How would you describe Slash to someone who hasn’t seen it?
Emily Allan: Slash is the name of our play, but it’s also a genre of fan fiction. The play is a deep dive into the world of homoerotic fan fiction on the internet. If there’s a narrative, it’s that there is a blonde and a brunette and they feel trapped in their world. They have a feeling that nothing is real, and if it is, how can it be? They feel that there must be something else. So, it’s their attempt to escape or test the limits of reality through roleplay and ritual. They go through a series of ritualistic cosplays of two usually male archetypal pairs, living out this prolonged romance.
Leah Victoria Hennessey: I’m interested in games, ritual and fantasy. Slash is very much a game that we play and it gets very confusing who the real characters are, and who are the characters that the characters are playing. The original or authentic is left open-ended—it’s open ended if there is any escape through games at all. This kind of roleplaying is the kind of thing that if I could still do with my friends—we wouldn’t have to do it in a play. Emily and I can obsess together, but I wouldn’t be able to say to Emily, let’s ‘pretend’ I’m him.
Do you remember, when every sentence started with that word? I remember when I was young, I was in my room playing and realized that adults don’t do that. So, I promised myself I would never stop imagining and pretending.
Emily Allan: That’s what the play is about.
Is fan fiction mostly written by women?
Leah Victoria Hennessey: Most slash fiction, which is homoerotic pairings of possibly straight characters, is almost entirely written by women.
Did I see a critique of that somewhere in the play? You guys were addressing that women write homoerotic relationships because traditional hetero relationships aren’t depicted as dynamic.
Leah Victoria Hennessey: It’s not a critique, it’s a take. In the play, we incorporate big chunks of this piece by Joanna Russ, called "Pornography by Women for Women with Love," and she posits that women fantasize about homoerotic male relationships because men are allowed the complexity and depth and equality that, when she was writing this in the ‘70s, she didn’t feel like women had. Kirk and Spock’s relationship, for instance, was portrayed as more equal, more fulfilling and more noble, and that love between man and a woman can never escape the context of life and patriarchy.
So, it’s a desire to see noble love without limits?
Leah Victoria Hennessey: Without those power dynamics.
Emily Allan: It’s about projecting a fantasy onto something that’s more equal in power. Some people pointed out—and Joanna Russ does too—that a lot of the slash stories wouldn’t fit into the canon of homoerotica. Some people would say it’s not about a gay sexuality—it’s about the sexuality of two characters. And yes, it’s about seeing two people with agency who can love each other free of these dynamics of oppression, but there’s also something that approaches the singularity, in making them one thing and one pair.
Leah Victoria Hennessey: Because when you fall in love with someone, you feel like one of a kind, like the last two members of a dying species. When I’ve fallen in love, I don’t feel like a woman among women who has fallen in love with a man. I feel like one of a kind, and that the other is one of a kind, too. And I feel like that’s part of the appeal of slash. It’s people falling in love and being attracted to each other, despite their sexual orientation, or asexuality, or being different species, alien or human.
It’s about obstacles. When I was a little kid, I read something that said, ‘Eroticism is the overcoming of obstacles.’ I remember being like eight and something clicking in my mind, and thinking, ‘Oh that’s the difference between pornography and eroticism.’
I think the most erotic thing I’ve ever seen was at a Catholic Church—a woman was kneeling and receiving the sacrament, and her eyes rolled to the back of her head as she opened her mouth. It was something that she’d been waiting for and finally received.
Leah Victoria Hennessey: That sacrament is theater.
Emily Allan: Because it happens again and again—there’s no resolution.
Leah Victoria Hennessey: I don’t think you can capture that in film because of the way it exists in time. What makes it theater is, that it’s not a single performance—it’s something you’re going to do over and over. You always know when you watch a play that it will begin again.
Tell me about the actual process of writing the play.
Emily Allan: A lot of our ideas our adapted from real slash fan fiction from the internet—The Beatles bit, Morrissey and Marr, and Trotsky and Stalin.