In December 2005, the New York Times reported that Showtime’s lesbian drama,
The L Word, was set to team up with website Fanlib.com to produce a 12-week contest in which viewers could “contribute ideas for show scenes as part of a continuing story line.” At the conclusion of the contest, which will be overseen by a staff writer, the winning scenes will be compiled into a commemorative ezine of the episode, with Showtime having the option to produce the finished script for TV down the road.

Whether the episode will actually be produced is not certain, but the contest (which has not yet started) marks yet another step in the mainstreaming of fandom and its cultural products, specifically fan fiction.

This idea of letting fans produce “ideas for show scenes” may at first seem only distantly related to fan fiction—which is fiction written by fans featuring the characters and setting of a television show, movie, or book—but upon closer examination, it is clearly connected. Many fans turn to writing or reading fan fiction because they find their favorite television show lacking. They may want to see a certain character fall in love with a different character; or they may want to find out what really happened when the camera panned away from a particular scene. Fan fiction allows them to take the story beyond the confines of scripted television or film, or even the pages of a book.

By inviting L Word fans—many of whom already create their own “ideas for show scenes” through their fan fiction—to invent their own storylines, L Word producers are piggybacking on a phenomenon that is rooted in centuries of community storytelling, and that has been more recently studied as a part of sci-fi fandom dating back to Star Trek.

In effect, what once was a closeted (or at least semi-closeted) community of fan writers scribbling stories about their favorite Star Trek character has become a worldwide, public phenomenon reported on in global media and openly acknowledged by cultural producers like Showtime.

Most significantly for lesbians and bisexual women, the changing of television—which has increasingly included openly lesbian characters—has also affected fan fiction, with slash (fan fiction about same-sex couples) expanding from its male/male homosocial roots to an open expression of lesbian romance and sexuality.

What is fan fiction, anyway?

Fan fiction originated in the pre-Internet science fiction fan communities that erupted around Star Trek in the 1960s and '70s, with fan-written stories traded through printed fanzines. These fan fiction writers were predominantly white middle-class straight women, an unlikely group who nonetheless pioneered the sexually explicit, homosexual genre of fan fiction known as “slash.”

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