Cecilia Tan is the award-winning fiction author of over 20 books and a co-writer of GEEK ACTUALLY, a fiction serial celebrating fandom, female friendship and sexuality, and the power of online spaces to connect communities. Her new series, The Vanished Chronicles, will launch in 2018 from Tor Books.

It's Pride month, but I have a slightly different story of coming out to tell you. This is the story of how I became a Slytherin. More precisely, it's about how I discovered I already was a Slytherin and how internalized Slytherphobia had me in denial until I found my people.

Going to my first Harry Potter convention was very much like going to my first Pride parade. I loved Harry Potter from the moment I read the very first book, but I didn't fall headlong into the community of fandom until around 2005 when I started reading copious amounts of Harry Potter fanfic online.

At the time my career as a fiction writer was in a slump and I was ripe to be distracted by a new obsession. I soon decided it was rude to lurk. After all, in the fanfic economy comments are the only currency an author receives. So I created a LiveJournal account. At the time I had never taken a "Sorting Test" online and I assumed on the basis of my nerd quotient that I was a Ravenclaw. I even took the fandom name "Ravenna" to reflect what a Ravenclaw I felt I was.

Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan







The dirty little secret of fanfic

Of course, the reason I took a fandom name at all was because I was in the closet in a number of ways. Within the online fanfic community I was in the closet about being a "real" writer (I'd been publishing fiction professionally for well over over a decade at that point), and in the real world I was in the closet about being into fanfic. Now in the post-50 Shades of Gray world, it seems quaint that authors used to hide their fanfic pasts when they "went pro" and that those who continued to write fanfic on the side for fun still felt they had to keep it a "dirty secret."

The fact that a lot of fanfic is sexually graphic, and queer, wasn't always the main reason authors were ashamed. Some were simply afraid to be identified as playing in "someone else's sandbox," even if what they wrote was G-rated, as if doing this were some kind of failure of their own imaginations. This didn't make sense to me. Painters are encouraged to go to the art museum and sketch and copy the masters. Musicians are urged to perform the songs of other composers before they ever write their own. Writers, though, are expected to lock ourselves in a room alone and strain until somehow genius pops out.

My skepticism over this prohibition about writing—for fun, not profit—in other universes or with pre-existing characters was only deepened by how judgmental people can be about erotic fanfic. Slash fic, stories by women about male characters falling in love, was not a new thing. The heyday of Kirk/Spock began back in the 1960s when Star Trek: The Original Series was merely called Star Trek.

Having been an activist for LGBT rights and visibility since the 1980s, and an erotica writer and BDSM activist since the 1990s, I was Not Okay with people saying that erotic or gay romance fanfic was something to be ashamed of. Excuse me, but no. Some pro authors even likened fanfic writers to pedophiles or rapists. It was the same old sex panic that forced LGBTQ people into the closet in the first place.

Find a closet door? Kick it down!

So once I realized that was a closet, my activist side took over and set about trying to kick the door down. That's been my M.O. all my life. Find a closet door? Kick it down! That goes for closets within closets, too. I'm bisexual. I always have been. But when I was in college in the 1980s, the predominant advocacy group for queer students on campus was the LGSA (Lesbian Gay Student Alliance). Bisexuals were basically considered "half gay" and therefore only half welcome.

Feeling ambivalent about whether I belonged, I stood outside the building for the college Pride Week keynote speech (that was back when we only got a week for Pride, instead of a month like we do now). The speaker was Gerry Studds, a United States congressman who had been forced out of the closet when his relationship with a congressional page was turned into a public scandal. I listened to him through the windows of the hall where he was speaking. I still remember the big applause line of the speech. "If Harvey Milk's message of the past was 'come to San Francisco and be gay,' my message to you today is stay where you are and be gay." This was 1986, right in the teeth of the AIDS crisis.

The speech was followed by a Pride march through the campus. It was nighttime. I'd never been in a protest march before. The speech had been attended by hundreds of students, many from universities around the country, in town for a lesbian and gay student activist conference being hosted at my college that week. Hundreds more joined in the march, though, carrying signs and chanting "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!" We marched through the campus, and even right through the heart of the frat area. (Some of the frats were notoriously anti-gay, even on our ultra-liberal campus.)

That march was a life-changing experience. I decided I didn't need any gatekeeper's permission to be part of the overarching queer community, whether I labeled myself bi, queer, or pansexual. I graduated and moved to Boston where I was active in Queer Nation and various bi community groups, as well as the leather/BDSM community. I'm here, I'm queer, I got used to it.

The Potter fandom equivalent of being woke

Flash forward to 2008. I had been writing Harry Potter fanfic for a couple of years. I had started breaking down the walls between my fanfic writing and my pro career. I kicked down the closet door the best way I knew how: by simply being out about it. I started suggesting fanfic panel topics at sf/f conventions I was attending as a pro. I added links to my fanfic from my pro website. I put a pro-fanfic statement on my pro website.

But there was still a closet door to be broken down, and it was buried deep in my love for Harry Potter. One of the magics of the Potter books for me was that as I read them, I was transported back to feeling like a kid again. Reading rarely does that for me. I read like an editor because I am one. It's difficult to read "for pleasure" because I'm always criticizing or analyzing what I read. With the Potter books I was able to let that go, at least for the first read of each book, and experience them with all the unfiltered, breathless wonder of a child. True magic.

It's not that the books don't hold up to analysis and scrutiny. One of the magical things about Potter fandom is that there is so much analysis of the books. It's not a blind devotion at all. A big part of the reason I fell so deeply into the fandom was its ethos of questioning the text while also being in love with it.

