The Best Kept Secret in Fandom

Interviews by Fans
Title:	The Best Kept Secret in Fandom
Interviewer:	Richard Glillam
Interviewee:	Richard Lee Byers, Debra Hicks, Dawn Jaekel, Rolaine Smoot
Date(s):	May 6, 1990
Medium:	panel discussion; transcript published in File 770
Fandom(s):	Slash
External Links:
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The Best Kept Secret in Fandom is a 1990 interview/discussion moderated by Richard Gilliam.

It was supposedly published in an issue of File 770, but a search of issues published in 1990, 1991, and 1992 do not show evidence of this.

The interview was conducted on Sunday, May 6, 1990, at the home of Ken and Denise Hillyard during the monthly meeting of Tampa's Stone Hill Science Fiction Association. More than thirty Stone Hill Members observed the discussion. Stone Hill was a generally mainstream science fiction club which sponsored Necronomicon, Tampa's annual literary science fiction convention.

PACIPANTS: Richard Gilliam, moderator; Richard Lee Byers, author and former clinical psychologist; Debra Hicks, slash fanzine writer; Dawn Jaekel, slash fanzine reader; Rolaine Smoot, slash fanzine editor.

COMMENTING OBSERVERS: Adrain Barton, Linda Bennett, Denise Hillyard, Ken Hillyard, Mark Jones, Mike LoBue, Jim Shippey, and Wade Warren.

In 2023, one of the participants (Hicks) said:

This [meeting] was in Riverview, FL. Richard Gillium [sic] had asked me the previous month if he could interview me and whoever else felt comfortable talking about slash. So, Rolaine Smoot, Richard G, and I went into a separate room. Some folks asked to join us if we had no objections and the rest is pretty much on the page. We did get a little frustrated at a couple of points over trying to explain things to the male members. But there was a lot of joking and bad puns.

Some Topics Discussed

• what is slash?
• why do women write and read it?
• does slash pervert male heroes?
• are gay people weak?
• many displays of ignorance, offensive comments, some examples: "the surest way to destroy heroic characters to change them to homosexuals," "slash fiction deconstructs and savagely mocks the characters it pretends to honor," and Slash "isn't romance at all. It's liberated women wanting to manipulate strong men."
• male posturing, men trying to be funny and failing
• think of the children!
• cherry-picking rare/odd fandoms to try to prove how outlandish slash is

From the Discussion

GILLIAM: Who wants to start? What is "slash?"

HICKS: You want a history? I'm going to assume most people are aware how fanzines started in the 1930s and evolved into a major force in fandom. The origins of slash start in 1968 with the origins of media fandom, which coalesced in reaction to Star Trek. When Star Trek was canceled fans wanted more. To fill the void they started writing their own stories. That's where media fanzines started. Around 1969 Leslie Fish wrote a story called "Shelter" in which Spock and Kirk become lovers at the end of the story. Fans went wild. In print this was referred to as "K/S" Kirk-slash-Spock which got shortened to "slash."

Slash fandom always has been a subgroup of fanzine media fandom. Even today, about seventy percent of media fan fiction is a straight forward pastiche of television programming without any change of sexual orientation of the characters.

GILLIAM: Only a small portion of general SF fandom seems to be aware of slash.

HICKS: Most slash fans keep a low profile. Some believe we shouldn't talk to outsiders about slash. There's too many homophobic people who wouldn't take the time to understand we're not a threat to them.

GILLIAM: So why do this interview?

HICKS: I tend to have more confidence in people's abilities to sort things out for themselves.

GILLIAM: Slash fandom seems to be almost entirely female.

HICKS: Not entirely, but certainly ninety percent.

GILLIAM: And the sexual orientation of slash fans?

HICKS: About what you'd expect to find in the general population. Most are heterosexual. Any liaisons are ones that exist outside of slash fandom.

GILLIAM: Is slash always homoerotic?

HICKS: Always, although not always graphic. It isn't necessary to describe a sex act or even to imply one. It's the orientation of the relationship that distinguishes slash.

GILLIAM: How large is media fandom?

SMOOT: Varies. When I first got involved with fandom there were maybe twenty media zines a year and only three or four were slash. That was around 1978. Now there are easily 300 titles per year, with each zine circulating 100 to 500 copies per issue. Half, maybe sixty percent of the 300 are Trek zines. Out of the 300 titles maybe 100 are slash.

GILLIAM: That's just fanzine media fandom. On any given weekend several thousand people show up at conventions featuring the stars of the various shows.

