Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Leslie Fish

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Leslie Fish
Interviewer: Megan Genovese
Interviewee: Leslie Fish
Date(s): July 23, 2017
Medium: aural, transcript
Fandom(s): Star Trek: TOS
External Links:
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In 2017, Leslie Fish was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 1:32:58 + ___.

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. For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer or transcriber, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Some Topics Discussed

Excerpts

Star Trek Chicago and Filk

In those days, [fandom] was all about snail mail, and I got to reading and writing fan fiction. At the same time, I’d always been a folk singer. So, at the same time that I was getting into writing fan fiction folk songs. When I heard that there was a Star Trek — I was living in Chicago by the time that I heard that there was an honest-to-God Star Trekfan convention. Wow! In town, and I had written for my own amusement an awful lot of songs, folk songs, about Star Trek.I called up the coordinators of the convention and asked if I could get a free membership in exchange for singing my songs at the convention. They were quite happy to have me. In fact, they said, “we’ll not only give you a free membership; we’ll give you the usual perks of a fan guest of honor, musical guest of honor,” and I got to go to the top floor of the hotel where all the stars hung out. Wow. Great introduction to fandom!

Anyway, I forget the name. It was the first professional, i.e., for money, big Star Trek convention that was held in Chicago. It was notoriously run by these two women who had a falling out, and I did get paid actually, but it was a rather famous and later-notorious convention. I don’t recall doing anymore. I don’t think there were any more professional Star Trek cons held in Chicago after that, but it was my introduction, and I took off from there.

[...]

They were my own Star Trek-themed filk songs. They later wound up on a couple of albums that I and my folk band at the time paid for at our own expense. The first was Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain't Even Been Yet, and the second was called Solar Sailors.

[...]

After [ Star Trek Chicago ], I had to work. I had to support pretty hard and sing pretty long and do an awful lot of recordings in order to get paid. I call myself a semi-pro folk singer because, “pro” in the sense that I get paid for it, “semi” in the sense that there’s never enough to live on. Heh. I was always an amateur fan fiction writer.

"Banned from Argo"

I put my favorite filk song, which is “Hope Eyrie,” my tribute to the first moon landing, and when the engineer added up the time [on the preliminary recording]. Remember, you had to have enough music to fill two sides of a record. He said, “We’re 11 minutes short. Can you come up with another song?” So, I thought fast. I had written a song for just about every crew member and major event. What’s left? Well, do a funny song that lists the whole [unclear]. I had written “Banned from Argo” in a couple of hours. We sang it the next day. It was purely a filler. I thought it would be forgotten, and oh no. (laughs) “Hope Eyrie” could be my most famous filk song or folk song, but “Banned from Argo” was the second most. Arrrgh! Such is fame.

[Why do I think "Banned from Argo" appeals to people?] Well, first, it’s funny. It’s more than slightly dirty, and it paints a lot of [un?]flattering portraits of all of their favorite characters.

"Shelter"

...what would be the big barrier to any such connection [a sexual one between Kirk and Spock]? Both of their social conditionings. How would you deal with that? And, well, the answer eventually became the plot that I came up with in “Shelter.” I thought that putting it from McCoy’s point of view—by the way...

I showed my first draft to Connie Faddis who gave me a lot of suggestions about how to make it more intense from McCoy’s point of view. She also came up with the suggestion of getting rid of the translator.

[Faddis advised to] just to make it more intensely from McCoy’s point of view and not skip around. In a short story, that was much more effective. I realized that it was a damned good point, so... I also realized that what makes a love, erotic –and this is advice I’ve given to other K/S writers since. Okay, plot out your plot. Plot out your action. Plot it in detail. Every touch and thrust and moan and twitch. And then don’t write it. Keep the detailed plot in mind, but what you write are the emotional and physical reactions to what’s happening, because that’s what really makes the story, and that seems to have worked ever since. It’s not the insert tab A into slot B and rotate. It’s important. It’s effective. It’s what the action makes the characters feel and think.

[Was I happy with how it turned out?]

I was astounded. The reaction to “Shelter” was overwhelmingly positive. There were some interesting nay votes and comments, which I had fun dueling with. I like a good, logical argument. I’m not afraid of confrontation on that. I’ve been on a few labor union picket lines. You’re not afraid of confrontation and words. Good God. But mostly, most of the reactions were overwhelmingly positive, and unfortunately, most of them insisted “What happened when they woke up? Tell us! Tell us!” So I had to write the sequel, so I wrote “Poses.”

