Samuel R. Delany on slash fic:

Still, the “K/S” material confirmed something that I already knew from my own life: that there are just as many heterosexual women who are turned on by the idea of men having sex with one another as there are heterosexual men who are turned on by the idea of women having sex with one another — that the engines of desire are far more complex than we usually give them credit for; and that if lesbians and gay men didn’t exist, heterosexual men and women would have had to invent them — because they constantly do.

–Samuel R. Delany, quoted in “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture” (Dery, Mark. Duke: 1994, 206)

I went to Dery’s book looking for stuff on fan labour, but found this fantastic quotation (which summarizes both slash fandom and Foucault quite neatly, I think) instead.

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