Kirk/Spock

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Picture of Kirk and Spock from the episode The Trouble with Tribbles

Contents

[edit] Timeline of events

Below is a partial timeline of events in this fan fiction community.

[edit] 1974

  • "A Fragment Out Of Time" is the first known Star Trek Slash to be published in fanzine. The author was Diane Marchant. The vignette was published in Grup #3. The language was highly coded and did not refer to Spock and Kirk by name but rather referred to them as he and him. (Langley) The first line of this story contained the rather ironic line of "we're by no means setting a precedent" spoken by Kirk. (Sir Bob)
  • Mary Manchester outlined her "Continuity Theory" of Kirk/Spock.

[edit] 1975

  • In 1975, "Ring of Shoshern" was circulating privately in Great Britain. This story was not published until 1987 in Alien Brothers. Some sources say the story was circulated among fans earlier than 1975, perhaps as early as 1969 or 1970.
  • Star Trek Lives!, edited and written by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston, was published. This book contained a chapter at the end of the book which examines Star Trek fan fiction and the Kirk/Spock relationship in fan fiction. This book is important because that last chapter helped formed a lot of the modern thought on Slash communities. Scholars still cite this source today.
  • While the first Kirk/Spock story may have been published the previous year, more material was out there and not getting published. The general community did not seem overly receptive to romance and in particular, that pairing. Diane Marchant would address this pairing in an essay in Grup #4. There was a follow discussion to this essay in the Star Trek letterzine, Halkan Council. This did not lead to a glut of these stories being privately circulated being published in fanzines. Rather, many would continue their trips underground, in some cases not being published for another ten to fifteen years.

[edit] 1976

[edit] 1978

  • Between January and March, Thrust is the first Star Trek anthology fanzine published to contain only Kirk/Spock slash in the early part of this year.
  • There began to be a drop off in the number of Star Trek fanzines being published as some were leaving the fan fiction community because of the prevelance of Kirk/Spock material.


[edit] Late 1970s

  • During the late 1970s, fandom rumor claims that women were not actively sought to write professional Star Trek novels because many of the ones who they had used had connections to the slash community. Paramount was worried that these female writers would try to work in more Kirk/Spock material and other homoerotic material, which they were uncomfortable publishing because that was not the way they wanted the franchise to go.

[edit] 1970s and 1980s

"The same thing happened in ST fanfic. Mary Sue’s abounded in the early years after the series ended and when I was following it in the early 70’s, they were practically non-existent. In their place was Kirk/Spock – the only form of self-insertion fic that the ‘establishment’ of ST fandom would tolerate. These types of fics grew rampant and it got to the point were you couldn’t find any other kind of Star Trek story. The people who would have written anything else weren’t being read and those who might have wanted to read anything else had long before found that nothing was being written (or at least published) in ST fanfic that wasn’t slash. It gave ST fanfic a very bad reputation and when SW fandom started up, Lucasfilm was VERY insistent that fanfic in it’s genre would not end up going in the same direction. I published a fanzine in that era, and you were supposed to send a copy of your ‘zine to Lucasfilm’s Fan Club – it was said to be for archiving purposes, but I knew from others in the fandom that if you had questionable stories in your publication, you would be pressured not to publish again. Lucasfilm was very active in monitoring it’s fandom while I was part of it (until 83) but I have no idea what happened afterwards."

[edit] 1984

  • The convention of using both K&S and K/S to designate a story featuring the Kirk/Spock relation was still in use; the use of just the slash had not yet been standardized.
  • Usenet gained more exposure in 1984 with a presentation by Alice Greene. In June, she showed Star Trek fans net.startrek and explained some of the advantages to using this medium for fannish communications. Archives from net.startrek during that period show that discussion of slash, referenced as K&S was happening on the group, along with advertisements for various Star Trek fanzines.

