LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
Fanfiction has been around for as long as humans have told stories. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno are both fanfiction based on the Old Testament. Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and other Arthurian works were a new take on a body of literature and legend going back centuries. There is a long tradition in Chinese literature of respected authors writing sequels and alternate endings for even the earliest classic novels, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West.
It wasn’t until the advent of copyright laws in the 18th century that fanfiction began to move out of the mainstream. With a few exceptions, fan-made content about an original work can no longer be monetized, and fanfiction has gone from being welcomed into the annals of classic literature to being completely delegitimized.
Modern fanfiction is its own genre of literature, with its own common story tropes and a collective focus on character-driven stories over plot-driven ones. While many fanfics are short (1-5k words), novel-length fanfics are also common. I have personally read at least one fanfic that was over 300k words long. For reference, the seventh Harry Potter book is 198k words long, and As I Lay Dying has 57k words.
Almost all fanfiction nowadays is online, published informally on freely-accessible websites, usually by authors writing anonymously under a pseudonym. The quality of writing in fanfic can vary a lot, due to the relative lack of editing that goes into the work and the fact that anyone can publish. However, the best fanfics are as good as or better than many traditionally published novels.
Even though modern fanfiction is now largely an online phenomenon, many of its genre conventions predate the internet. The history is a little bit murky, but most longtime fans credit one show with the birth of modern fandom.
In 1966, Star Trek: The Original Series first began airing on American TV. Star Trek portrays a deep and intense friendship between two of the main characters, Captain Jim Kirk and Spock, his first officer. By about 1967, some fans of the show had taken note of this relationship and thought that it might not be strictly platonic, despite the fact that both characters are men. A few fans began writing what amounted to romance and erotica about the relationship between the two characters, and small fan communities sprung up around the idea of publishing and sharing these stories. This early fandom consisted of fanzines, magazines of fan content, usually including art and fiction writing. The zines were shared through mailing lists. This entire community existed underground and out of the public eye due to American society’s extreme prejudice at the time against anything related to queerness and homosexuality.
Almost as soon as the internet became widely available in the early 90s, fandom moved online. The old mailing lists became webrings. Fans began to build their own online archives to host and publish content. Eventually, fandom migrated onto early social media platforms, with LiveJournal being the most popular. Internet archives are unstable, however, and there’s a long history of servers going dark and whole archives being lost without warning. Fandom has also come under attack from far-right groups. In 2007, the right-wing Christian group “Warriors for Innocence” pressured LiveJournal into deleting blogs and communities relating to anything “deviant,” which included many queer fanfiction groups, regardless of how tame their content was.
These events led to the creating of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit which defends the legal right of fanfic to exist and hosts its own archive for fanfiction, the Archive of Our Own. That archive is now where a lot of fanfiction can be found, and it currently hosts about 6 million works in over 36,000 fandoms.
In fandom, “canon” refers to the original work upon which a given fanwork is based. For example, a story about Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings having a quiet domestic romance together after the battle to defeat Sauron is a fanfic based on Lord of the Rings canon. Fanfiction often includes story elements that fans feel are missing in canon. This can manifest as the inclusion of queer characters, but it can also influence the kind of stories fans write. For fandoms where the canon is full of suffering and struggle (such as Les Miserables) much of the fanfiction is lighthearted. Coffee shop alternate universe fanfics, wherein the characters live in the modern day and hang out at a coffeeshop together, are popular. In fandoms where the canon itself is relatively cheerful, many fanfics will feature lots of angst.
Even though my examples so far have largely been romances, fanfiction isn’t just about romance. For example, there are what feels like a million Japanese animes about high schoolers, and I’ve found that a lot of the writers for these fandoms eschew romance entirely, and instead write what’s called genfic (fanfic for General Audiences). Like most fanfic, these stories can fill in the gaps left by the canon storyline, taking the time to explore friendships in quiet moments that the canon skips over. There are stories about a beloved character coming out to their friends and loved ones as gay, or trans, or ace, and being immediately accepted for it. It’s a simple narrative, but one that is almost entirely lacking in mainstream media. I’m only 23, and I can still vividly remember the first canonically queer characters I saw in literature, Cecil and Carlos from the podcast “Welcome to Night Vale.”
I spent many years reading and enjoying mainstream fiction before I found the world of fanfic. While I do still enjoy traditional novels, in fanfic I have found a much larger body of work written by and about people like me, and I have a great appreciation for it.
Queer fans are writing their own representation, writing themselves into their favorite stories because there are so few stories that include people like them. Even though I wish it weren’t necessary, it has created some beautiful writing.
Further reading about fandom:
Fanlore.org
Archive of Our Own
Upcoming LGBTQ Literature Schedule:
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October 25: OPEN
November 29: Kalisiin
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