Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Rebecca Oroukin

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Rebecca Oroukin
Interviewer: Megan Genovese
Interviewee: Rebecca Oroukin
Date(s): July 28th, 2017
Medium: audio, transcript
Fandom(s): Star Trek: TOS
External Links:
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In 2017, Rebecca Oroukin was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 01:27:13.

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

I was born in 1953, so by the time Star Trek rolled around, it was uh, obviously I was about 13 and I'd been through the gamut of seeing all the really terrible movies they had on TV and then Lost in Space and crap like that. And I was just so sick of that stuff. It's like I'd always been kind of a sci-fi fan. I was always very smart and kind of analytical and everything and I didn't relate to anything out there pretty much until I saw Star Trek. And of course I immediately got, I guess I was involved in the sense that I was very much a Spock fan. Ah, he kind of .....He was different, unemotional, detached, smart, kind of a lot like me. I could understand where he was coming from because I always felt sort of alienated too. And uh, you're also female when you're a very, very smart female or girl, especially back in the late fifties, early sixties this isn't something people appreciated a whole lot and even nowadays that may not be something that people appreciate a whole lot and I'll be upfront, I'm kind of direct and have some strong opinions so I tend to calls it as it sees it. So, uh, you know, just be aware.

I didn't really do a whole lot [of fan writing]... I'll be very blunt. I mean when you're working with people like Connie Faddis who writes tremendously and Paula Smith and then you've people that can draw wonderfully....I was more of like the background editor type, that kind of stuff, more of the worker bee type. I did do a lot of letter writing for Welcommittee and stuff, but I myself did not do a lot of writing for one thing. Like I said I was working at that point. I did have a lot of letter writing and stuff through the Welcommittee. Also helping put together zines and things. And then when I went into the Air Force it's like I really did not have a lot of time.

[The Star Trek Welcommittee] started in 1972 and ended in 1997 and those dates are pretty significant because when we started, again, it was paper and pencil, mimeograph. If you were lucky, you may have had a fax machine. If you were lucky. A lot of this was done the old fashioned way and by the time 97 rolled around of course, we, as I put it, we were OBT - Overcome By Technology. People did not want to wait for an answer. They wanted a response right this minute, you know immediately. So here come the websites and the Internet and everything and all the technology that would be. Or it was starting to come into play. Then it's like, we can see which way this is going. A lot of the reason why we also quit. We had some licenses that we, of course, we were licensed by Paramount to sell certain items to maintain our activities because we weren't making a profit and some things and we had a lot of things going on and it says it's about time we just folded the tent and went away. Because we weren't getting as many letters as we did before, it wasn't feasible to try to keep the thing going.

[The first Star Trek Lives cons] was pretty crowded, but obviously there was a lot of interest involved and I'm really kind of sorry that the convention people, the Committee decided not to do any more, but again, it was a lot of very much labor intensive activity. They also were not primarily motivated about making money. OK.

About that time, '76, and the early eighties, you know, started seeing some of the people coming in that were running these things to make money. And I'm not downing people like Dragon Con and Creation Con, but you know, what they charge for this and that is just really astronomical and it's very much a canned product. It's very, very much a canned product. You know, you show up, you sit down, you get an autograph, you do this, you do that, but it's not the same. You know, you don't bring your personal touch to any of these events in the sense that you don't have the filk sings and the art shows and the actual panels of fans discussing things or bringing their homemade films or whatever to discuss or art show or anything like that. I mean, you just don't see that anymore except that the smaller fan run conventions that are still out there. For these humongous things, it's like, no, we're in it to make money. And uh, that's kinda the way it is.

...one thing I kind of credit Star Trek for is I went into the military, I spent 30-some years in the Air Force plus Air Force Reserve plus I worked for the Air Force as a civilian. So I did that for 34 years. I was kind of interested. It was the idea of being able to do many different jobs, being able to do many different things. It's not like you were, you know, you were a teacher, you teach; you're an accountant, you do accounting. It's like you had many different jobs from day one. I went in and I was in a non-traditional career field, aircraft maintenance and that kind of stuff... From the very first day you were a leader, you were responsible for people, there were people counting on you to be responsible. You're, you know, you could've been, you were a mentor, you're disciplinarian, you're a teacher, you, you were working on personnel issues, money, etc. So you weren't doing one thing, you were a lot of different things. And a lot of that I picked up out of the Star Trek world in the sense that--and the Next Generation especially cause you could see like the people that were in off--as officers, and I was an officer were able to do a lot of different things that were interesting and you were respected for your knowledge and what you could do and it didn't matter that you were female or blue or a Vulcan or purple. You were doing the job, you had the rank, you got the respect for it.

