A Brief and Very Personal History of Slash

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Title: A Brief and Very Personal History of Slash
Creator: Dargelos
Date(s): September 20, 1999
Medium:
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS, The Professionals
Topic:
External Links: A Brief and Very Personal History of Slash; 2002 repost
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A Brief and Very Personal History of Slash is a 1999 essay by Dargelos.

For context, see Timeline of Slash Meta.

Some Topics Discussed

From the Essay

It’s not easy casting the mind back to the time before the flood, but I do recall an itch that began in 1962 when I saw "Lawrence of Arabia" for the first time. For months afterwards, I lived and breathed Lawrence (I saw the film over a hundred times while it made its way through the first, second and third run theatres in Chicago. Take that "Star Wars!") and what I dreamed about most was Lawrence and Ali and their friendship, and about the Turkish Bey who was very bad, and incidentally rather interesting, though I wasn’t clear on why. I was only ten and I had no roadmaps. Then in 1965 the light finally went on over my head. I was poring over racks of paperbacks at the school bookstore and spotted a copy of The Lord Won’t Mind. Even at thirteen I knew instinctively that there was something about the book I needed to explore and also that I’d have to be ultra cool about paying for it. I put it in a pile of paperbacks – thank God they were cheap back then – took it home and devoured it. It was the hottest thing I’d ever read, even though I was no stranger to implied heterosex.

... thanks to a friend we met at school, that yes indeed, the Trek characters could be slashed and there were people out there doing just that. Yee HAH! Only...there I was reading every bit of K/S I could get my hands on and while it was nourishment of sorts, it didn’t really do more than open my eyes to the possibilities of slashing other people’s characters, characters who hadn’t already been slashed. This wasn’t champagne and caviar, it was cheese puffs and Coke, but I devoured it for years, and only towards the end did I realize that I had become so tired of the Trek universe that I was appending different faces and bodies to the names "Kirk," "Spock," "McCoy" etc.

Then we met Karen and she introduced us to Starsky and Hutch. I felt like I’d come home. S/H felt right, it felt good, I liked these guys separately and together. Really together. I started to write them, and I discovered facets of fandom I’d never really been aware of before: becoming fast friends with people you’ve never met, bonding over fictional characters, having an audience of more than one for the stuff I was writing.

There was no internet back then, not for us, no mailing lists or newsgroups. We had round robins and APAs. If you had an IBM Selectric, you were high tech. The medium was the zine and the zine was mimeographed. Xeroxing was still pretty much in its slick, stinky paper infancy and offset was only for those who figured they could sell a thousand copies of a zine…or who could afford to take a financial belly-flop.

Fans like Tabby Davis produced beautiful, handmade zines that stood as very personal statements of their involvement in and commitment to fandom. Professional authors were bred. I could drop a few names right now, names you’d all recognize because you’ve bought their books at B&N or Borders or Amazon.com (or will; more old time fans surface as professional authors all the time), but the mania for secrecy has begun to infect us all, and though we all knew who was who back then, I’m not going to be the one to out anyone. Trust me, they were there in S&H fandom in those days, learning their trade, making a lot of people very happy.

But at the same time, there was something just a little, well, naughty about the whole process. For years, slash wasn’t an accepted part of most conventions, even ZebraCon, because it was incredibly controversial. I recall getting an early morning phone call from a fan who had reason to know things like this, during the course of which I was warned that if Code 7 was published openly, there would be lawsuits. It was published anyway, but we stripped out all the names, even the pseuds. Hit-and-Run was our motto in those days. Up against the wall? No chance. They’d have to drag me there, but I’d be writing the whole time. We’re here and we like it queer.

The one guy you didn’t buck was George Lucas who had more money than God, and could afford to pay every lawyer in America to make your life miserable. "Star Wars" slash? No way. S’Wars hetfic? Same thing. Sex became a non-issue unless you went so far underground you needed a lantern and compass just to get yourself off.

I got into "The Professionals" just about the time media fandom entered what I like to call the navel-contemplation phase during which we spent a lot of time analyzing why we wrote slash, and what did it mean and who gave a damn anyway? Despite all that inward focus, I did some of my best writing there. And in that fandom something strange was happening, zines began to be displaced by stories being passed from hand to hand. Soon there were so many stories being passed around that it became known as a story circuit. Then The Circuit, and not very long thereafter – 1984 to be exact – Karen’s mania for organization forced her to start the Professionals Library which exists to this day, though it is going to close down by the end of 2000.

