Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2019: Week 47
Kirk/Spock, widely known as K/S, was the first officially slashed couple of media fandom. While fans had been privately creating fanworks about Holmes and Watson, James and Artemus, Buz and Tod, or Napoleon and Illya, Star Trek was the first show in which amateur stories with a homosexual theme were more widely shared among fans.
No one person or group "invented" K/S. Instead fans wrote it in the form of drawerfic, stories written only for themselves and perhaps a friend. Some of this fic was in the form of circuit stories, fanfic meant to circulated among a small group of friends.
K/S fic rose in visibility after 1974, in part because Star Trek was the first television program to grow a fandom that generated fan-published fanzines. These amateur publications allowed stories, poems, and art to be circulated outside of a circle of friends to a wider audience of fans.
Early on, the speculation that Kirk and Spock were romantically or sexually intimate with each other was referred to as The Premise.