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shadowscastSo, having come out as asexual in my previous post, I want to talk about the experience of putting an explicitly asexual character in my fic for the first time.
But actually before that, I think I need to talk a little bit about the experience of writing fics about sexual characters, as an asexual writer.
In terms of my own life story, I figured out that I was asexual around the same time that I first discovered fanfic (ie: twenty years ago! Time really flies, you guys.). This raises an obvious question: why have I written so many stories in which the characters have sex?
There isn't just one answer. Part of it is that I'm sensitive to the genre conventions, and trying to make my readers happy. Part of it is that the characters I'm writing are sexual, and it's in-character for them to want to have sex. I like writing stories about people falling in love; for people who aren't asexual, I am given to understand, sex is often an important part of that process. (At one point, while working on my recent fic, I stopped in the middle of composing a sex scene and wandered out to the kitchen for a snack. My husband was there. "Mac and Vic are having sex," I said. "I'm not into it, but they are, so I guess it's got to happen." "That's nice," said my husband, who knows all about my fanfic and is supportive of all my weirdness.)
I write sex scenes more or less the same way that I write fight scenes—by thinking about the blocking, the flow and the timing, and about what I want the characters to gain and lose and learn.
When I'm reading other people's stories (both fanfic and profic), I tend to skim over the sex scenes unless there seems to be important character-development stuff happening in the middle.
In a way I'd really prefer to write less sex (and it's not like I write all that much, all things considered), but the thing is that I mostly like to write slash. The reasons for that would require a whole other post, so for now let's just roll with it. I write slash, therefore I mostly end up writing characters who want to have sex, in situations where it makes sense for them to have some. Also, I really don't write very many different pairings, and I've only ever written in three fandoms (although I've enjoyed reading many others). My muse is picky!
Still, though. Why did it take me so long to put even one explicitly asexual character into one of my stories?
Well, one big reason was that I really couldn't even imagine what that would look like.
I mean, there are lots of stories out there where the characters don't have sex. In fanfic, there's the whole world of gen. Outside of fanfic, there are tons of books and movies and TV shows about characters having various adventures and never getting around to having sex, or even mentioning sex or thinking about sex. Not everything is about sex. Lots of stories are about other things.
But what's the difference between a character who doesn't have sex, and an asexual character?
I had an uncomfortable experience once, about a decade ago, that stuck with me. (Before I even relate it, let me just say: don't make too much of this! My life in general is blessedly short on uncomfortable experiences, and even the people in this story are very lovely friends.) I was having a fannish discussion with a couple of people; call them A and B. And it was all fun and games and shared fannish joy, until A suddenly mentioned being annoyed with people wanting to submit stories about asexual characters to a queer-themed fic fest. I was momentarily stunned; I think that this was the first time I'd even heard someone refer to asexuality outside of that one newspaper article in which I'd first discovered the term, and the AVEN message-boards. And then B said "Oh, those asexuals," in an I-know-what-you-mean kind of tone, and at first I thought she was joking, the way you might say "Oh, those leprechauns" if somebody started complaining about little magical green men tying their shoelaces together—but no, then the two of them talked for a while about how annoying it was that asexual people wanted to be identified as queer and to submit their fics to this fest.
I just listened in stunned and uncomfortable silence. It's one of those moments—if you don't say "Er, actually I'm asexual" in the first ten seconds, it's kind of too late? (I did later talk to B about it, and she did some reading on her own to educate herself about asexuality as an orientation, and afterwards very compassionately apologized for having spoken thoughtlessly and made me uncomfortable. I never brought it up with A, because we weren't as close and I just didn't feel comfortable doing so.)
So first, there was the pain of identity erasure—of being told, explicitly, that I wasn't queer. And that was a complicated pain, because claiming a marginalized identity while living the privilege of a heterosexual marriage is certainly, from some angles, questionable. But at the same time, I had a very intense feeling of if I'm not queer, then what the fuck am I?. I sure as hell wasn't straight. And I'd had a profoundly queer experience of my late adolescence and early twenties, including being uncertain and anxious about my sexuality, attending LGBT youth groups, having a girlfriend, immersing myself in queer culture, marching in gay pride parades, and permanently damaging my relationship with my mother by coming out to her. And the reason I'd had all those experiences was because I wasn't straight; and specifically (I eventually figured out) because I was asexual.
But also, I was sitting there thinking "What fics about asexual characters?" I'd never seen one. I'd never imagined one. Were they out there? What would that look like? How was a fic about an asexual character different from a gen fic? I was thirty-ish, and I'd known that I was asexual for a decade or so, but it had never once occurred to me that someone like me might appear in a story.
Anyway, those questions remained largely unanswered for me, for many years! They did churn away at the back of my head, though, rephrased as "What would it look like if I wrote an asexual character?" But I couldn't think of how to get a handle on it. How do you centre a story on an absence? Sure, I'm asexual myself, but that's not what my life is about—my life is about math and bicycles and science fiction books and RPGs and board games, and friends and family, and various other things.
