Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Linda McGee

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Linda McGee
Interviewer:	Megan Genovese
Interviewee:	Linda McGee
Date(s):	August 28, 2017
Medium:	aural, transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
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In 2017, Linda McGee was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 45.44 (part one) and 46.03 (part two).

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

• MaGee learned about fandom from reading Star Trek: The New Voyages, then seeing an ad on television for the Atlanta Fantasy Fair; at the con, MaGee found zines
• comments about Idiot Triplets Press, see that page
• threats of doxing by religious anti-slashers in Starsky & Hutch fandom
• some memories of MediaWest*Con
• some history about the zines The Lucky and the Strong and Turned to Fire
• the chilling effect on fandom and the internet due to the cease and desist actions taken against the Miami Vice zine, Vice Line
• a great appreciation for Flamingo's support of fandom, and of being a good friend

Excerpts

So I'm going through the dealers room looking at comic books and things that held no interest for me. And, I finally found one man who had a small box of used zines by his table, and I was looking through them and then with no information to go on trying to decide which...I could afford, and which to pick. And in that box was a zine called “Half You, Half Me", which was half Star Trek and half Starsky and Hutch. And I thought 'Oh, Starsky and Hutch, I used to like that show, so I bought that zine and one other Star Trek zine and took it home and started reading and was really excited about it. And noticed that the editor of the zine Lucy, lived in Columbus, GA, which I now know was about 2 hours from where I live and I thought about writing her but I didn't have the nerve. I was afraid that she would think: "how dare you write me"...whatever.

[...]

It probably would have ended there, except the zine was missing a page, and it was the last story in the zine, and the premise was basically Starsky & Hutch have gone to NY to visit Starsky's family, and all the relatives and friends are over there to see, none of whom Hutch knows, to see Starsky. After a while, Hutch just kind of wants to get out, so he's going to go out jogging, and Starsky's mother sends Nick, who is a shifty character who is Starsky's brother (that we met in an episode), with Hutch, and at the bottom of one page, Hutch and Nick are standing together on the corner and at the top of the next page, Nick is back at the apartment telling everybody that Hutch is dead.

What?! Wait! So, I'm thumbing through the zine in both directions and that page did not magically appear. So finally, I screwed up my courage and wrote Lucy this timid little note: "I got your zine, and I'm really enjoying it, but oh, my copy is missing a page." And she just wrote back the nicest letter, sent a copy of the missing page, and said: "Well how far is Carrollton from Columbus? Would you like to come down and visit?" And, I had no exposure to the kind of open friendliness that you encounter in fandom. So--

We talked on the telephone and I said: "You know, yes I would like to but my husband is going to be out of town that weekend. Let me see if I can get somebody to take care of the dog." And she said, "Oh, just bring the dog along." So, I brought the dog--so, now I'm explaining to my husband how on Labor Day weekend, while he's gone, I'm going to be driving to Columbus, GA, to spend the weekend with a woman I've never met...he wasn't quite sure how to take that, which, of course, this is the way it is in fandom. But, yeah. [chuckling]. Neither of us really knew that. And I went and met Lucy, who is just a lovely person. And had a wonderful time. And she sent me home with one of those double sized laundry baskets full of Starsky and Hutch and Star Trek zines, just on loan. So, that's how I discovered fandom.

At the time I came in, everybody got along. You don't read slash, that's fine. Some people didn't read gen at all, that's fine. We all got along. At one point, there came into fandom, a group of people who labeled themselves as anti-slashers. On a religious basis. And... they caused a lot of friction and would do things like threaten to out people to their employer. And I don't think that people now, and I could speak on this later, but people living in 2017 don't realize how far we've come on a societal basis. On tolerance. ... At the time, I taught kindergarten in a small southern town. I didn't want my employers to find out about my little hobby of, you know, writing stories about two men in bed together.

The internet was a whole new world, and when it first came into existence and came into common usage, no one knew how it was going to affect the world and their lives and fandom and publication, and at that point in time, fandom was like this private little world, and you had to really look for it to find it. And people were writing. They weren’t using pseuds — most people did not use pseudonyms because there wasn’t any reason to, and I had mentioned, And at that time, people I know specifically in Miami Vice fandom — someone who just had a newsletter, not a zine, a newsletter, received a cease-and-desist order. So, we weren’t sure how the real world was going to react to fandom.