"Descensus Averno" and "This Deadly Innocence"

[“Shelter” was the first slash story that you published, but it wasn’t the first one that you wrote. I understand that your first K/S story was the last one you ever published, “Descensus Averno”]:

I don’t think it ever did get published. It was an attempt to, it was a rough attempt to explain — in the past, okay, I had them both safely dead and their relationship only mentioned, but honored. I decided that that was really — it wasn’t good enough.

I believe the last K/S story that ever got published was — let me look this up. Yeah, The End of the Hurt/Comfort Syndrome. I can’t find it here, but a year earlier there was a zine that came out which cautiously celebrated the relationship of Kirk and Spock without the sex. There was a year there where there were an awful lot of hurt/comfort stories, which were, as somebody pointed out, a clever way of avoiding getting them in bed while expressing love, and I illustrated a story for them about — it was a typical h/c, and as I recall, I did the illustration with white ink on black construction paper which required great precision because that’s an awfully coarse paper and fine ink, and I wound up doing kind of pointillism, and the editors were most impressed and offered to print any story that I could give them...

I wrote This Deadly Innocence as kind of a mirror image of the story that I had illustrated, and I did the illustrations, but this time in black ink on a white Bristol board paper where I could get a lot more fine detail. The last illustration in it was a sort of mirror image of the illustration that I had done for the first story. I remember that I finished This Deadly Innocence at a Star Trek convention. I took it to the editors of that first zine on the first day. On the second day, they reluctantly handed it back, saying, “It’s a great story. If you could only cut that last paragraph.” I said okay and then took the story and walked it down the corridor to the editors of another zine which was starting up, handed it to them, and they said, “Yeah!” (laughs) and they took it as is. I think that it’s up for grabs which of my K/S stories is the most popular, that, which is to say, purely a romance and “Shelter.” [I was pretty attached to that last paragraph.] The last sentence, actually. “That’s exactly what they did, three times that night and again in the morning.” (laughs)

[I wasn't going to allow it to be published without that.] Nope. The whole point was that any powerful emotion demands physical expression. When we’re tickled, we laugh; hurt, we cry. When you feel a powerful attraction to somebody, yes, we fill feel horny.

Slash and Media

Starsky & Hutch was a cop show, a buddy cop show. The same crowd also cheered for and watched Cagney & Lacey, female buddies, although there was never any question of Cagney and Lacey being that kind of buddies. I remember there was a lot of discussion as to why were we, mostly women, drawn to shows about men who might be making it, other than women. I remember once being in a rather intense discussion at a party, at a convention about that exact question. My reply was “Look. We are women. We can be with men or with other women, but the one thing we cannot be and cannot do is to be men with other women or with other men. Fantasy is for what you can’t do and can’t have in real life.”

Anarchism and Anachronism

I was living in Chicago. I was working for the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, famous old radical labor union -- very old, very honest, very radical labor union. Very poor labor union. (laughs) We got involved in a lot of political set-tos. The Wobblies had and still have the world’s greatest library of labor union tactics, which are also amenable to other causes besides unions. So the local red squad was always watching us, and they caught me coming home from a meeting at one point. The cops pulled me off into the — I think it was the FBI actually, along with the red squad, but I know it was the red squad. I had also gotten involved in the SCA by this time and so they were interested in that, too. They hauled me off into a room, and I simply acted bewildered, said, “Yeah, we’ve been on strike, so you can know what kind of wages that they’re paying, so what?” “Tell us all about this Society for Creative Anarchism!” I laughed my ass off at that and pointed out, “You’re spelling it wrong! It’s "aNAKchronism!” It turned out that they had made that mistake a few times before. (laughs).

"The Weight"

My anarchist’s opus. It started with this story about a sixth-year [garbled] who wrote it appeared in Warp Space, and I just couldn’t let that go. I could think of the solution. A lot of my friends accused me of being a man in disguise because, as [garbled] explained it, “You think like a man!” “How’s that?” Well, men usually, when faced with this situation, a bad situation, women will usually sympathize, and men will think of practical solutions.” (garbled) We had covered the same ground about five times when he made that comment. I said, “Yeah, I do think of solutions! I mean, what’s the point of simply going "'Ooh wee ooh mooey gooey’? I mean, like, what’s the solution?” So, okay here’s Kirk stuck in an alternate timeline with no crew, no dilithium crystals, no way of getting back. How would I get him back? I add to the plot right away, and the author of the sixth year had made a mistake assuming that the Heritage Society who would be anti-science, anti-technology, and I knew better because I knew an awful lot of real [garbled] who were certainly not at the time. So the solution presented itself, and again, I wrote the first chapter, and it was meant to be a freestanding story. It ends. How’d he even get out? Again, the fans loved it, and said, “Go through the whole thing. Show us what [garbled].” I did. It had turned into a serial, and it lasted nearly two years. Hmm. I had fun checking Anarchist’s Theory and Practice by the end of the story. I actually had a sequel planned, but real life intervened, and I never got to write it.

