Print Zines and Customs

Related terms:	Explicit Zines, and Print Shop Adventures
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The mailing of print zines to other countries was an expensive and often complicated process, made even more so by issues Customs and zine content.

Zines most often targeted by Customs were ones which had content deemed offensive or pornographic, specifically those which contained same sex material.

Slash as Obscenity

Because of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which states that Congress can make no law abridging freedoms of speech or press, there is no federal obscenity law in the United States. In each state, obscenity is determined by applying what the "average person" for that area, applying "community standards" deems obscene or not, and whether or not the work contains sufficient "artistic merit". This extremely subjective standard is called the Miller test after the author Henry Miller, whose book Tropic of Cancer was ruled not obscene after considerable scrutiny in Miller vs. State of California 1973.

Zine publishers were thus bound by the laws of their states and communities as to whether or not they could accept slash. Any and all fiction depicting homosexual relations at that time was generally considered obscene by the aforesaid community standards, even if non-explicit. In many places, it could be construed as using the mails to distribute obscenity or pornography, leading to a big court case which no fan publisher had the money to defend in court.

It is difficult to convey to modern readers just how controversial this all was at the time. At the time of the Stonewall Riots of 1969 which sparked the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, being homosexual was illegal in most states. Before the sodomy laws were repealed, state by state, most gay people, especially young people, lived in fear of discovery. Being gay was legal grounds for imprisonment and/or commitment to insane asylums. Groups such as the Mattachine Society had to be extremely discreet and nearly everything was published anonymously. It is unknown whether slash fan fiction made any sort of impression or had any influence on public opinion in favor of normalizing homosexuality.

From Bill Hupe, the editor of Mi-Anime in late 1988:

I have been asked if I will accept homosexual fiction if the characters involved were portrayed in such a manner, but I cannot. Homosexual fiction, as well as fiction along the lines of Creme Lemon, are illegal in many states, including Michigan. In other words, it is illegal for me to publish it here, as well as transport it into to many states. Sorry folks.

Some Specific Examples

Most copies of the Kirk/Spock zine, The Price and The Prize (1981), mailed to addresses in the U.K. were seized by Customs because of the explicit content. There were some reports that a disgruntled Star Trek fan, disapproving of slash, alerted UK customs to be on the lookout for packages with the publisher's return address. A friend of Newton's explains that:

Ray Newton lost her contributor's copy. The first she knew was when a Customs letter arrived saying that a packet sent to her had been seized.

She decided to visit Customs and ask about it, dressed in her soberest working clothes. As she tells it, it was hilarious.

She asked about the letter, explaining that a friend in America sometimes sent her Trek stuff, and she couldn't think of any reason why *Trek* stuff should be seized; that that was all she ever got from America.

The Customs man was elderly, and clearly trying to spare her blushes as he tried to explain, without actually *saying* anything explicit, that the zine had been seized because it was pornographic - pictures *and* text. Of course, he said, she could appeal, but they would fight the appeal; she asked if she could see the zine, to decide for herself if it was something she would *want* to get and he said no; that any appeal had to be made blind. It did, after all, assume a - er - uh - sexual relationship between the *male* characters, and - er - did she understand what that meant?

At that point, having decided that "I should do, I wrote some of it" would be an inappropriate response, she retreated, agreeing to accept the expertise of the Customs men in respect of the zine.

From A 2007 Interview with Valerie Piacentini:

I was really excited about The Price and the Prize — I never expected [The Prize] to be a featured story. When I had word the zine was ready I started counting the days waiting for my copy, but instead I received a letter from HM Customs and Excise saying that a packet addressed to me from America had been seized by Customs on the grounds that it contained obscene material. Since the packet was marked as a gift, they assumed it was not something I was trying to import, so no action would be taken. If I had any questions, I could contact the Customs office. I realised it must be The Price and the Prize, and wondered if there was any way I could manage to get hold of the zine, so I decided to visit the office. First thing was to make sure that I looked ultra-respectable, so I dressed up in my best librarian-on-the-way-to- a-meeting outfit. At the office I was lucky enough to be dealt with by a really nice, grandfatherly officer, who couldn’t have been kinder. BUT. He was adamant that the magazine, as he called it, had been confiscated because it contained illegal material. He said that I could appeal against the seizure, but Customs would contest the appeal. Could I, I asked, see the magazine to decide if I agreed it was obscene, and decide if I wished to contest the seizure? Ah, well, no, that wasn’t possible; once the decision had been taken, no one could see it, so if I wanted to appeal I’d have to do so “blind,” and the appeal would involve appearing in court to claim that it was legal—but there was no way I could know whether it was legal or not. Talk about Catch 22! I said that I couldn’t understand; an American pen friend sometimes sent me Star Trek magazines, but I really couldn’t imagine that they’d be obscene. He said that yes, it did seem to be about Star Trek, but it dealt with an “inappropriate” relationship, and contained obscene pictures. Bless him, he was really concerned about my supposedly innocent mind; did I understand what it was about? I didn’t have the heart to reply, “I should do— I wrote some of it.” All I could do was say that there had to have been a misunderstanding, and no, I wouldn’t contest the seizure. (I would have liked to, but as a librarian working occasionally with children, I didn’t dare take the risk. At that time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain...) It turned out that someone who was rabidly anti-K/S had alerted British Customs that this “obscene” material was being sent into the country, and they seized everything with Gayle’s return address on it. Believe me, if we’d ever found out who she was.... Subsequently we learned that one copy of the zine had slipped through the net, but all others were seized. Eventually I did get my copy, sent a few pages at a time, as letters with different return addresses; several others who ordered it did much the same thing, so most people got their zines—eventually. However, apparently anything with Gayle’s original address, even letters, was opened for quite some time thereafter, even though she only sent innocent material under her own name after that. I did hear, though I don’t know if it’s true, that Gayle changed the cover illo in later copies. The very explicit original cover might have been the reason Customs made the judgement. (Editor’s Note: Yes, a later edition of The Price and the Prize had a completely different cover.) As an aside, the law here used to be what we called the Mull of Kintyre standard in my course on censorship and obscenity. The Mull is a peninsula off the west coast of Scotland. The rule of thumb at that time was that in a male nude, if the penis was at an angle greater that that of the Mull, it was considered erect, and therefore obscene; a lesser angle was okay.

