Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Jane Mailander

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Jane Mailander
Interviewer: Megan Genovese
Interviewee: Jane Mailander
Date(s): July 14, 2017
Medium: aural, transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
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In 2017, Jane Mailander was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 2:25:43.

The Media Fandom Oral History Project is supported by the Organization for Transformative Works, the organizers of Escapade conventions, and the University of Iowa Libraries.

Some Topics Discussed

Excerpts

I was 14 [when I discovered fandom], in 1977. In a two-month period, starting in April, I discovered Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, written science fiction, and puberty all at once. It’s a wonder I’m still alive.

What happened was, I think there was like a paperback sale at my high school, and one of the books was Star Trek: The New Voyages, a collection of fan-written Star Trek stories that had, like, forewords done by the actors and things like that, and I was reading these stories, and my jaw dropped, because all I knew about Star Trek then was “that was that space show that they reran all the time that would have the ships crash and people fly around and the woman with the scary white eyes in the mirror when I was a little kid.” I read this and said, “Hmm. Maybe I should start watching this thing. Those were the days when Star Trek was in perpetual reruns and one of the ten network channels that were on television at the time, before the internet. I was kind of lost from there.... I kind of drowned and never came up for air. It’s been good.

Well, for a few years, all I did was read, and, like I said, I’d also discovered written science fiction, so I was checking out the books by Alan Morse and Andre Norton, and I took a stab at Dune and got bored silly by all the politics. It was just everyone talking about stabbing everyone else in the back, and some of Asimov’s Foundation which was also kind of heavy going because of the cunning story of defeating the galaxy with economics, and Heinlein, who had some serious problems with women and gay people, but then, you know, things changed so fast socially.... I think it was probably 1980, there was a book by Joan Winston, who was in the book Star Trek Lives! It was like a person who does a bunch of stuff on back scenes of Star Trek when it was still filmed, and it was just a book about the Trek convention, the first Star Trek convention in the early 70’s in New York, and I realized, “Oh! People can participate, too!” I’d been reading so much fan fiction, I thought that maybe I can try writing some of the stuff myself, and I was 17 at the time, and I started writing. I’m 54 now, and I’ve never stopped.

...whenever I see brand new fans online, it’s really lovely to see the new Star Trek fans. They’re all, “This stuff sucks!” and “My writing is so terrible!” I’ve just said, “Honey, you’re just lucky that my stuff was in paper zines, or you’d be laughing your head off at how awful my stuff was.”

For a while [Star Trek] was the only fandom, as far as I was concerned. For a good little Catholic who didn’t know much about the mechanics of anything, I would picture Kirk and Spock in bed, making love because I could see how powerful their friendship was, but this was back when you didn’t talk about things like that. You could get thrown out of a convention for saying the “S” word out loud. The boxes of zines would have slash stories in it, the K/S stories, the Kirk/Spock stories (It’s called “Spirk” now. The word kind of makes me giggle, but I still think of it as “K/S.”) The boxes with the K/S zines were under the table at the conventions, and you hunkered down and kept one eye out for a con committee member who is going to throw you out for peddling porn. These were the same guys who had absolutely no problem showing naked women being torn apart by dragons and raped by robots in the art show were horrified if you showed Kirk and Spock holding hands.

There was probably, like, a six-month to a year lull between me getting absolutely hooked on Star Trek and deciding that Kirk and Spock should be together, and I thought I was the only weird kid who was thinking things like that. Of course, these were pre-internet days, and of course, there’s probably like a million teenage girls out there who were sure that they were the only ones in the world who were thinking this stuff and writing weird stuff and hiding it in their sock drawer. Then I discovered it in some magazine talking about K/S, and they immediately talked about, “Oh you mean those awful stories were Kirk and Spock are sleeping together and they’re gay fags pervert hobos?” I looked at all of that, and all I said was, “There are stories out there?!I gotta find them!” and I found a couple of zines and coughed up horrifying amounts of money for, you know, for the late 70’s, to drag these things home and read them in secret, and it took me a long time to be able to write stuff like that.

It’s [been] a joke for years, that fandom is “socialization for the antisocial.” I was one of those kids who was always happiest by themselves. Some people, who will not be named, used to say that I was “socially retarded” because I was better on my own, and I didn’t like loud, noisy parties, and when I dragged off to one of my older sibling’s parties at a house with their friends, I was kind of overwhelmed, and I kind of huddled in the back room, and thanked God that one of them was a science fiction fan. I just kind of locked myself in his room and read. Yeah, I was called “socially retarded” at one point by someone, a family member, and then I discovered that, yeah, I actually am pretty socially active. I did a conventions a lot. I did this [interview]. I’d get together with other fans. I’d write back and forth with, like, five different people, and these were the days before the internet. Those were paper letters back and forth.

