Kirk and Spock: The Straight Story

Meta
Title:	Kirk and Spock: The Straight Story
Creator:	Gamin Davis
Date(s):	early 2000s?
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
Topic:
External Links:	online here, Archived version
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Kirk and Spock: The Straight Story is an essay by Gamin Davis.

It appeared in a slightly different version in an unknown Star Trek: TOS fan club newsletter.

Gamin Davis' summary: "My interpretation of the Kirk and Spock friendship and why I don't believe it has any sexual aspects, including an episode-by-episode / movie-by-movie account of the evolution of their relationship."

Excerpts

Many years ago, when fan-fiction was confined to fanzines and Star Trek fans kept in touch by snail-mail, a pen-pal of mine asked me to write an article for her club newsletter abut why Kirk and Spock's friendship could not possibly (in my view) be homosexual in nature, despite an entire sub-genre of fan-fiction being obsessed with--er, based on the idea (known as K/S, with a slash mark, to differentiate it from K&S, which simply refers to their friendship relationship). In response to certain more recent requests, I've decided to rewrite and update that article for presentation on the Internet. This article is based solely on opinion and my interpretation of canonical evidence; if you happen to be a fan of K/S, also known as "slash", your mileage will definitely vary.

Back in the days when I originally wrote the original version of this article, sometime in the late 70s, I was new to organized Star Trek fandom and just getting into fanzines. It had, quite frankly, never even crossed my mind that Kirk and Spock's relationship could be seen as homosexual until I became aware, through my membership in the now-long-defunct Leonard Nimoy Association of Fans, that other people were not only writing Star Trek stories that were collected into things called "zines", but some of these zines were devoted to the characters' sex lives--including, of all things, Kirk and Spock having sex with each other. Granted, I was at an impressionable age at the time, but it's over twenty years later, now, and I still don't get it.

Wanting to be able to form an educated opinion on the subject, I ordered an adult zine as soon as I turned eighteen, just to see what some of this adult fan-fiction was like. I still remember the name of the zine, the K/S story and the author, but no other details about the story, other than I wasn't able to take it seriously and found it very offensive. I never read another K/S story until joining the online newsgroup alt.startrek.creative, where I could do so without having to pay for the privilege, as well as acquaint myself with the views of a variety of K/S fans, and to this day, I still can't read a K/S story all the way through without either skipping parts or just not finishing them. As I said, I still don't get it; it's as if slash fans watched some alternate-universe version of Star Trek that I never saw.

Maybe in part, it's because I identify so strongly with Spock that I find the idea of him being in a homosexual relationship with Kirk so implausible, or maybe it's just that that exploring the characters' sex lives is just further than I ever wanted to go in any fan-fiction I read (or wrote), but either way, I've never seen anything in canon to make me believe it could be possible for Kirk and Spock to be sexually involved with each other.

Kirk and Spock's friendship as it was shown to develop through the series and the first six movies. It's a very deep and sincere friendship, involving affection, respect, loyalty, implicit trust and a mental bond--certainly a more unique and special kind of friendship than most of us are likely to ever have--and perhaps it's this aspect that makes it unfamiliar or confusing enough to some people that they assume it must be sexual. But I'm able to separate the two, and I just see nothing in canon to indicate a sexual component to their friendship.

I also seriously doubt Gene Roddenberry had any such thing in mind when he stated, as quoted in Star Trek Lives! (p. 152):

…I definitely designed it as a love relationship. And I hope that for men…who have been afraid of such relationships…that they [Spock and Kirk] would encourage them to be able to feel love and affection, true affection…love, friendship, and deep respect. That was the relationship I tried to draw. It's quite a lovely thing where two halves make a whole.

Note those words: love…friendship…respect…affection. He's not talking about homosexuality; he's talking about the fallacy so prevalent among men--a fallacy that still exists--that they can't feel or express really deep friendship for each other without being assumed to be lovers, and how he meant Kirk and Spock's relationship to show them it didn't have to be that way.

For the Star Trek: the Motion Picture novel, Roddenberry created the term "t'hy'la" for Spock to use in reference to Kirk, describing it in a footnote in which he assumes Kirk's identity (Star Trek: the Motion Picture, pp. 6-7):

…the Human concept of "friend" is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the word "t'hy'la", which can also mean "brother" and "lover". Spock's recollection…is that it was a most difficult moment for him, since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However…because t'hy'la can be used to mean "lover", and because Kirk and Spock's friendship was unusually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject:

"I was never aware of this 'lovers' rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently, he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow, which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself…I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would not like to be thought of as being so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years."

This tells me a couple of things: (1) Roddenberry was playing with fire when he attached the "lovers" meaning to t'hy'la, even though his overall purpose was probably to settle the matter. (2) Spock's reaction--"dismissing" it with "surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance"--combined with Kirk's (he prefers women) make it pretty clear to me that the only sexual involvement between them is in the minds of the rumor-mongers.

As for K/S (slash) fandom vs. K&S (friendship) fandom, I don't think diehard members of either camp are going to be converted by anything anyone says or writes, so my purpose here is just to state my position that there simply isn't any indisputable canonical evidence that Kirk and Spock were ever lovers. What there is is abundant evidence of their intense feelings of friendship for each other; in my view, slash fans choose to attach sexual undertones to every word, look or action between them, however innocuous. To me, this is just sort of an alternate universe of their own making and has little relation to Gene Roddenberry's Kirk and Spock…which, for them, is fine. But as for me, I'll stick with the Kirk and Spock I know -- the real, original, straight Kirk and Spock.

Reactions and Reviews

2002

help... *a wibbly little K/S rant* Sorry guys! :-p, Farfalla, 211 comments at alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated, (October 9, 2002)

2007

OMG. It's the perfect summary of every anti-slash argument ever! Plus a bonus ep-by-ep list of all the points slashers would find slashy, with the querulous remark that, really, there's no ACTUAL SEX in here, so why would people imagine that there IS? Or even want to imagine that there is? Pervs.