My History Writing Gay Superman/Lex Luthor Fanfic

Slash, OTPs, and Fanfic, Oh My!

My first fandom was Superman.

I was visiting my uncle’s house in Northern British Columbia. Their yard was a square of yellowing grass and dust. A child of the mountains, I was overwhelmed by the empty distance, the desolate blankness of the Canadian prairies.

I holed up in my cousin’s bedroom, sifting through a box of old Superman comic books. I devoured stories of Clark, Lois, Kara, and Krypton the dog. I lost myself in a world of wonder and fancy, where survivors of a planetary destruction could fly and shake off bullets.

My sister and I watched several episodes of an animated Batman series one day while waiting in a store for my mom to finish shopping. I don’t remember what store it was, but it wasn’t unusual for store televisions then to play hours and hours of a show. I know it was not Batman: The Animated Series as this was years before that, and this show had a Robin who said, “Holy rusted metal, Batman!” and fought alongside Batgirl against Mr Freeze and the Riddler. My best guess is it must have been The Adventures Of Batman from 1968.

At some point in our childhood, my sister and I began to create “imaginary plays’’ together at night before we fell asleep. I would lie in my bed in the dark across the room from her and stare toward the ceiling I couldn’t see, our voices creating a story back and forth by turn. We started with Batman and Robin and Batgirl, and we invented complicated plots for them to solve. Eventually, we introduced other characters, some we even created ourselves.

I graduated high school in 1998, and started writing fanfiction when I was in university in the aughts. I was excited to learn that there was a whole online community of people who took existing characters and worlds and made up new stories with them.

I even wrote a fanfic narrative essay for one of my university English classes. The assignment was to choose a “myth” we related to and write ourselves into it as Maxine Hong Kingston did with Mu Lan in “White Tigers” in her book Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The professor gave me 99% and a gold star sticker. She told me later that she had held her breath while reading it, afraid that I would fall off the tightrope at any moment, but I didn’t. It was the greatest compliment I had ever received from a teacher.

I became part of the Fanfiction.net community in 2005, posting my own works and reading others. I wrote stories and poetry in the worlds of Harry Potter (HP), Lord of the Rings (LotR), Avatar: The Last Airbender (AtLA), Star Wars (SW), Doctor Who (DW), Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and Sherlock.

For some time, I wouldn’t admit that I even read “slash” fanfiction. In fanfiction communities, a “pairing” is a couple you can “ship,” which means you enjoy the idea of them being together romantically. Fandom uses the shorthand “Clark/Lois” for a romantic ship or “Lana & Chloe” for a platonic friendship pairing. For some reason, even though the / (forward slash) is used for all romantic pairings, the term “slash” came to mean specifically male/male pairings.

I posted my first Smallville (SV) fanfic in 2013 but I wasn’t brave enough to make it obvious Clex (Clark/Lex) slash. A year later, I finally posted my first slash fanfic, “Your Touch On My Soul”, a story of destined soulmates, yearning, and love where Clark and Lex discover they were always meant to be together. They were now unquestionably my first OTP (One True Pairing).

That same year, I posted two more Clex fics and a Stucky (Steve/Bucky) fic. In 2015 and 2016, I posted two more Clex fics each year.

Also in 2016, I discovered Malec (Magnus/Alec from Shadowhunters) and I had a second OTP.

I joined Archive of Our Own (AO3) in 2012, and “Red Tights” was my first story there. To date, I’ve posted 82 fanfiction works on AO3 and 14 of them are Clex slash.

From 2013 to 2018 I worked on my biggest project to date: a genderbent retelling of Star Wars. Anneke and Lucia Skywalker, Padraig Andelko, Hanna Solo, and Alaric Organa taught me more about writing than I had ever considered I could learn. I drafted and edited 6 multi chapter fics in the series. When I posted the final chapter of A Shadow in the Glass Episode VI: The Rising Dawn, I felt a sense of accomplishment greater than I had ever felt before. The whole series clocks in at 97,327 words, which is preposterous to me.

For those who don’t know, most fanfiction writers are women and girls, though you might not guess that from some of the usernames. I go by atwojay on Tumblr and Fanfiction.net and I’ve had people shorten it to Jay and use he/him pronouns.

I write much less fanfiction now than I used to. I focus more on writing original fiction. But I will always be grateful to fanfiction and fandom communities for giving me a safe place to be creative.

I am especially grateful to SV and Clex. They opened my eyes to a whole new world.

Esther learned to read when she was four years old, and began writing shortly thereafter. She is a queer Christian poet, crafting with words to create art and music.

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