Eventually a friend recommended a BBC Sherlock story to me, in which Sherlock was asexual but in a poly relationship with John and Mary (this was before Mary entered the BBC Sherlock canon, so it was an original-character Mary based loosely on the character from Conan Doyle's stories). It was a pretty good story, I thought! And it was the first story I'd ever read in which the question of asexuality was explored explicitly. Mostly it was explored in the context of sex scenes—Mary and John experimenting with Sherlock to see if they could find a way for him to enjoy sex, and eventually determining that while they could bring him to orgasm, he still preferred to avoid the whole thing. For me, as an asexual reader, that was an awful lot of sex to read through. But it was really cool to see the lack of sexual attraction explicitly explored.
I read some more stories with an asexual Sherlock, after that. An asexual reading of BBC-Sherlock seems pretty consistent with canon, which is neat.
But if I were going to write a fic with an asexual character, I would have to find a plausibly-asexual character in a fandom that I actually write (because, as I said, my muse is picky)!. I don't think that there's anyone in BtVS who it makes sense to read that way (except maybe Illyria?).
Oh, and also I barely wrote anything in the last decade, since I was busy with life. Let's not forget that. :-P
At some point it occurred to me that in Once a Thief, it might be possible to read the character Li Ann as asexual. I can't remember when I first thought of this; maybe quite a while ago, but I wasn't writing. When I suddenly did decide to start writing again, three months ago, one of the first things that I decided was that I wanted to try to fit an explicitly-asexual version of Li Ann into my story.
Now I'm about to go into spoilers for a twenty-year-old TV show, and also for the fic I just wrote! If, for some reason, you want to avoid those, stop reading now. :-D
For context, if you don't know Once A Thief: it was a strange mix of Canadian absurdist humour and Hong Kong action-drama. Ridiculous over-the-top action sequences with characters sliding across the room on rolling chairs, firing their guns the whole time; explosions galore; martial arts; mad scientists with mind-control drugs; Waiting for Godot pastiche ... wait, what was that last one again? Yeah, it got weird. It was sort of like a Canadian La Femme Nikita that didn't take itself at all seriously. The three main characters (Mac, Vic and Li Ann) are secret agents who work for a shadowy government agency (which is constantly referred to, in canon, as "a shadowy government agency"). It never aired in the U.S.A., but it did attract some fannish interest because Vic was played by Nicholas Lea, who also played Krycek in the X-Files.
If you'd like to be able to picture the characters, go watch this adorable fanvid and then come back: The Frug bysome_stars.
Anyway, the show was super slashy. Super duper slashy, omg. And while there were lots of potential slash pairings with decent canonical justification, the pairing that got written most often (including by me!) was the two male main characters, Mac and Vic.
Now, the show set Mac, Vic and Li Ann up initially in a love triangle; in the pilot, Li Ann and Mac are lovers, and then Mac apparently dies in an explosion, and Li Ann gets engaged to Vic. Mac comes back from the dead eighteen months later, and rivalry ensues.
Except, in episode three (out of twenty-two), Li Ann decides that the idea of marriage is stifling, and she breaks up with Vic. After that, although both guys still have feelings for her and she clearly feels a lot of affection for both of them, she makes it very clear that she doesn't want to be romantically involved with either one of them. And she doesn't have any other lovers over the course of the show. There's one episode where a suave older James Bond type comes to town and she spends most of the episode swooning over him with a professional crush, and Mac and Vic assume she's having sex with him, but at the end of the episode she reveals that she didn't.
I certainly don't think that the show's writers wrote her as asexual deliberately, but I also don't think that an asexual reading of her dramatically contradicts anything from canon.
So ... what did I do in my story? I ended up deciding that I would stay in my comfort zone, largely, and make the main romantic thread be about Mac and Vic getting together. But there's also a thread about Li Ann negotiating a rekindling of her relationship with Mac with an explicit boundary that she only wants to kiss him, and not do anything sexual.
Part of the puzzle of figuring out how to write Li Ann with an explicitly asexual orientation was that I figured that she wouldn't know that she was asexual, at least at first, in much the same way that I didn't know either when I was a little younger than her. This story is set in 1999; asexuality was not something that people talked about.
I'm going to quote the bit of the story where the idea of Li Ann's asexuality is first raised. Feel free to skip through if you aren't interested in the details! Also, warning for nudity and reference to genitals. (In the scene, Mac is naked and Li Ann is giving him a sponge bath, because he suffered a concussion and barely escaped an exploding building a few hours ago, and he wants to get clean but can't stand up in the shower. *ahem* I have a thing for hurt/comfort, have I mentioned?)
(From chapter 3 of my fic Recoil.)
That was about as explicit as I felt like I could make her asexuality, to start with, since she wouldn't know the word or be aware of the orientation. Later in the story she also has a conversation with Vic in which she explains that she's been kissing Mac, and tries to explain that this doesn't mean they're back together as lovers.
Again, I'm going to quote the passage. Again, feel free to skip through if you're not that interested in the details! (This time, Vic and Li Ann are in the ER, where they've brought Mac because they were afraid he'd re-injured himself. Mac is present in the scene, but asleep.)
Anyway, that was about all the asexual-content that I managed to bring into that story. But then I wrote a much longer sequel!
