Why Slash?

This is a question I didn't actually ask myself until after I had already started writing. I had the idea, I could see the scene, and I wanted to get it into words. As Dorothy Sayers says, "In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper--and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further." (Gaudy Night)

Then I started reading some of the things other people had to say about the element of weirdness involved in women writing slash, and I started wondering if I could account for my own motivations. I'm still not sure I can, but here are some of the possibilities (all more or less extreme) that the brainstorming session produced:

• The cultural stereotype that gay sex is (in itself) more bizarre, kinkier and therefore hotter than het sex.

• The extra charge the gay factor gives the UST (as opposed to the sex itself). A romance plot needs obstacles to resolve, and getting past the motss threshold draws out the courtship dance just that much longer.

• Some dark, hidden personal hangup of mine that only lets me entertain sexuality when it's dissociated from myself?

• I got hypnotized by the Deutsche Bank. (Check out their logo!)

• For M/K slash in particular: I'm really rooting for a depiction of a long-term male/female friendship that doesn't go the Harry-and-Sally route--no MSR here--and yet I'm still a romantic at heart (sigh). M/K steers nicely clear of that dilemma (though of course it raises others...).

• Um . . . they'd just look really cute together?