I found the wondrous world of slash at the tender age of fourteen. The year was 1995, the browser to use Netscape 3.0 beta, and bandwidth grew on trees. I stumbled onto alt.books.anne-rice, saw that some of the stories posted actually featured male/male couples, and was promptly hooked. Before that, I had thought I was really quirky for wanting to see actual explicit action between the male characters. Most of my peers didn't even want to read het romances of the Harlequin stock at that age.
The only trauma I carry because of that early find is that the early VampChron fandom was overrun by Mary Sues, and you really had to sift to find the slash. Hence I'm not blaming slash for anything ;) Except for eating my life.
I didn't post in that first fandom, but I certainly read, speculated and imagined. At great length, too. I had done so before, but there was always the nagging thought of "You can't imagine THAT!" (Legolas and Gimli were *the* couple of fantasy lit in my prepubescent mind, but you certainly couldn't talk about that to your friends. At least not to the few friends I had then.). I think I wrote my first fics at about fifteen or sixteen, stories now lost in the mists of history and broken floppies. I didn't talk about them, since the rule of Finnish junior high schools was that teh gay!fic never existed. Fanfic never existed. I didn't even meet another Finnish slasher until I was nineteen(!).
So yeah, I found slash on my own, and was into it long before I was legal. And I'm none the worse for it.
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This got long. Sorry ;)
Date: 2004-04-23 05:07 pm (UTC)The only trauma I carry because of that early find is that the early VampChron fandom was overrun by Mary Sues, and you really had to sift to find the slash. Hence I'm not blaming slash for anything ;)
Except for eating my life.I didn't post in that first fandom, but I certainly read, speculated and imagined. At great length, too. I had done so before, but there was always the nagging thought of "You can't imagine THAT!" (Legolas and Gimli were *the* couple of fantasy lit in my prepubescent mind, but you certainly couldn't talk about that to your friends. At least not to the few friends I had then.). I think I wrote my first fics at about fifteen or sixteen, stories now lost in the mists of history and broken floppies. I didn't talk about them, since the rule of Finnish junior high schools was that teh gay!fic never existed. Fanfic never existed. I didn't even meet another Finnish slasher until I was nineteen(!).
So yeah, I found slash on my own, and was into it long before I was legal. And I'm none the worse for it.