I wanted Li Ann to have the chance to learn the word "asexual" and apply it to herself. Keeping in mind that it's 1999, and that she's a secret agent who spends most of her time practising martial arts and fighting bad guys (as opposed to, say, researching her own sexual identity on message boards on the internet), I gave her a case which involved infiltrating a burlesque show/same-sex marriage fundraiser, in order to protect a drag queen from a right-wing motorcycle gang. I did this so that she could meet someone who would plausibly have heard of asexuality, and who could tell her about it! (I also did it for an excuse to put her in drag, because that's actually a thing that she does once in canon and I wanted to explore her feelings about that.)
I mean, just to be clear, this is a 130,000-word fic, and most of it is about Mac and Vic falling in love. Li Ann's self-discovery is a secondary thread. But I put the whole thing together in the first place for her!
There was one particular problematic aspect of writing Li Ann as asexual, and I had to decide how to deal with it. The thing is, canonically, Li Ann was sold into prostitution when she was twelve years old. This is established in the pilot and then never mentioned again, possibly because after the pilot the tone of the show got a lot sillier, and having Li Ann revisit her memories of being a child prostitute probably felt too tonally dark for where the show ended up going.
In writing her as an asexual character, I didn't want to fall into the trap of making it look like Li Ann was asexual because of the childhood sexual abuse. This was delicate, though, because Li Ann did have that experience, and it might seem very natural for her to wonder if her distaste for sex is because of it. So I decided that that needed to be brought up explicitly, and she needed to consider it. It comes up in the following passage, in which Li Ann also talks through her asexuality some more with Mac (still without having a word for it).
In this scene, Li Ann has just invited Mac to sleep with her (actually sleep, not euphemism-sleep).
Okay, last passage: in which Li Ann finally learns that there's a word for what she is. Here she's at lunch with Benjamin (an original character), a 45-year-old gay man who performs as a drag queen and is also a divorce lawyer and a same-sex marriage activist. Li Ann is undercover; Ben doesn't know that she's a secret agent.
(From chapter 17 of my fic Rainbow Connections.)
So anyway, that was pretty much my asexuality sub-plot! After that, Li Ann starts using the word "asexual" to describe herself in conversations with both Vic and Mac.
I still feel a little sheepish about how it's only a sub-plot; in the actual stories, the building up of Mac and Vic's relationship gets a lot more screen-time. But anyway, I did it; I wrote an asexual character. Yay!
But actually before that, I think I need to talk a little bit about the experience of writing fics about sexual characters, as an asexual writer.
In terms of my own life story, I figured out that I was asexual around the same time that I first discovered fanfic (ie: twenty years ago! Time really flies, you guys.). This raises an obvious question: why have I written so many stories in which the characters have sex?
There isn't just one answer. Part of it is that I'm sensitive to the genre conventions, and trying to make my readers happy. Part of it is that the characters I'm writing are sexual, and it's in-character for them to want to have sex. I like writing stories about people falling in love; for people who aren't asexual, I am given to understand, sex is often an important part of that process. (At one point, while working on my recent fic, I stopped in the middle of composing a sex scene and wandered out to the kitchen for a snack. My husband was there. "Mac and Vic are having sex," I said. "I'm not into it, but they are, so I guess it's got to happen." "That's nice," said my husband, who knows all about my fanfic and is supportive of all my weirdness.)
I write sex scenes more or less the same way that I write fight scenes—by thinking about the blocking, the flow and the timing, and about what I want the characters to gain and lose and learn.
When I'm reading other people's stories (both fanfic and profic), I tend to skim over the sex scenes unless there seems to be important character-development stuff happening in the middle.
In a way I'd really prefer to write less sex (and it's not like I write all that much, all things considered), but the thing is that I mostly like to write slash. The reasons for that would require a whole other post, so for now let's just roll with it. I write slash, therefore I mostly end up writing characters who want to have sex, in situations where it makes sense for them to have some. Also, I really don't write very many different pairings, and I've only ever written in three fandoms (although I've enjoyed reading many others). My muse is picky!
Still, though. Why did it take me so long to put even one explicitly asexual character into one of my stories?
Well, one big reason was that I really couldn't even imagine what that would look like.
I mean, there are lots of stories out there where the characters don't have sex. In fanfic, there's the whole world of gen. Outside of fanfic, there are tons of books and movies and TV shows about characters having various adventures and never getting around to having sex, or even mentioning sex or thinking about sex. Not everything is about sex. Lots of stories are about other things.
But what's the difference between a character who doesn't have sex, and an asexual character?
I had an uncomfortable experience once, about a decade ago, that stuck with me. (Before I even relate it, let me just say: don't make too much of this! My life in general is blessedly short on uncomfortable experiences, and even the people in this story are very lovely friends.) I was having a fannish discussion with a couple of people; call them A and B. And it was all fun and games and shared fannish joy, until A suddenly mentioned being annoyed with people wanting to submit stories about asexual characters to a queer-themed fic fest. I was momentarily stunned; I think that this was the first time I'd even heard someone refer to asexuality outside of that one newspaper article in which I'd first discovered the term, and the AVEN message-boards. And then B said "Oh, those asexuals," in an I-know-what-you-mean kind of tone, and at first I thought she was joking, the way you might say "Oh, those leprechauns" if somebody started complaining about little magical green men tying their shoelaces together—but no, then the two of them talked for a while about how annoying it was that asexual people wanted to be identified as queer and to submit their fics to this fest.