HICKS: We're pretty much separate from that. There's overlap, but we don't influence that type of convention and they don't often influence us. Even within media fanzines, slash fandom is specialized. Star Trek is maybe a third slash. The Professionals is ninety nine percent slash. So it depends on the show.

GILLIAM: Why The Professionals? It's only rarely been shown in the United States.

HICKS: The Professionals caught on when Starsky and Hutch dropped. It's a violent show with, good writing and interesting characters. There's a good deal of closeness between the characters. The Professionals spread by word of mouth, people exchanging tapes.

GILLIAM: Does slash include lesbian fiction?

HICKS: There's very little lesbian fiction written. Slash concentrates on lead characters in an equal partnership. That's almost always two males. One major writer did Nurse Chapel and Uhura . There's not much else.

BYERS: If they wanted to do straight material they could have done Steed and Mrs. Peel from Avengers.

HICKS: That doesn't get seen much and, unlike Pros, tapes are hard to get.

BENNETT: What about Moonlighting?

LO BOUE: What about Charlie's Angels?

HICKS: Almost all slash writers are females and women hated Charlie's Angels.

BENNETT: Do any men write slash?

HICKS: Not many.

SMOOT: Some stories from slash zines have been published in the Star Trek paperback series.

GILLIAM: How did they manage that?

SMOOT: They disguised the homosexual content. But people who knew what they were reading could understand.

GILLIAM: Which books?

SMOOT: Black Fire by Sonnie Cooper which I'm pretty sure is a pseudonym and Killing Time by Della VanRise [sic] were written and sold as slash zines in the '70s. When they came out as paperbacks in the '80s the publisher didn't know they were slash. Both books got pulled and changed.

HICKS: The unaltered versions of the paperbacks are quite collectible.

GILLIAM: Is there much heteroerotic fiction in fanzines?

HICKS: Yes, but that's not slash. Most of it is Star Trek. Beauty and the Beast is big. Spock gets paired with Nurse Chapel. Sarek with Amanda. Just like what happened in the show. Except that Kirk is a lot nicer in the fanzines than he is on TV.

JAEKEL: Then you've got R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars!

HICKS: Actually someone wrote R2D2 and Princess Leia.

GILLIAM: What about The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

HICKS: I've never seen a slash story. You won't see many comedies done, either straight or slash, or shows that rely on puns like I Spy or Moonlightling. Rocky Horror has a big following. They're just not doing zines.

GILLIAM: Do you consider most slash stories to be pornographic?

JAEKEL: We're only sending it to people who want it.

HICKS: No one will knowingly send a slash zine to a minor. You have to send an age statement with proof, like a photocopy of your driver's license. Even though we're a significant portion of organized fandom, we're small enough in real world terms that no one's paid any attention to us.

JACEKEL: We're certainly not any more pornographic than what you can buy at any mainstream bookstore.

HICKS: What is pornographic? Take what I write. I write some stories that don't even have any kissing, but it's obviously a story about gay men. The sexual content depends on the characters, their history, and the type of story. I write some stories that have no sex and others that have long graphic scenes. If I'm writing an already established relationship there won't be much graphic sex. If I'm writing a story where the characters are discovering their sexual attraction to each other, then I'll likely include a graphic description of their first lovemaking.

GILLIAM: Are the stories illustrated?

HICKS: Not usually. The art tends to be romantic, not graphic. Lots of hugging and kissing lovers, looking into each others eyes. There are several really good slash artists. The best art sells at conventions for lots of money. The graphic ones go for more.

GILLIAM: How does the rest of fandom react to slash?

HICKS: Most often they are unaware. But every so often certain [elements of] fandom will go through the great slash debate. There's some parts of media fandom that detest slash. Mainstream fandom, that is nonmedia fandom, by and large doesn't know we exist.

SMOOT: People have done some really nasty stuff...

HICKS: Things like sending letters to the employers of slash writers accusing them of being perverts. Things like banning slash fans from conventions.

GILLJAM: How did that happen?

HICKS: One of the main actors at a Blake's 7 con networked fans. They made a list of slash fans. The fans weren't allowed to enter any of the conventions where he appeared. Once word got around, B7 fandom, even the non-slash fans, avoided the cons. I heard the convention organizers lost money, which is what they deserved. Fans who try to hurt slash fail to realize that slash is self-supporting. The people who like it buy it. The people who don't like it aren't the ones supporting it.

SMOOT: Sometimes conventions attract people who want to trash slash fans. At a charity auction the auctioneer opened a slash zine to the most graphic illustration he could find and proceeded to ridicule it to the audience. He got really cutting and nasty. The guy's done the same thing in several other forums. He's a well known professional writer. Basically it was the pot calling the kettle black. He was just covering up that he was gay.

