Lay Story

Synonyms:	Explicit Het
See also:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The earliest romantic fan fiction -- what fans today would call "het" -- were sometimes called "lay" stories (lay-Spock, lay-Kirk, and so forth).

Examples of Use

From a review of ...A Handful of Snowflakes and Other Trek Tales: "This 'zine contains four stories of different kinds of love—nightmare love. Kirk and Spock's caring for each other love, a lay-Spock story, and a retirement story."

There was much debate about lay stories in the early issues of the letterzine S and H. Fans questioned the lack of "lay-Starsky" and "lay-Hutch" stories in the fandom, speculating on the reasons for their absence: One fan writes, "As to the question you asked in the first issue about the absence of lay-Hutch and lay-Starsky stories... [the short-skirted, frivolous female background characters] always had a negative effect on me so perhaps writing that sort of story has a similar effect on people. Writing just a lay-story brings down the characters." Another fan writes: "Lay stories? So far, the S&H zines have been almost puritanical content as far as sex goes... before we start in on the gay S/H stories, where are the explicit straight S&H stories?"

A fan in 1993 felt she had to explain this term: "A Note on Fannish Usage: For the uninformed, a 
"lay___" story is one in which (not too surprisingly) the character in question Gets Laid, with all of the attendant (and charming) attitudes the term connotes. It is not generally considered complimentary; sensitive, believable descriptions of intimate encounters are usually referred to as erotica, or (more often) "the good stuff."