I just listened in stunned and uncomfortable silence. It's one of those moments—if you don't say "Er, actually I'm asexual" in the first ten seconds, it's kind of too late? (I did later talk to B about it, and she did some reading on her own to educate herself about asexuality as an orientation, and afterwards very compassionately apologized for having spoken thoughtlessly and made me uncomfortable. I never brought it up with A, because we weren't as close and I just didn't feel comfortable doing so.)
So first, there was the pain of identity erasure—of being told, explicitly, that I wasn't queer. And that was a complicated pain, because claiming a marginalized identity while living the privilege of a heterosexual marriage is certainly, from some angles, questionable. But at the same time, I had a very intense feeling of if I'm not queer, then what the fuck am I?. I sure as hell wasn't straight. And I'd had a profoundly queer experience of my late adolescence and early twenties, including being uncertain and anxious about my sexuality, attending LGBT youth groups, having a girlfriend, immersing myself in queer culture, marching in gay pride parades, and permanently damaging my relationship with my mother by coming out to her. And the reason I'd had all those experiences was because I wasn't straight; and specifically (I eventually figured out) because I was asexual.
But also, I was sitting there thinking "What fics about asexual characters?" I'd never seen one. I'd never imagined one. Were they out there? What would that look like? How was a fic about an asexual character different from a gen fic? I was thirty-ish, and I'd known that I was asexual for a decade or so, but it had never once occurred to me that someone like me might appear in a story.
Anyway, those questions remained largely unanswered for me, for many years! They did churn away at the back of my head, though, rephrased as "What would it look like if I wrote an asexual character?" But I couldn't think of how to get a handle on it. How do you centre a story on an absence? Sure, I'm asexual myself, but that's not what my life is about—my life is about math and bicycles and science fiction books and RPGs and board games, and friends and family, and various other things.
Eventually a friend recommended a BBC Sherlock story to me, in which Sherlock was asexual but in a poly relationship with John and Mary (this was before Mary entered the BBC Sherlock canon, so it was an original-character Mary based loosely on the character from Conan Doyle's stories). It was a pretty good story, I thought! And it was the first story I'd ever read in which the question of asexuality was explored explicitly. Mostly it was explored in the context of sex scenes—Mary and John experimenting with Sherlock to see if they could find a way for him to enjoy sex, and eventually determining that while they could bring him to orgasm, he still preferred to avoid the whole thing. For me, as an asexual reader, that was an awful lot of sex to read through. But it was really cool to see the lack of sexual attraction explicitly explored.
I read some more stories with an asexual Sherlock, after that. An asexual reading of BBC-Sherlock seems pretty consistent with canon, which is neat.
But if I were going to write a fic with an asexual character, I would have to find a plausibly-asexual character in a fandom that I actually write (because, as I said, my muse is picky)!. I don't think that there's anyone in BtVS who it makes sense to read that way (except maybe Illyria?).
Oh, and also I barely wrote anything in the last decade, since I was busy with life. Let's not forget that. :-P
At some point it occurred to me that in Once a Thief, it might be possible to read the character Li Ann as asexual. I can't remember when I first thought of this; maybe quite a while ago, but I wasn't writing. When I suddenly did decide to start writing again, three months ago, one of the first things that I decided was that I wanted to try to fit an explicitly-asexual version of Li Ann into my story.
Now I'm about to go into spoilers for a twenty-year-old TV show, and also for the fic I just wrote! If, for some reason, you want to avoid those, stop reading now. :-D
For context, if you don't know Once A Thief: it was a strange mix of Canadian absurdist humour and Hong Kong action-drama. Ridiculous over-the-top action sequences with characters sliding across the room on rolling chairs, firing their guns the whole time; explosions galore; martial arts; mad scientists with mind-control drugs; Waiting for Godot pastiche ... wait, what was that last one again? Yeah, it got weird. It was sort of like a Canadian La Femme Nikita that didn't take itself at all seriously. The three main characters (Mac, Vic and Li Ann) are secret agents who work for a shadowy government agency (which is constantly referred to, in canon, as "a shadowy government agency"). It never aired in the U.S.A., but it did attract some fannish interest because Vic was played by Nicholas Lea, who also played Krycek in the X-Files.
If you'd like to be able to picture the characters, go watch this adorable fanvid and then come back: The Frug by
some_stars.Anyway, the show was super slashy. Super duper slashy, omg. And while there were lots of potential slash pairings with decent canonical justification, the pairing that got written most often (including by me!) was the two male main characters, Mac and Vic.
Now, the show set Mac, Vic and Li Ann up initially in a love triangle; in the pilot, Li Ann and Mac are lovers, and then Mac apparently dies in an explosion, and Li Ann gets engaged to Vic. Mac comes back from the dead eighteen months later, and rivalry ensues.