I really wasn't a costume designer or anything like that. Although one or two times the group of us did put on costumes that Connie Faddis had designed and we would go to conventions and I'm really glad we didn't have iPhones and things like that, then because there's no pictures of any of this stuff, it's like, oh, thank God. You know? I mean, the costumes weren't bad. It's just you feel like now, well maybe I really wouldn't have worn something like that nowadays out in public. I mean we, she did things that were kind of you would consider, I guess very--maybe not risque, but very interesting. Let's put it that way. I'll just leave it at that, but yeah, they were interesting. Very well air-conditioned is another way I put it. I'm just glad there's no pictures. Although we had a lot of fun with it.

I was primarily a Spock fan. I will make a comment about some things that--I'm not, I've never been a Kirk fan. I always thought he kind of came across as the character you'd seen like a thousand times and all, the stalwart captain with the chiseled jaw, pretty boy looks, and always gets the women and I really got tired of the, I always called it the broad of the week thing. So to me that got really old very quick...

...there seems to be some kind of, at least in regards to Nichelle Nichols character, they're trying to kind of put maybe a revisionist spin on it that maybe her character was really more groundbreaking or memorable than it really was. And frankly, I never really saw it that way. I never considered her a primary character because to me she was always in the background. She had very few landing party expeditions and uh, one of them, she says, I'm scared. That makes a real impression. She screamed on the bridge the one time and she never got the conn. In fact, one time he gives the conn to Chekov in lieu--who was an ensign in lieu of giving it to Uhura and I said, yeah, that sends a message, all right. Yeah, and that's not the way you do. Well, when I got into the military later, I said there's a ways you do things, but doing stuff like that, for example, sends a real message and it's not necessarily the message you want people --that want to send or it's not a good message. I picked up on a lot of that like more when I went into the Air Force and started looking back at some of the stuff going, you know, you just can't do stuff like that because you are sending a message and it may not be a good one. So yeah. I have some issues with them trying to make out that this is some kind of a ground-breaking character and all that. So no, I don't think so. At least I've never seen it that way.

[...]

The other issue I had problems with, Uhura was a good example of the fact that the women there were just basically eye candy. You know, they didn't seem to have a lot of brains. Ah, I got really tired of their asses hanging out of their uniforms and everything else showing too. It's like, OK, we know why you're there, you're decorative. So that was another thing I had some real issues with.

So we were still, we're still fighting battles in the military about women in the service, especially folks like me that were in non-traditional jobs like aircraft maintenance and all. It's not as egregious as it was. I mean we do have women pilots now and a whole bunch of other things that weren't allowed when I first got into the service, but it's like we've had to fight our battles to get there and I really hated this picture of the 300 years from now, this is the kind of uh, image that's being shown. It's like, OK, great. Now granted, I know it was done in the sixties, but it's like, it's still that part of it still kind of rubs me the wrong way.

[The practice of sending most of the commanding officers down on various away missions?] Frickin stupid. You don't do it that way. That's just what-- I'll be honest. There's never a really accurate portrayal of how the military works generally on the science fiction shows for a lot of different reasons. It was just not entertaining or you won't engage people's attention if you do things the way you really are supposed to do them or the way we're supposed to do them. Now there are rules and regs you follow, etc, etc.

Ah, I did [enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation. . . Deep Space Nine not so much. I thought that one was really kind of depressing in the sense that they seem to be stuck in one spot. They did have some interesting episodes where, you know, Sisko does cross the line at one point, I think it was, I can't remember the title of it, but he did some things you would not expect a Federation officer to do. I've got issues now in the sense I don't think this, that series would resonate really well now. Although when it was made, it wasn't quite the same in the sense that, you know, Major Kira, Colonel Kira was a terrorist and this was before 9/11. I think after 9/11, that would not have played quite the same way. You know, she was a terrorist fighting off the, uh, the space Nazis, as I call them, the Cardassians--Kardashians, it's almost the same thing. But yeah, sometimes I think they are the Cardassians, but yeah. She was a terrorist and like I said, it would not have had the same resonance after 9/11. It's like, uh no.

