This is an essay that was written for a Gender, Digital Media and Social Curation class that I took during my time studying journalism at Rutgers. This class was a part of my Gender in Media Minor.

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Kai Kiernan

Professor Alok Vaid-Menon

Gender, Digital Media and Social curation

12/3/2018

Being a Fanboy made me like Men

 Being a fan-boy is a little gay, and the white rich men of the media are afraid of that. Let me explain this through talking about the history of fan-Girling, and my personal experience of running a music blog on Tumblr where I reviewed/ covered and reblogged music for 4 years. I wish to speak of fandom because I see it as a wonderful way to explore one’s identity in terms of sexuality, romanticism, our relationship to the notion of what it means to care, and how fandoms exists in a place that challenges heteronormativity.  

I grew up spending hours on Tumblr. Using this website was very important to me due to two reasons. It was something I could do to talk to other people who shared my interest online, and also because I was terribly afraid of speaking up until the age of around 16. I had a speech impediment that was in part due to me having my right cheek bitten by a dog when I was six years old. It was luckily able to be superficially fixed up by some plastic surgery after being immediately rushed to the hospital, but afterwards, there was still damage that made it difficult to pronounce certain sounds, which resulted in me choosing not to speak for many years out of fear of being seen as less because of it. But out of this fear of speaking, I looked out for online communities where I did not have to speak, and when I did find them online it allowed me to access groups of people who were able to show emotion freely through their blogs. This meant having fan-pages and geeking out about music provided a place where I could speak freely with essentially zero consequence. This meant that I could look at long list of pictures of these immensely talented people, and allow myself to fantasize about what it is like to be them, to notice everything about them, to listen to music they had written about their inner turmoil in addition, to being amazed by their performance, charm, kindness, and to fully escape in their existence in contrast to what it was like to grow up in a place that only took note of my existence when it could be used on a college resume. I loved loving these men, because it allowed me to see myself in them, and to have a situation where I could speak and be loved. I think this exploration of gay admiration is something that is so deeply powerful because it allowed me to not only have a place to express and come to terms with what I was feeling, but it was something that could start off a search for self-love and learning to become a more authentic self through a mimicry of what I admired. Being a fan is a wonderful first step in that process.

While I could go on forever about how excited a 15-year-old me was, I would like to speak about fandom as a tool against toxic masculinity (and perhaps even a tool to deconstruct the very title of the masculine). The heteronormative culture of the US suggests that when men who express affection towards each other, they must always be able to justify it as a heterosexual action, despite how their admiration for another could be interpreted as an extension of what they want in a romantic/ sexual sense. This is something that requires thought. It requires emotional investment and is often times something that is discouraged. It requires a dialogue of seeing a blurred line in respect, love, appreciation and the long tails of spectrums that these words inspire. I see myself as a collection of reactions based in a neuro-biology that I cannot fully understand, and the emotions I feel a construction I have allowed myself to create. My narrative is one is biological reactions I have deemed authentic, and through being a fan and a student of those I love and respect I am constantly contributing to that story book. The narratives I found compelling were compiled from appreciating others, and when I wanted to create a narrative around my own sexuality and existence, I used notions collected from being a fan to create that. 

 Being a fanboy of another man is not normalized because it is seen as a winding road where many men have to first address the idea that they might be infatuated with another man. This Bi-erasure and blunt discrediting of thought through time is something that has been done in the west for many generations. 

“In 1904  American  psychologist  G.  Stanley  Hall  first  defined  adolescence  as  a transformative life stage taking place between fourteen and twenty-four years of  age. Although both white males and females underwent this biological moratorium, Hall proposed that “pubescence lasts longer [and] is more unsettling . . . in the life of  the girl than the boy. She is a more generic being . . . [who] loves to have her feelings stirred because emotionality is her life. She is impressionable, but her sentiments are fugitive.” (pg 1, Sequeira)

This idea from the white man who has clearly never felt an emotion, suggest that this entire paper was a stupid idea and that my entire existence online is false. If allowing sentiments to be fugitive to the ups and downs of a story is something that is pre-determined by prepubescent femininity, then how do all artist ever learn to appreciate art? How is there ever a need for creative expression such as film or music, without film being able to inspire emotion to a point of action? How do these men ever find out that they want to make movies if they are not fans themselves? This is an unrealistic trope, and a misinterpreted trend of young girls taking an interest in film being seen as some grand gesture of a sex. This is an example of science being used to appease social understandings (that are most certainly endorsed by the people who benefit from this knowledge). It does not depend on gender, it depends on interest. Young women being fascinated with the early days of film makes complete sense, since it was a world changing technology! I guarantee that young men who saw these movies were also feeling a similar way, when they were not dealing with their early onset alcoholism and perhaps the fear of polio. In addition, these most likely Christian men, were most certainly not going to mention every time their heart started beating a little faster when the saw some daddy with a nice hat solve a crime (or whatever they did in older movies).This meant that an un-addressed feeling about their “man-crush” results in them sort of pushing these homo romantic desires and fantasies into a subconscious part of their brain where they can continue to live a life where they are in an ideal position within the hegemonic culture.
 
I also wish to say that there was essentially no benefit to not being a heterosexual man in that time, and thus the language was not going to be developed in a way that that was accurate to that silenced population of men. But today is not 1904-1918. In the shades of culture where homosexuality and wider notions of sexual authenticity are accepted, being able to appreciate people for who they are, and their appealing qualities is an immensely important ability. That means being able to recognize when something is good and being able to speak about it and analyze it.

Fandom, appreciation and the ability to care about anything is a wonderful set of toolns to fight against heteronormativity and the ills of patriarchal suppression of the feminine. By being able to analyze media as groups do through fandom, we can juxtapose alternative narratives onto media to create spaces of theoretical representation everywhere, find surprisingly iconic and powerful imagery to use in the creation of our own stories, and also create a self-narrative of greater comfort and authenticity to how we want to be.