Since I was a small child I’ve had a singular fantasy: I am on some sort of expedition to a far flung local–occasionally some sort of pulpy jungle but much more often somewhere cold, remote, and inaccessible–my favorites being the arctic, antarctic, and Mount Everest. There would come a point in the expedition where Something Terrible Happens, a rope bridge snaps, an ice cliff gives way, a climbing buddy’s rope snaps and the only way to save him is to give up my own tether. I inevitably sacrifice myself for the good of the group, and a handsome, rugged man weeps for the loss of me.
I was the sort of odd, sickly child whose adults gave it a lot of boy’s adventure stories, old national geographics, and gruesome children’s nonfiction as a sort of consolation prize for their horrible adult knowledge that I was never really going to make anything of myself. When a kid can’t keep up with its peers in athletics, but is never really going to be Midwestern Wife Material either, you raise it on another generation’s ideals and hope it doesn’t get weird, I guess.
But I did. I did get weird. Or: let me tell this another way: I am 8 years old, during a girl scout lock in we get to see a movie in the brand new iMax theater. It is a documentary about Lewis and Clark. I am enchanted. I am overcome. I have no concept of gay people, but I am convinced Lewis and Clark were in love and that the museum was just not Allowed To Tell Us. I say as much to my girl scout leader, who tells me not to even joke like that about Great American Heroes (it is 2005. things were Like That Then. Things are like that again, now.) But I become fixated, always roping my sister or the neighbor girl into games of Lewis And Clark Discovering Things. No one but me enjoys this, I find out much later. My sister tells me later, well into our 20s, that she much rather would have been playing barbies instead of acting out elaborate scenes of Peril and Rescue and just ever said, and I couldn’t explain why that fells like such a rejection.
Or, let me tell it another way: I’m ten, and it’s not cute to be this strange anymore. Terrible things are happening are happening, and I cannot speak them. And I learn about survival cannibalism. I read the segment in my Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader about incidents of survival cannibalism over, and over, and over. I won’t shut up about the Andes plane crash. Nobody cares. I hear ‘shut the fuck up’ a lot. A very well meaning English teacher gives me a book about ‘explorers’ that is, mostly, about men dying horribly in the wilderness. And at the end of the book is the Erebus and Terror. We hadn’t found them, yet. This was 2007. But the book spun a wonderfully gruesome yarn of lead poisoning, cannibalism, desperation. My father wants me to run away with himand live in a tent in the wilderness. My great-grandmother who gave me many of these books is dying. My classmates have decided I am a faggot. And the school sends a letter home telling my mother I need to stop showing people a pictures of mummified sailors.
Or this: I’m 11. I’m miserable. My father isn’t speaking to me. He left without me. Moved around the corner with a mom from my sister’s softball team and her young daughter. The school is taking us on a week long trip deep in a national forest. No one will sit on the bus with me for fear of ‘catching fag cooties.’ I daydream about the bus crashing. About using my Survival Knowledge from years of reading wilderness guides for fun to keep them alive, before dying in a horrible accident so they can eat me to stay alive. They’d appreciate me then, I think.
Or this: It is 2018. I trashed my notebooks filled of fantasies where I rescue George Mallory from the slopes of Mount Everest years ago. I am a Serious Person who is Very Aware those fantasies are rooted in colonialist propaganda and problematic. Anyone who finds out that I ever cared about such things will hate me forever, just like they did in grade school. The AMC’s Terror comes out. I don’t watch it. I know better. I become obsessed with Riverdale for several years.
Or this: It’s 2025. Everything feels like it’s falling apart, in the world and also In Life. I am sick as hell and pick a fight with my sister because we can’t have any conversation without our shared 25 years of baggage together weighing everything down. I have a low grade fever. I turn on The Terror in hopes a tragedy will at least help me feel something. And go insane again.
There is a scene in the Terror, which I will explain if you haven’t seen it, but if you’ve gotten this far you probably have. James Fitzjames, second in command and poster child for imposter syndrome, having just confessed that he has spent his entire life Never Feeling Good Enough or that he is Real beyond his Contacted Image is dying horribly of scurvy and lead poising etc etc, begs his captain, former workplace nemesis, and current dear friend Frances Crozier, to mercy kill him, and in one of the most initmate scenes I’ve seen on television, and yes I’m including sex scenes, he does. “Use my body, feed the men,” He says. And I know I’m going to have to chew on this, finally.
It’s a masochist’s fantasy, at it’s heart. I say that without judgement; I am often inclined in that direction. It would be honestly be weirder if it wasn’t. Physically, I think my sensory processing is fucked up and dialed towards extreme sensation. Emotionally? A lot of things have happened to me. Eventually you get a taste for it. But it’s also a fantasy of the neglected, in a way. When you are so convinced of your own uselessness, creating a scenario where you are Valuable in both Life and Death, deeply grieved and missed despite your own sacrifice, is a heady thing.
There are 2,105 Fitzjames/Crozier fics on fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own at the date of writing. Clearly I’m not the only queer person deeply hit by these ideas. It is hard, noticing how deeply entwined something that, again, is rooted in another generation’s colonialist propaganda is also deeply entwined with your own nascent experiences with queerness but also. At a certain point you do need to own your interests and inclinations. Stop running from the person you are and embrace it. I do wish, of course, that I had something that would parse to my peer group. Those trans guys who want to be Dean Winchester with all their heart and soul are at least parsable to their fellow nerds of a certain age. But first you have to Admit The Fantasy. And then you can play with it. And maybe, even, cast yourself as the survivor for once.
Signing Off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 