Bent Street 4.1

Love from a Distance

Tiffany Jones

• Publisher: Clouds of Magellan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780648746942
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires LGBT

Bent Street 4.1 - Love from a Distance shines a light on the role of technologies in shaping human intimacy within the broader frame of COVID-19 and lockdown. Writers, academics, artists and poets reflect on the role that technologies, old and new, play in mediating human intimacy and shaping queer culture. Bent Street 4.1 is edited by Jennifer Power, Henry von Doussa and Timothy W. Jones from La Trobe University, and produced in association with The Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society and La Trobe University Transforming Human Societies Research Focus Area.

LIFE, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

GEOFF ALLSHORN

Star Trek, fan culture, slash fiction and the queering of Starfleet Command

‘Beam Me Up, Scotty!’

Many will immediately recognise this catchphrase as a testimony to nerd culture and cult television. Yet in its day, it was a somewhat covert signal between adherents in much the same way as talking about being ‘a friend of Dorothy’ indicated membership of another fringe group.

When considering how technology has transformed social norms regarding sexuality and intimacy, we might think most readily of Grindr, social media, and even more ubiquitous tech such as mobile phones and the Internet. My story begins before any of this technology existed, back in the days of what may now be considered dinosaur tech, such as free-to-air television, the typewriter, the fordigraph machine, and the film camera. This now-outdated tech helped plug me into a Matrix of alternate reality that introduced me to my first ‘out’ gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer friends, in an era when male homosexuality was still illegal and LGBT people were shunned by polite society. This dinosaur tech also introduced me to a counter-culture of bohemian people whose lifestyles and views were open expressions of inclusion, diversity and difference.

Television

There was a time when the apex of popular communication technology in Australia was free-to-air colour television, comprising a standalone box with an antenna. There were no videotapes or DVDs, no satellite or cable TV, no streaming or iTunes, so viewers relied totally upon the whims of local TV station programmers for whatever content they might get to view. Those seeking other visual entertainment could go to the local movie cinema.

Amidst the cultural fare of programs like The Beverley Hillbillies, Are You Being Served? and The Paul Hogan Show, my young teenage self sought somewhat higher inspiration and aspiration. I found the world of Star Trek. It was a wondrous place, filled with spaceships and aliens, diverse peoples and galactic technological marvels. Although it offered no explicitly queer themes or characters, its variety of aliens implicitly endorsed the principles of diversity and inclusion. The addition of the half-human, half-Vulcan character, Spock, was also extremely popular with audiences, with many people admiring different aspects of his complex character. Stephen Fry asserts the Spock character to be a Nietzschean counterbalance to his two closest human associates as a symbolic representation of different aspects of the human psyche (Knight, 2010). Barbara Jacobs has even suggested that Spock serves as a possible role model for those with Asperger’s Syndrome (Jacobs, 2003, 38); while SF author Joanna Russ explores the idea that ‘Spock is a woman’ in that he displays attributes or characteristics that were common to gender expectations for women in earlier times—cyclical and uncontrollable sexuality, a submissive and subservient nature, etc (Russ, 1985, 29). This gender subversion would arguably become important within a cultural phenomenon that I will discuss shortly.

Many fans upheld Spock as an archetype in that he embodied optimism amidst the universal human condition of loneliness: ‘This is an optimism that says it is possible to find somebody who understands your innermost silent and lonely battles’ (Lichtenberg et al, 1975,101). Such sensitivities within the character appear to have come directly from the background of Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, who spoke of his childhood as a time when he felt different and isolated (Roddenberry, 1976). The universal nature of Spock’s inner conflicts: balancing logic with emotion, and alien with human, led one Star Trek analyst to declare that, ‘We Are All Spock’ (Blair, 1977,160). He became popular among many adolescents such as myself, who were seeking a role model as a metaphoric other exploring the strange new world of adult life. Added layers of nuance within his character were undoubtedly familiar to young LGBT kids in my day: being someone who was ‘emotionally guarded’ and living a life that testifies: ‘it’s no big jump from alien to alienated...’ (Russ, 1985, 29). In a 2015 fan eulogy for the actor Leonard Nimoy, I wrote of his character’s significance in my own life some decades earlier, when I had faced stigma, prejudice and discrimination:

Spock was a kindred spirit, someone who had found strength, pride and nobility in being different … Spock’s resilience and quiet dignity in the face of intolerance, or bullying, or alien dangers; served as an example to ennoble and enable the lives of many fans who might otherwise have felt isolation or despair. (Allshorn, 2015, 13)

Star Trek was a utopian fantasy that explored galaxies of diverse ideas. While Australia was grappling with the idea of multiculturalism in the 1970s, I was absorbing the Star Trek philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC). The Star Trek fan base has always been welcoming of those whom normal society might consider to be aliens in our midst. Star Trek actor and LGBT activist George Takei elaborates on this conjoining of diversity with inclusion: ‘The show always appealed to people that were different — the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian’ (Lang, 2015). Even after Star Trek’s popularity had peaked, it was reported that Star Trek Voyager was equal third most popular TV show (alongside The Simpsons) in San Francisco (PlanetOut staff, 2000). LGBT viewers have always been attracted to this TV program—even though its implied diversity has not explicitly included queer characters or themes—and they have been prepared to translate its sense of inclusion into real life.