Kraith, the Jacqueline Lichtenberg series. I have read some of it, a lot of it. I admit I never really got that much into it because it started. It was kind of like an amoeba, in a sense. It started out small and kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and it had its own rules and regulations and when it started getting into 'this is a story, Kraith 2 A, B dash 6,' I'm going, oh, come on. I didn't like the characterizations. I didn't like the way the series was going. It's like this does not appeal to me at it. That's why in some respects when Enterprise came along, it reminded me a lot of that because it seems like there's a lot of adversarial relationships. It's like things that happen in there that I don't believe would really happen. I didn't relate to it at all. Like I just don't like this theory. And it was like to me too, it's like, OK, you have to adhere to the rules and regulations as that. I guess some of it was this attitude, and they do have an attitude. It's like, OK, who died and made you king, you know? Yeah, I just was never that impressed with it.

There were some problems that cropped up [with fan, Trinette Kern], and she was also in the Pittsburgh area. She puts some zines together and stuff, but there were some issues involving, you know, I guess creative differences and money differences and different things and a lot of us kind of basically we, we pulled away from her in the sense of 'OK, I don't like what I see going on with her publication called Off the Beaten Trek. It's like she was taking in or it seems like she was asking for a lot of money and time and not a lot was coming out, if you know what I mean. She also did two issues of Off the Beaten Trek. There was a third one that came out under somebody else's auspices.

She supposedly wrote an novel called The Climb, which was pretty good actually, but a lot of us were kind of concerned, convinced that she really didn't write it and then she had one other issue of something come out called Side-Trekked, which I finally ran across a copy of like a couple of days ago and it's one reason I've been kind of still collecting zines to find those little gems out there that I don't have or have never had access to before. But there was a lot involved. There are some things that went on with her that we didn't think were really kosher in the sense that it's like, OK, she's asking for a lot and taking a lot, but we're not seeing a lot come back the other way. So it was kind of a off-putting situation.

[Regarding To Slay or Not to Slay: Why We Write 'Get-em' Stories -- & Love 'em!, the essay I wrote with Connie Faddis about Get-‘em stories.] Well, yeah. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess. I guess we were kind of in the mood. I don't know, I think by that point we were getting a little punchy? In fact, when we were doing some of the zines, especially Interphase and stuff like that, there were bunches of us that would put these things together and punchy probably was the word because some of the color covers, uh, we would print them out one by one by one by one and the the, inks and whatever we were using, were very pungent and there are a lot of fumes and I'll tell you, we were having fun. We were like higher than kites. I don't know what the hell was in this ink. But we were laughing like hell and having a good time. In fact, some guy delivered pizza. We had all these Spock faces all over the floor, especially the ones that I think it was the blue and the gold covered, and we had a couple of hundred of them on the floor and we were laughing like hell because of the fumes from the ink because we're running these covers off one by one and he's looking at us like we're all nuts. But yeah, we were kind of punchy. I think at that one ime we had read, several variations of how we're going to get Spock and/or Kirk and we'd just says, ok, we're just going to kind of attack it like this and kind of, you know, just be, I don't know, really forward about it or whatever, or we were just kind of punchy or maybe kind of said, ok, we're filled up on this genre or, and we need to kind of put an end to it. So yeah, I don't even remember how, that much about that article, but I think we did it mostly because it was a reaction to some of the stuff that was coming in. It was like, ok, I think we've had enough of this now can we move on?

[We were not against hurt/comfort] per se, but it was kind of a reaction. It was like ok, ah, I hate to use the term, but it was kind of like overkill and say, ok, enough's enough. Could we kind of move on to maybe another subject or something else to deal with here? Um, and I think this was about the time when people started writing K/S material, I think they were trying to do a little more with the Get 'em things because this other stuff was now starting to come along and it was not really accepted at first.

It was very, very difficult for people to look at this and believe in it at first. Uh, in fact the first [slash] story I read was back in 1973 [1], which is kind of hard to believe, but uh, but it was very mild compared to some of the stuff that came out later.

Gee, there's a surprise, but some of it really was not accepted, in fact, there were some people that would not touch it. They says we don't believe in it, we're not going to deal with it. Some people really advocated strongly against it. There were some people that were sort of more of a, I don't want to pick on anybody's religion, but they were really down on it because, you know, this is a mortal sin. We don't do things like this and so on and so forth. And yeah. So it was very contentious. So that was just starting to come into the, the, into play here in the sense of, ok, here's something else that's starting to come up and uh, you know, and of course it's still out there, but it's much more, I guess, explicit and ah-- prevalent than it was before?

