The X-Files, Writing, Sex, etc.

The X-Files premiered in 1993, when I was about 16 years old. Which was perfect, since everything about it was designed for a 16-year-old boy in the 90s.

The special connection I had, well one of the special connections, was that my father worked in advertising and a month before it premiered he handed me a tape with rough edits of the first two episodes.

It was everything I wanted from a tv show. Darkness, intrigue, conspiracy theories, hackers, distrust of the government and any authority, Dana Scully.

I was hooked from the first five minutes and I had a whole month of telling my friends about this amazing show that was going to start soon.

The problem was, none of my friends cared. I was in that weird middle ground where I was the nerdiest of my circle of friends. Any nerdier and I would be a loser. Any cooler and I would have to dress better. It was a fine homeostasis.

My high school was huge, like one of the largest high schools in the country and by Wikipedia’s telling the most ethnically diverse high school in the country. So it was a weird wild place and you had to stick close to your friends or chance getting lost in the shuffle.

Luckily, right around when X-Files started, there was another way to talk about that amazing show. The internet. More accurately, Usenet.

At that point, the learning curve for communication online was pretty high. You actually had to figure a lot of stuff out just to follow a conversation on something like a Usenet newsgroup. So in the desire to talk about a nerdy show, I had to teach myself a bunch of tech. This also involved convincing (and lying to) my mother to get some sort of data connection.

I was dabbling with BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) which was basically dialing up to a phone number somewhere and connecting to a mostly text shell where various people posted things. It was horrible, slow, and compelling.

Just after X-Files premiered, AOL got Usenet access and thus, I got AOL.

It wasn’t until around 1995 or so that I started figuring out that there was something called fan fiction out there. It started with X-Files, then I backtracked and realized there was already Star Trek, and the next year Buffy came out and it started things rolling for me.

X-Files fan fiction was always a little more advanced than everything else, at least to me. It seemed to attract the most serious writers and damn there were people putting out whole novels every week.

Of course during my forays into X-Files forums, conversing about the minutia of the show, reading plot summaries, reading people much smarter and older than me explain every reference and detail, I was also exploring the other things Usenet provided; porn. Written porn specifically. alt.sex.stories.

At that time anything took forever to download, but text was always the fastest and the most plentiful, so text was my medium. I read all kinds of things on erotica newsgroups and forums. Usenet porn, then and now, was always completely wild. The dirtiest and weirdest things always seemed to funnel to the top. To be noticed, you wrote the biggest thing you could imagine. And I gobbled it all up.

And lo and behold it wasn’t long until my two loves merged and I found slash and erotic X-Files stories. All that unresolved sexual tension finally finding a release.

So something about words online and the communities around them has always been intrinsically tied to my sexuality. When I was figuring out sex, I was also figuring out the internet, as well as starting to write. It all seemed like the same thing to me.

X-Files was my first fandom girlfriend. It was a rocky relationship, but it will always be special to me. Buffy was a rebound.

Now, as I look back at this era in my life and read up on fandom theory it is all coming back to me. I miss the camaraderie of fandom. The every day back and forth of forums. Reading other people’s work and having them read yours and commenting and critiquing.

As much as I like Tumblr and now Medium, there is no real interaction. I put things out there and I get a like, a reblog, a little hashtag or note, but there is no critical engagement. I miss that a lot. Livejournal, which was the forum that seemed to come after Usenet for me, was such a wonderfully generous place when it came to feedback.

I suppose book sales and Amazon reviews are something, but it is such a different metric and so removed from the personal back and forth.

Not sure where I am going with this, but just thoughts. Are there fanfiction fans here? Are there other writers who want to engage? Are there places were these kinds of conversations are happening that I don’t know about?

Scully?