On Fandom and Smalltown Boys : A Dialogue

As a politically aggravated thirteen-year-old in 1995, I used my bar mitzvah as an opportunity to appeal for quality popular entertainment. At the time, ABC Networks had canceled a teen drama called My So-Called Life, which depicted high school student Angela Chase's weekly life lessons. Angela's self-conscious interior monologues complemented a gritty Pittsburgh teen ensemble, including recovering alcoholic Rayanne, an illiterate hunk named Jordan, and a gay, homeless, Latino character known for his ingenious asides, Ricky Vasquez. In 1994, when My So-Called Life first aired, Ricky was the only Latino, openly gay teenager on prime-time television. Complexly addressing race, class, sexuality, abuse, and addiction, the show's producers took meaningful risks, which resonated strongly with my peer group.

Meanwhile, America Online had exploded. Besides the plethora of gay chat rooms and message boards, an intensely committed culture of fandom emerged on the Internet. Assembling shrines of pirated media images, poetic tributes, and interactive forums for gushing stalkers, fan sites became important community-building spaces in which teenagers developed meaningful relationships. The fandom culture surrounding My So-Called Life—mostly driven by adoration for the show's protagonist—was explicitly queer.

Such risky television is usually short-lived. Following a nineteen-episode run, ABC announced the show's cancellation. In response, its outraged fans shifted their adoring fandom effort to grassroots activism. Listservs and Web sites organized direct mailings to ABC executives, and countless online petitions were circulated with the imperative "Save My So-Called Life." Fandom shrines were replaced with archival databases, which included massive catalogs of multimedia, fan fiction modeled on the show's unresolved plots and characters, transcriptions, episode analyses, and interactive fan response forums fashioned for salvage preservation. This youth activist logic prompted my own appeal on the occasion of my bar mitzvah. I instructed the attentive crowd of old Jews and preteens to fight for their beliefs and to write ABC in support of My So-Called Life.

Three years later I was very publicly gay and involved in statewide legislative activism to amend discrimination policies affecting queer and transgender students in California high schools. Following the television moments of Ellen DeGeneres and Matthew Shepard, the cultural temper had shifted, and queer youth became a visibly neglected social and political entity. An aggressive movement led by queer youth emerged alongside high-school-based "Gay-Straight Alliance" clubs, which effected concrete change in school policies and profoundly transformed ingrained cultural ideas about gender and sexuality among young people, particularly the generational group dubbed "the Class of 2000."

Now, as a twenty-two-year-old filmmaker in New York City, I examine the recent past and the relationship between television and generational queer politics. My video Smalltown Boys (2003) is an experimental exploration of the life of AIDS activist artist and writer David Wojnarowicz. Using historical fantasy, reenactment, and fandom strategies, I imagine a relationship between Wojnarowicz and the fictional Sarah Rosenburg, a teenage lesbian on the Upper West Side in 1994 who is fighting to save My So-Called Life from cancellation.¹ The video, using a fake documentary form with talking heads and staged b-roll, figures Sarah as a generational foil to Wojnarowicz. Their imaginary relationship marks a generational transition and shifting ideas about activism in queer culture.

Archival strategies build formal and conceptual connections between the fake teen documentary and Wojnarowicz's biography. Shuttling between generational paradigms and representations, the two narratives compare the So-Called Life fans and the generation of AIDS activists, whose cultural production and resistance complemented Wojnarowicz's fierce output. This article discusses "archival filmmaking" in relation to queer biographical narrative. Mimicking the formal structure of Smalltown Boys, the article prompts a response and a contrasting analysis of Wojnarowicz's artwork by Marvin J. Taylor, director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University...