Except, in episode three (out of twenty-two), Li Ann decides that the idea of marriage is stifling, and she breaks up with Vic. After that, although both guys still have feelings for her and she clearly feels a lot of affection for both of them, she makes it very clear that she doesn't want to be romantically involved with either one of them. And she doesn't have any other lovers over the course of the show. There's one episode where a suave older James Bond type comes to town and she spends most of the episode swooning over him with a professional crush, and Mac and Vic assume she's having sex with him, but at the end of the episode she reveals that she didn't.
I certainly don't think that the show's writers wrote her as asexual deliberately, but I also don't think that an asexual reading of her dramatically contradicts anything from canon.
So ... what did I do in my story? I ended up deciding that I would stay in my comfort zone, largely, and make the main romantic thread be about Mac and Vic getting together. But there's also a thread about Li Ann negotiating a rekindling of her relationship with Mac with an explicit boundary that she only wants to kiss him, and not do anything sexual.
Part of the puzzle of figuring out how to write Li Ann with an explicitly asexual orientation was that I figured that she wouldn't know that she was asexual, at least at first, in much the same way that I didn't know either when I was a little younger than her. This story is set in 1999; asexuality was not something that people talked about.
I'm going to quote the bit of the story where the idea of Li Ann's asexuality is first raised. Feel free to skip through if you aren't interested in the details! Also, warning for nudity and reference to genitals. (In the scene, Mac is naked and Li Ann is giving him a sponge bath, because he suffered a concussion and barely escaped an exploding building a few hours ago, and he wants to get clean but can't stand up in the shower. *ahem* I have a thing for hurt/comfort, have I mentioned?)
Suddenly Li Ann felt a surge of emotion that she didn't know what to do with. And without realizing that she had formed the intention, she found herself leaning over and kissing Mac on the lips.
She heard his quick, sharp inhalation; she'd surprised him. Her eyes were closed, so she couldn't see his expression. He didn't pull away, nor did he try to deepen the kiss; he followed her lead, lips gently touching and nibbling without opening.
She let herself continue for the space of five breaths ... then ten. And then she pulled away abruptly, as her guilt caught up to her.
"Li Ann?" Mac whispered. His eyes were very wide, and shining.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice catching a little in her throat. "That wasn't fair. I shouldn't have done it."
"I really don't understand," Mac said plaintively.
"I love you, Mac. I never stopped loving you. But I don't want to be with you, and I really shouldn't have just kissed you."
Mac's fingers twitched and he made a slightly strangled noise in his throat. "Fucking hell," he said, but pensively. "I have a concussion, so I'm not sure I'm following this. Humour me for a minute?"
"What do you mean?"
"Just ... answer the questions. Yes or no. You love me?"
She hesitated. She was scared she'd really fucked things up with Mac, again. There might be no going back from this.
But in terms of the yes-or-no question, she had just said it. "Yes," she admitted.
"And I love you?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Isn't that a question for you?"
"I'm looking for your perspective."
"Okay." Her heart was racing. "Yes."
"And you wanted to kiss me just now."
"Yes." She could hardly deny the reality of the past minute.
"But you don't want to date me."
"Correct," she said, to avoid the ambiguity of answering a negative question with a 'yes.'
"Do you want to have sex with me?"
She took a breath, and thought about it.
Mac was laid out naked in front of her, as lean and strong and beautiful as he'd ever been, minus a few scrapes and bruises. His cock was very much standing at attention, letting her know his own body's involuntary answer to the question.
But the thought of sex—of revisiting that type of intimate relationship—it had no appeal. "No," she said, doing her best to soften the word.
"No for the moment because my brain might start bleeding and kill me, or no for forever?"
"No for forever," she said, surprised even as she said the words at how sure she felt.
Mac was silent for a moment. She hoped that he wouldn't argue with her. She really didn't want to have to deal with that.
"Do you think that you might want to kiss me again?" he asked finally.
She nearly answered with a quick no—the kiss a moment ago had been so obviously ill-advised—but she stopped herself, and considered the question.
It was a different question than the one about dating, or the one about sex. And she had wanted to kiss him in that moment. "Maybe," she admitted finally.
After another moment of thoughtful silence, Mac gave her a plaintive look. "But what does that mean?" he asked.
"That's not a yes-or-no question," she pointed out—ducking the question, since she really had no idea what the answer was.
"Okay," he said. "Um. Do you want to kiss me again now?"
"I don't want to hurt you," Li Ann said carefully.
"Actually," Mac said, "When you kissed me a minute ago, my headache eased up a bit."
Of course that wasn't what she'd meant, but she decided to follow his lead with a bit of teasing. The emotional intensity of this conversation was exhausting her. "That's because all of the blood from your brain went somewhere else," she said.
He grinned unabashedly at her. "That is probably one hundred percent physiologically true."
Catching his grin, Li Ann realized: yes, she wanted to kiss him again.
And she wasn't sure at all that it wasn't a terrible idea, but in this moment it felt so right.
And so she did.
(From chapter 3 of my fic Recoil.)
