It took only a couple of days after the election before the first Justin Trudeau fan-fiction was for sale on Kindle; now there are Trudeau erotica writers on Wattpad as well. These works are graphically fictional stories of sexual encounters between a first-person narrator – usually an intern – and the new Prime Minister of Canada.
This kind of fantasy is a staple of celebrity fan-fiction, which imagines a famous person entering into the life of a normal person, like a giant figure stepping off a movie screen and into the audience. And the goal of such fantasies is not merely wishful thinking or prurience – it is also to cut these giant figures down to size. It is not entirely kind.
There are fictionalized erotic fantasies available to read online about nearly every prominent person in every imaginable field of activity: In fan-fiction forums, Angela Merkel is getting it on with Barack Obama, Christiano Ronaldo and Neymar Jr. are nuzzling each other's sweaty necks, the toughest NASCAR drivers at Daytona are sending each other flirtatious selfies. The most macho of occupations tend, of course, to be those that generate the steamiest gay fantasies, but everything and everyone is fair game.
The same goes for purely fictional characters: Every popular novel is pretty much instantly rewritten as pornographic romance. In one recent scandal, the successful self-published romance writer Laura Harner was caught repurposing another more successful writer's novel by simply changing the gender of one of the lovers (she made it a gay male cowboy romance instead of a straight one). She was condemned for plagiarism, but it seems to me that what Harner did was more like a kind of remixing, and true to the defiant and iconoclastic spirit of fan-fiction.
The new Trudeamaniacal porn on Kindle, Serving the Prime Minister: A Canadian Romance, is written by one Sam Shiver, who is prolific. Shiver is also the author of Gay for Pay: The Rancher's Son and His Babydoll: The Training of Krissi, among other titles. These works are not novels, they are very short stories – and expensive ones, at that. Serving the Prime Minister costs $3.86 and is only a few pages long. It consists of a perfunctory introduction to Shawn, a buff young aide to the handsome leader of the Leaf Party, Dustin Waterhole. Dustin has just won the election and Shawn has just come to Ottawa. One night after a long day, Dustin seduces Shawn (who has never been with a guy!) on his office couch. End of story. In fact, there is no story at all, just one single, very graphic sex scene. So, like a lot of porn, it is quickly over and makes one feel a little ripped off.
Trudeau fantasists on Wattpad are even less successful at writing stories: Like many Wattpad writers, they are good at coming up with covers, titles and the first paragraph of "Chapter One," and peter out pretty quickly after that. They do promise in their bios that they will marry Trudeau some day, though. There is one absolutely surreal story told in deeply colloquial Quebec French, by "Justintrudeaumavie," that describes a kind of orgy in Trudeau's office with other local celebrities, involving fruit-flavoured, glow-in-the-dark lip balm. It ends with the Prime Minister twerking. The narrator becomes pregnant with his child.
This piece is a bizarre mash-up of pop culture and news. In this it is political: Its juvenile humour is a low-level form of satire; it mocks the serious. They remind me, these crude caricatures, of caricature itself – that is, drawing, the kind of drawing one finds in editorial cartoons, that which exaggerates bums and noses and makes every important person look like a sack of potatoes. The goal of caricature is to undermine the pompous, and political caricatures have been seen as dangerous sedition at some point in history in every country in the world. In other words, the literary adorers of Trudeau are not without a desire to refashion him into a more vulnerable and sometimes frankly silly persona: They want him pantless, horny, goofy. They want to bring him off his pedestal. This is subversive underground art not unlike rude drawings of the king, distributed in the streets of European capitals after dark, long before the Internet made everyone free.