Leticia Sim
There is no climax in a kiss
Perhaps the desire to write is the desire to launch something that returns to you as much as possible in as many forms as possible (Derrida 158).
It was passionate and it was perfect.
When they pulled apart, Jack's hands still rested around Ralph's neck; Ralph kept his grip on Jack's hips. Gazing into each other's eyes, Jack rested his head on Ralph's collarbone (“My One True Coral”).
I attended an all-girls secondary school for the better part of my teens. We wore a bright green pinafore, green pin-striped collared shirt underneath. We called them our celibacy garments.
They walked back to the makeshift campground hand-in-hand, and Piggy came running up to them.
"Ralph! Jack! What's happened to you?" The fat boy asked, glasses askew.
"Um, we've discovered something, Fatty. Something for ourselves." Jack replied (“My One True Coral”).
Yaoi is an acronym taken from the words yama-nashi (no climax), ochi-nashi (no point), and imi-nashi (no meaning) (Kwon 5).
At 13, we would hide our phones in our pencil cases or nest them under our desk, on our crotches, our fanfiction site of choice tiding us through our classes.
At 14, I made friends with girls who were really into anime–or more specifically–yaoi, the East Asian counterpart to slash fiction.
"I don't think we're fully prepared, though," Ralph said, internally cursing his lack of preparedness.
"That's true. Maybe there's something around here we could use?" Jack suggested. "No. We have to do it n-now!" Ralph exclaimed, choking on his own lust. "It'll hurt, though, darling. I can't afford to see you in pain," Jack confessed.
"It's okay. My love for you will block out all my pain, if any. I know you won't hurt me on purpose," Ralph replied.
He put his hands on Jack's shoulders and looked into his blue eyes (“My One True Coral”).
At 15, my seatmate and I spent our literature classes writing Lord of the Flies fanfiction. We were assigned to the study the novel for the year, and to be tested for our national exams at 16.
Slash eroticism of gay sex acts tends to follow rather formulaic patterns which detail the mechanical aspects of, for example, anal sex, whereby narrative time is spent explaining how the top will use his fingers to relax his partner’s anal musculature, and introduce lubrication (Maddison 100).
Our teacher was a pudgy lady with a funny gait. She wore sandals and her coral-tinted toes were often the subject of our laughter. She threatened to sit us on the far ends of the classroom if we continued laughing during class–it was important to understand her retelling of Litchart’s analysis of the metaphor of the novel’s Beast. We evolved past passing notes to writing explicit gay romance in our school notebook.
Ralph and Jack looked at each other while society paused about them. The shameful knowledge grew in them and they did not know how to begin confession.
Ralph spoke first, crimson in the face.
“Will you?”
He cleared his throat and went on.
“Will you light the fire?”
Now the absurd situation was open, Jack blushed too. He began to mutter vaguely. “You rub two sticks. You rub—” (Golding 55).
There is no point in passion
…the polymorphous perverse child is a subject of epistemophilic curiosity ; the polymorphous perverse child is a seeker of knowledge, a little researcher, we could say (Kristeva).
The Singaporean curriculum necessitates sexual education classes. At 13, we were shown a video detailing the nasty aftermath of having a one-night stand: gonorrhea.
At 14, I had a mathematics teacher who helmed a part-time job as a youth pastor. Math classes became sexual liturgies: “If you don’t take to Additional Maths, you won’t be able to find a husband” .
"O-ok," Ralph gasped. He felt something press against the cheeks of his arse. Jack was lining himself up with Ralph's entrance. He gently pushed in at a leisurely pace. Ralph gasped, both in pain and in pleasure. The sensation of being filled was entirely new to Ralph, and it hurt a little, but it was worth it because it just felt so good (“My One True Coral”).
School’s overbearing injunction only became palpable at the unofficial banning of celebrating Valentine’s Day. Most of us hardly ever interacted with boys our age, so we had riffed on this celebration of love and made an event out of baking cookies, writing love letters, and spending our morning before assembly to pass around these declarations of adoration.
The vocabulary of adaptation is highly labile: Adrian Poole has offered an extensive list of terms to represent the Victorian era’s interest in reworking its artistic past: ‘(in no particular order) … borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating … being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed … homage, mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion, and intertextuality’. We can easily continue the linguistic riff, adding into the mix: variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation,....paratext, hypertext, palimpsest… (Sanders 5)
This tradition wasn’t new–it had been passed down from batches of girls before me, and many after. Some time after I graduated, I heard the school had cracked down on this–banning any sort of presents or references to the day. The Valentine’s tradition continued operating in covert.
There is no meaning in relation
Our fanfiction was a crowdsourced project–we would pass our notebook around the class after our literature lessons and ask for feedback, plot recommendations, or just to incite general giggling. More romance! More sex! More characters! More sex with more characters! The suggestions would get exponentially risqué. Is it possible to have a collective erogenous zone?
A gift for the beast. Might not the beast come for it? The head, he thought, appeared to agree with him. Run away, said the head silently, go back to the others. It was a joke really―why should you bother? You were just wrong, that's all. A little headache, something you ate, perhaps. Go back, child, said the head silently (Golding 197).
Remember that the adolescent escaped from childhood when the subject persuaded himself that there was another ideal for him , either a partner, husband or wife or a professional-political-ideological-religious ideal - an ideality already established in the unconscious (Kristeva).
Our desire transformed into a twofold reification, embodying at once a dismissive appropriation of homoeroticism and the exciting packaging of heterosocial projection. The desire to be found out, to be caught, grew in inverse. We can no longer conceal our desire underneath our crotches.
Perhaps a more appropriate reading here would be to shift focus away from its crotch, and to look towards the belly of the beast.
In my mid-20s, I bring up photos of the notebook as a party trick at social events, an ancient artefact at gatherings with classmates-turned-friends, and nostalgia bait when I’m bored and alone. We would never continue the fic, or even think about writing any form of it now. It wielded no power then and it wields no power now—it’s like we’re stuck in perpetual girls’ school.
Derrida situates loss as a necessary constituent of the consummation of desire, and Kristeva considers adolescence as less of an age category than an open psychic structure.
Continuously returning to this fanfiction, as I do now, necessitates facing head-on the fantasy of adolescent subversion, the falsity and continuous malaise of having grown up. It was neither particularly interesting nor especially horny.
"See? I told you it-" Simon was interrupted by Jack's lips claiming his. Jack kissed with a fervour he'd been yearning for from the head chorister.
"I'll do it. To see you smile again," Jack said boyishly, Ralph momentarily forgot…(“My One True Coral”).
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques, and Christie McDonald. The Ear of the Other : Otobiography, Transference, Translation : Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Kristeva, J., Marder, M. & Vieira, P. I, Adolescence, a Syndrome of Ideality. Psychoanalytic Review, 2007.
Kwon, Jungmin. Straight Korean Female Fans and Their Gay Fantasies. University of Iowa Press, 2018.
Maddison, S. “Roseanne: Domestic Goddess as Heterosocial Heroine?” Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2000.
Sim, Leticia & Doe, Jane. “My One True Coral“, 2015.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, 2017.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Faber and Faber, 1958.