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12/03/2001 Entry: "Sure Signs I Think Too Much: The History Of Fanfic?"

WARNING: Highly random.

Randomly:
Did you know that American women were provably writing slash fanfic in 'zines as far back as 1975? I sure didn't, until I read about it in one of my encyclopedias of pop culture. Furthermore, it was Star Trek slash. Spock/Kirk. A concept which makes large many-footed bugs crawl up my spine.

Even more randomly:
Boyfriend read the same book, and we ended up getting into a discussion of slash fanfic at dinner. Boyfriend postulates that the concept of yaoi/slash as entertainment for women probably developed in the 60s, since it was then that both the women's lib and the gay rights movements first got underway. I thought about that for a minute, then agreed. It sounds plausible.

Odd, really. That's a facet of yaoi fandom I'd never stopped to consider: the history thereof.
I've only really been a yaoi fangirl for about a year. Furthermore, I've restricted my fangirlish leanings to Japanese offerings: anime, manga, and RPGs. So if I'd ever stopped to think about it, and I didn't, I would have assumed that it was a relatively recent development, and one that grew concurrently with the rise of the internet and the importation of Japanese pop culture... how wrong I would have been.
I have no doubts that those two things contributed greatly to the massive growth of the fandom in recent years. But... man. 1975. Goes to show you that there's nothing new under the sun, I guess.

I don't know about you guys, but I'd love to read some of the earliest slash fanfics. Talk about impossible to get your hands on, but...

Hell, now I'm curious about the history of fanfic in general. I'm assuming that it's linked to the post-war rise of American pop culture, but I could be wrong... were there people in the twenties writing Lovecraft fanfic?
Well, hey! That's one way to look at August Derleth, right? But back then, it wasn't fanfic, it was considered actual legitimate publishable writing...

Now I have this mental image of the medieval Japanese writing fanfic about the Tale of Genji... grargh. Someone stop me, please. Stop me before I decide to try to write a dissertation on the history of fanfic.

Replies: add your comment: currently 12 comments

>>>Someone stop me, please. Stop me before I decide to try to write a dissertation on the history of fanfic.<<<

No, no, Moonie, think I'm gonna let you run with that one. It's actually kind of interesting, I knew about that whole Kirk/Spock thing a while ago. I think the first "slashy" thing I ever saw was Star Wars related, and now you know that the Phantom Menace had like a crazy yaoi following. Slash/yaoi pops up in the weirdest places, and is actually a time honored tradition, as well as an important byproduct of the civil rights movement. So woo hoo.

...Yeah, moving on from my scary knowledge of this genre. O_O;

Posted by Becca Ming @ 12/03/2001 06:40 PM EST

You can get old school slash, and it's wonderful. "Price of the Phoenix" and it's sequel, "Fate of the Phoenix" contain no outright slash, but they are clearly written by women who have slashed, and allowed me to jump to the concept myself when I read them. They are officially published, and have even been reprinted, but they are before the current parasitic publisher got a hold of the series and sucked the life out of it. I learned to love Star Trek from these books, rather than the reverse. And if you wanted to do that research paper (please please) I bet the women who wrote it would know something, maybe be able to tip you some leads.
Just Amazon for the titles -- the used books cost more to ship than they do to buy.
-Mari

Posted by Mari @ 12/03/2001 10:05 PM EST

The first slash fanfic I ever ran across was back inİİİ oh, shoot, it musta been around 1995İİİ I remember that I had Netscape vİ 1İ0 at the timeİ And it was Star Trekİ And, at the time, it frightened meİ

Posted by Lack Thereof @ 12/04/2001 12:37 AM EST

That's actually... *fascinating*. I knew about early Trek slash, which I'm positive still exists out there in the form of well-loved and carefully preserved 'zines, just hadn't pegged it to the rise of feminism/gay activism. But now I'm wondering, how far back does the yaoi tradition in Japanese culture extend? I don't think the feminism movement hit them the same time it hit the "west", is it even pegged to the same cultural movements? Was it always more acceptable there than here as entertainment for women?

