“As
a gay Doctor Who fan, the
question you get asked quite a lot is—why are so many Who fans
gay?” This line comes from Paul Magrs’s “The Monster Queer is
Camp”, the opening essay in Queers Dig Time Lords,
and it focuses on what is a fairly central point in the book. It’s
certainly true that Doctor Who
has always attracted a large number of LGBTQ fans, more so than
probably any other science fiction programme out there. One likely
reason for this—and one that the essays in Queers Dig
Time Lords repeatedly draw
attention to—is the almost complete lack of sexuality in the
original series. Apart from an occasional companion leaving to get
married to someone, attraction and sexuality was absent. In a world
where the male heroes of science fiction regularly flirted with and
bedded the women they met, Doctor Who
stood out. The Doctor was an asexual hero. He almost always had at
least one woman travelling with him, but there was never any hint of
romance or sexual attraction between them. Sure, fans have debated
heatedly whether the Doctor was truly asexual (he has a
granddaughter, many will point out, while ignoring the fact that
children and grandchildren aren’t really evidence of any particular
sexuality) or if his sexuality was just behind closed doors because
of what was acceptable in a programme that children would be
watching. And the new series has established the Doctor as
unequivocally sexual while still keeping him chaste. However, with
sex out of the question in the original series, the Doctor became a
hero that queer fans could more easily identify with. As Paul Magrs
goes on to say:
If we don’t see the hero bedding and flirting with sexy young women, then there is room for other possibilities. Or simply the idea of sex not being a primary concern. When you grow up gay and are terrified or in denial about your own burgeoning sexuality, this is very liberating. It allows you to identify or root for a hero who won’t confuse you by having desires of his own.
Queers
Dig Time Lords from Mad
Norwegian Press (publishers of Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time) brings
together essays from a wide range of LGBTQ authors who are also fans
of Doctor Who. It is
very similar in style to Chicks Dig Time Lords,
in which the authors write about their own experiences with the
programme. Most of the essays are anecdotal, telling stories of how
the authors discovered Doctor Who
and came to love it, or how their geek lives and queer lives
overlapped and influenced each other. A few of the essays are more
analytical in nature, looking at aspects of the programme from an
LGBTQ perspective; however, these essays are in the distinct
minority.
It’s
a good, entertaining book overall, but I have to admit as I got
further into it, it became a bit of struggle to get through a few of
the essays. This isn’t due to any particular problem I had with the
essays that appear later in the book—indeed a couple of the best
ones appear towards the end of the book—but rather that many of the
essays started to feel repetitive, like I’d read the particular
story several times already. Which, in a sense, I had. This is a bit
of an unfair criticism, really, given that any book of essays with a
linking theme is going to have a certain degree of repetition.
However, that repetition does feel particularly noticeable in this
book. I feel a bit bad for some of the authors whose essays ended up
near the end of the book (such as Susan Jane Bigelow, author of “Same
Old Me, Different Face: Transition, Regeneration, and Change”), as
I suspect I would have appreciated and enjoyed their essays more if
they were nearer the front (although that would mean that the early
ones would be displaced to later in the book, possibly lowering my
appreciation of them—kind of a no-win situation).
The
only major criticism I have of Queers Dig Time Lords
as a whole is with the editing. There is a surprisingly large number
of errors throughout the book, generally missing words, but also
occasional misspellings and verb tense errors. The latter is
particularly egregious in the first few paragraphs of “A Man is the
Sum of His Memories...” by Neil Chester, where the verb tenses
switch back and forth between present and past seemingly randomly and
sometimes multiple times in a single sentence. For example, “My
parents knew that it’s a game, but at four years and eight months
old, I genuinely believed she’s not going to let me.” I was
initially worried that the whole essay would be like this, as this
mixing up of tenses is somewhat common with inexperienced writers
(and Chester’s bio at the top of the essay indicates that this is
“his first-ever published work”). However, the problem clears up
after a few paragraphs and the tenses become more consistent, leading
me to believe the cause is due to a combination of inexperience and
poor editing. Now, I should point out that I’m well aware that
editing is never perfect and that you can find errors in virtually
any published work. However, in the case of Queers Dig Time
Lords, there are considerably
more than I would expect from a professional publication.
That
aside, all the essays in this book are quite good. Some are certainly
better than others, and my personal preferences tend to lean towards
the more analytical essays (one of the reasons why, as much as I
liked Chicks Dig Time Lords,
I preferred Chicks Unravel Time),
but there aren’t any essays I would consider bad. The stories are
often heartfelt and moving. “Time, Space, Love” by Emily
Asher-Perrin is one of my favourites of the anecdotal essays. It
tells the feel-good tale of how Doctor Who
brought Asher-Perrin and her best-friend-turned-partner together.
Melissa Scott’s “Long Time Companions” tells a similar tale,
but one with a heartbreaking ending that is bound to leave readers in
tears. “My Straight Best Friend” is a wonderful tale of author
Nigel Fairs’s friendship with Louise Jameson (who played the fourth
Doctor’s companion Leela). Possibly the most unusual and thoroughly
intriguing entry in the book is the final one. It’s hard to call
Rachel Swirsky’s “The Girl Who Waited (for the Guidance
Counsellor to Get to His Point)” an essay as it’s written more
like a short story, one that clearly contains autobiographical
elements within a fictional framework—or as Swirsky’s bio says,
the “piece is in fact entirely
autobiographical and includes absolutely no
fictional elements.” It’s the story of Swirsky’s encounter with
the Guidance Counsellor, who “resembles—but is legally distinct
from—the Doctor,” and her travels with him/her through time and
space. It’s a very fun read.