The sequel [to "The Weight"]? Well, it was going to be called Roantree’s Progress, and it was going to follow one that Jenneth Roantree, after she woke up in the sick bay of the Enterprise and probably wanted to wring Kirk’s neck, but also what happened to the anarchists. Do you remember the planet of the, name of the episode of the human immortal who bought himself a whole planet and tried to create an immortal mate for himself and couldn’t quite do it? Remember? What was the title of that? Gideon, right? Gideon-something. [1]

Well, I had the Anarchists with their cranky, outdated ship, but still one that they understood and could repair, and with all the records on the Enterprise. Getting through Gideon’s World. I remember the starting sentence: The only man sat in a room. There was a knock on the door, and he goes to answer the door, says “who’s there?” and a voice says, “I pulled quantum [garbled] today.” So the Anarchists team up with Gideon. He gets a family, a community, and better [garbled] to [garbled]. Meanwhile, Roantree winds up going to [garbled], and she brought Spock through there. I had this wonderful scene where she is sitting a table with her now-short hair, mostly pulled into a short ponytail and her Star Fleet uniform, and there is a little aside there about, she has big breasts and she’s not used to 23rd century styled brassieres so she makes her own, and she is sitting at a bar, contemplating her fate and her future when up walks—damn! I can’t even think of her name! Carol Whatever the, the one who traded sexes with Kirk or who traded bodies with Kirk in that episode? [2]

Dr. Carol Something. Anyway. She walks into the bar. She has apparently been let out of the nuthouse for good behavior. She walks into the bar, sees what she thinks is Kirk and starts railing at him about “Well, at least I made you understand the degradation of being a woman!” Roantree figures out early that she thinks she’s talking to Kirk and plays along. So when the woman gets to that point, she says, “I’ve done even better than that. Actually, I had a lot of fun!” She rips open her Star Trek suit, rip, pull, rips open her bra and boom! Boom! Which is guaranteed to draw eyes, and says, “See? I understand it all! I got a cunt, too, and I’m having a hell of a lot of fun with that,” whereupon the nutty doctor turns around and runs away screaming. (laughs) And Roantree says to the rest of the crowd, which is staring, as she pushes her breasts back into her homemade brassiere and pulls her shirt, “Nutty as a bird!” or “Poor loser!” “Sore loser!” I had other individual scenes planned and plotted out, but as I said, I forgot to write it. It’s been 30 years now. Wow!

Well, Warp Space had a fairly long publishing skid, but, as I say, real life intervened. I was, among other things, I was working with the Union. I was trying to get somewhere with my art. I was beginning to get somewhere with my music, and I was short on time. I typed ["The Weight"] when I could, and of course, I was short on money. This was over the time when I was planning to get out of there and go to California. I was beginning to get into my filking. I was beginning to go a lot of conventions, and I was simply short on time. I had a chapter for each edition as it came out. As I recall, they were two or three months apart, and I actually missed a couple of issues, an issue here and there, because of things of being moved out of one apartment and into another quickly and losing a job. Stuff like that. Real Life has a habit of intervening, and it does even now.

[...]

The Weight, as I said, I wrote it when and how I could. I’d finish a chapter, sleep on it, come back the next day and edit it, and then send it to Lori Chapek, and she would do her own second edit and then send it back to me to re-edit, which took more time since it was all done by mail, and then I sent it in. Either she’d publish it as is, or I’d send it back to her, and we’d go through the process again. All of this contributed to the slow serializations of The Weight.

The Porn Debates

[The porn debate in fandom after Mary Lou Dodge’s open letter after SekWesterCon in 1977]: The lady is — she’s a nice lady, and she wrote well, but she was a prude and could not appreciate the fact that the sexual face of the culture had changed since 1960. She denounced us all for being porno addicts. This was shortly after the Supreme Court decision that made X-rated writing legal and acceptable. Just don’t sell it to kids. And likewise, movies. In effect, no more censorship on sex except age limits, and I’m awed by that. Okay, parents want to raise their kids according to what they think their personalities need at a certain time is fine. Okay. It’s their choice. Although beyond a certain point, I’d say that the kids should have a voice, too, but no, I can see why, once the floodgates were opened, everything poured out, and, well, Sturgeon’s Law. 90% of everything is shit. What had kept K/S high quality writing up until then was the fact that it was taboo or argued, anyway, threatened, endangered, so you had to write really well in order to get away being able to publish it. In that sense, it virtually improved the quality.

