The Gimlet Eye: Fanzines

News Media Commentary
Title:	The Gimlet Eye: Fanzines
Commentator:	D. Keith Mano for "The National Review" (v.31 issue 23, page 756-757)
Date(s):	June 8, 1979
Venue:	print
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
External Links:
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The Gimlet Eye: Fanzines is a two-page article/essay by D. Keith Mano (who had a love affair with the colon punctuation mark).

It was published in the conservative magazine, "The National Review," on June 8, 1979.

Part of this article was reprinted in APA Enterprise #22 in 1984.

Some Topics Discussed

• the author asserts that Star Trek fandom is primarily women (by a margin of ten to one)
• a fan named Lynn explains what a fanzine is to our intrepid journalist
• the statement that all fan fiction writers want to "move up" to pro writing someday
• emphasis on fan fiction requiring a lack of profit
• the journalist's statement that fan writers are not very creative
• the hint that fan writers don't please their husbands in the bedroom
• the assertion that people have always gravitated to pairing off characters, including The Lone Ranger and the "ethnic misfit" Tonto
• the suggestion that both Kirk and Spock can't have "normal" relationships with females
• the suggestion that "Kirk is woman; Spock is man," but also that Spock is also a woman, too
• males are "pestered by that ubiquitous, annoying get-in-touch-with-your-femaleness tirades"
• for all the journalist's pretentious expertise, he admits that "Star Trek is the only TV series I have seen more than one episode of"

From the Essay

Dateline: Fandom. A female country: ten women for each man here, at the Star Trek Convention. Women with husbands who will never travel at warp ten: a phone switcher, a policeman, a dentist. Their children eat pacifiers solemnly...

[...]

Serious, attentive women much like those who fret about beginning-middle-end at writers’ conferences — and I don’t intend to mock them. They are in charge of our small legends.

“Artwork and layout and editing. A good fanzine takes months, sometimes years to produce.” Lynn has one in her hand: thirty contributors, two hundred pages, lush printing. Cost: $12.35 postpaid. A comely item: my publishers should care so much. “We’re learning to write. We all hope to move up from fanzines to paid writing. But, meanwhile, this is a place where we can get published. Where we can read each other’s work and criticize it. You know, we say. That isn’t the way Captain Kirk would talk or Spock would think. This 'zine took 140 hours just to type on computer tape. Most of us have jobs or children. Believe me, no one can make a profit. Anyhow, we’re not allowed to. That’s why these are called fanzines, not magazines. We’d be infringing on the Star Trek copyright if we made money. We have to be amateur — though not amateurish, I hope. And, if you like your teeth, don’t call me a trekkie.”

So there it is: the TV school of literature. I’ve always wondered about those newspaper ads for cutlery or glue — you know, the ones that say as seen on tv. A disputable imprimatur: can the mere visibility of glue on my 16-inch screen improve its adhesiveness? Now we’ll have poems and stories as seen. Used to be the tag “True Life Adventure” could increase marketability in a book: readers didn’t want fiction. But TV fiction, apparently, is another fish. After all, it happens right in the living- or bedroom: your husband is not more intimate (both can be turned off). Star Trek fanzine dialogue will impersonate Spock’s didactic locutions, even William Shatner’s farinaceous pause... filled...acting. There is no reason for character development: ingredients are given on each label. Kirk and Spock have wide reference: anything televised enough does. Reality, too, is intermittent at best. Action will plot itself out in strange space/time continua: fanzinists feel no responsibility to refurbish or make more concise our perception of subcelestial life. This can’t be, I think, a promising exercise for new writers: the rerun method.

Yet they jerk at my attention. In one story Kirk dies. In another. In another. Then Spock has been blinded for good: really all ears now. The fanzinists won’t accept TV law: This character must be kept alive and recognizable for next week. There is even a noticeable amount (say 10 per cent) of hardcore Star Trek porn at the convention. Little subcortical rebellions against TV. If Kirk can die, then an extra quantum of anxiety (and humanity) will drift within gravitational pull. Fanzine stories are each, at base, the final episode. (Remember: for almost ten years Star Trek has been in cryogenic freeze: repeating, repeating: unable to finish.) Fanzinists don’t want another three-year hitch on The Enterprise. They want consummation: death and porn signal that. Consummation particularly in the matter of relationship.