The seizure did not go unnoticed. In a 1981 issue of the UK letterzine STAG the editors wrote:

We've had more word on The Price and the Prize (see zine ads page). More people have now received seizure notices from Customs. This is the first time that any explicit zine has been seized (although we know that some 'adult' zines have been opened in the past) so...!!! One Scottish buyer of the zine went to Glasgow Customs after receiving her seizure notice to ask what was wrong with the zine, wearing her most innocent expression, and everyone she spoke to went scarlet ... the chief official she spoke to trying to tell her without saying anything compromising just why he had condemned it. He did manage to explain that it was about ... er ... Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock ... er ... having an affair, and that the pictures left nothing to the imagination. That must be one Customs man who has a whole new outlook on ST! He refused to let her see the zine to decide whether she felt it was worth appealing against the seizure, and after she said that she accepted that, he ended up giving her a long tale about the trials and tribulations of a Customs officer's life. It was from her that we received the first notification that this zine had been stopped.

The editors of STAG added in that same 1981 issue:

It should be noted however that Customs have stopped copies of this [The Price and The Prize] coming into the country and have confiscated several. A lot of othor people are still waiting for word of the zine either arriving or being seized by Customs - there has been silence for about a fortnight since the first seizure notices went out and we know Gayle sent out all the pre-orders at the same time. The possibility exists that othor explicit K/S zines might also be seized by Customs in the future. All such zines are therefore ordered at your own risk. ANYONE wanting to put out a zine - Gene Roddenberry and Paramount have never apparently objected to zines. it is too late now for Paramount to object to series-based zines, at least, since several of the episodes have been issued, apparently completely legally, on video and film, so it seems safe enough to go ahead and put out a zine without asking anyone's permission first. There is nothing to stop anyone putting out their own zine - however it is advisable to put in a copyright disclaimer similar to the one we put in Log Entries.

Luckily, this was the only blanket seizure of K/S zines in the UK, although fans reported in various UK letterzines for many years thereafter that their packages had been opened and, on occasion, a few individual zines would be confiscated. Future shipments of the Price and the Prize were mailed from a different location.

A fan in 2016 remembers this incidence, and others:

How's this for an international pre-Internet fandom persecution. There was a large zine publisher in Australia. She got divorced and her ex-husband was not friendly. He worked for the customs office. Fans claim that he monitored her friends packages and confiscated "porn" (aka slash). Luckily, fans came up with workarounds and of course he did not know all of the zine buyers. But if they wanted to complain about the confiscations - well, the complaints went to him.

Not all Australian fans used the workarounds. One slash fan got fed up when her copy of Naked Times was confiscated by customs as porn. So she picked up a scratch and sniff edition of Hustler from the shelf of her local newsagent, in a clear plastic cover. Took it to customs and demanded an explanation of why this filthy muck was available over the counter, in full view of children, when her book, in it's plain brown wrapper, for her own private use, was confiscated. Basically, she kicked up a stink, got her book back, and was reimbursed for her copy of Hustler since it had been used as proof. It was an embarrassing, but as I said she was fed up.

I know of another US based slash zine publisher who was asked by a South African fan to help bypass their customs. She recruited a few friends and they each mailed 10 pages of the zine to the fan. Letters were not usually opened, so it got through.

And then there was the infamous Gayle F zine that had one Scottish fan being lectured to by customs. [See The Price and The Prize].

For many of these pre-net fans - the idea of a fan run archive backed up by legal advocacy and public outreach is revolutionary. We still marvel about it when we get together.