[Around 1980] was about the time that I began to actively participate in fandom by writing, by going to conventions. It was ’82 that I spent my first night at a convention, and it was like five dollars for a patch on a hotel room floor with a barbarian’s cloak for a blanket, and my knapsack for my pillow.

As I keep telling you about the youngsters who spent thousands to go to these really awful, kind of greedy cons, like, “Yeah! Line up for hours to see an actor! Only forty thousand dollars!” and they keep saying the same thing when they come home: The best part of the con wasn’t lining up to see the actor or getting an autograph or paying more money to do this; it was getting together and talking to fans in the hotel rooms because that’s what “convention” means in Latin. Con ventio, come together, and that’s pretty much still the heart of a convention. It’s just getting together and yakking, and now a lot of folks can do that online, which is helpful for even more folks who are even more antisocial or folks who have a lot more trouble socializing, and they can talk online with people.

I’ve got to admit that I was one of the old geezers who used say nasty things about all this type-and-send fan fic out there. It’s not like “real fan fic when I was a kid.” You know, you had to write it and then get it edited, and maybe you had to wait a few years to get it published in a paper zine, and if you were lucky, three people would send a letter to the editor for the next issue and say something nice about you. I began to find a lot of good stuff online, and I began to write my own stuff for online. It got to the point that just from sheer repetition practice, like anything else, I got better at being able to write on the fly and get it stuck out, and to do it online. I’m not quite sure when I really latched on to Archive of Our Own. It was about five or six years ago, and most of my stuff on Archive of Our Own...

Everything [on Tumblr] goes back so fast on a flow feed that if you wait for five minutes, you missed about twenty things. You have to backtrack and find whatever stories that someone has just posted, and by the time you’ve read it, you’ve missed 12 other things. It’s a little bit like the—to me, it’s a little bit like that candy conveyor belt in the Lucy episode.

The fact that I didn’t watch Man from U.N.C.L.E. much didn’t mean that I didn’t read some of the fan fiction. A lot of the fan fiction kind of solved problems from the original source material that a lot people, especially women, would kind of bring up, like, “Yeah, these guys are really great making quips and shooting guns and stuff, but they’re also friends. Shouldn’t they be talking about something bad that just happened instead of saying ‘oh well, let’s go have a date with these two different women.” Something bad just happened. Shouldn’t you talk about it or deal with the aftermath? So, I began to read some of the fan fiction mostly because there was that gorgeous Susan Lovett art attached to it, and because the people who wrote it were able to write enough information about the show into the fiction, you didn’t need to watch the show to pick up on it, or to read it. So I became a fan of Perestroika and some of the other amazing fan fiction out there, and from Paula Smith who wanted someone to be “Pair’ o Strokers.” Her stuff has been funny for decades. She used to have, like, the Star Trek Dick and Jane stuff in zines. It was hilarious. It was illustrated by the then-unknown Phil Foglio, who is also a Star Trek fan who made good, but her stuff was hilarious and I leapt at the chance to be in one of her plays. I actually watched Man From U.N.C.L.E. episodes to kind of get an idea of how to play Napoleon Solo. I said that instead of voguing, I was “Vaughning,” as in Robert Vaughn, the actor who played him. Like, how he walks, the little facial things he did, and I had a great deal of fun doing it.

I love the fact that one of the oldest fandoms ever is one of the newest ones at the same time. I love every version of Sherlock Holmes. I’m very fond of kind of slapping some of the younger kids across the nose and saying, “Honey, I was a fan of Sherlock Holmes before Benedict Cumberbatch was born. My dad was reading Holmes before Doyle died. This fandom is older than you, and people have been pretty much as crazy as this from the very beginning. I can tell you stories...”

I’ve noticed in a lot of all the other Sherlock Holmes fandoms out there, including, like, the Jeremy Brett, the Granada groups, and Elementary, are taking in all of these bedraggled refugees who were just traumatized by season four of Sherlock. Why don’t you come in, have a cup of tea, and watch a serial where Holmes and Watson are genuinely affectionate with each other and don’t feel the need to make a homophobic joke? Oh look! They can tell each other that they like each other without having a psychotic sister in the attic like Jane Eyre.

