started to express preferences and she saw how much I had missed, she sent more mixes, some of them devoted to a single artist or group. For instance, I knew only two of Queen's songs: "YMCA" and "We Are the Champions," and them only because they were played at hockey games.
I'm not sure I've entered the 21st century yet, musically, but I do notice the sound track on movies and TV shows now, and when I hear something I like, I look for it. And I know many more Queen songs, as well as Rufus Wainwright and Jason Mraz and Great Big Sea and many many others. Thank you, chering, and thank you, fandom, and thank you, most of all, QAF, for giving me the motivation to find the fandom.
During the seemingly unending months of hiatus between S4 and S5, I overcame my snobbery and started reading fanfic. I read wonderful writers who made me laugh and cry and fan myself while drinking ice water, and I read writers who made me want to get out my red pencil and mark their fics up. Somewhere along the line, before the sho.boards met their untimely end, killed by an unsympathetic Showtime, I beta'd a fanfic. I corrected spelling, punctuation, and a whole lot of grammar, and my efforts were not appreciated. I thought, "I could do better."
One day I was vacuuming my living room and thinking about...surprise!...Queer As Folk. I thought, "Brian Kinney. My kids called kindergarten, 'kinneygarten.' Brian must have thought kindergarten was named after him." I stopped vacuuming, went up to my office, and wrote "Kinneygarten," which turned out to be the first of 13 chapters that took Brian from kindergarten to high school graduation.
chering beta'd "Kinneygarten," and that was the start of a partnership that lasts until today. Sometimes I write, and she beta's. If chering writes, I beta. Often we write as a team, switching authorship section by section.
When I clicked on that first episode of QAF, I knew that, once I went out looking for you lot, I would find friends because that had already happened for me with my Dunnett fandom. I never guessed that I would also be introduced to, and love, an almost limitless volume of music. I didn't think I would discover a literature...yes, literature...that would bring me emotional highs and lows, as well as moments of wisdom and truth. I certainly never, ever thought I would write fiction myself. Truly that click changed my life.
Thank you all. FanSee