My journey as a fan, then, started from a childlike devouring of the books where I took Harry's journey at face value. Harry hated Snape and Draco? I hated Snape and Draco. Harry thought all Slytherins are bad? I thought all Slytherins are bad. It's a book for kids, right? A simplistic worldview is appropriate and comforting. That was how I felt before my headlong into fandom

But the moment I leapt into fandom was also when book six, Half-Blood Prince, came out. In that book, Harry keeps on thinking that Snape and Draco are villains. It's also a book where many adult readers started realizing that Snape and Draco are victims.

On my first read-through I saw everything through "the Harry filter." But in the two-year wait for book seven I re-read the book several times and wrote reams of fanfic about it. I started to realize that Harry's a bit nuts at this point. What kind of hero almost accidentally kills someone, and then gets pissed off that he has to have detention? Shouldn't he have been sorry about his horrific mistake? I went back and re-read the entire series through Snape and Draco's eyes and what I saw was very different.

I guess you could say it was the Potter fandom equivalent of being woke. The anti-Slytherin bias throughout the series was so strong, and yet I had never noticed it before. It was so pervasive. Harry takes the word of various characters throughout the books as "truth" so long as the person saying it was considered one of the "good guys." Take Hagrid for example. When he tells Harry in the very first book "There's not a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin," Harry believes him and so do we.

Hagrid probably believes it, too. But it's not even true within the books. We meet plenty of non-Slytherins who "went bad," including Peter Pettigrew (Gryffindor) and Gilderoy Lockhart (Ravenclaw). We also find out that Sirius Black defied family tradition to go into Gryffindor instead of Slytherin, as if this were the equivalent of choosing to join the police instead of the Mafia. The idea that maybe Sirius could have been both a good guy AND been in Slytherin anyway is never even considered. So much bias!

Before the Final Battle at Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall orders all the Slytherin students to leave the castle as if they're traitors, but never once considers that there could be traitors in any of the other houses. And in the epilogue, 19 years later, although Harry himself seems to have finally decided that Snape was a hero and all Slytherins aren't bad, the rest of the Wizarding World has clearly fallen right back into the old bias. His son's angst about being Sorted basically boils down to "Daddy, what if I'm in Slytherin?"

Try replacing that with "Daddy, what if I'm queer?" Harry has the good-parent response: we'll still love you. But society won't.

Confronting bias, even in fiction

By the time book seven had come out, I had spent two years learning to recognize anti-Slytherin bias, but I still considered myself a Ravenclaw. Learning to recognize bias, after all, is simply smart, and Ravenclaws are smart. But in 2008, I attended my first big Harry Potter convention. It was a huge convention in Chicago called Terminus, with thousands of attendees. There I met Slytherins in person for the first time.

These Slytherins identified me as one of their own right from the first social event of the con. At first I resisted. What? No, I'm a Ravenclaw. I was, I admit, scheming about how we could get the most house points out of the ice-breaker dueling game. "That's just smart," I tried to say. But my self-delusion was starting to crumble.

What is it that defines a Slytherin, and all the people who self-identify as Slytherins? In the canon it's "ambition." In other words, the desire to be the best. Why is this bad? If you're ambitious, you strive to get to the top. If you're not ambitious, you...what? Complain about elitism, that's what. Slytherins make easy villains for writers because all you have to do is add a dash of cold-blooded disregard to that ambition.

If you're willing to trample or betray others on your way to the top, you're a villain. Hm, that sounds like Lockhart and Pettigrew. What had happened to my ambition, I wondered? As I mentioned, I'd partly started writing fanfic because my writing career was in a slump and I was looking to rediscover the joy in writing. I found that in fanfic. But was my Ravenclaw persona a way to hide in a safe space? If I embraced my Slytherin nature, did that mean I was going to try to rise above, regardless what criticism or social censure I might face for doing so?

Prior to our arrival at Terminus, the organizers had sorted us into new houses (the conceit of the convention was that this was the "university of the four winds" and we came together once a year for wizarding higher education). I had been placed in something called Bru-Bru House. Each house had a Head of House who was a prominent celebrity within the Potter fandom. Our head of house was none other than Brian Malfoy of the well-known Wizard Rock band Draco and the Malfoys. A Slytherin, of course.

The convention was held at a huge historic Hilton hotel in Chicago. For the Opening Feast each house entered a massive function hall as if in a parade. Brian mustered the thousand-plus Bru-Bru House contingent in a nearby ballroom and then off we marched, chanting "Bru-Bru House! Bru-Bru House!"

And it clicked. We're here, we're Slytherins, get used to it. As with my bisexuality, I realized I didn't need a gatekeeper to let me in. I had to kick the closet door down in my own mind. It's very difficult to do when all the subtle (and not-so-subtle) signals of your society are negative, telling you there's something wrong with you for being different, right up to telling you you're downright evil. You have to take pride in who you are. And it helps to feed off the pride others have in that identity.

Ultimately accepting that it was okay for me to be ambitious was as important for my writing life as accepting my bisexuality was for my love life. And confronting bias is crucial, even when that bias is supposedly fictional or imaginary.

As Dumbledore says to Harry when Harry asks if their conversation is real or if it's been all in Harry's head, "why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” Emotions, identity, sexuality, personality: these all exist in the intangible realm but they define us as humans. Love yourself, even when the mainstream doesn't celebrate you, and find the places where you are celebrated. Happy Pride, everyone.

Listing image by Cecilia Tan