Well, running cons costs a lot of time and money, and real life keeps intruding. People have bills to pay, and if you’re not running a con like a big, brutal money-making endeavor the way the Creation Cons are, and all their little minions, like the Sherlocked convention. “Ooh! Forty thousand dollars to be in the same room to touch an actor’s hand!” Or you could just get together in a room and yak. It’s cheaper. (laughs). The conventions that are run for the sole purpose of coughing up cash from the idiot fans, or the, uh—those aren’t as much fun. Those are the ones where you pretty much have to pay for, like, “Oh, if you want to be in the front row, that’s going to cost extra. If you want to be in the back row, it’s a little less extra.” “But I’ve already paid my con membership!” “That was just to get in the door. If you want to get out of the dealers room, you’re gonna have to pay this. If you want to leave your hotel room at any time, here’s a toll.”

Mycroft and Lestrade aren’t even in the same freaking shot until like six hours into the series, and yet there’s a thriving fandom about Mycroft and Lestrade having a relationship, and of course, the triumph of fandom. You know, this is all very well and good, but let’s make some human connections here, and they even made a little hat tip to that at the very end of season four, with Sherlock sending Lestrade to take care of his brother. [I] even wound up doing a little Mystrade myself this year. I got to kind of get even with the show’s neglect, if not absolute abuse of women, by writing an all-female commando story in the Sherlockverse, where Sherlock and John have, like, a cameo at the end of the story. Lestrade is the token guy in the all-girl commando group. And there’s Mary, and she’s not dead after all! I’m not explaining because fuck you. They didn’t explain how Sherlock came back from the dead.

The trouble is that Cumberbatch and Freeman are such good actors, they kind of made us not realize that these guys really aren’t as good writers as we think they are. You know, I couldn’t get away with that in a fanzine. The editor would be demanding that I finish up the plot, but since they’re fanboys with a lot of money, people think they’re experts, and of course, there’s that whole “well of course their stuff is more important than ours; they’re men and we’re women.”

It’s like the whole concept of the Mary Sue character, this funky, perfect little girl who looks a lot like the author. She’s a ridiculous, stupid thing when a 13-year-old girl comes up with it, but if you’re George Lucas, and you invent Lucas Skywalker, the perky boy who does everything right the first day, you become a billionaire. If you’re Gene Wesley Roddenberry, and you invent perky boy hero Wesley Crusher, you’ve got a TV show about him.

...someone said that the definition of Mary Sue is “any main character with a lot of impossible things going on who’s looked down upon and sneered at if it’s a girl and called The Chosen One if a man writes it.

...that’s another thing that fandom does, and it’s why fandom is so overwhelmingly women. It’s essentially women fixing stuff that was written for male viewing and male consumption, saying, “You know, I like this stuff, too, and not just because the guys are good looking. You know I’d love to run around with a gun and be a super spy, too. I’d like to be on the Enterprise and fighting things. The girls who wanted to be Han Solo, not to go to bed with Han Solo, and now they’ve got Rey, and little girls are dressing up as Rey at conventions. I’m like, “YES!” Of course, the same guys who thought Luke Skywalker was totally awesome are saying, “Oh Rey is so unbelievable, this punk, this poor little kid from a desert planet who does everything right the first day and somehow knows all of this stuff and is powerful in the ways of the Force...” What about Luke Skywalker? “That’s different!”

If I come up with an idea and I really want to do more, I’ll do the research on stuff, but it’s a lot easier these days. I remember the days when I was writing a story that a crossover between Wiseguy and Beauty and the Beast, which was the New York version, the 1990’s TV show, and mostly because both of the characters were named Vincent, but one was like the most romantic depiction of New York City, Beauty and the Beast, and one was very gritty, kind of mobster thing, and he’s the guy hiding in the sewers with the Beast’s people. It was called “Terranova’s Adventures Underground.” I remember calling a library at the time, just to get “what’s the meaning of the name ‘Vincent’?” because they’re both named Vincent. I wanted to make sure I described it correctly in one sentence.

That’s how we did things in the days before Google. We called the library.

