lgbtfest | Info & Guidelines

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Info & Guidelines

Inspired by the now-dormant

lgbtfest is a panfandom prompt fest focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual/pansexual/otherwise multi-gender-attracted, and transgender (including non-binary) identities. Please read the guidelines, and feel free to ask for clarification on any points.

How does LGBT Fest work?

On May 1, the first prompting post will go up. It's there that participants will leave prompts -- if you've ever participated in a kink meme, it's sort of like that, only without the smut. (Well, without a focus on smut, I should say.) Prompting should be done in the following format:

Sleepy Hollow; Ichabod Crane; Ichabod has always known he was attracted to men. How does he react upon awakening in a future where these attractions are much less stigmatized? (Gay or bi Ichabod okay!)

Please use semicolons to separate fandom from character(s) from prompt so I can have an easier time search-and-replacing for the inevitable prompt-collating post. You can include however many prompts from however many fandoms you like in one comment. Both "Any fandom" and "Original work" are acceptable as fandoms.

Prompting will run through the month of May, closing on May 31.

Fills will open on June 1, after I've had the chance to collate the prompts into an easily-searchable database. To fill a prompt, simply make a new post on this community with the following template:

Non-textual fanworks will need to be uploaded somewhere and linked to. Try Imgur or Tinypic for images, Soundcloud or Dropbox for audio, and Youtube or Vimeo for video.

You can also post your fills to the LGBT Fest Ao3 collection.

What kinds of prompts and fills are allowed?

Anything focusing on one or more lesbian/gay, bi/pan, and/or transgender characters. This can range from romance, introspection, and coming out, to action, adventure, and mystery.

I know that "focusing on" is a bit vague, but honestly, use your best judgment. A story with one throwaway line about a character being gay is not appropriate, but it doesn't have to be a navel-gazing angstfest, either. Do What Feels Right.

Because speculating about the identities of real people is a moral grey area, only fictional characters and OCs are allowed. No real-person fiction, unless it's of fictionalized versions of historical figures -- Harry Potter RPF is not allowed, but Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton is.

Minimums:

There is no minimum or maximum length for prompts.
There is a 300-word minimum for fanfiction fills.
There's no minimum size for fanart. Please don't draw on lined paper.
Fanmixes should include at least five songs.
Fanvids and audio (other than podfic) should be at least 30 seconds long.
Podfic should be at least 300 words. Please make sure you have permission (either explicit or blanket) before podficcing somebody else's work.
For any work type not listed here, go ahead and ask!

Do the characters in my prompt or fill have to explicitly identify as LGBT?

No. The "LGBT" in

lgbtfest is meant to describe the subjects of same-gender attraction and identification as a gender other than that assigned at birth, utilizing words that are in common use today. That doesn't mean that any of those words have to be used in your prompt or fill. After all, depending on the characters involved, it may be completely out of character for them to identify as anything in particular. It may also be the case that the setting of your story uses completely different terms for sexuality and gender, or no terminology may be in use at all.

If a specific identity is requested in a prompt, you are required to not deviate from that in your fill. For example, if you're filling a prompt for "lesbian Mary Sue", even if you don't use the word "lesbian" she still has to be a woman who is attracted solely to women. She can't be bisexual or pansexual, or identify as male.

In addition, characters do not have to be canonically LGBT to be eligible for LGBT Fest. One, that would seriously limit our pool. Two, it would just lead to identity policing. Headcanon to your heart's content.

What about marginalized non-LGBT identities?

Prompts and fills about how LGBT identities intersect with other identities such as gender, race, ethnicity, disability, religion, intersex*, class, asexuality, polyamory, kink, and so forth are more than welcome. LGBT identities are the focus of this fest, but that doesn't mean they're the only thing you have to include.

*Out of respect for intersex individuals who have asked that their identities not be automatically lumped together with LGBT, intersex in its own right won't be included in this fest. Of course, you can still prompt and write stories featuring characters who are both LGBT and intersex, and non-LGBT intersex characters can be included alongside LGBT characters.

However, prompts along the lines of "For John Doe, being [X] is easy. It's being [Y] that's hard." for any given values of X and Y (e.g. "trans" and "gay", "black" and "gay", "bisexual" and "kinky", etc.) will not be accepted.

