A Brief History of the Sapphic Fangirl

The following is actually an extract from the introduction to my Masters dissertation, but I thought it might prove interesting to some readers, so....

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'In the more recent films that naturalise lesbian desire, but offer it as an alternative that is not viable within the ‘real’ world of the film’s fiction, lesbians can either invent their own narratives that allow the lesbianism to be enacted or can become engaged with the film through an attraction to one of the characters. (If all else fails, there is always the girl sitting next to you in the theatre).’ – Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema, p83

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It is ten in the morning on a murky London Saturday, in September, 2010, and I have pulled my best friend, T., around the back of the Southbank BFI to snog her face off.

T. accuses me of biting her. I’ll admit I may have been somewhat careless about what I was doing with my teeth in my fervour, but this still seems like an uncharitable observation given the circumstances. I’m being romantic, for fuck’s sake!

I have been attempting to get us to this point in our relationship – from ‘best friend’ to ‘girlfriend’ – for almost the entirety of the two years that I’ve known her: we met on one of Merlin’s online fanfiction communities whilst the show’s first season was airing. I do not know yet that the entire two year courtship is an absolutely fucking terrible idea (Closeted Girls: They’ll Take A Shit On Your Heart – a memoir), I’m just giddy. My stomach is in knots because I haven’t eaten yet – I can never eat on Merlin days – but I’m happy.

Today is the preview of the first episode of Merlin’s third season, airing at the BFI two weeks before it airs on TV. I have already been to other BFI previews of Merlin episodes in T.’s company, but this time in the cinema I hold her hand. When Morgana wakes screaming from a nightmare and her loyal maid, Gwen, leaps onto the bed to embrace and console her, we giggle conspiratorially.

We know that the show will never allow any actual expressed romantic love between these two characters, but we've built the foundation of our relationship on fictionalising Morgana and Gwen’s romance for ourselves. I run the primary online community for fan-authored stories (‘fanfiction’, ‘fanfic’ or just ‘fic’) about the couple and T. and I have probably spent more time than is sensible dreaming up Morgana and Gwen’s off-screen adventures together.

We like ‘MorGwen’ because they, like us, are an interracial queer couple – but, unlike us, their problems are less about the dull, grinding presence of a patriarchal racist heterodoxy, and more about dragons, magic, and stupid princes who won’t do as they’re told. It makes for excellent escapism.

T. and I broke up some time later and I found another Merlin fangirl to date – and then another – but Merlin’s presence in the backdrop of these relationships remained constant, as did my reworking of stories about its central female characters in order to ‘queer’ them to my satisfaction.

By the time Merlin had finished its five season run, I was well aware that the history of my development as an adult queer woman was now bizarrely but inextricably linked to this TV show. I had formulated a queer media consciousness through its fandom; I had met, seduced and broken up with my first love almost entirely via the show and its fan communities. I had, in fact, embarked on a wide array of variably successful relationships with girls I knew entirely because of Merlin – the show had operated both as my muse, and my dating service, throughout my university career.

And then, after graduating and job-hunting necessitated the winding-down of my participation in Merlin fandom, I fell for Gwen, a girl who was totally unconnected to the show's fandom but still shared a name with one its main characters. As if the Gods of Queer were mocking me.

(And, bless her, she didn't turn and run the minute I got her in my bedroom to be confronted with one entire wall dedicated to signed pictures of Katie McGrath's face). 

The fact is that it was the combination of my queer identity and Merlin’s influence that drove me out of my bedroom and into the industry upon graduating from university. Having spent years writing fanfiction primarily for Merlin, but also a handful of other British dramas, I realised my ‘queering’ of the narratives presented in the source material was better serving my needs and desires as a viewer than the shows themselves were, and I resolved to enter the industry as a writer in order to do better.

The recent emergence not just of deliberately queer subtext but of openly queer characters in British TV drama is viscerally enlivening both to me personally as a viewer, and professionally as a young screenwriter. Even more encouraging is the inclusion of queer characters in drama aimed at a ‘family’ audience. ‘Family’ drama tends to include a presumed subsection of child viewers, and what a culture will expose its children to is arguably a litmus test for what is considered ‘decent’ in a public place in general. For a community whose media representation was historically censured under obscenity laws, our transition from unspeakable to downright PC feels like it represents a monumental step forward, toward true equality.

But I'm suspicious of the source of this wider representation – and am probably not the only queer person to have noticed, as Andrea Weiss points out, ‘that [the queer community’s] ability to appropriate images from the dominant culture is often matched or surpassed by the dominant culture’s amazing capacity to absorb and co-opt marginalised groups’ (Vampires and Violets, p163). That is, I worry that in some cases not just ‘out’ queer characters onscreen, but queer subtext itself (traditionally a haven from which queer viewers can reinterpret the narrative), may be being systematically co-opted by a hetero-centric media culture in these dramas.

Weiss is talking specifically about lesbian images in film, which are notoriously fetishized and co-opted by the heterosexual male gaze; but I think her argument here is easily applicable to wider queer representation in television.

My hunch is that, in family dramas, ‘queerness’ is appropriated by television makers for dramatic effect. Because of its relative novelty in a pre-watershed timeslot, subtextual or overt queerness can be used to create mystique around a character, which lends intrigue to their presence and power to their actions in the story.

And whilst the subversive power of the marginalised is refreshing to see in pre-watershed drama, and certainly has the potential to be progressive, there are troubling implications if my hunch is correct. Firstly, the character who I will prove has the most queer subtext on Merlin is Morgana – who is also the villain of the piece and whose murder at the hands of our heterosexual male heroes is celebrated. The power that Morgana’s subtextual queerness grants her is almost always negative in tone, spectularly so in her arc with Guinevere in the show’s fifth and final season, which I will draws heavily on regressive ‘lesbian vampire’ tropes. (Right down to Morgana 'dying' and coming back).

Secondly, even in cases where the power associated with queerness is positive – as in Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint on Doctor Who, who are presented as allies to the Doctor – this power is still ‘othering’. The way the viewer is invited to perceive these characters is from an oppositional ‘norm’, so the characters can be presented as ‘other’ to this norm, which grants the ‘other’ the novelty that makes it dramatic. But that still leaves the queer character(s) abnormal and strange, however benign.