Okay, so as an African American male, I find it extremely hard to find African American Slash fiction. I'm just wondering is it because a majority of slash writers aren't African American, or are they just kind of on the fence about writing about it without it seeming like there are stereotypes? Just wondering, partly because I truly wanna know and partly because I don't wanna be flamed if I post mine.

I wouldn't worry about being flamed, since I don't think it's a racist mindset going on. I know that I have read stories on here with main characters who were black, and when people commented with something negative to say, it wasn't about the characters' race but the writing, as it should be. Being afraid to post your own writing isn't going to help the lack of African American slash, so go for it.

Okay, and yeah, I've noticed from the ones I have seen, they're not well written enough to read. But I'll give it a shot :)

Yeah, I agree with Casey. I don't think most people consciously go "this person is white" or "this person is not African-American" when they're writing. Race just doesn't happen to be a key point in what they're writing, so it doesn't occur to them.

Yeah, I understand that, it just kinda turns out that your characters have certain attributes, that's understandable.

You know what, Astir, we need more African-American writers PERIOD. Everyone has a different voice, but not everyone chooses to speak, and then no one learns anything about anyone else. And slash? All the better!

Don't worry about flamers. We'll torch the flamers! Katy's (SerialXLain) got a hammer, and she knows how to use it!

It's hard to write a character who's race is other than your own... without feeling like a huge fake.

But then, most of us are fakers from the get-go anyway, when writing slash romance stories. MOST of the writers here are women (and most of them, for that matter, are teenage women). Me, I'm male... but oddly enough, I'm not gay. :) And I'm 51 whereas my characters tend to be teens. Well, at least I WAS a teenager, once. But I'm rambling.

We all know (perhaps I should say "think"?) that there are vast differences in life-experience for races other than our own. As a white man, for instance, I've never had the experience of feeling like other people (i.e., of other races) feared me because I'm white. I **think** black men probably get that quite a lot (although a lot probably depends on how they look/dress). As for me trying to write an Asian character... I don't even know where I'd start. I **assume** that Asian people "feel" Asian (and even that may be a stupid thing to assume) but I have no idea on what basis they would.

Luckily, you can get away with a lot just by assuming that people are different enough from each other - even within a race - that yeah, your fake character probably won't be SO far off the mark as to be impossible. And as for a gay black male character WRITTEN by a black male (gay or not), yes, we'd all like to read something "from the horse's mouth", so to speak.

Well said, Jack. Nice rambling there. :)

This is actually the reason why I wrote Chinese Canadian gay men as my main characters in two of my stories. I haven't found a lot of slash with them in it. I am a Chinese Canadian myself (a bi woman however, not a gay man). I figure I can perhaps write something that many Chinese in my generation can relate no matter where they live in the world. So Astir, I think as an African American male, don't be afraid of writing a story with an African American in it. Research can take you far of course, but write what you know first hand is perhaps still the best.

Well this has helped clear up a lot of things as far as what I'll be writing next. Thanks guys.

I'm glad you brought this up, Astir. I wondered that myself. Because I was thinking, there are so many Americans on FP, and there are a lot of African Americans (more than there are Canadians of any race), so where are they? Are they not around, or writing about white characters? Or is it like really taboo in the African American community in a way it isn't in white America? I've only read one story that I remember about African American characters, but man, it was good. It's "Three point play" by Shampoo Suicide, about the NBA. It's so so so good.

Also, as I recall, the love interest in "A Suitable Lover" by plumblossom is mixed-race, with lots of African American in there.

Also, white authors' characters are almost always default white. It's pretty automatic for white authors and not something they think about. And they assume that the characters they're reading about are white as well if otherwise stated. Sometimes even when otherwise stated if its not mentioned multiple times. A lot of people flipped that Rue from the Hunger Games was actually black (in a really racist terrible way via tumbr and twitter posts) and I managed to miss that Shadow from American Gods was probably black although I realized he wasn't white. There's actually a lot of analysis of race in other medias and the primarily white main cast is a pretty common thing.

Hmm, I try to add races quite a bit.

