Nine years after she got sober, psychiatrist Sarz Maxwell was doing well enough. More than a decade earlier Drug Enforcement Administration officials had caught on that she had been prescribing herself amphetamines for about a year through her practice in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Initially the state’s medical licensing board wanted to send her to prison. “It was very scary,” she says. “It’s a felony to write yourself a prescription for a controlled substance.” She wound up making a deal with the board: in exchange for clemency she would let her Missouri license lapse. Prison was no longer a threat but Maxwell’s life was nonetheless falling apart. “I was an alcoholic and was dying of it,” she says. “The last year in Missouri it was: ‘Hang on till we get home.’” She moved to Chicago, where she had family, and entered the Physicians Assistance Program for doctors in recovery at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, where the evaluating doctor told her, “I think you might be salvageable.” After four months as an inpatient, Maxwell took up a new direction as an addiction psychiatrist and eventually opened a small private practice at the Center for Personal Development on Michigan Avenue.
The next day she went back and saw the movie again. She did the same the day after that, and then the day after that, and then the day after that. Maxwell saw The Fellowship of the Ring five times a week for two months, usually by herself. “I could feel the clock moving toward 7 PM, when I knew there was a showing at Village North,” she says. “I saw it 20 to 30 times in that theater alone.” She also bought the sound track. “I would ride in my car and listen to the sound track and cry and cry. I got so I could picture every scene just from the sound track.” As she drove around town, when the music reached the point in the movie where Frodo screams, Maxwell screamed too.
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At first she had a hard time finding anyone who understood her new fixation. “I’d say to people, ‘Did you see Lord of the Rings’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, good movie.’ And I’d go, ‘But what does it mean that Frodo was an orphan, and then Gandalf falls at Khazad-dum? How did he feel?’ And everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, good movie.’” In frustration she turned to the Internet, where she found fan discussion boards full of people as desperate to analyze every facet of the movie as she was. She also discovered that quite a few fans were writing and posting their own stories about Tolkien’s characters. Even more intriguing: some of those fan stories–the ones called “slash”–were homoerotic. A friend she’d met through a Reader personal ad (“Tolkien addict seeks same for obsessive conversation”) showed her a story in which Frodo and his hunky male companion Aragorn get it on. “I was like, wow, this is really fucking sexy,” she says, grinning. “It was a lightening that I needed. It wasn’t all trauma; it was fun too. ‘Look at that glance between Frodo and Sam.’ You just feel friendlier to someone when you know they’re sucking each other’s cocks.”
Lord of the Rings slash sites started popping up around 1999, but exploded in popularity with the release of the first movie in 2001. The stories are eminently slashable not only because of their huge, virtually all-male cast but because of Tolkien’s affinity for depicting comradely affection between men–an affection director Peter Jackson retained in the films. As Maxwell puts it, “You have this group of gorgeous men who are incredibly bonded. They sing songs to each other, they kiss each other, they cry. They love each other, they talk about how they love each other, they carry each other in their arms.”
Frodo was her favorite character from the beginning. “I have the same birthday as Frodo,” she says, “so there’s always been this connection.” Like Frodo, she knew what it was like to lose a parent; like Frodo, she was bookish. There were other reasons too. Frodo is subject to an enormously powerful source of evil, and so, says Maxwell, was she.
“‘Frodo! Mr. Frodo, my dear!’ cried Sam, tears almost blinding him. ‘It’s Sam, I’ve come!’ He half lifted his master and hugged him to his breast. . . .’I’d given up hope, almost. I couldn’t find you.’