We had all these cool bootleg tapes that we made for each other, and in the days before the internet and the TV’s that got hooked up to the internet and all the rest of it, before there were 50 billion channels, some of the public networks, yeah, the PBS stuff, the old ones would show reruns of Blake’s 7 late at night, and I remember fiddling with my little bitty black-and-white TV to get, like, an hour’s worth of snow so I could vaguely see people walking around and talking to each other. That was how I used to watch some Blake’s 7 episodes. It was a huge thing when people came out with VHS tapes, and you could see kind of a blurry, dark version of these. The thing with The Professionals — these blurry, dark bootleg tapes back when people couldn’t play the British tapes because of the different — whatever the system was — that ran VHS tapes in England. There were these kind of blurry, dark versions, and then we saw the cleaned up versions, and we were like “Oh my God, his eyes really are green! I just thought they were like these two dark blurs! Wow! This guy really is good looking, and wow! What happened to him?”

Yeah, fandom was a pretty tough thing to beat down. We’ll pass stories under the table when we’re not allowed to do it in public. I mean, I joked for years that “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the one version of Gilgamesh that survives, which focuses heavily on Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s friendship and how devastated Gilgamesh is by Enkidu’s death, was actually a fan fiction version of the original Innana story that was created by the women of Sumer, and they passed it around at the marketplace to read on cunniforms... “Oh my God. Did you hear the way Arthur and Lancelot talked to each other in that last story?” “Oh my God! I cannot even!!” Considering the fact that Lancelot and Guinevere are fanfic creations themselves. So is Maid Marian from Robin Hood. What happened was these British folk stories about King Arthur and Robin Hood, these jolly, macho men beating each up and, you know, fighting on horseback and robbing people, and the French balladeers loved the stories, and said, “This is nice, but where’s the love story?” and the English said, “The what?”And the French said, “Never mind. We fixed it.” (laughs) ... The Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur triangle was like the original fan fiction creation. “I’m here to read about the damn Grail! Not a bunch of stupid little—fan, fan trio here!” ...All those stories about Robin Hood and Little John beating up the sheriff’s men. How about Robin Hood and Maid Marian courting each other in the freaking woods? (laughs)

Some of The Ray Wars was pretty vitriolic, the way fans get, but there were also those of us who loved the stories with all the characters, and it was joked that we “swing both Rays.” I’ve seen some fabulous stories that also united all of the characters, or treated everyone with the respect that the show refused to. It’s another one of those fandom fixes, like, I don’t mind the fact that you came up with a new character. What I mind is that you made the original character invisible, or you decided that he never existed. I think that’s what we were really angry about, and then it kind of gets annoying when someone decides that that person never existed because they don’t rerun those episodes.

I’m still not too sure about my own sexuality. I’ve just sort of been a singleton my whole life, but there were many women who were lesbians, and it was just the idea of seeing any non-heterosexual representation at all. They were seeing stuff that acknowledged that it wasn’t all boy/girl out there. I’m not sure because the—you’d probably have to talk to actual, card-carrying lesbians, the ones who win the toaster. But, I think it could be part of it, and just, umm, riffing off of that, of course, leaping at the chance to tell more interesting stories about women when Xena came out. Some of the other shows focused on women, and it is getting better and better with, now that they’re having more and more women who are in the stories and are not just there to be the token Smurfette in the background who all the guys fight over. Stories that passed the Bechdel test.

I’ve been saying for years that Elementary is a truly modern retelling of Sherlock Holmes, and the BBC Sherlock is Victorian Holmes in modern dress.... phones and use the internet, and they use motor cars and all the rest of it, but they also have the same attitude about people of color and women that — in some ways it’s worse than the original Doyle stuff. You gotta be twitchy about something when your modern remake is more misogynistic than a Victorian male contemporary stuff was. The psycho sister in the attic who sets fires with her mind? Yeah, that went out in 1812.

I was absolutely repulsed by the ending of “The Empty Hearse,” for example. Because I’m old enough to remember when, in the 1960’s, comedy films, where women were treated abominably, would have some schmuck like Jerry Lewis, do something really stupid to himself, like pretend to hang himself, just to get a girl to admit to, to promise to marry him, and that was considered funny. I saw the exact same thing when Sherlock gaslights John at the end of the episode, saying “We’re gonna die! You’ve gotta forgive me now! Ha-ha psych!” If John was psychologically healthy, he would have said, “You know what? I’ve already finished mourning, so screw you. Have a nice life,” and he would have walked out of his life forever, something like that. But you know, the fact that John is sort of stuck in his orbit is part of the story but it’s treated like it’s normal and healthy in Sherlock. In Elementary, they actually have Joan Watson admit that it’s not entirely healthy, her fascination with Sherlock and staying with him, and she says, “I like being with you, and I’m fascinated by you, and that’s why I have to leave you. I’ve gotta take care of myself first,” which is what happened at the end of one season. I was like, “Oh my God, yes! That’s what a real person does. That’s what a person with a healthy sense of self does."

