Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.

“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.

I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.

Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.

Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.

Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.