As part of this inclusive mindset, enthusiastic fans sent letters to the Star Trek offices offering constructive suggestions for future Star Trek adventures. Among their suggestions back in the early days of gay liberation was a request that gay characters be included in order to demonstrate and promote tolerance (Sackett, 1977, 166). This call was ignored by Star Trek creators, so the fans created their own reality. They took ideas from television and translated them into real life.

Typewriters and Fordigraph Machines

Star Trek fandom attracted a large influx of female authors and participants, indicating that something specific within Star Trek must have attracted the interest and passion of such women. Part of the attraction, it seems, was an interest in what became known as the Kirk/Spock relationship. This was possibly first glimpsed in a 1967 episode of Star Trek called Amok Time, which featured exotic Vulcan (hetero)sexuality with just a hint of homo-suggestive entanglement. (Sinclair, J. and D’Anne, eds, 2016).

Eager for more Star Trek adventures, fans wrote their own. Female Star Trek fans grabbed their typewriters and fordigraph (or similar hand-operated spirit duplicator) machines to assertively self-publish fan fiction (‘fanfic’ or ‘fic’) stories within amateur fan magazines (‘fanzines’ or ‘zines’). Actor Leonard Nimoy acknowledged the popularity of heterosexual fanfic written by these women, whose zines ranged from generic Star Trek stories to others that were outright erotic—some of which transgressed beyond heterosexuality into the homoerotic:

The cover of one of these ‘fan-zines’ in particular shows `a very well done drawing of Mr Spock stripped to the waist, his lower portion covered for the most part with a draped toga exposing one bare leg, his hands manacled and a belt from the manacles chaining him to a post. The title boldly reads ‘Spock Enslaved!’ The obvious suggestion is that Spock in this case is a love slave, much in the same way that women have been used for years in erotic or semi-erotic literature. I suppose in this case, turn about is fair play. (Nimoy, 1975, 55)

Expanding upon this idea, heterosexual Australian fan Diane Marchant wrote a story entitled A Fragment Out of Time, which was published in a 1974 issue of an adult US Star Trek fanzine called Grup (Roberts, 2015). Her story is widely recognised as being the first zine-published slash story (so-named after the coded slash symbol in ‘K/S’ being shorthand for ‘Kirk/Spock’), although there are other claimants to the actual origins of slash (fanlore, 2020b). The slash symbol refers to stories containing what became popularly known as ‘the premise’, that is the practice of taking established or potential character relationships and extending them into deeper same-sex attraction (fanlore, 2020 b & d). Diane was a friend and mentor of mine, and I know that her reticence to identify Kirk and Spock within her story—and her reluctance to ever talk about it—reflected a lifelong sensitivity regarding material which may create contention, friction or scandal, evocative of the era when ‘... gay relationships of any variety, even fictional, were considered deviant, overtly sexual and perverted’ (Smith, 2018). Nonetheless, the precedent she set, and the aspects of Star Trek fandom that arose in response, gave women an avenue for expression of ideas which were, for their time, quite unconventional:

As the first depiction of a love scene between Kirk and Spock, it wasn’t just hot; it was a way of making visible the thread of attraction that runs through the complex bond between the two characters. It elevated subtext to text. In doing so it gave rise to an entire writhing, sweating universe of romantic and sexual pairings. But slash isn’t just about making porn out of things that weren’t already porn. It’s also about prosecuting fanfiction’s larger project of breaking rules and boundaries and taboos of all kinds. (Grossman, 2013).

In the historical context, the burgeoning female fan movement helped to provide women with liberated and liberating expressions of recognition, sexuality and empowerment, and many chose this freedom to lend support to other marginalised forms of sexual or gender identity. They also expanded their scope to other science fiction and TV/literary identities: Blake’s Seven, Starsky and Hutch, Babylon 5, and many others. However, slash as a genre is not without its potential problems: ‘Slash is important in creating queer representation; it’s fun and pleasurable for many people and that’s important too; but slash can sometimes be regressive, sexist, or fetishizing.’ (Flourish, 2017).

As a young gay man, I personally never found slash fiction to be particularly appealing or authentic to my life. I concluded that slash was not exploring the gay experience so much as it was presenting women’s fantasies of idealised romantic/sexual love liberated from oppressive patriarchal and homophobic traditions. In my day, slash was believed to be the purview of predominantl...