I grew up surrounded by Americans and I tend to make my writing very 'white'.

Not that I am saying all Americans are white, but there were more white people than blacks in my area. Um, I am not sue why my writing doesn't really have black people in the spotlight.

Hmm, will have to fix that.

But maybe it's the setting of my writing. Because there were more whites in the place I grew up in, there are less blacks in my writing? IDK

I was trawling my the m/m group bookshelf for aster-lewis earlier, since IIRC I remember seeing a m/m novel about an African-american doctor and a poor white man, and it had some race issues too. As in, trouble with each other's lifestyle/culture and such. Alas, I can't seem to find it though. Anyone remembers such a book?

As for race in our own writing, I'm Chinese, so unless someone wants a novel all about spittoons and slit-eye jokes (totally PC when it comes from one, a-yup), everyone's just going to stay rainbow in my fics. The after-effects of reading so many books about white people is that I just automatically assume everyone is white. Hmm. For the most part though, I prefer to think of them as anycolor. They could be purple, WhyTF do I care?

(And a slight off-topic on PC-ness for one's one kind... : http://youtu.be/KVN_0qvuhhw)

"slant-eye", not "slit-eye". Although... I kinna get it either way. But what do "spittoons" have to do with anything?

Depending on who you happen to be looking at *cough*

Anyway! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon#Spittoon_in_Chinese_Society

The running stereotype of Mainland Chinese by non-mainland Chinese is that some of them do that spitting business everywhere. As in, you'll be waiting in line with them and then suddenly... Glob of spit! Never actually seen one doing that, but hey, what do I know? Maybe they do, maybe they don't; Stereotypes exist to be wrong after all XD

For myself, the problem with featuring race in slash fiction is that I see too much race-fetishization in gay men's fiction like you find at Nifty and thereabouts. It gives me the creeps when characters are presented as eroticized stereotypes (I have that problem with a lot of slasdh in general, too).It just seems to reinforce racism.

That being said, I do include African-American men in my own fiction, along with a rainbow of other men (and women). In A Suitable Lover (http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2577176/1/A-Suitable-Lover) the love interest is black, though I think I kind of under-emphasized it because some people said when I introduced his family they were surprised that he was black. When I do revise it, I'll be making sure that it's not so under-emphasized. I was going for a casual air, in which people weren't surprised that an African-American man is a sophisticated intellectual at the beginning of an artistic and socially useful career, and that he doesn't put on any thug airs. In other stories, there are other black characters, including one in which the love interest is Senegalese, which is different, of course.

Anyway, I think you have a tremendous opportunity yourself: draw on your own experience, draw on the experience of the people you know, and also on experiences only you can imagine, and you'll probably find you can write much better stories than if you shy away from it because the other authors aren't writing African-American characters.

White people spit too. :P INCLUDING MY OLDER BROTHER! And, as a result, my niece and nephew AND their kids all spit.

I hate spitting. :( I want to yell, "JUST SWALLOW IT!" That, and sunflower seed shells. Hasn't ANYONE ever heard of a tissue? Or a trashcan?

I was going for a casual air, in which people weren't surprised that an African-American man is a sophisticated intellectual at the beginning of an artistic and socially useful career, and that he doesn't put on any thug airs.

In the third book of Peridor, I have rainbows of people. My blacks are not thugs. They are middle-classed people, with whom I grew up. (I don't live in LA) I don't think I've ever met a black thug ... yet. Mexican thugs, sure. I live in Southern California. :) One thing I have noticed that bugs me to no end (being a Grammar Nazi) is that many blacks don't speak properly, in that they mispronounce a lot of words, my close friend included. I had to teach her to say "converse" instead of "conversate" as though blacks have their own dialect. She also says "pacific" instead of "specific" but I'm working with her on that. :) And, she admits that they discriminate against their own. Lighter colored skin is preferred over darker skin. Smaller noses are better than wide ones. Straight hair (what they call "good" hair) rather than kinky. It's sad.

I get a kick out of her storytelling, though. "She did that and I was stank! Oh, no, Boo Boo! I don't play that game." LOL

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