[Regarding warnings on fanworks], I used to be part of those “oh the poor little dears need their hands held,” and part of my anger at warnings originally was because I have read some Trek stories that gutted me, but I never would have started if they had warnings. They were amazing and unforgettable and brilliantly written and heartbreaking, and if they had had to start by saying “Warning! Character death! Warning! Main character dies in the last page,” it’s like, “Oh well, why don’t you just write the name of the murderer at the top of every murder mystery so that these poor little dears won’t be traumatized.”

I was in that kind of school for a while, but then I began to read of stuff from people who weren’t as psychologically healthy as I had been raised, and I was, “Okay, we’re dealing with folks who actually need these warnings to function properly,” and I thought about the fact that I do want to self-care myself that way. I refuse to watch movies, for example, that mistreat women. You know, if I want to see this shit, I’ll watch the news. And I want to know if they’re going to be—I don’t want to go in there and find out it’s just two hours of guys slapping a woman around and people laughing at it.

I thought, well, okay, warnings do actually have a purpose, and then there’s the whole thing about how to do the warnings, like, do you have them at the end so people can look at them but that they won’t spoil people? And they have the AO3 where you can choose to ignore the warnings or kind of thumb through them and decide if you want to filter them out. There is that. I am kind of sorry because you do lose that element of being surprised that you can sometimes get from an amazing piece suspense or a twist ending with the warnings, but people’s health does come first.

[snipped]

You listen to other people who did not have my experiences growing up, like the transgender people and people of color and people who are emotionally fragile. “Oh! That’s why there are warnings!” “Oh, okay, that’s why that’s a bad thing to say,” and “Oh! I shouldn’t use that word.” Used to be, I’d get, like, huffy and defensive. “Oh great! Now you’re mad at me for something else I didn’t know about!” These days I react with “Oh dear, I’m learning again, aren’t I?”

the thing is, fans are consumers of the same culture as everyone else. We just react to it differently. We have the same programming involved. Maybe we’re a little better here and there, in some parts, or you can tell yourself, “I’m not a racist! I watched that episode where the two aliens fight each other, and Kirk gives them the speech about how racism is bad, but then, how come you don’t like any of the people of color in that last movie? “That’s different!” No, it’s because you’ve been trained to only see white people as the important people in the story. Almost like, look at the backgrounds of those folks. It’s not comfortable when you’ve spent a lot time patting yourself on the back for being unique and being a little better or special than everyone else, to realize that you’re influenced by the exact same social stuff, but it does happen and again, it’s kind of a part of that wisdom thing—admitting the fact that, yes, I’m a nice person who would never say that word, and I voted for Obama, but I still have racist ideas and thoughts and I have to fight them when I write. You know, why did I just background that person who is really important to the story? Oh, right. Can we bring that forward, and can we give that person some more lines?

I know people who started [vidding] and it was like a slide show of scenes from Star Trek to a thing. Or they very carefully had to do all the editing by hand, with, like, razor blades. These were the people who were doing the vidding. It’s so frustrating to see all these fabulous vids that were made for decades by women, and then suddenly some dude boy on youtube comes up with one two years ago, and they hail him as the inventor of videos. It’s like, “Ohhh, there’s the history of women in history, isn’t it?”

[My advice to fans today]: Umm, pretty much “read everything and write your fingers off” if you’re a writer. When I get asked advice for how to write like I do, I say, “The only reason you love this stuff is because I spent 40 years making it better than it was.” Just keep writing, and you get better. And for fans coming in, same thing, it’s like there are always going to be fan factions as well as there’s going to be fan infighting, and any group does this. Knitting forums were famous for being bloodthirsty. Every time you get a bunch of people together, two or three are going to fight each other. This whole country—George Washington was the only president who was the member of no political party at all. He didn’t want political parties, based on the damage they did in Parliament in England. They said, “Great! We’ve got George Washington! He has no party.” And the very second one, Jefferson and Adams were at each other’s throats because there were two separate parties, as president and vice president. So, you know, welcome to the club. There’s nothing new under the sun. There’s always going to be fans fighting. There’s always going to be stuff that distresses you, upsets you about fandom or the way people treat or the way the actors react to stuff. There’s always going to be something like that, and just remember that this has always been going on. None of this is new. Nothing new under the sun, the Bible says, and they knew what they were talking about.

References

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