That was about as explicit as I felt like I could make her asexuality, to start with, since she wouldn't know the word or be aware of the orientation. Later in the story she also has a conversation with Vic in which she explains that she's been kissing Mac, and tries to explain that this doesn't mean they're back together as lovers.
Again, I'm going to quote the passage. Again, feel free to skip through if you're not that interested in the details! (This time, Vic and Li Ann are in the ER, where they've brought Mac because they were afraid he'd re-injured himself. Mac is present in the scene, but asleep.)
"You care about him a lot," Vic said, quietly.
She nodded.
"Earlier, in the car..." Vic trailed off. He wasn't sure if he really wanted to bring it up.
"You saw me kiss him," Li Ann said, letting the words fall very softly. She didn't look at Vic, but kept gazing at Mac.
"Yeah," Vic said. "So, is that ... happening again, now?"
"Would you be angry?" she asked.
"No," he said. They were both talking very quietly. Vic looked over at Mac, wondering if he might be hearing them—but by the soft, slow sound of his breathing, he really did seem to be deeply asleep. "Sad, though. I can't promise not to be sad."
"Anyway, it's not," she said. "Not the way you think."
"I don't understand," Vic said.
She gave a little shrug. "That makes three of us."
"That was cryptic," Vic observed, and sipped his coffee to ease his feeling of total confusion.
"I love him," Li Ann said.
Vic just nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
"That doesn't mean I want to be his lover," she said.
The language, Vic reflected, was confusing. 'Love' was an important word but it had an awful lot of shades of meaning. "But you kissed him."
"I think..." Li Ann said, "that it's possible to want to kiss someone without wanting to have sex with them."
Vic raised an eyebrow. Oddly, it occurred to him that he didn't think he'd ever heard Li Ann directly refer to sex before, without elisions or euphemism. "And that's what's happening?"
She gave a little shrug of weak confirmation, and sipped her own coffee with a rueful look.
"And what about ... Mac?"
Li Ann gave a sharp little giggle, dribbling a little coffee from the corner of her mouth. "Oh, he wants to have sex with me," she said, quickly swiping her mouth clean with her wrist. "But he has self-control." She looked thoughtful. "Also he's been suffering from a serious concussion. So..." she shrugged again. "Actually, Vic, I have no idea what I'm doing."
Vic blinked, and felt the world shift sideways as he realized what was happening.
He was doing girl talk with Li Ann.
About Mac.
Oh God.
"Um," he said carefully. "I'm getting the impression that you're not just talking about what happened in the car."
"No," she confirmed. "It's been happening for the past two days. Whatever it is. Since the first night."
"You've been kissing Mac."
She nodded.
Vic felt a bit weird about not having noticed, considering how they'd all been practically living in each others' laps—but then, he and Li Ann had been pretty much sleeping in shifts.
"And how is he taking it?"
Li Ann gave a helpless shrug. "We've talked. About what it isn't. I'm not sure what it is."
"Wow," Vic said. "Okay."
"Do you think I'm making a terrible mistake?" Li Ann asked.
Vic shook his head. "I really have no idea. You two have a complicated history, and the past two days haven't exactly been life-as-usual. I guess you might just have to wait and see how you feel about each other when things get back to normal."
Anyway, that was about all the asexual-content that I managed to bring into that story. But then I wrote a much longer sequel!
I wanted Li Ann to have the chance to learn the word "asexual" and apply it to herself. Keeping in mind that it's 1999, and that she's a secret agent who spends most of her time practising martial arts and fighting bad guys (as opposed to, say, researching her own sexual identity on message boards on the internet), I gave her a case which involved infiltrating a burlesque show/same-sex marriage fundraiser, in order to protect a drag queen from a right-wing motorcycle gang. I did this so that she could meet someone who would plausibly have heard of asexuality, and who could tell her about it! (I also did it for an excuse to put her in drag, because that's actually a thing that she does once in canon and I wanted to explore her feelings about that.)
I mean, just to be clear, this is a 130,000-word fic, and most of it is about Mac and Vic falling in love. Li Ann's self-discovery is a secondary thread. But I put the whole thing together in the first place for her!
There was one particular problematic aspect of writing Li Ann as asexual, and I had to decide how to deal with it. The thing is, canonically, Li Ann was sold into prostitution when she was twelve years old. This is established in the pilot and then never mentioned again, possibly because after the pilot the tone of the show got a lot sillier, and having Li Ann revisit her memories of being a child prostitute probably felt too tonally dark for where the show ended up going.
In writing her as an asexual character, I didn't want to fall into the trap of making it look like Li Ann was asexual because of the childhood sexual abuse. This was delicate, though, because Li Ann did have that experience, and it might seem very natural for her to wonder if her distaste for sex is because of it. So I decided that that needed to be brought up explicitly, and she needed to consider it. It comes up in the following passage, in which Li Ann also talks through her asexuality some more with Mac (still without having a word for it).
In this scene, Li Ann has just invited Mac to sleep with her (actually sleep, not euphemism-sleep).
She gave a helpless little laugh at that, and leaned over to hug him. "We are so messed up," she murmured, resting her head against his shoulder. "At least we have each other."
