In the next few weeks at Fishmarket Theatre Co., we’re interested in…
THE QUEER AND LADY-LED ORIGIN OF FANFICTION!
CRINGE (or #NO BETA WE DIE LIKE MEN), our new play which you can read about in our last newsletter, is focused on the genesis of fanfiction in 1960s fanzines. The first, and largest, was Spockanalia, a fanzine (fan-written magazine) focused on Star Trek that was first published in 1967.
In our quest to trace the history of modern fanfiction, we begin in the 1960s with the women who penned fan content around the show, from paintings to Vulcan geography theory to silly, romantic, serious stories about Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.
Men are seen as the main demographic of the Star Trek fandom (whatever). But the fiction stories that now dominate fanfiction sharing forums like Archive of Our Own (Ao3) started with the women who thought that Star Trek “‘did not keep its distance from emotion; did not deny close, warm human relationships even among males; did not call for a stiff upper lip; did not deny the existence and importance of sex; did not ban psychological action as a plot-moving force; did not deny the possibility of women who might be more than damsels’” (47)
The above photo features a cartoon from the story “A Fragment Out of Time,” featuring Kirk and Spock in an embrace. Diane Merchant wrote the story in the 1970s, and it is seen as the first published Kirk/Spock story that originated the term “slash” fiction.
“Slash fiction” is defined as literature about romantic relationship between same-sex, fictional couples.
In the 1970s, more fandoms finding queerness emerged. The aptly named “Starsky and Hutch” syndrome is the phenomenon in which the male leads of a buddy-style show (Starsky and Hutch, for example) are constantly in physical contact. Of course, this kind of filming and scene staging lead to homoerotic interpretations that emerged largely in fanfiction. By 1978, a new Star Trek zine called Naked Times mostly consisted of Kirk/Spock relationship fiction.
These days, fanfiction authors on Ao3 are 80% female, 6% genderqueer, and about 4% male, according to a census of Ao3 spanning 105,000 users. 38% of them identified as straight. This thread is where CRINGE takes its inspiration—if you’re interested, or want to learn more, you can get tickets for our New York production here!