Dark Art as an Access Need

[ada_hoffmann]

When I was a much-younger, more-naive little Ada, I used to worry that I would hurt people by being queer. Not because being queer is inherently, directly harmful – I’d gotten past that already – but because someone might be upset or in distress or lose their relationship with me if they knew I was queer, and isn’t that in some sense me hurting them? Did I have the right to upset other people and make them distressed about their own morality, just so I could gratify my own desires? That didn’t seem right.

I think about this a lot when I think about dark content in queer stories.

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Comments

[rhoda_rants]

And the ugly paradox is that it's sensitive, compassionate, highly scruplous writers who are scared by this most.

I've seen that too, yeah. And it's not like the, "I'll just take my toys and go home then!" people actually stop creating. I'm thinking of a number of filmmakers and comedians here, not necessarily writers, but like, almost everyone who's legitimately problematic and highly successful . . . keeps making their art.

And what does that mean for the future of the field - that the only people who can make it as queer writers writing about sensitive themes are those that can make themselves callous enough, or insular and separate enough from the broader community, to push past all of this?

I hadn't even thought about this. I guess it's the flip side to telling people they need to grow thicker skin to handle criticism, because that's part of the deal when you make art, not everyone's going to love it, but do you really want to have art that's made entirely by people who have made themselves cold so they're unaffected by it? Yikes. :/

People just need to be kinder to each other. I don't know how to achieve that, but that's the real issue. People need to be kinder to each other.

[ada_hoffmann]

Yes, you're right. This is an oversimplification, but it almost feels like there are two different "cancel culture"s - one for very successful rich white bigots and one for struggling, beginning or less-or-known, marginalized artists. The bigots will whine a lot about having been canceled but they'll just keep on trucking. The marginalized ones are the ones who will wholly or partly vanish, or who will change what they're writing because of the chilling effect.

The way I've been dealing with this is not so much to try to make myself more callous, it's to do something... adjacent to being callous but a little subtler. It's to get used to the risk and remind myself of my real values. Writing articles like this is one small part of that, I think. It's not that I think fiction doesn't matter and people should just do whatever, amorally; it's that marginalized people being able to tell risky, difficult, or self-indulgent stories *is* one of my values, and that means I have to take a lot of responsibility for thinking about how it fits into my values, practicing writing that way despite how scary it is, and mentally preparing (or taking steps to try to protect myself) for encounters with people whose values are different and who think that I shouldn't be writing or talking this way. Sometimes that looks like callousness, sometimes what I tell myself is that I'm being bad for fun, but I think deep down it's actually a different thing.

I've been fortunate enough to find a few people who Get It, in terms of where I'm coming from with this, and I've also found that there are groups and communities I've had to step away from. Groups that might be full of very well-meaning people and that I once felt welcome in, but that made it actively harder for me to claim my own values, where writing was concerned, instead of complying with what the loudest people in the group wanted me to think. My radar for that kind of thing has become much more sensitive in the last few years, and it's meant some quiet but painful endings. :-\

[rhoda_rants]

There are definitely two cancel cultures! That's exactly it.

"It's to get used to the risk and remind myself of my real values. Writing articles like this is one small part of that, I think."

Yeah, and actually, after I read this, I saw two or three other articles/threads/rants about the exact same thing, so I know you're not alone in recognizing it as a problem. Writing has enough pressure attached to it without trying to make everything perfectly suited to every potential reader. I long to be self-indulgent, and actually I just started revising a novel (my NaNoWriMo from last year, actually) that is VERY self-indulgent on a few different levels. No idea if it has an audience, but I have to hope, y'know?

"My radar for that kind of thing has become much more sensitive in the last few years, and it's meant some quiet but painful endings."

I've been pruning a bit too, and it sucks. I wonder if I'm overreacting sometimes, but also, my life is noticeably less stressful after cutting certain people out of it, so I have to believe I did the right thing.

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