Freudian cheap-shot artists would whiff an incipient homosexuality in Spock-Kirk. (This sort of pairing has been continuous throughout American adventure: the Lone Ranger and Tonto are separated from Star Trek only by time and hardware: Tonto, like Vulcan Spock, was an ethnic misfit.)

Both Kirk and Spock are repressed around women: Kirk, because of his rank; Spock, because of, his dispassionate Vulcan heritage. Fanzines, though—owing, doubtless, to their female orientation — have shaken off the simple-headed homosexual psycho-cant. Star Trek derives its influence from a much more complex (and lucky) suggestiveness. In fact: Kirk is woman; Spock is man. Kirk (and, to a lesser extent, McCoy, Scott, all the and the Earthlings) will flirt with Spock. They are passionate, vulnerable—well: human, earthy. Spock’s unresponsive nature irks them. He is paradigmatically masculine: logical, tearless, profession-directed: shut off by Vulcan (read macho) moral codes. Fanzine story after fanzine story will conclude with something equivalent to a sensitive (but sexless) Spock-Kirk embrace. Actually Star Trek, as series, might be subtitled “The Emotional Seduction of Mr. Spock.”

Yet Star Trek is more even than all that. In its prime time — 1968 or so — the nation was bullied by a new and often unpleasant emotional permissiveness: demonstration, riot, explicit sexuality. Spock stood for the Eisenhower Era under siege: he was Fifties Man, self-assured and rigid and chauvinist. I remember (Star Trek is the only TV series I have seen more than one episode of) — I remember that famous Omicron Ceti III chapter. On Omicron, Spock, stricken by some local un-Vulcanizing germ, attempted love: attempted. It was, given the social and psychological resonances set up week after week, a most sublime dramatic moment.

Fanzine writers (women) have reconstructed Spock’s past: in doing this they have also anthropomorphized him, so to speak. He was, you recall, an inter-galactic mulatto: half Vulcan, half human. The ladies change that terminology: they make Spock half male, half female. They attribute his epic stoicism to an oppressive father and an oppressive Vulcan (male) culture. They then do what Kirk could not: seduce him: give him tears. I daresay Spock has cuckolded many of us in the female daydream. But he was us, too: us men, pestered by that ubiquitous, annoying get-in-touch-with-your-femaleness tirade. He never gave way: network programming wouldn’t allow it: and, by pure dumb chance, a powerful thematic tension was strung in place.

How powerful? Powerful enough to make Star Trek fanzines the most evocative, clear, and consistent vanity-press writing I have yet read. That is one hallmark of true myth: it can instill in even its smallest minstrels a universal tone.

Fan Comments

Thanks for running the excerpt from that article, and especially for telling us exactly where we could find it (I ran right out to the local library to read the whole thing.) It's always fascinating to read how an outsider (non-fan) views things Trekkish. I don't buy his Spock-as-ultimate-male theory — in fact. I've argued in the K/S APA that he has many "feminine” traits and is often used in fanzine stories to contrast with Kirk-as-Alpha-Male — but it was an intriguingly different personal response to Trek.

The theory of "Spock being the ultimate male" has been around awhile. I've read articles on that similar idea which were written back in the early seventies. I have also read fanzine stories where the idea of Spock having feminine traits is hinted at. One that comes to mind is a non-K/S slavery story which I believe appeared in Matter/Antimatter. Although the idea of Spock having feminine traits were forced upon him by the circumstances of the story (and the writer herself), it was definitely emphasized. I wonder why the idea of Spock (or Kirk) is so apparent in many fan stories? I don't have an affection for the idea myself... both Kirk and Spock are all male to me.