“Everybody agrees we need to shame straight women for reading queer fanfiction, but–”
No. No, we literally do not need to do that. It helps no one, homophobes don’t care, people exploring their sexualities and genders will retreat back into the closet, queer people will be pressured to out themselves, there is no version of this that doesn’t do massive disproportionate splash damage to queer and questioning people, and moreover it hurts literally no one to let straight people read and/or fap to smutty queer fanfic in peace as long as they aren’t shits to actual queer people.
Juststop, for the love of Christ.
More to the point, reading slash was how I learned how to treat actual queer people well. I’d read fic, then I’d read the author’s journal. Since the slash end of fandom was even then heavily queer, the bread and butter “how my life is going” posts often included encounters with homophobia, in person and on the internet.
Between those and the more essay-ish posts, it didn’t take much to figure out what not to do or what to do instead. If my favorite reccer complained about men trying to hit on her when she was out with her girlfriend, clearly I shouldn’t bug male couples who were just holding hands in public—and under no circumstances ask about what they did in bed. If she later posted about how happy it made her for a receptionist to casually ask which wife would be picking up their son, then clearly I should drop assumptions about who did what in a relationship and just ask quite normally if I needed to know something for some practical reason. (Also to use spouse and parent on forms instead of husband and wife, mother and father.)
I can think of many other examples of microaggressions and other prejudiced behavior I learned not to avoid from queer fans, because they were fellow fans and it’s hypocrisy on top of base ingratitude to mistreat the fans whose meta you read, whose comms you haunt, whose stories you relax with, whose recs you rely on to find new authors, whose fests you anticipate.
In short, for me as a straight woman, being a good fan meant learning how to treat queer people right. IRL nobody I knew was out. In fandom, so many people were out that they could and did complain about homophobic mistreatment.
It should really be November 14th, shouldn’t it? Am I forgetting something? All the news posts from back then say open beta launched on the 14th.
The site had already been open for reading for a year at that point, but that was when account creation opened up more generally.
AO3 must have launched before Nov. 14. I was waiting impatiently for the launch so I could sign up. According to my profile user #575 joined on Nov. 13. (It took me a couple of days to hear about it—mainly because I was only keeping track by word-of-mouth aka posts on flist.)
