“Newsies acknowledges that it needs a plot of some kind, but the story, I started to feel on first viewing, can seem like an excuse for boy-watching: boys in big groups running around, doing flips and pelvic thrusts, and singing about how they are an unstoppable force if they can only stick together. The only thing they might love more than unionization is dancing and singing and touching each other constantly. What Newsies knows is that a herd of boys, and the chemistry between them, is all the energy you need to drive a movie. The rest you can make up as you go along...
When I look back at stories like this, I feel as if I didn’t know this side of myself unless I was up late, dreaming, writing, telling the truth of what I imagined and desired to a few dozen girls I trusted not to judge me. This was a corner of the internet snug as a table made into a blanket fort: we reviewed the new chapters of each other’s ongoing sagas with unstinting faithfulness, lovingly critiqued each other’s drafts, and credited each other for the innovations and ideas we traded. (The Snitch/Skittery pairing was invented by a girl from Arizona who wrote under the pen name Lute and was our fandom’s Stephen King, in terms of sheer output and popularity; to write a Snitch/Skittery story without crediting her somewhere was simply Not Done.) We wrote fictionalized versions of each other, as adoring tributes, into our own stories. And when we weren’t writing, we were instant messaging each other for hours, collaborating on stories via email, and sometimes scraping together the courage to talk to each other on the phone (“It’s your real voice!”), incurring long-distance bills we sometimes couldn’t explain to our parents, because they knew to fear the internet as a place where grown men could prey on their daughters, but hadn’t yet thought to worry that it might be a place where their daughters would come together to share their fantasies...
There was something, at least to me, that felt particularly liberating about a world of boys, and the idea of not just watching that world but being within it: a world you could walk fearfully and joyfully within, freed from a life in which your body was a dangerous object that could, at any moment, cause someone to suddenly wish to dominate or destroy you.”
https://thebaffler.com/latest/newsies-marshall
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