Are you affiliated with queer_fest or LiveJournal's lgbtfest?

No. This fest was started out of nostalgia for queer_fest, but admittedly, I didn't know that queer_fest had started to fill the void of LJ's lgbtfest -- which I didn't even realize existed until I tried to start an Ao3 collection called lgbtfest.

Whoops.

Stealing their name was not my intention, but I also really like the name because it's concise and descriptive. I thank queer_fest and, in turn, LJ's lgbtfest for inspiring this fest theme; without them, none of this would be possible.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi, sorry if I missed something but is this just for fic or is fanart included too? Or other kinds of fanworks, but fanart's the one I personally care about.

Hm, I only had fanfic in mind, but including other kinds of fanwork would definitely be a good idea. I'll see about rewording things.

Ooh, nice! Nb, it's not a big deal, but your template still says fic.

Oh, whoops! Thanks!

(Edit) It's fixed now. Thanks again.

Edited 2016-03-14 12:23 (UTC)

Characters haven't be LGBT in canon in order to be prompted, right? I mean, could I prompt about for example gay!Lex Luthor if he's portrayed as straight in canon?

That's correct. I thought I put that in the post, but it looks like I forgot to mention it. Thanks for asking!

Okay, thanks for the swift answer. Glad I was accidentally of help. :p

I really adored queer_fest and am really looking forward to taking part in this challenge, and perhaps writing some stories I didn't find time for those years. As such, I'd definitely not like for this community to end up a huge mud-slinging pit, which I can see happening very soon without the benefit of a judicious edit or two. I understand wanting to use 'LGBT' in a very concise way to make things go more smoothly, but I implore you to widen your criteria to include asexuality as well.

if you go on the original lgbtfest's prompts pages, or the pages for queer_fest, you'll see a plethora of asexuality prompts and successful fills. Even in the first year of the original lgbtfest, the mods were willing to accept prompts regarding asexuality. They still used the terms 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender' for simplicity's sake, but their criteria was wider, including stories 'dealing with issues like:

'Figuring out sexual orientation and gender identity (deciding you're LGBT, making a gender transition, moving between labels, dealing with other people's labels that don't necessarily fit you.)

'Dealing with prejudice (job discrimination, hostility from family or friends, legal problems, violence, and what characters can or can't do about them.)'

In practice, the community did accept prompts that dealt with the experience of being asexual, usually the struggle to figure out or accept this identity, or to navigate relationships and/or the world while saddled with this identity that some couldn't accept. The spirit of the challenge was about the experience of being queer (although that terminology wasn't so prevalent at the time), not the letter(s) of the law.

Queer_fest was more explicit about the inclusion of asexuality, probably because a lot of growth happened in the wider lgbt community over the interim few years and asexuality became a common term: 'The purpose of queer_fest is to celebrate and examine the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, genderqueer, asexual, intersex, and trans characters through fanfic and fanart. There are many themes of intersectionality that you can explore through prompts/stories about disabilities, race, being poly, being kinky and all of those are welcome, as long as they focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, genderqueer, asexual, intersex, or trans characters.'

Like I said, I'm only bringing this up to help you out, I'm not coming with pitchforks and torches. My personal definition of queer is sexual or gender identities which have been stigmatized by [whatever time period/culture you're talking about]. This definition, for me, includes polyamory and kink, and I would have loved to write fic for this fest regarding the ways these identities fit into the larger queer community, but the inclusion of polyamory and kink under the queer umbrella is very contentious, so I completely get not wanting to include them in the fest. However, asexuality has had a long history of being erased and insulted, and it's as much a sexual identity as being homosexual or pansexual, just as agender is as much a gender identity as cisgender or transgender. Not including any of these identities follows a similar logical path as saying that trans people or bi people aren't really queer, and is going to go over just about as well, particularly in fandoms with fanon ace characters, like Sherlock or Leverage.

On the subject, you're going to get prompts for agender, bigender, genderfluid, etc.; basically trans*, along with sort of amorphous prompts about people feeling weird about their attraction to people or how they relate to the world, gender-wise. I'd recommend accepting those as well, both because it will save you a lot of headache, and because they do fit with the spirit of the first lgbtfest, queer_fest, and I assume your fest as well: the complicated work we do as queer people to protect, accept, and celebrate our identities, our relationships, or our lack of the same.

