No Place to Go?
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| Title: | No Place to Go? |
| Creator: | Rosemary Wild |
| Date(s): | May 1984 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TOS, K/S |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
No Place to Go? is a 1984 Star Trek: TOS essay by Rosemary Wild.
The topic: trends and cliches in K/S fanfiction, something the author felt were detriments.
The essay begins with a quote from a 1980 essay by Joanna Cantor. See excerpts here.
NOTE: the original essay quoted used the term "'only' gay." Wild misquotes Cantor and uses "only gay" -- while a small difference, it isn't. Wild also spells Johanna's name incorrectly.
The Essay
The K/S stories I've seen, by and large, seem to present a Kirk and Spock who are .... "only gay." That's why the stories seem wrong to me and ultimately become crashing bores. They take two complex beings who are so many things and do some many things, who interact with others as well as each other, who operate along many spectra on many different levels and strip them of all their attributes but one, turning them into stick on one spectrum at one level. And I feel cheated. Those characters are not Kirk and Spock -- not as I know them.
And I would suggest -- especially as so many good fan writers have produced K/S stories -- that this one dimensional quality is not lack of skill in the writing. You can't work other aspects of Kirk and Spock's lives into a K/S; it just doesn't go. Probably that's why the genre seems so limited to the "first time" stories with the corollary of "how shall I tell mother?" The stories can't take off, because from that premise, there's no place to go in the ST world.
Before regular readers begin to wonder whether I've done an "about face," let me say that the above is a quotation from Joanna Cantor [sic] from R&R XII which was published in the Spring of 1989. When I first read it, several years ago, my reaction was - "rubbish!" How could such a complex relationship with such great possibilities have "no place to go"?
Recently, I came across this passage [by Cantor] again and count my response to have changed radically. For, from a survey of recent and current K/S, it seems to me that Joanna has been proved right!
This implies no criticism of any particular zine or writer, merely the impact of the zine count. If you catalogue the K/S material of the past two years, approximately, the majority of stories still fall into the categories Joanna names: "first timers" and "how should I tell mother?" Even the most full length one-story zines are, in fact, extended "first timers." A recent extension of this genre seems to be "Why did he leave for Gol and what happened when he came back. The answer is the same.
Part of the problem seems to be how we writers and readers have come to regard K/S. The early erotica is superb (Thrust, Mirrors, Companion 1) and one can see why the beginning of the relationship appeal, but we have become fixated by the erotic-celebration-fade-out-into-the-sunset syndrome descended from those early zines. Nowadays each writer feels obliged to give his/her own version. This is fair enough as a private exercise but it is when we come to the realm of publication that the difficulty intensifies. Editors do not seem to view the K/S genre as a whole. Even the tone of ads requesting submissions limits the intending writer. Exhortations to release one's fantasies, lose one's inhibitions, get out one's whips and chain, all lead to the same result. This must be very intimidating for new writers. It certainly seems to perpetuate the K/S cliche: log cabins, pon farr, gifts, showers, caves, child regression... Oh, Joanna you were right!
Yet still I don't believe this need be so. As Joanna also states, we have a vital, compelling relationship that we have hardly begun to explore. Here are two forceful (understatement) men, accustomed to obedience, strong personalities, who have never acknowledged compromise, attempting to live together. What are their lives like? How is their work affected? Do they change over the years? So many questions still to be answered, so much material for the writer. In addition, Kirk and Spock must work and interact with others as they did in the series. How does their relationship alter with those others? I'll stop before I exhaust your patience.
Recently, I have heard many references to the decline of K/S and again I thought, rubbish. But the current trend of the genre speaks of lost opporunities and the possible demise of K/S, strangle in its own cliches.