A phenomenon that has dominated the youth of the most recent generations, fanfiction can be traced back to the days of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels in the late 1800s. The first fandom to exist in a form we recognize is that of Star Trek, which premiered its first episode in late 1966. From there forward, fans across the world wrote their own miniature stories and unique versions of the science fiction tales for themselves, their friends, and for other community members at yearly conventions. This became the earliest form of the distribution of fanfiction. From the Star Trek franchise came the rise of slash fanfiction, stories that focused on homosexual relationships, as fans longed for the depiction of a romantic relationship between Captain Kirk and Spock. It was from the 1970s on that fans began to use fanfiction as an outlet to quell their desires for queer narratives and representation in the fictional worlds they loved, as often the media they consumed rarely depicted the pairings they adored, or if there was representation present, it was not necessarily good or healthy. 

​

Over the course of the last decade, queer author Malinda Lo has compiled statistics pertaining to the number of LGBTQ+ YA novels published by mainstream publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon and Schuster) as well as major publishers such as Disney Book Group, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Scholastic, and general interest publishers that do not focus on LGBTQ+ books, between the years of 2003 and 2016. Her research also depicts how gender and genre are presented across the queer novels that were published in that time frame. Lo also asserts that 2016 has been the peak for LGBTQ+ YA publications with 79 novels hitting the shelves that year (“LGBTQ”). Over the course of her 13 years of research, mainstream publishers have released a grand total of 299 queer YA titles, and Lo’s research says that, as of 2016, cisgender males make up 43 percent of the representation and cisgender females comprising of another 38 percent (“LGBTQ”; “LGBT Young Adult”). The remaining 19 percent is broken up between transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and questioning characters, as well as the representation of multiple characters with multiple genders, and novels pertaining to general LGBTQ+ issues (“LGBTQ”). 

​

When you combine this information with that of a demographics survey of popular fanfiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) from 2013, you may begin to see the cause of the rise of fanfiction being the main source of LGBTQ+ content in the publishing industry today. In the aforementioned survey, only 38 percent of users identified as heterosexual, making the majority of their usership a sexuality other than heterosexual. The survey also found that 80 percent of the users identified with the female gender and that of those, over 50 percent identified as non-heterosexual (“Fanfiction”). Assuming that the trending statistics of this survey have stayed the same, that would make the vast majority of fanfiction writers and readers LGBTQ+ women, a group not very well represented in the few queer titles that are published in a given year. 

​

In the mainstream successes of fanfiction within the publishing industry, none of the known heavy-hitters are representative of the LGBTQ+ community either. The Fifty Shades of Grey and After series are the most notable examples of fanfiction breaking through to the mainstream media after being adapted into full-length novels with name and setting changes to remove the copyrighted elements from within their content. From their novels, these two series were then also adapted into feature films that even sported well-known actors within their casts. However, neither of these are examples of queer narratives, nor were they prior to adaptation for publication. Instead, both series have been criticized for being hard to watch and depicting unhealthy, toxic relationships between characters that only further stigmatizes the concept of fanfiction in greater society and lessens it as an art form and a valid platform for individuals to write and create original, representative storylines within different fictional universes. And with big publishers already hardly publishing any LGBTQ+ novels as it is, it is even more unlikely that one of those publishers would choose an adapted fanfiction for release after the harsh criticism of the two breakout examples listed above, even if it were a queer story that would likely be received better, as many LGBTQ+ fanfictions seek to correct unhealthy and stigmatized representations within the source material. 

​

Because of this, many fanfiction writers turn to self-publishing as a means of getting their work into a more “credible, legitimized” space outside of fanfiction websites such as AO3, Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad, which according to the publishing industry professionals, threatens the publishing industry as we know it, as it takes away applications and potential revenue from publishing companies that may have, by some very small chance, published their work. One example of this is the Yellow trilogy, written by queer author Lena Nottingham. Nottingham’s debut novel Yellow is an adapted version of a lesbian fanfiction about two members of the real-life musical girl group Fifth Harmony.  

 

In an interview from Adolescent.net, Nottingham said: 

​

There's very little representation for LGBT persons in television, film, and literature. Some of the top-selling books in the Gay/Lesbian category on Amazon are heavily sexualized erotica. Gay men were given space in film and television before gay women were, because their oppression isn't gendered in the way it is for women. On Wattpad, it's a feat for a lesbian fanfiction to get a couple million reads, while gay male fanfiction regularly garners over 10 million. 

 

Nottingham also mentioned how, after years of navigating fandom culture on Twitter and Tumblr, there’s such a large, powerful audience of queer women out there, and yet media is so infrequently written for them, which she believes is why they turn to fanfiction as a means of creating and consuming the narratives they wish to see in media today (Isley). She commented that she finds it surprising that executives within the publishing, film, and television industries fail to capitalize on a market that is “so starved for representation that it searches for gay subtext in all the media it consumes” (Isley). 

​

Since its origins in the 1970s, fanfiction has been a space for underrepresented identities within the LGBTQ+ community to explore original plots within established media. With the rise of the internet and the lack of appropriate rise in creation of queer novels and other media in the subsequent nearly 60 years since the creation of the original fandom, fanfiction’s numbers and legitimacy within the publishing industry continue to grow. As younger scholars enter the academic scene and publishing industry, the hope is that fanfiction becomes less stigmatized as a genre and their market becomes more satisfied with a (hopeful) increase in media made for them as a result.