As an entirely separate note from above, Supernatural RPF is probably not the best example to contrast fictionalized versions of RL figure; idk if SPN's going to get into this fest bigtime, I guess that depends on how it's advertised, but there was actually an episode where some actors played parody versions of themselves. :D I'd just say, like, Harry Potter RPF or something. (is that a thing?)

Thank you for your input.

I understand that queer_fest explicitly allowed prompts revolving around asexual and aromantic identity. However, my purpose in starting this fest was not to focus on some nebulous "queer" umbrella; it was to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual/pansexual/otherwise multi-gender-attracted, and transgender identities. Something that exists for one specific group of people does not have to be open to everyone else -- for example, if you wanted to start a prompt fest for asexuality, it would be quite rude if somebody barged in and started demanding that you also open your doors to non-asexual LGBT identities, wouldn't it?

(On that note, if you would like to start a fest for asexuality, I would love to affiliate with you and link to you on the lgbtfest Tumblr.)

My reasons for not allowing intersex in and of itself have been outlined in this post; I won't be going into that further.

I find it curious that you bring up agender, bigender, genderfluid, etc. It's my understanding that these identities all qualify as transgender -- and, in fact, in this very post I specified that "transgender" includes "non-binary". Of course non-binary identities qualify for this fest, and I won't be excluding them.

Thank you for pointing this out! I just went with the first huge RPF fandom I could think of, but you make a good point. I'll use HP RPF as an example.

I guess I just don't see why you're picking out asexuality as the one major sexual identity not to include. Like, the impression I'm getting from this is 'I'm not going to include asexuality because I don't want to and it's my fest.' It's not like you're doing a multi-fandom fest and saying no comics because they're really hard to differentiate, it's like you're doing a Harry Potter Houses fest and saying no Hufflepuff just because.

I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of any asexual people who come to do this fest, expecting it to be as inclusive as the spiritual predecessors. If I came and saw 'but we're not taking bisexuality fics, because that's really nebulous,' I'd be fucking pissed. I'm not saying this is what you're doing or trying to do, but this definitely seems like you just don't think asexuality is queer enough.

It's also going to get complicated, because a lot of fests in previous years have revolved around the differences between romantic and sexual attraction. Is a biromantic asexual character acceptable? Or what about someone with a high sex drive who experiences no sexual attraction and identifies as ace? Does it count as long as they're fucking people o the opposite gender? My point here is just, these are clearly queer issues, and if you try to block out one type of queer, the overlap's going to give you trouble.

As I already told you, my point here isn't to include every identity that could be called "queer". That's why this fest name does not include the word "queer". This fest is for identities that include attraction to the same gender as oneself and identification as a gender other than that assigned at birth. As asexuality does not inherently include either of these traits, it is not, by default, included.

Your other question would be best answered by reading the "What about marginalized non-LGBT identities?" section of this post. Asexuality as it intersects with LGBT identities is welcome, and this includes what some would call biromantic asexual. But asexuality, inherently and by itself with no connection to any LGBT identity, is not within the purview of this fest.

I hope this has clarified things for you.

Edited 2016-05-03 03:09 (UTC)

Do you have any pimping posts? I would try to make them but that would likely scare people away from the fest.

Thanks! Yes, I have a post with a banner on my pretty sparse Tumblr, and a more low-key post I put up when I opened prompts.

Can I ask you to please stop referring to LGBT people in general as 'queer'? What some people decide to reclaim is their own business, however to many it's still a dehumanizing slur used to attack us with. You're calling us a slur without caring about whether we reclaim it or not, and that's not cool.

My personal definition of queer is sexual or gender identities which have been stigmatized by [whatever time period/culture you're talking about]. "

The trouble is that not everyone uses queer in the same way you do, you seem to be using it similarly to queer theory as in you see it as marginalized sexual identities, other LGBT people see the word primarily as a reclaimed slur and think that it should only be used by those who are members of the groups that were historically oppressed by the slur. You talk about all the asexual prompts at those previous fests, and perhaps don't realize that many LGBT people did not participate in those fests at all precisely because they found it offensive that asexuality was included under the definition of queer. You've presented your way of seeing the word queer as the default and implied that the mod here is doing something wrong by not including asexuality, gender-fluidity, etc. and don't seem to acknowledge that this is a hugely contentious issue in the community and doesn't have the simple defined answer that you think it does.