However,
the stand-out essays (for me at least) are the ones that take a more
in-depth look at the show itself and how it handles LGBTQ characters
and themes. “Bi, Bye” by Tanya Huff examines the treatment of
bisexuals in Doctor Who.
Huff argues correctly that bisexuality makes a first open appearance
in Series One of new Who
and then pretty much vanishes again early in Series Two after
including a bisexual Shakespeare in “The Shakespeare Code”. The
essay is a great look at how, even though gays and lesbians have been
relatively well represented in recent years, bisexuals remain
marginalized. In “Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master’s First
and Last”, Amal El-Mohtar examines the relationship between the
Doctor and the Master and the implicit attraction between the two of
them, from obvious exchanges like their telephone conversation in
“The Sound of Drums” (“I like it when you say my name”) to
exchanges between Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado.
One
of my favourite essays is “The Heterosexual Agenda” by John
Richards. Ever since Doctor Who’s
return in 2005, there has been a loud subset of fandom that has
complained about the so-called “homosexual agenda”. This stems
from the inclusion of non-straight characters in the series. Rather
than seeing this as simply trying to show the variety of people that
really exist in the real word, these fans see this as somehow forcing
homosexuality upon them, or as Richards puts it, “a sign for them
that that the feminista-nazicrats were forcing dildos down the
throats of our children, which at the very least was a choking
hazard.” But Richards rightly points out that, while there are gay
characters, the show hasn’t be homosexualized; it’s been
heterosexualized. The Doctor himself is now a heterosexual character
(although Tanya Huff’s “Bi, Bye” makes a very good argument
that the ninth Doctor could be considered bisexual) and his
companions are resolutely heterosexual, too, some of them even
falling in love with the Doctor. In contrast, the gay characters,
alas, tend to die. I was kind of shocked to read that “so far no
gay male couple has ever survived to the end of a story,” and at
first I thought there had to be a mistake there. But as I thought
about it, the only exception I could think of was Canton Everett
Delaware III (from “The Impossible Astronaut”/”Day of the
Moon”), whom Richards does acknowledge but points out that his
partner is never seen on screen, only mentioned at the very end of
the story, so doesn’t really count as a full exception. Richards
acknowledges that this isn’t a deliberate attempt to marginalize
gay characters, but that doesn’t change the problematic nature of
their portrayal. “The Heterosexual Agenda” is in some ways a
rather disturbing essay, in that it draws attention to things I’d
really rather weren’t true, yet I can’t argue against. But that’s
also one of the things that makes an essay like this so important.
It’s only through recognizing and acknowledging problems that
things can improve.
Not
surprisingly, many of the essays in Queers Dig Time Lords talk
a great deal about Captain Jack, probably the most prominent queer
character on Doctor Who (the book even has an introduction by
John Barrowman and his sister Carole). Captain Jack is a popular and
influential character to many of the authors, so it makes sense that
several of the essays focus on him or Torchwood. One such
essay is “Jack Harkness’s Lessons on Memory and Hope for Cranky,
Old Queers” by Racheline Maltese. A mixture of anecdotal and
analytical, the essay looks at categorization in the queer
community—both the advantages and disadvantages of
categorization—and Maltese’s own struggles with categorizing
herself. The essay opens with a quote from the Torchwood episode
“Day One” with Jack saying, “You people and your quaint little
categories.” Maltese goes on to say,
Labels and categories mattered and continue to matter, even as they have seemed to proliferate to describe the many shades of our not heterosexual existences. For example, this week I’m a masculine-identified genderqueer pansexual woman in a lesbian relationship, but I prefer the word gay for political reasons. What was once shorthand for what we are has become a toolkit for answering essay questions, and the LGBT group of my university years has now expanded to include at least twice as many letters.
For
Maltese (and many others), Captain Jack and Torchwood
represent a world where people who are not heterosexual are not
strange or abnormal. “Torchwood, Camp, and Queer
Subjectivity” by Brit Mandelo covers similar territory, and even
makes use of the same “Day One” quote (though doesn’t open with
it). Mandelo follows up the quote by saying, “That phrase, really,
summarizes a great deal of what Torchwood is doing with its
commentary on gender and sexuality that makes it so damned appealing
to a viewer with a non-binary identity.” Mandelo argues that
Torchwood twists away from the typical heterosexual male gaze
of most programmes and instead presents a queer gaze. The usual
patterns and responses to non-heterosexual characters and
relationships don’t occur in the same way in Torchwood.
She doesn’t ignore the problematic elements in the series
(which certainly do exist), but does argue that its “active refusal
to participate, its insistence on changing the game and context—using
camp, using strategies of visual presentation—mark it as unique.”
There’s a lot about Queers Dig
Time Lords that is very good. I don’t rate it as highly as
Chicks Dig Time Lords or especially Chicks Unravel Time,
but it contains a number of excellent essays and moving stories. More
than that, I’d say it’s an important book as it presents a
prominent side of fandom that doesn’t often make it into print, and
gives that part of fandom a voice. There aren’t many other
programmes out there for which people would put together a book like
this, and I suppose that shows just how special this show called
Doctor Who and its spin-offs are.
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