[edit] 1985

  • The following is a post to net.startrek from 1985 to give people an idea of the climate at the time:
Aug 14 1985, 7:09 pm
Newsgroups: net.startrek
From: s...@uoregon.UUCP
Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 19:09:00 EDT
Subject: Re: Requested information on K/S

Feminists who are interested in erotica written by women for women should find themselves very able to "stomach" K/S. They should check out the rave review of K/S written by SF feminist author Joanna Russ in a fanzine namec NOME, "Another Addict Raves about K/S." Natrually there is a spectrum of material-from mild to X-rated, from well-written to total trash. This material is widely circulated, but not "Published" in the ordinary, or profit-making sense, and is in fact underground material of great interest to the participants-the writers, readers and editors. Unfortunately, attention paid to K/S for its feminist
importance, may be damaging to fandom as a whole, if Paramount gets too interested in it. Starsky/Hutch and Star Wars fandoms were severely restricted by
paranoid producers. Joanna has refused to supply the names of K/S editors and writers to the editors of Penthouse FORUM--but FORUM is interested. As for the writers involved, writing fan material is wonderful fun, and may just provide the impetus for writers to break into publication, as a number of fan writers have. While it is true that REAL SF writers look ascance at Trek as formula
fiction, the first item of importance to most aspiring writers is GETTING PUBLISHED. Trek is a "hungry" market.

[edit] 1987

  • An examination of Datazine 48 looking at Star Trek fanzines published this year shows that there were 47 non-Kirk/Spock zines compared to 30 Kirk/Spock zines. Universal Translator, looking at the same year, lists 144 non-Kirk/Spock zines to 58 Kirk/Spock fanzines.

[edit] 1992

>Sure, what do you want to know? K/S is a sub-genre of Trek fan lit in
>which Kirk and Spock are in love. It is a highly feminist and female
>phenomenon. The love affair is definitely between men, as far as bodies
>go, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to a female ideal of love.
>Basically, K/S stories are about everlasting love between equals and
>heroes, a thing almost impossible in more mundane love stories. [2]

[edit] 1995

A discussion of Star Trek pairing codes and name abbrevations was posted by Aleph Press to rec.arts.startrek.current on November 30, 1995. It said:

B/G *is* Bashir and Garak. There are only two commonly accepted fan slash
acronyms in Trek-- K/S (Kirk/Spock) and P/C (Picard/Crusher.) You never
see S/K or C/P. Other orthographies exist for B/G, though (I've also seen
it G/B, and even G/J! A side note-- a lot of fans have taken up using
people's first names in their orthographies, for instance referring to
Dax/Bashir fiction as J/J, despite the fact that neither character is
commonly called by their first name on the show. I think this is
annoying. If I see J, I expect it to be Janeway, not Dax or Bashir.)

[edit] 1996

[edit] 2000

  • K/S fiction, which has blossomed online after Sci Fi Channel's decision to rerun the series in the late 1990's, peaks at nearly 900 story posts. (Some stories were posted in multiple parts, so the total number of individual stories is somewhat lower.)


[edit] Official positions on Kirk/Spock

I was never aware of this 'lovers' rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently, he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow, which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself... I have always found my best gratification in that creature called woman. Also, I would not like to be thought of as being so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years. (Roddenberry, Gene. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Pocket Books, 1979.)

Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy, and William Shatner have been asked many times over the years for their opinions on Kirk/Spock. They said it was not something the did intentionally but that they don't object to the Kirk/Spock subculture.

At times, however, Gene Roddenberry seemed concerned—as were many fans—that exposing Kirk/Spock to the mainstream could hurt the Star Trek franchise. Gene Roddenberry was reported to have remarked that there would be trouble if "the mothers of America" were to discover the existence of sexually explicit Kirk/Spock zines.

Gene Roddenberry on K/S:

"Yes, there's certainly some of that—certainly with love overtones. Deep love. The only difference being, the Greek ideal—we never suggested in the series—physical love between the two. But it's the—we certainly had the feeling that the affection was sufficient for that, if that were the particular style of the 23rd century." (Shatner, William, et al. Where No Man... The Authorized Biography of William Shatner, Ace Books, 1979, pp. 147-8)

[edit] Sources

  • Alexander , A., & Harris, C. (Eds.). (1998). Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity. Hampton: Hampton Press.
  • Bacon-Smith, C. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Pittsburg: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Byrd, Patricia. "Star Trek Lives: Trekker Slang." American Speech, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring, 1978) , pp. 52-58.
  • Cherny, L., & Weise, E. R. (Eds.). (1996). Wired women : gender and new realities in cyberspace. Seattle: Seal press.
  • Curtin, Mary Ellen. A Bibliography of Early K/S. Foresmutters Project. Copyright 2000. Bp http://www.eclipse.net/~mecurtin//au/earlyKS.htm
  • Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
  • Penley, Constance. NASA / Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. New York: Verso. 1995.
  • Russ, J. (n.d.). Another Addict Raves About K/S. Nome, 8.
  • Sir Bob. "Re: Coolest Fantasy Villain." rec.games.frp.dnd. 1 Jul 2003.

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