As a final note some LGBT people think of queer as still a slur primarily and do not like it when the LGBT community is called queer as default, individuals self-define that way, but it isn't ok to use the word for people who don't like it.

If I don't understand a prompt, can I ask the person for clarification?

Absolutely!

You've presented your way of seeing the word queer as the default and implied that the mod here is doing something wrong by not including asexuality, gender-fluidity, etc.

Thank you for your comment, however, I would like to note that genderfluidity is allowed in this fest as it falls under the definition of transgender. The implication that it wasn't allowed seems to have been a misunderstanding on meatball42's part.

Literally the next sentence I wrote was saying that I'm aware not everyone else goes by that definition, and for that reason I wasn't trying to get the mod to include polyamory or kink, although I would have had fun with that. I was putting forth my definition conversationally and using it to contrast my personal opinion from the fact that asexuality is becoming accepted (I would have said 'has been accepted' but apparently that's not the case) as an equal member of the LGBT umbrella. I have not met anyone who does not include asexuality as part of the larger gay/queer/LGBT community, even among those who don't include polyamory, kink, or even transgender people as 'gay'.

I don't know anything about LGBT people who chose not to participate in previous fests due to them allowing asexuality prompts. I never heard of that, not even while participating.

Regarding my use of 'queer'. I used it as a self-identifying queer person, discussing issues related to a previously popular community called 'queer_fest'. I understand that some people do not like the use of this word, but I felt that since there are already prompts using it, and the fact that the previous fest was called 'queer_fest', people might be able to focus on the point I was trying to make rather than arguing over terminology. I was certainly not attempting to refer to either of the anonymous users who have commented on it, and particularly not in a hurtful way. In my experience, it's the most concise way to discuss issues relating to a wider definition of marginalized identities, rather than having to break out quotation marks or hyphenate in order to have a basic conversation.

I brought up gender-fluidity because I was contrasting gender as a spectrum along which any identity was allowed in this fest, and sexuality as a spectrum along which one articular identity was not allowed in this fest.

In summation: I didn't come here to argue. I loved queer_fest, I look forward to loving lgbtfest, and I want it to succeed; considering how many prompts regarding asexuality have already been vetoed, and how many there have been in previous fests, I thought it would be both wise and inclusive to allow them to count. I used queer as an umbrella term which has been used by this fest's spiritual predecessor and many times in those fests, and I didn't think it would be an issue; I apologize for any offense given. In case it matters to anyone, which it seems as though it may, I do self-identify as queer: I'm a bisexual woman.

If nobody else says they want asexuality included, let it be; it's not my fest. I'm literally only trying to help.

I understand where you're coming from, but it bears repeating: This fest is not about cramming in as many identities as possible that can lay claim to the label "queer". It's about lesbian, gay, bi/pan/mga, and trans identities. Since that's not going to change, any further discussion on the topic will be frozen.

Supposing I don't have a Dreamwidth account, can I still participate? Or would you suggest getting a Dreamwidth account?

You should be able to use that OpenID you're using right now to post on the Dreamwidth comm, but I'm not 100% sure.

Nope. It gives me this message:

"Sorry
Non-Dreamwidth Studios users can't post entries because they don't have journals here, but can leave comments in other journals."

Oh well. If I were to post just in AO3, that wouldn't be in the spirit of things, would it?

If you just post it to Ao3, the person who posted the prompt may not see your fill. If you'd like to register a dreamwidth account, they are free and haven't required invite codes for a few years now. Please do join so you can post your fill(s)!

Hi there! I know this is ~~pretty~~ super late, but I ended up writing a fic inspired by one of the prompts here. Is it still okay if I post here and/or to the AO3 collection? Do you have a preference about which (or both) I post to?

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Info & Guidelines

How does LGBT Fest work?

What kinds of prompts and fills are allowed?

Do the characters in my prompt or fill have to explicitly identify as LGBT?

What about marginalized non-LGBT identities?

Are you affiliated with queer_fest or LiveJournal's lgbtfest?

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