One of the women involved in the anti-slash group had a — I guess you’d call it a letterzine that she published online, and the subscribers included children, police officers, who knows who, and without asking for my consent, she published a review of “The Lucky and the Strong,” the first zine, and she did not — let’s see how to phrase this — she made a point of mentioning that, for religious reasons, she didn’t read the slash stories. But she did reviews on the gen stories, and she made a point of mentioning every single slash writer by name. She didn’t even mention the title of the story, as in, “In Linda McGee’s story, blah blah blah blah blah,” and that just — that didn’t make you feel real safe. And, as I said, this had a readership of people in all kinds of professions. Things were certainly better than they’d been 20 or 30 years before, but homophobia was still alive and well. You could be killed just for choosing to be gay, and writing about two guys in bed together? Not really a safe topic. So, it didn’t seem safe for my writers or me to make it all public. The stories had a happy ending. The internet probably helped open up the world a lot to the idea of fan fiction, but I couldn’t predict that in 1993.

You know when I first heard about [slash], I wasn't shocked or appalled or offended. I wasn't sure whether I'd like it because I was afraid that it would change the way I saw the characters. And then, I was reading through the basket full of zines that Lucy had sent with me and I had no idea which was gen, which was slash ...so I'm just picking 'em up and reading them and enjoying them. And, I got to one called Who You Know, What You Know, & How You Know It... and the very first story in that zine was one called The Last Charade by a woman who was called Rosemary... She's a fabulous writer. And this was the first slash story I ever read. And by the time I got to the end of it, I was a goner. And to me...I'm sorry I haven't thought about this in a while...let me try to be articulate. You've got someone who's your best friend, who you trust more than anyone else in the world, who you have all of these things in common with, you have a great relationship with. All that's missing for a life partnership is the sexual element.

Somebody asked me one time: "You know, do the actors ever come to your Starsky and Hutch conventions?" I just said to them: "No." But to myself I was thinking: "No, and we wouldn't want them to." Because of the slash element. Do you really want two actors twenty of thirty years ago coming to a convention with people who are writing about them in bed together?

One of the things that surprised me about it the first time I went to MediaWest was that there were men there. Because, I had been going to conventions that pretty much only the membership was women. And, at MediaWest it was held at a lovely hotel that, for one thing, had a big like a pit--lobby area. So, if you weren't doing anything you could sit down in the lobby and your friends would pass by and sit and chat with you. And they had an outdoor atrium, and I remember seeing guys out there practicing sword fighting, they had a lot of people that were into costume play. Just a very, very diverse group of people. They had a tremendous dealers room. MediaWest used to be the zine con. That's where you would go to get the new zines, and that's where you would try to premiere your zine. I can remember just standing at the door waiting for the dealers room floor to open on Saturday so you could charge in. [chuckles] Or I guess it was Friday that they started in--and buy your zines. They even hired people from shipping companies to be there with boxes with tape and all so that you could ship all your zines home.

[...]

Some people would ship their clothes home and carry their zines because it was cheaper to ship clothes [chuckles] than zines.

I am not a prolific writer. I wrote, I'll say a dozen, it could be more. I would say less than twenty Starsky and Hutch stories. I actually wrote, believe it or not, a Man From U.N.C.L.E. story , and I'm not even in the fandom. But, one of my best friends was, and she was publishing zines. We were on the phone talking and we were saying you know, 'somebody really ought to write a story where - oh maybe Napoleon and Illya don't meet through UNCLE; they meet at a gay bar!' and we talked about it some more and - and my concept which was that, she, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. fan, was going to write this story. She did not. And I got a good idea and once I get a good idea, I can't stop myself. So, I ended up writing one Man from U.N.C.L.E. story that was in a zine that she put out.... I wrote three Pirates of the Caribbean stories that are in a series . They had to be published in the same zine because part two and part three wouldn't really make any sense if you didn't know what happened in part one.