GILLIAM: How did you discover slash?

SMOOT: A friend got me started. I don't write slash, although I like to read It. Usually I'm careful about who I let know. I came into Star Trek fandom in 1969. I got into slash around 1971. I used to write a lot of erotic poetry. Then I didn't write for a while. What writing I do is straight. I did some editing for a slash zine, Matter AntiMatter, it started straight and went slash pretty quickly.

HICKS: I've been a member of Stone Hill since 1979. I have to admit I was more heavily involved in regular fandom before I got into media fandom. I'd been reading fanzines for a while before 1979. I guess about 1987 was when I got started writing slash. I really wasn't part of Star Trek fandom. I never liked K/S, Kirk had no loyalty to any of his lovers.

SMOOT: No one likes Kirk.

BYERS: Who does?

HICKS: I discovered Starsky and Hutch through the Universal Translator.

GILLIAM: There was a big outrage when the Universal Translator was nominated for a Hugo.

HICKS: It certainly met my definition of a fanzine. It had a great letter column, which is a key part of most fanzines. And it sold other zines, so it was a good source of information. I was unaware of the prejudice against media fans by mainstream SF fans until I went to the 1980 Worldcon in Boston. It's as though they think there's some thing inherently more worthy about reading the latest commercial fiction than watching a good episode of a television series. We're fortunate Stone Hill is tolerant of the various types of fandom. All I ran into in Boston were media bigots.

GILLIAM: How many stories have you written?

HICKS: Forty five stories. Maybe twenty are slash. I was nominated for a fan quality award at Media West for a slash Man From U.N.C.L.E. story. I didn't win. I got beat out by a straight Miami Vice story. I won a Huggy at ZCon for most humorous story. Yes, It was slash, but there was not sex in it.

GILLIAM: Do slash characters practice safe sex?

HICKS: It's pretty much ignored.

SHIPPEY: Because AIDS doesn't exist?

HICKS: Starsky and Hutch fucked their way through half of L.A. Don't tell me that a monogamous homosexual relationship is less safe than a casual heterosexual relationship. There's never any safe sex on TV.

GILLIAM: We've pretty well established what slash fiction is, but we haven't talked about why women are attracted to homoerotic pastiches of archetypal heroes.

HICKS: There's a lot of disagreement over that...

BYERS: Let me take a shot at it first. One could argue that slash fiction deconstructs and savagely mocks the characters it pretends to honor. You take a heterosexual character and, from the standpoint of conventional values, degrade him by making him homosexual. Slash fans don't see that at all.

HICKS: Of course, Richard [Byersl has read two stories.

BYERS: I read your stories. They're not grossly atypical of the form, are they?

HICKS: Not that I perceive.

BYERS: What are your opinions of slash, Richard [Gilliam]?

GILLIAM: I don't find the stories interesting, but neither do I find them bothersome. The interesting question is why is there this underground genre, and why are people attracted to it? When I first heard about slash I thought it must be a parody form. I tried to write a Flintstones story. It started off well with Fred ramming Barney with his bedrocks, but when I got to the point where Fred shouted "YabbaDabbaDo!" while he came, there wasn't any place to take the story.

BYERS: That sums it up! Where do you go from there?

DENISE HILLYARD: Wherever you want to go. By the way, I want my name to be Denise "The-Heterosexual-Who-Doesn't-Write-Slash" Hillyard when this appears in print.

GILLIAM: That's okay. They're only a few people here who do. Maybe I should be Richard "The-Heterosexual-Who-Doesn't-Read-Slash" Gilliam.

SMOOT: You're all taking a defensive posture. Richard is wrong about mocking heroes. It's the romance of the relationship that attracts women.

BYERS: It inherently mocks stock heroic figures. One of the requirements to be a member of that club is you have to be a heterosexual. To turn one of the heroes gay makes a variant version of what is in the source series a variation most viewers would reject. I'm a Batman fan. I wouldn't want to read stories where he molests Robin.

HICKS: Molests is an interesting choice of wording. Let's put changing the character aside. Women like romance. If you see two characters you like, you want them to have a romance. That can't happen in series television. Heroes date two kinds of women, the one night stand and the kiss of death.

BYERS: That's a limitation of the TV form.

HICKS: Exactly. You want romance, but you want to be as true to the series as possible. You could add a new female character and have one of the protagonists settle down and marry, but to me the new character would change the dynamics of the series more than making the leads homosexual.

BYERS: Isn't there a prurient appeal?