I don't disagree with it. I've read some really beautiful stories in that genre per se. I don't think they have to necessarily be that explicit in some of these things. Um, I can see where they did --do have the concern and the love for each other and how they express it, etc. etc. But I don't think we need a description of everything that happens, if, you know what I mean. Yeah.

But there are some things I don't agree with. I mean, some people write what they called MPREG where the men get pregnant or they swap genders and see, that I don't quite go along with. Some of that is just ridiculous. But, uh, you know, to each his own. But I don't believe in some of it could be, you know, realistic, because you do see the concern and all between the two of them.

[Get 'em story, on a sort of progression towards K/S slash?] Yeah, well in some respects, yeah, because I think they maybe have been testing the water, says ok, we're going to put these two in a very extreme situation. One of them you know, and usually resulted in the death of one or the other. But ok, how would they react to this situation. Alright, that used to be, you know, they were acquaintances, like fellow workers and now they're friends. Now they're very close friends and they're on a progression to getting closer and closer. Ok, now that you put them in this situation, say if they were more than friends, they were extremely close. They were bonded, they were, you know, together, how would they react to it? And then that actually became the focus of, you know, the story of like, ok, we know that they are leading up to this and now we're going to jump in with both feet and say, this is what they really are.

Leonard never really got into [slash fanworks]. He didn't believe, he didn't think it was feasible. He just thought the idea was, they're friends. Uh, that's, that's pretty much where it is. He never really got into that idea. So of course, you know, the basic fan clubs and all based see, hey, this is Leonard's a opinion and we respect that and we never really got into it or anything like that. No, it, the people that we're disagreeing, they would disagree with each other and all that. And some people are still, were still mad at each other for awhile because they thought that, well, not only shouldn't we be done, it shouldn't be printed and now, now you're starting to get into censorship. It's like, well we shouldn't even be reading or seeing the stuff in print because it's just, you know, it's just a) blasphemous or b) totally illogical or something, and now you're getting into censorship. All right, you may not agree with this stuff. You may not like this stuff, but that doesn't mean that other people don't want to read it or see it. You don't have to; just don't buy it or look at it.

So I'm getting stuff off of eBay and uh, various other places to kind of fill my collection of zines. I have tons of reading material and I prefer stuff I can pick up and hold and you know, flip the pages on. But yeah, I don't know if there really is a fandom per se anymore. It's like people do the same thing I do. They go to websites, they go to the Creation Cons when it's like you're almost an individual doing this type of thing, you don't have a group per se. Uh, I, at one time they used to have the various cities or different places, have.. We would be the USS whatever and we had a local group that would get involved. Where I live now, there's really nothing going on. This is a border town, any local fandom would be in San Antonio and I'm sure there's fans there, but it's like a three hour drive each way. So that makes things a little difficult. But there's still some groups out there I'm sure, but it's not like it used to be. I mean, granted, things have changed so much, but that's kind of how I keep my fingers in the pie here. I kind of follow it online and watch to see what's coming up and I do get the Star Trek Magazine and I keep hoping that someday we'll see more of it as opposed to less. You know,

[Regarding females in fandom]: You may have noticed a lot of these people, I think of it as a strike for, for women at this point because most of the mostly really involved in intense fans at the time and we're not saying all but most of the fans were women and I think it was kind of a reaction to the fact that, you know, you felt like you were, maybe people now don't feel quite the same way, but we felt like we were being stifled in a lot of ways because you were expected to act a certain way and grow up a certain way and do certain things and aspire to certain things. And we were not inclined to do that. And this was our way of saying, no, we're gonna do what we want to do and this is what we think is important and it has a message. So. But yeah, most of the fans back then, especially active really active ones were female.

[Fandom is] just so different now. I feel like a, I really feel like a fossil in some respects because, like I said, I do miss some of the earlier days of fandom because then you felt like you had a personal touch. You knew these people. You can see them and talk to them, etc... I would say just, you know, maybe keep an open mind, careful what you read, what you get into. There are a lot of things out there that are available. Some you may like somebody may not like, but just kind of keep an open mind and the people. There are different people, different ages and backgrounds that are interested in Trek and all that and enjoy as much as you do and we have that in common. We may look different on the outside and all that, but we have something we really enjoy and we enjoy together.

References

  1. ^ This was possibly The Ring of Soshern. Or possibly My Love Has Wings or something else by Audrey Baker. Or possibly a story by Jennifer Guttridge.
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