![slash fiction slash fiction](https://documento.mx/img/detail/5c1154bd90969.jpg)
Still, the explosion of slash as a substantial subculture can be tied directly to two cultural phenomena: the birth of the internet and the rapidly shifting public attitude toward homosexuality. I like to believe, though, that this is a phenomenon that has been going on for quite some time now – I mean, do you really think all those crazy Victorian Sherlock Holmes fans were so desperate for the good detective to come back from the dead for any reason other than poor Watson’s emotional health, or that the teenage girls who got their hands on A Separate Peace in the sixties didn’t titter themselves about Finny making Gene strip his dirty, sweaty clothes while watching? (If any of you had to read that book as a fourteen-year-old and found it dull, I highly recommend a reread.) I can’t prove that either of these hypotheses is true, of course, but they can’t really be disproven, either, so I’ll carry on believing what I’d like to believe. Since then, it has been a force in Harry Potter fandom, in X-Men fandom, and has reached a kind of hilarious (to me, anyway) zenith amongst fans of the television show Supernatural. Slash, according to Wikipedia, “is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on interpersonal attraction and sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.” Conventional wisdom goes that slash as we know it began with Star Trek – specifically, with Kirk/Spock, about which little, really, need be said. “Oh, dear,” I muttered to my friend, and my hand shot up, Hermione Granger-style, because I just couldn’t help myself. “Um,” one of the boys said tentatively, “isn’t it, like…porn?” Everyone, the male students in particular, immediately began to look incredibly uncomfortable. In this first, massively overpacked, section, she asked her students what they thought “slash” was. A couple of years ago, I sat in on the first class of a seminar on cyberculture at Columbia, taught by Brenda Silver, which I sort of knew I wasn’t going to be able to take due to an over-full schedule, but wanted to check out anyway.