HMMMmmm...

Posted by Wren @ 12/04/2001 07:46 AM EST

Did that book happen to be _Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth_ by Camille Bacon-Smith? I ran across that book almost 10 years ago (published 1992), and it was the first time I learned the term "Mary Sue." Slash pairings mentioned (aside from Kirk and Spock) were Apollo/Starbuck and Starsky/Hutch. O_O;;;;

Posted by Crying Sailor @ 12/04/2001 10:35 AM EST

Some things indeed are much older than we realize, and it can be surprising. It does make you wonder how old these stories are indeed and when they began. Getting a hold of them, like you said, would be a challaenge. Perhaps not impossible, but probably damn near so.
I guess I don't know enough about the matter to say anything else.... Asi es la vida....

Posted by Wolf @ 12/04/2001 01:38 PM EST

urgh Urgh Urgh.... Apollo/Starbuck?
Starsky/Hutch! YUCK! ur... sorry. Just thinking about those pairings give me the willies. I think even as a tiny brained pre-adolescent I though Starbuck was way too gross. URk. Now, lets see.. hmm CHiPs...

Posted by Cheri @ 12/04/2001 08:57 PM EST

Actually, as far as fic itself goes, there were people writing Sherlock Holmes fic way back in the day, and so forth; frankly, I think the concepts of fanart and fanfic are such that they'll happen any time a relatively creative person enjoys something, especially when there's a plot hole or something, even more so when they have someone else to talk to. They may never write it down, or share it, but it's there.

As for slash, there was Trek slash as soon as the TV show started airing in the early 70's. Like, the VERY FIRST SEASON. Trek slash built the genre; whatever existed before, nothing blew it up and grabbed people the way Trek slash did. Kirk/Spock is the reason we call it slash, yo.

I too find the subject fascinating; I did a class report on it last year for a Literature in Japanese Culture class (my teacher was a very strange woman). There are a lot of really good "history" sites out there already. I recommend them to you.

Posted by benimaru @ 12/05/2001 09:12 AM EST

The Foresmutters Project is dedicated to unearthing and archiving early Trek slash. There's not much there, but it's a place to start.

Posted by tiercel @ 12/05/2001 10:05 AM EST

Jaysis, you people are starting to scare me here. The comments and email I've gotten on the subject have all been reasonable, intelligent, learned, and well-written; not bad at all for something I wrote in about ten minutes because I thought it was amusing.
This subject demands more research. Whether it demands it from me depends entirely on how much longer my winter slump lasts.

Posted by Mooncalf @ 12/05/2001 12:58 PM EST

Trek might have gone into syndication in the 70s, benimaru, but it was first shown on September 8, 1966 (the episode "The Man Trap"), and by 1967 Star it had won a Hugo for "The Menagerie".

I remember reading my first slash at a convention in the mid eighties - and it was a K/S slash. The scary thing was that it was actually well-written, so you would have Kirk and Spock recognisably behaving as themselves on one page, but doing, ahem, shall we say "stuff that didn't appeal to me as a heterosexual male" on the next. Very strange.

Slash fiction is all over then place now - I've even heard of straight slash fiction. Ivanova and , well, anyone from Babylon 5 for a start.

The problem is if you're interested in this sort of things is that there's a lot of badly written slash around out there.

Posted by Johnny @ 12/07/2001 07:34 AM EST

Oh, yes. There is straight slash. Huge amounts. Come now, think about it. Trek fanboys + the cast of Star Trek: Voyager = Slash, slash, SLASH. There just weren't any characters which it was appropriate for back in the days of kirk/spock. There used to be a big archive of it at archive.nu but I'm not sure if that domain even exists anymore.

Posted by Lack Thereof @ 12/08/2001 04:34 AM EST