An American Werewolf in London is not a gay movie. The love story at the center of the movie is decidedly heterosexual, and the two male leads have no sexual or romantic chemistry whatsoever. Yet, if you watched my edit of the movie, set to “Ribs” by Lorde, you’d think it was the gayest, queerest piece of queer media you’d ever seen. 

I didn’t intentionally watch An American Werewolf in London. The whole thing happened by accident. One night, my roommate and I decided to watch Stopmotion, an indie horror movie that any A24 snob would love. It was my second watch, her first. After the movie ended, Amazon Prime decided to autoplay An American Werewolf in London. It was a Friday night, we had time on our hands, so we said “fuck it” and kept watching, despite the movie having the longest and most unnecessary opening credits sequence we’d ever seen. 

As we watched the movie, we kept remarking on how it wasn’t made for us. “This is the kind of movie a father shows his son,” one of us said; I forget now if it was me or her. Though gender is more complicated than some things being boy and others being girl, we both thought the movie was very boy and it was funny to be two girls watching this boy film. I joked, “I should edit this to ‘Ribs,’” the joke being that “Ribs” is a girl song, and the overlap between “Ribs” listeners and An American Werewolf in London viewers is probably very minimal. 

I did end up making the edit using iMovie. I texted it to various friends, including my roommate. I even showed it to my mom, who asked, “So are they gay in the movie?” No Mom, but they are in your daughter’s edit. And I’m not alone—the vast majority of edits create a queerer world by making characters that are decidedly heterosexual in the original work fall in love with each other. As we inhabit this contemporary political moment where fascist politicians are more concerned about trans kids playing sports than gun violence, I think making the world a queerer place is valuable. These edits don’t just strive for queer representation; they loudly invade heterosexuality and rip it apart entirely. Rather than desperately claw toward an assimilation we’ll never achieve, I think it’s more valuable to disrupt the sanctity of heterosexuality altogether, and edits do that.  

I’ve always loved to mess around with other people’s works of fiction. As a middle schooler with no friends, I spent a lot of time on FanFiction.Net. An avid Draco x Hermione (“Dramione”) consumer, it didn’t take long for me to start writing my own fan fiction. I set up my profile, which, if you want to understand who I was then, began: “Howdy. Geez, that sounds weird. I apologize for my awkwardness. But seriously, hello. I have no idea how you got to my profile, but thanks for taking the time out of your day to read this.” My first story was typical Dramione content: pining, angst, and a chaste kiss on the lips because that was the most scandalous thing my middle school brain could come up with. 

None of my FanFiction.Net work is particularly well-written. All of the sex scenes are anatomically incorrect because I hadn’t had sex yet. If people spoke the way that I used to write dialogue, you’d think everyone was AI-generated. But, what no one can deny is that these stories are ridiculously imaginative. Why was I shipping Dean and Seamus from Harry Potter when they have less than three scenes together? Why was I writing Dramione from Ron’s point of view? As I scroll through my profile for this piece, I cringe but also shake my head in disbelief at how I came up with this stuff. This way of writing, weaving stories out of other people’s fiction like Frankenstein making his monster, taught me not just to imagine but also to never accept text as unchangeable. So when I get yet another notification on my phone about the latest executive order making this world a worse place to live in, I do not give into despair, but instead think of what actions we can take to challenge this latest proclamation. 

Though I gave up writing fan fiction many years ago, my love of edits—another way to manipulate works of fiction—has remained constant. My first exposure to the medium was through iMovie trailers the summer between fifth and sixth grade. Using the “horror trailer” template one summer afternoon, I made a dark gothic edit of my Elmo plushie and was instantly hooked on the medium. Recent edits include: a thirst trap of a hypothetical high-speed rail line in the U.S., a fan edit of my hard-working premed friend, a time-lapse set to a Deftones song of me and my lover assembling his shelves this summer (ft. a fake explosion at the end), a video of my friends’ storage unit blowing up that nobody fell for, and an iMovie about my attempt to get my boots fixed at a cobbler downtown. Making my friends laugh via edits is one small thing I can do during a time when those who seek to oppress us work to divide us. They want to make us feel so isolated that we become futile. I share an on-campus apartment with an aspiring journalist and climate scientist, respectively, and I hope that the brief laughs my edits provide can sustain them as they fight the good fight, which feels harder every day.

Lately, I’ve been returning to my fan fiction roots and editing other people’s works of fiction. I recently edited The Social Network to Charli XCX’s “Girl, so confusing.” Through my edit, this film that details the rise of Facebook becomes a tender exploration of platonic love and femininity. Suddenly, a movie where girls are only love interests and objects becomes a treatise on femme friendships. In this contemporary anti-choice climate which thrives on viewing people with uteruses as only good for producing babies, edits provide a valuable way of repurposing media that objectifies femme people. The objectification of femme people in movies and television is not unrelated to these attacks on our bodily autonomy, and editing against that objectification is a meaningful form of resistance (and I promise I’m not just saying that because I really like my own “Girl, so confusing” edit). Anyway, I’m not going to post my edit of The Social Network, but come up to me in person anytime and I’ll show it to you, as long as you can handle the screening taking place on the most fingerprinted, cracked iPhone you’ve ever seen. 

Of course, every artist is the product of the art they’ve consumed, and there are edits that have fundamentally changed the course of my life. From one that sets Maurice to Lana del Rey’s “Brooklyn Baby” to another that splices clips from Challengers to “One of Your Girls” by Troye Sivan, these edits have fundamentally changed the way I read the original works. And I’m not the only one—back when TikTok was going to be deleted, one of my friends frantically saved all her favorite edits so that she could have them forever. To those of us who love edits, they are beautiful objects imbued with layers of meaning, like pieces of sea glass or feathers, that we collect and clutch close to our chests. 

Being someone who edits also changes the way I consume. For example, I hate Sex and the City. Yet, I can’t stop watching it. I abhor each character as if they were my real-life enemy and find lines from the show so repulsive I genuinely gag upon hearing them in my headphones. I laugh at the moments that are supposed to be tender and find the show to be a distillation of everything I hate about capitalism, the U.S., and white feminism. And I know that if Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samatha ever met me, they’d hate me right back. Yet, there’s part of me that wants to edit the show to some bhangra and make the whitest show I’ve ever seen South Asian, just because I can. It gives me a form of agency as a viewer predominantly consuming media that is not made for me. Fascists want you to feel as if you have no agency because their regimes thrive on anticipatory obedience—acquiescing before they even take action—so any way you can recuperate that agency is valuable, even if it’s silly and small.

Edits provide a valuable way of seeing. While they are often dismissed because they’re not original works, they repurpose the source material so much that in doing so, a whole new piece of media is produced. I believe edits are a medium in their own right, just as much as writing, painting, or singing. With iMovie as your paintbrush and [insert-the-heterosexual-movie-you-want-to-queer-here] as your canvas, you can create anything. 

In this current, very fascist moment in the U.S., hate thrives on seeing the world in one way and rendering people into one-dimensional, hateful stereotypes. While I’m not equating making an edit to tangible anti-fascist action, I think any medium or way of seeing that complicates things, that says, “No, actually, here’s how I see it,” is valuable. Moreover, fascists don’t want us to have imaginations, so while my forthcoming Oppenheimer x “Like a G6” edit is nothing revolutionary, it’s a very quiet middle finger at those who would rather I not dream, who would rather I not laugh despite it all.