It’s better that it finally came out because people who had never been exposed to even the very concept of porn now had the chance to think about it. Openness is always better, because you never know who you’ll reach or what they can produce. Once it became wide open --- I think the problem was that anybody could publish anything they wanted in their own blog as long as the server didn’t shut them down, and then you get Sturgeon’s Law. When zines had to go through, like, when the publisher had to go through an editor who was nervous about how the stuff would be received, you had to — well, quality sells, and publishers knew that, and if a story was quality, they’d take the risk. Nowadays, it seems like anybody can publish anything. Again, it’s a question of who bothers to read. There’s no barrier anymore between the writer and the audience except “can you find them?” The same problem I have with professional writing holds with fan writing. How does anybody know it’s there? Oh, you can write, draw, publish anything, but who’s going to listen? Who’s going to read? If it’s really gross, the server can eventually stomp on you. Those were the only limitations, so, in this sense, yes, the free market does work but only if people have enough communications with like-minded people to set up communication nets and say, “hey this is a good book or a good story, go read it” or “ah, that’s a piece of tripe and don’t even bother.” You’ve got to have people not just able to communicate but knowing how to reach each other.

"Pushin' the Odds" -- To Be Read Through Red-Colored Glasses

My one adventure into zine publishing [was Pushin’ the Odds]. The cost of paper, not to mention printing, in those days... Of course, that was a Starsky & Hutch slash zine. I divided it in half—the ones that were just Starsky & Hutch affection stories, and the ones that actually got into sex, and I had to find good illustrators. I sent out a call for stories, and I got stories of various quality. One I had to beta read and edit to a fare thee well, and it turned out to be part of a two-parter, and I never got to publish the second part. Damn. Interesting story, but God, the woman could not write! [3] I hope she took a creative writing course and managed to clean up her grammar. [...]

Anyway, yeah, I published the Starsky & Hutch zine. I remember hearing the same old issue all over again about how this illegal and slanderous. It’s damaging to the characters. You’ll get into legal trouble, and how do you keep under-agers from reading this stuff, and a big question was how do you keep it from getting xeroxed because xeroxing had become really cheap and abundant just then, and that’s where the infamous red pages came from. The funny numbers on the bottom of the page — you could only get the magazine by writing for it. You had to send your check with your name on it, and you could only order it by signing a paper which said “yes, I’m over 18” or “I’m 18 or older,” and I had a file of these numbers of every last zine, every issue, all the way from 1 to — I forget how high it went. I had this cute trick. I printed numbers at the bottom of the page, and then I would punch out holes in the page above it, which exposed each number, and that way, if anybody tried to copy it, I could just look at the bottom of the page and see which copy it was, who I sent it to, and who tried to xerox it, or who complained about it. I kept track of who exactly who and where bought what, and, as for the X-rated pages, the stories where there was actual sex, because the big problem in those days was Xerox, photocopying it, which was at that time all in black and white. It did not have color sensitivity. I printed the text in all black ink on fine, figured red paper, which has the same — a tech told me this — that red has the same reflectance, in photocopying, that black does. So, if anybody tried to Xerox the pages, it would come out a blur. You know, a mess of fine figures, which you couldn’t even make out a single word or layer. That’s where the infamous “red page” story comes from. I don’t recall that anybody ever did photocopy a zine and give it to an underager. Since the show itself went off the air — I think in 1979 or ’80. There was never any problem with the producers. I believe the producer is dead now. The actors were tired. Nobody associated with the show, I think, was still in the business, so who would care? Even their lawyers have either died or retired.

Summary of the Physiological Roots of Andorian Culture

Oh yeah! I had fun with that [article]:

Well, this was before Star Trek: The Next Generation or any movies that actually mentioned Andorian, so I just had free reign. Nobody knew anything about Andorian except that they were blue, had antennae, and we had not seen a female one yet. After reading a few more stories with Ted Sturgeon – amazing! Nobody would admit in public that he was gay until after he was dead. They can’t garbled] to his writing. I got the idea of, okay, to start with, their basic planet, whatever — we’ll assume that it’s temperate. How did they manage to evolve with intelligence? They would have had to be carnivores with omnivorous capabilities, meaning that they can digest vegetables but they need meat. It takes a hell of a lot of protein to support a complex nervous system.

[MUCH snipped about world building in that fanwork]

References

  1. ^ "Requiem for Methuselah"
  2. ^ “Turnabout Intruder”
  3. ^ Fish is referring to "Echoes, Part One of Three, by Nancy S. Hopson"
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