Life, But Not As We Know It: Star Trek, fan culture, slash fiction and the queering of Starfleet Command

Meta
Title:	Life, But Not As We Know It: Star Trek, fan culture, slash fiction and the queering of Starfleet Command
Creator:	Geoff Allshorn
Date(s):	24 July 2020
Medium:	online or hard copy available in Bent Street 4.1
Fandom:	Star Trek
Topic:
External Links:	Life, But Not As We Know It [1]
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Life, But Not As We Know It: Star Trek, fan culture, slash fiction and the queering of Starfleet Command is an essay by Geoff Allshorn.

The intro:

‘Beam Me Up, Scotty!’

Many will immediately recognise this catchphrase as a testimony to nerd culture and cult television. Yet in its day, it was a somewhat covert signal between adherents in much the same way as talking about being ‘a friend of Dorothy’ indicated membership of another fringe group.

Some Topics Discussed

• fans resonated with Spock because 1) he was "a Nietzschean counterbalance to his two closest human associates as a symbolic representation of different aspects of the human psyche," 2) a possible role model for those with Asperger's Syndrome, 3) he was he displayed common female characteristics,4) his loneliness and "otherness" reflected their own
• fans' requests for gay characters to be included in the show's storylines were rebuffed, so fans created their own fan fiction and other fanworks; fan fiction preceded the franchise in promoting LGBT rights
• Star Trek attracted a large female audience, many of them interested in the Kirk/Spock relationship
• Leonard Nimoy's comments about the cover of Spock Enslaved!
• the author's relationship with Diane Marchant, one of friend and mentee
• Marchant's A Fragment Out of Time
• the positives and negatives of slash fan fiction
• the proportion of not-straight women in fandom is higher than in the general population
• the creative and technical things that fans created and talked about
• fan films

From the Essay

‘Beam Me Up, Scotty!’

Many will immediately recognise this catchphrase as a testimony to nerd culture and cult television. Yet in its day, it was a somewhat covert signal between adherents in much the same way as talking about being ‘a friend of Dorothy’ indicated membership of another fringe group.

Amidst the cultural fare of programs like The Beverley Hillbillies, Are You Being Served? and The Paul Hogan Show, my young teenage self sought somewhat higher inspiration and aspiration. I found the world of Star Trek. It was a wondrous place, filled with spaceships and aliens, diverse peoples and galactic technological marvels. Although it offered no explicitly queer themes or characters, its variety of aliens implicitly endorsed the principles of diversity and inclusion. The addition of the half-human, half-Vulcan character, Spock, was also extremely popular with audiences, with many people admiring different aspects of his complex character.

Expanding upon this idea, heterosexual Australian fan Diane Marchant wrote a story entitled A Fragment Out of Time, which was published in a 1974 issue of an adult US Star Trek fanzine called Grup. Her story is widely recognised as being the first zine-published slash story (so-named after the coded slash symbol in ‘K/S’ being shorthand for ‘Kirk/Spock’), although there are other claimants to the actual origins of slash. The slash symbol refers to stories containing what became popularly known as ‘the premise’, that is the practice of taking established or potential character relationships and extending them into deeper same-sex attraction. Diane was a friend and mentor of mine, and I know that her reticence to identify Kirk and Spock within her story—and her reluctance to ever talk about it—reflected a lifelong sensitivity regarding material which may create contention, friction or scandal, evocative of the era when ‘… gay relationships of any variety, even fictional, were considered deviant, overtly sexual and perverted’ (Smith, 2018).

As a young gay man, I personally never found slash fiction to be particularly appealing or authentic to my life. I concluded that slash was not exploring the gay experience so much as it was presenting women’s fantasies of idealised romantic/sexual love liberated from oppressive patriarchal and homophobic traditions.

This female fan cohort may have actually resuscitated and saved the Star Trek franchise (McNally, 2016) and forever changed the gender ratio within the science fiction community. Many of these women became prominent in Star Trek and science fiction clubs, convention committees and fanzines, reshaping the role of women in such community activism. The number of Star Trek clubs and fanzine titles worldwide peaked at approximately 450 each in 1977 (Verba 2003, 35). These fanzines—predominantly written, illustrated, edited and read by women—were often comprised of multiple issues of adult or slash content. This helped to not only promote female self-empowerment, but their gender subversion included voluntary exploration of non-heterosexist, liberated, erotic, subversive, female-directed, queer-normative literature.

Star Trek fans have always been at the forefront of using or adapting technology. For their originally rudimentary forms of costumed roleplay (cosplay), they created costumes out of velour and glitter and papier-mâché and tinfoil, and cobbled together props out of whatever was at hand; they recorded episodes on audio cassettes. For social networking and Star Trek news, they might join a local club and await its fordigraphed monthly newsletter. Those wanting international networking generally relied on the snail-mail postal service (and maybe an occasional operator-assisted overseas phone call from their home phone). International pen-pal (and free holiday visit) networks sprang up around the world. This tendency to innovate and reinvent led many fan authors, artists, scientists, computer wizards, astronauts, medical specialists and others to change the world with new ideas and tech ranging from medical scanners to mobile phones (Evangelista, 2004; Handel & Jones, 2005).

The Star Trek franchise has a long history of homophobia and LGBT erasure (Sinclair, 2003). Although modern-day audiences today often interpret older episodes or characters to be queer-supportive or queer-friendly (Hennessy, 2019), an analysis of these same characters and allegories within their contemporaneous settings reveals heteronormativity and covert homophobic insinuation (Ex Astris Scientia, 2020; McNally, 2020). Conversely, Star Trek has been appropriated by its legions of LGBT and other followers — if not in a strictly legal copyright sense, then certainly as a source of intellectual and philosophical inspiration. Although the franchise has avoided LGBT characters and stories — prompting one Australian LGBT commentator to lament: ‘… there are no poofs and no dykes in the future’ (McKee, 1996, 13)—the LGBT community and slash supporters continue to be fascinated by the implied diversity in its fantasies. It is interesting to see how Star Trek as a Hollywood franchise has evolved—or not—in response to this social evolution.

The Star Trek franchise — one that proclaims itself to ‘boldly go where no one has gone before’ — is still struggling to be out and proud, falling behind any number of other television and film franchises, over fifty years after its tech-savvy LGBT-friendly fan base built an inclusive community of queer-friendly bohemians and others who not only proclaimed diversity, but actually lived it. These pioneers are heroes in the history of LGBT civil rights; may their memory live long and prosper.

References

A copy of the original article can be found on Academia and a reprint is available on Humanist blog.