"And Vic," Mac added.
"You have Vic," she corrected him.
Did he? Thinking about it, Mac realized it was true. At least for now. The thought gave him a warm, happy glow—tinged with anxiety, because how long could it really last before Vic decided that he was straight after all, and/or got tired of putting up with Mac's shit?
"You could have had Vic," Mac pointed out. "Any regrets?"
She shook her head, not lifting it from Mac's shoulder. "He was good for me," she said contemplatively, "at the time. He really helped me to draw a line between the life that I have here and what I used to have, in Hong Kong. I felt very ... safe, with him."
Mac put his hand on her hair, started to stroke it a little. "He does have that effect on people."
"But that kind of relationship wasn't what I wanted, in the end. It was too ... involved, too stifling. I didn't want somebody in my space every night."
"You just invited me into your bed," Mac pointed out.
He could just see her smile out of the corner of his eye. "Once in a while is okay," she said. "And ... there was the sex thing, too. I guess I've realized that I really don't want to have sex anymore."
Mac kept stroking her hair. "Is that because of the brothel?" he asked, quietly.
"No," she said. And then, "I don't know. ... Maybe? But I don't think of it that way. It never bothered me to have sex with you, or with Vic."
"Ah," Mac said. "Well, that's a relief."
"But I was never really into it, you know? Somehow I just don't find the experience of sex very compelling."
"Is it possible that Vic and I just aren't very good?" Mac felt obliged to ask, for fairness' sake. "I mean, I'm mostly gay, as it turns out, and Vic—up to this point, I have no information about Vic as a lover."
She made a sort of snorfling noise into his shoulder. "Are you fishing for compliments, Mac?" she asked, laughter in her voice. "You gave me a lot of very nice orgasms, okay? Physically I have no complaints."
"Okay, good to know," Mac said. "Wow, I don't think we've ever talked about sex like this before."
"I've been thinking about it a lot, lately," Li Ann confessed. "Trying to figure out why I don't want to have sex with you, even though I love you."
Mac's heart skipped a beat on the I love you. She'd said it before—just not very often. "Do you think you might be gay?" he asked. Not that he'd ever suspected that about her, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to ask.
She shook her head. "I've never been attracted to women in that way," she said. "Well, except—"
"Except?" Mac prompted her, intrigued.
"You know I've been hanging out at the club, in drag," she said.
Mac nodded. He was a bit jealous; Friday and Saturday nights, while he'd been freezing his ass off checking IDs at the door and fending off bikers and frat boys, Li Ann had been inside, cementing her place in the scene. That, and looking for a chance to meet Ebony Stalking—though by sheer dumb luck, it was Mac who'd finally caught the clue and found out who she was.
"Well, I couldn't just stand by the wall for two whole nights in a row," Li Ann said. "So, I danced with a few women."
"And?" Mac said.
"Being in drag puts me in an interesting head space," Li Ann said. "I think ... I did feel some attraction to the women I was dancing with. But it was very abstract, not really sexual."
"Hm," Mac said. "I can't really relate to that. When I feel attraction, it's always sexual."
"Interesting," Li Ann said. "I can't really relate to that." Then she lifted her head, stifling a yawn. "Come on," she said, "let's go to bed."
Okay, last passage: in which Li Ann finally learns that there's a word for what she is. Here she's at lunch with Benjamin (an original character), a 45-year-old gay man who performs as a drag queen and is also a divorce lawyer and a same-sex marriage activist. Li Ann is undercover; Ben doesn't know that she's a secret agent.
"Him?" Benjamin repeated, with a startled blink.
Oops. Li Ann schooled her face to blankness, and took a bite of salad.
"Sorry," Benjamin said, looking off-balance. "Just—I'd assumed that you were gay. I guess I should know better than to assume things, at my age."
"Oh," Li Ann said, with a bit of relief. Right, there was absolutely no reason for Benjamin to leap to the realization that she'd been talking about Mac; he would probably assume that Li Ann had more than one friend. "Actually ... I'm not really sure what I am."
He cocked his head curiously. "Care to elaborate?"
She gave a vague shrug, and took another bite of salad to give herself time to think. "I've come to realize," she said eventually, "that I'm not really attracted to anyone. Er, sexually, that is."
"What about the Sunday-night friend?" Benjamin asked. "With the kissing?" He refilled his wine glass, and looked questioningly at her—she nodded, and he topped her up too.
"It was just kissing," she said. "I do like kissing this friend. I feel very affectionate towards them—well, him. But it's not a prelude to something more. It just is what it is."
"Have you always felt that way?" Benjamin asked. "Or is this something new for you?"
She considered the question seriously. Their entrées arrived in the meantime; Li Ann had ordered a mushroom risotto, and Benjamin had chosen the duck confit.
"Always, I think," she said. "But I did have lovers. Um, I was engaged to be married, actually. For a while. But I broke it off."
He tipped his wine glass to her, a slight gesture suggesting a toast. "You're a wiser woman than I was at your age," he said. "But go on."