HICKS: I like the romance. I like getting characters together sexually for the first time. Iconoclasm is a big part of the appeal.

KEN HILLYARD: It isn't romance at all. It's liberated women wanting to manipulate strong men.

DENISE HILLYARD: We want men to love more and fuck less.

KEN HILLYARD: Women like to destroy strong male figures.

BYERS Deconstructing heroes...

JAEKEL: That's only because of the prejudice in our culture.

KEN HILLYARD: That's the surest way to destroy heroic characters to change them to homosexuals.

HICKS: So it's a heterosexual male's idea that as soon as a character becomes gay you've made him weak. Why is a homosexual male character a weaker person than a heterosexual?

KEN HILLYARD: The media stereotypes gays as weak...

BYERS: When you change a popular heroic character from heterosexual to gay you debase him in terms of common cultural values.

HICKS: Does that mean we have to go along with this?

BYERS: Ken is proposing that on a subconscious level you're destroying these strong male characters.

KEN HILLYARD: You're implying in order for a man to be loving he has to be homosexual.

HICKS: No! We're saying men can be strong and loving and still dynamic whether they're straight or gay. We like romance. Since we don't want to introduce new major characters, the only way to create romance is to make one of the established heroes gay.

BYERS: I can understand that you want to include sex without the dilutions that occurs by involving a third character.

JAEKEL: Right.

HICKS: Remember, slash fiction concentrates on equal partners. A new character not in the television series can't be an equal to the established protagonists. Usua1ly the series has established that the two guys are buddies. Slash simply converts this into physical expression.

KEN HILLYARD: That implies that sex is romance. Sex is not romance.

BYERS: Not if you're doing it right.

HICKS: But romance implies at least sexual interest. You certainly can have romance without sex.

KEN HILLYARD: Suppose you were to take a television series and change the characters to racists? Make the black characters into Steppin Fetchit stereotypes. Wouldn't that be the same type of degradation?

SHIPPEY: Are we trying to find the reason for the existence of slash?

BYERS: We're trying to figure out what kind of personality it appeals to.

HICKS: What we're hearing right now is male prejudice. Why should we as writers, be governed by the prejudices of a society that's bigoted? Captain Kirk is a much nicer person in slash fiction than he is on TV or movies. Is this such a bad thing?

SHIPPEY: Why slash? Why not original gay characters?

HICKS: We like the characters we see on the shows. Some slash writers do read gay novels.

SHIPPEY: Slash fiction is prurient. Its appeal is based on female fan fantasies involving established male characters.

GILLIAM: Jim, how much slash have you read?

SHIPPEY: A little, enough for a solid introduction.

BYERS: Enough to form a prejudice.

SHIPPEY: I don't consider slash writing to be anything higher than the basest level of writing that exists. It never goes beyond the prurient level. Readers of slash go to the marked pages.

JAEKEL: You mean it's okay if there's no sex in it.

SHIPPEY: No, but don't try to say slash is something that it is not.

HICKS: It's easier to write no sex slash.

BYERS: That establishes a false dichotomy. Surely there are other possibilities? Stages in between chaste and graphic?

HICKS: Of course there are. Jim's accusing us of being exclusively prurient.

SHIPPEY: Sort of. I'm saying the objective is to titillate.

HICKS: Sometimes. Not usually.

SHIPPEY: Straighten me out.

BYERS: So to speak.

SHIPPEY: [Laughsl Okay, you got me.

WARREN: [Pretending to be George Bush] Straight story good. Slash story bad.

GILLIAM: I doubt if Bush would be any more tolerant of explicit heterosexually oriented stories than he would be gay ones. This administration is strongly pro-censorship.

HICKS: Censorship is often directed toward the outrageous. After all, don't we read science fiction to challenge social norms?

BYERS: Slash fans have their social norms. They want to see their adventurers in a particular way. What we're trying to analyze are those norms to see what it tells us about the fans.

GILLIAM: Doesn't slash have it's own social norms? Do you write bestiality?

HICKS: No, that does fit with wanting to see certain characters together. [Laughs] Though I guess Beauty and the Beast might be.

GILLIAM: Then there are social norms within slash. Do slash writers include children in their stories?

HICKS: Not sexually.

GILLIAM: Sadomasochism?

HICKS: Blake's 7 does a lot of S&M, but the characters all hated each other anyway. For some reason I'm seeing a lot of it in U.N.C.L.E. fandom.

GILLIAM: Mr Waverly and his cane.

BYERS: Bend over and open channel D!

SHIPPEY: Like I said, the basest form of writing.

GILLIAM: That seems to correlate some of the theories that were advanced earlier.