I loved the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I just loved it. And, you know, I loved the relationship between Jack and Will, and I like having a female heroine who can do more than trip and fall and have to be rescued. You know. So I really liked the character of Elizabeth. And I was so excited when the second one was coming out. And I just despised it. Because you'd established this relationship between Jack and Will where... Will is willing at the end to be hanged for trying to rescue Jack. You know? And they had this great relationship, and then you have part two where Davy Jones wants Jack's soul. And Jack's like, 'Well how 'bout if I give you somebody else. I know, I'll give you Will Turner.' It wouldn't bother you to betray your friend? 'No!' What?! So, I loved the first one, couldn't stand any of the others. I put a note at the beginning of my first story that as far as the story was concerned only the first movie happened.

What the heck made me do that, [starting writing fanfic in 1985]? I don't know. But, I had the fever. I was married at that time and I'm writing in longhand since this was back in the dark ages. And I'm sitting over my chair and I'm writing, and I'm writing, and I'm writing. And my husband kept saying, you know, 'What are you writing?' And...I was like 'Oh, Letters, letters.' Well that excuse only holds up for so long. And finally I had to confess that I was writing a story. Which, of course he wanted to read. And I got him to agree to wait until I had it finished and published. And by the time that had happened, he kind of lost interest so, phew on that.

As God is my witness, I didn’t have any ambitions to publish, but the situation at the time was that Starsky and Hutch fandom was kind of dying out, and there weren’t many zines being published, and those that were being published, could be difficult to get hold of. So, I was afraid that if I didn’t do it, nobody would, and we even made up some flyers at MediaWest convention, and they would be down in the lobby pit area that I told you about. There, it’s surrounded by marble walls with flat tops, and people would put out flyers for different zines they were planning, or conventions, or whatever. And, we made up a flyer that said, “Yes, Virginia, there is a fandom for Starsky and Hutch," and it listed contact information for three people. I was one of them, and a couple of others, that you could contact if you were interested in finding out more. So I was only going to do one zine. My friend Cath, we also called her the art liaison—she was had gotten me this gorgeous Suzan Lovett cover, and I called the zine “Turned to Fire,” you know, ooooh. So great title, great zine. The submissions starting coming in, and they were almost all gen, and I hadn’t specified, and they were good stories, but you can’t put a hot Suzan Lovett cover and call the zine “Turn to Fire” on a zine that is two-thirds gen. So, then I had to do at least two, and (mock groan) the rest is history.

I went ahead and published “The Lucky and the Strong.” That was the first one.

[...]

It had some excellent, excellent stories in them... I just did for that on my old-fashioned printer with an incompatible font, I just put the title of the zine on it, and some good advice I got from somebody was “put the name of the fandom on the front of the zine so people know what they’re getting.” So it said, like, “A Starsky and Hutch, Starsky/Hutch anthology zine.” And I had some little doo-dahs on the corner and a border, and so that was the first publication, and then “Turn to Fire” was the next one.

One of the greatest blessings Starsky and Hutch fandom has come along in the form of Flamingo. She is very outgoing. She is very gung-ho. She is very active. She was able to take it a lot of places that I would not have been able to. Learning about different online services and how to spread through there; just doing things that were not my forte, and she kind of, she asked my permission at one point, could she maybe throw the Starsky and Hutch party, and I was delighted to have her do it. She is a very charming woman.

[...]

There’s a saying a fan told me one time that I’ve always remembered. It’s “wherever two or more fans are gathered together, there will be too much food,” and she would go gung-ho. The place would be jammed, you know, piled with food, and of course, the party was starting right after everybody had eaten dinner.

[...]

She was a wonderful hostess and a wonderful banner carrier for Starsky and Hutch. She’s really done a lot for the fandom. She does song vids. You know, that’s something I could never do. She’s just done so much for the fandom, so if there’s a Starsky and Hutch torch, I passed it on to her, happily.

I’m pleased with the fact that I was able to give back [to fandom], because Starsky and Hutch fandom changed my life in so many ways, and I was having a conversation with someone not involved in fandom, and we were talking about, you know, our lives, etc. I was talking about how shy I used to be, and it wasn’t really until then that it hit me so clearly that the turning point in my life was getting involved in fandom, you know? I didn’t know how to talk to people; I didn’t know how to interact with people, and it wasn’t until I met these sisters of the soul that I started to feel freer, and when I started writing, that helped me give back. I would like everybody to, everybody who’s a fan at heart, to discover fandom, and my best friends are fans. People that I met 30-some odd years ago at my first convention are still some of my best friends, and I’m glad that I was able to help strengthen it at a time when it was kind of dying and carry it on through to the next generation.