The Comfy Chair

Hey! I'm just going to leap gaily in. :)

It seems to me as though the disconnect you guys have going on here isn't so much one of kind as of degree. I don't think it's a case of 'either the friendship is important, or the shared experience is important': I don't think that for the shared experience and community-of-two reading that cathexys is putting forward to hold, it has to be generalisable to an 'any two genderfucked guys' situation. They can be motivated partly by their friendship (which lets them get past the barrier of articulating the sexual aspect of their shared experience, perhaps, and allows for the second part of the story where they remain together after being changed back) even if the primary reason they begin to look at one another sexually is because of the bodily changes they've gone through.

You're seeing this as a two strangers who meet in a bar and have no connection but decide to hook up for the sake of the sex, and maybe because they're both travellers in a strange city, something else that connects them that the others in the bar don't share

I don't read cathexys's approach this way at all. I see it more as two guys who've known each other for a long time but it never occurred to them to look at each other sexually, all of a sudden something happens that makes them look at each other in a different way (it's the change in their bodies and the fact that the other suddenly has the attributes they've always been sexually attracted to, here, but we can imagine it being something else), the change takes them both by surprise but they decide to go with it, and that leads to the rest of the story. Barring the genderswap aspects, this has happened to me: I became friends with someone who I thought was straight, found out that she wasn't, and in one sudden silly conversation I was looking it her in a whole new way. We decided to follow up on our attraction even though we knew there would be consequences and mornings after (we work together, effectively) and – though because we are queer intellectual women and not John and Rodney we talked about it very theoretically at every stage – we are now casually seeing each other. It took both our friendship and the mutual realisation that we were potentially sexually compatible to bring that about; as it did with John and Rodney.

I don't think cathexys was ever arguing that it would have been the same story with McKay and Kavanagh; if the same movement from unwilling colleagues into sexual attraction had taken place, it would have been a different story. It would have been different with McKay/Zelenka or John/Ronon too; the personalities would have been what made the story. But the movement from recognising attraction to having sex become a possibility to the consciousness of community could still have possibly been similar, depending on how the story played out. And even with McKay/Kavanagh, it might have worked out: if you've had certain profound sexual experiences and you know there's only one other person who has also had them, and you find that person physically attractive, wouldn't you consider sleeping with them, even if you didn't actually like them all that much? I know I would.

This is quite possibly why queer communities have a tendency to be kind of incestuous – if the pool of possible sexual partners is limited to people that have a certain shared experience (whether through choice, politics or however you want to define it) the social consequences of sleeping with someone can get understood differently than when there's a potentially infinite bank of available partners outside your particular in-group. Atlantis being such a limited group to begin with, it's always seemed to me that people would probably be more willing to sleep with one another than colleagues who aren't living in a sealed-off city on another galaxy, anyway; when the pool of possible partners is smaller and it gets more common for everyone to have slept with everyone else, bringing sex into a friendship could easily start to seem like a far less significant event. If you extrapolate that to a shared-experience/mutual-attraction community of two... well, then you get this story! At least as far as I'm concerned.