ZebraCon, which had threatened to begin shrinking thanks to the inevitable attrition which occurs when a series is over and the fandom runs out of steam either temporarily or permanently, began to grow again when we opened it up to Professionals fandom, and if you’ll allow me a moment for preening here, Cat Tales, my Pros novel, won "Best Novel" at ZebraCon (The Huggys), MediaWestCon (FanQ) and Scorpio (Zen). In fact, I have been told, though I’ve never confirmed this, that CT was the first slash novel ever to win a FanQ. With that, slash became not only legitimate, it started being a little bourgeois around the edges.

The Circuit has been replaced by the internet, the most hit-and-run of all media. Get busted at GeoCities in the morning and you can have a free site up at Tripod by dinner time if you have a fast connection and a current back-up. The Outpost has had about four incarnations, mostly due to my own stubborn belief that I could have everything in one domain. Well it happened and like a good percentage of sexual experiences, it wasn’t what I hoped it would be. Oh well.

In some ways the move to the net has been one of the best things to happen to fandom. It’s being tugged open to encompass a good many small fandoms that just couldn’t have survived in a zine-only era, and exposing people more easily to the idea that fannishness is not just some silly, passing interest in Harrison Ford that makes you want to go out and rent all his films to watch when your boyfriend goes bowling with his buddies.

For slash fandom, I think, the revelation of the internet has had even more profound effects. Slash is more accepted than ever, and the supply of fanfic seems endless. If you’re the type to slash anyone, you could probably spend the rest of your life on the net reading slash stories. And in numbers there is always strength. Most of us probably don’t spend a lot of time composing rebuttals to angry, anti-slash editorials any longer, or carry a long list of defensive positions in our heads. Even non-slashers have learned not only to tolerate but to be wary of offending us. We are everywhere.

Conversely, net fandom has opened up a few pretty unpleasant worm cans. Far be it from me to be hide-bound, to be the sort of person who whines "that’s not how we do it in fandom!" every time she hits a new site. But the honest truth is that a lot of fannish customs have sensible sources. For example, Zcon is a strictly fan con because it’s a place where fans don’t have to be always looking over their shoulders to see who is listening before they say what’s really on their minds. Invite the stars? Hell no! I’d rather eat ground glass. And yeah, we had our share of flames in non-net fandom, but on the whole I think we were all a little politer to each other because there was a damn good chance of running into your nemesis at a convention. (I see the tradition of fannish rah-rah girls persists. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing that particular custom go belly-up.) And if I hear one more net fan say or imply that if you’re not wired, you’re nothing in fandom, I think I will probably email bomb her.

Okay, so slash fandom has Arrived. It’s real, it’s vital, it’s even acceptable in polite fannish society, always assuming there is such a thing. ;-) What’s it all about? What do we want? Why do we write it? Yeah, yeah, even I’m not immune to a bit of navel contemplation. And to be honest, I’ve spent a lot of time brooding over these questions in the past, and coming up with long, corkscrew explanations which don’t really satisfy me. However, a few weeks ago, Taz and I happened on what we felt was an important truth about slash and I am going to share it with you: We do it because it turns us on.

There ya go. You don’t have to try to justify it to yourself or anyone else, you don’t have to do a ten minute rap on gender identity and male-female roles or formulate any heavy post-modern, deconstructionist, feminist, queer, doctrines to explain it. It’s supposed to be fun.

Let’s run through that one again…now repeat after me: It’s supposed to be fun. And if you don’t believe this – and I suspect there are some die-hards out there who won’t – try this little experiment. Next time you read a hot slash story, tell me how you feel. Does your breathing get irregular? Do you get warm? Do your panties get damp? Do you, in fact, have the urge – acted upon or not as you choose and circumstances dictate – to slip your fingers into those panties and share the experience with the two heroes? The older I become, and boy am I becoming older, the more I consider it something of an injustice to feel as if pleasures must be justified. To what purpose? So the prigs and prudes won’t hate us? Feh, they’ll hate us anyway simply because we are not like them.

I know other gay friends of mine are sort of bemused by it all and slashfic isn’t exactly their rocks-off read of choice because it’s…well it’s not male enough. Slash caters to female sensibility almost exclusively for a darn good reason: Most of media fandom is female! Hello? This is not rocket science. And, of course, like good girls, we struggle with the need for validation for what we do, but listen: If I were to hand you a porno flick and a vibrator, would you try to give me the political reason why you were going to run right home and use them? Or would you smile, thank me and go home to enjoy your gifts?

We don’t need validation. Honest. Would this face lie? We don’t need to feel bad about our needs and desires, and we sure don’t need to justify them. We like what we like and so long as no one is dragged into our fantasies unwillingly (Please…please do not write to me and ask, "Well do you think the actors are willing participants?" because I’ll tell you that they’re not participants at all and if you can’t tell the difference between an actor and the role s/he plays you’ve got some serious problems.) your reading and writing habits are your own business.

References


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