Li Ann shrugged. "In retrospect, when I think of the reasons that I was with each of those lovers—and they were both men—it had to do with the circumstances that I found myself in at the time. In both cases I was trying to escape ... something. And I had sex with them because ... I guess it just didn't occur to me that we wouldn't? That's what you do in a relationship."
Benjamin looked thoughtful. "You know," he said, "I think I might know what you are."
She raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
"Take this or leave it," Benjamin said, putting down his fork to make an open-handed gesture. "But I do know some people who say that they're not heterosexual or homosexual, but asexual. Meaning, not sexually attracted. It sounds a lot like what you're describing."
"I've never heard that term used that way," Li Ann said. "Really, there are ... people like that?"
Benjamin gave her a wry grin. "There are all kinds of people, my dear. Only a lot of them have learned not to stick their heads up too far." He gestured with his fork. "If you'd like, I could ask around, see if I could find a discussion group for you..."
"No thanks," Li Ann said quickly—even though she was, to be honest, a little curious. But she probably had only five days at most left in this cover identity, and then she'd have to fade away. "But—those people. The ones that you know. Do you know if they'd been ... hurt ... as children?" That was an important question, but it had been hard to ask. She took a quick bite of risotto to hide her discomfort.
"Hurt?" Benjamin repeated, sort of blankly, and then he caught himself with a sharp look at her. "No," he said, slowly. "Not necessarily. I couldn't say that that's never true—all sorts of people have been hurt as children, unfortunately—but I know, for instance, a very sweet man in his sixties who tells me that he's asexual, and always has been, and who has lived a very happy, gentle life. He's a gardener. He's coming to the Two-Ring Circus, by the way—I could introduce you, if you'd like."
Li Ann shook her head mutely. The last thing she needed was Benjamin building a whole social network for her. She was a secret agent.
(From chapter 17 of my fic Rainbow Connections.)
So anyway, that was pretty much my asexuality sub-plot! After that, Li Ann starts using the word "asexual" to describe herself in conversations with both Vic and Mac.
I still feel a little sheepish about how it's only a sub-plot; in the actual stories, the building up of Mac and Vic's relationship gets a lot more screen-time. But anyway, I did it; I wrote an asexual character. Yay!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-27 08:22 pm (UTC)In some ways I do see queer fic as much like gen fic, in that it is also defined by what it is not -- which is heteronormativity.
Either way though, I can imagine the sense of erasure that produced -- and has probably continued to since it is easy for it to become obscured. Plus most interactions would have a lot of assumptions built into them that would be time consuming or awkward to confront.
"What fics about asexual characters?" I'd never seen one. I'd never imagined one. Were they out there? What would that look like? How was a fic about an asexual character different from a gen fic? I was thirty-ish, and I'd known that I was asexual for a decade or so, but it had never once occurred to me that someone like me might appear in a story.
I've read across various large, active fandoms, and I'm not surprised you were surprised. I'm not surprised it was in Sherlock fic that you first saw asexuality presented. I find it amazing that he's so rarely written as one when canon almost presents him that way (especially pre-S3). It's been only the last 3-5 years that I've come across any fic with asexual characters, and I suspect there was very little a decade ago.
I do agree about Illyria. Granted, I understand they have a long comics history together but I found it unfortunate that this is the direction Vision was taken in the MCU because it seems so unnecessary. (Which brings up the larger issue that if you don't know what to do with characters, throwing them into a sexual/romantic attraction seems to be a common choice -- I had an issue with this in S4 of Lucifer). But I have also seen writers create AU stories that change a character's canon sexuality.
I still feel a little sheepish about how it's only a sub-plot; in the actual stories, the building up of Mac and Vic's relationship gets a lot more screen-time.
This made sense to me because Li Ann was not going on any kind of intentional journey of self-discovery, whereas most of the stories were a very deliberate reveal of Mac's past and present. Plus Vic also discovers new things about himself as a result. So even though all three were on a similar path, it's Mac that got the most focus and it isn't really until Safe that Li Ann really starts understanding the parts of his past that she missed.
That said, I hadn't realized that Ben's existence and subplot had been primarily a way for Li Ann to encounter a new identity!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-28 02:43 am (UTC)Was the issue for them that A&B were equating asexual fic with gen fic?
That's a good question, actually! If I'd had the presence of mind at the time to query them about it, maybe we could've had an interesting and productive discussion.
I do agree about Illyria.
I was just reading the TV Tropes list of canonical (and semi-canonical) asexual characters, and they had Lorne on the list—apparently the actor who portrayed him was on record at some point saying that he thought Lorne was probably asexual. Which, okay, I can see.
I found it unfortunate that this is the direction Vision was taken in the MCU because it seems so unnecessary.
Yeah, I was taken by surprise by the relationship between Vision and Wanda at the start of Infinity War. I mean, I accepted it; they're characters we don't even know very well, and lots of time has passed since we last saw them, so I accepted that their relationship had developed offscreen.
That said, I hadn't realized that Ben's existence and subplot had been primarily a way for Li Ann to encounter a new identity!
Well, like I said, that's why I chose that particular setting and case. The details worked themselves out in the telling, as usual!