by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

There would be no modern fandom without Star Trek. It’s a plain and simple fact. And as a person who was raised on Livejournal, AO3, and Tumblr throughout my very formative years, it’s extremely clear where we can lay all of the praise (and a fair amount of blame) for the current state of things. Well, Star Trek and social media, but the latter is a conversation for another day!

Given the expansive nature of what fandom looks like today, it’s strange to think that all the things we consider as part of the “canon” came from an episodic television series in the late 1960s. It’s something that feels, at once, like the longest time imaginable and like there should have been something before it. But what could have come before Gene Roddenberry’s space western? The answer is, ultimately, absolutely nothing. Star Trek was an hour-long series that captured the imaginations of women (massively big deal in fandom) in a way that no other drama had. And that it managed to do that before serialization occurred in American television in the 1980s is a spectacular achievement.

It’s an achievement that sits, quite attentively, at the feet of its characters, and the actors portraying them. I talked last month about the very specific draw that Mr. Spock (and by extension Leonard Nimoy) had on women, even before the show aired. But the inexplicable sex appeal of the Vulcan First Officer was both predicted by Roddenberry and then played into during the second season of The Original Series.

With episodes like “Amok Time,” “Mirror, Mirror,” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Roddenberry secured the show’s place in the world of very recognizable types of fanservice, while maintaining the specifics of his vision for the series. It’s easy to imagine the logic in a lot of the episode plotting. Women love Spock? Well, what if Vulcans have a type of biological mating ceremony that involves fighting, and it’s time for him to take part? Don’t worry, he’s fighting Kirk and we’ll very carefully give Shatner a shirt tear for the ladies.

Because Roddenberry and company knew what so many gatekeeping men in modern fandom fail to remember, or even consider: women are often the building blocks of fandom, especially where genre fiction is concerned. People always make fun of teen girls for their interests, and yet those very interests become billion-dollar industries overnight.

And the same can be said, both monetarily and culturally, about the way that women and girls have shaped and constructed what is considered the very building blocks of media consumption. Without the women who, during season two, started Star Trek fanzines and led the charge on the campaign to save the show when it was all but canceled, there would be no enduring fandom culture as we know it. They created the mold we’re all just fitting ourselves into.

So, let’s talk about those fanzines. They’re cool as hell, and a lot of them are actually saved online and in academic archives because of their cultural significance. (Plus, it’s neat that fandom at large started in the very thing we, at MovieJawn, still use as a medium! I feel very connected to the women who started this whole thing because of it, honestly!)

Widely considered the first of the Star Trek fanzines, Spockanalia’s first issue was released while the second season was just starting in September of 1967. It was edited by Devra Langsam (who originated “Langsam’s Law,” a concept related to characters being “Out-Of-Character” or OOC, in fanfiction, though the name, itself, didn’t stick) and Sherna Comerford (who would later organize the first Star Trek convention). It was a 90-page spread of various content from fanart and fanfiction, to nonfiction musing on elements of the show and an opening letter from Leonard Nimoy, himself. He’d sent along a biography of Mr. Spock at their request, which I find absolutely charming.

But even more so than Langsam and Comerford getting some interaction from Nimoy, was the general reaction from Roddenberry at large. In 1968, Gene called Spockanalia “required reading,” saying that it should be given to every new writer and decision maker on the series. And that was how the people involved in the show related to this new level of fan interaction, the depths of which hadn’t really been seen before. They loved it. They interacted with it. They wouldn’t stop talking about it. And they used it.

One of the other big zines at the time was The Concordance, which was privately published in 1968. It was a resource zine compiled by Dorothy Jones and edited by Bjo Trimble. And it would be used, later on, by actual writers on Star Trek shows to keep continuity, eventually being published in that form for a mass audience in 1976.

Now, it should be noted that slash fanfiction, aka queer shipping, didn’t come into wide popularity in the fanzine community until the publication of Grup in 1972. Everything published in fanzines up to that point had been general fiction. No “Spock-goes-to-bed-with” stories, as they were often known as, which is part of the reason why Grup was created in the first place. The very first issue of it had a NSFW piece of centerfold fanart of Mr. Spock, with issue two having one of Sulu. And in Grup #3, published in 1974, was what is widely considered the first slash fic. That short and, by today’s standards, not particularly explicit piece of fanfiction was written by Diane Marchant, and I doubt she could have known how it would change history and shape our fandom world today.

Because when you’re talking about fandoms of genre media, specifically in the television realm, one of the largest factions in any successful one is the queer fanbase. This can mean a few things, which is kind of neat. It can mean queer fans, generally, but it can also mean (and often does) the queering of canon, within fandom. (Or the celebration of anything that might be actual canon.) This usually results in queer shipping in fanon works, like fanfiction, fanart, and sometimes even fanfilms. Something Marchant unknowingly led the charge on, even when it was published anonymously. Perhaps even more so.

And because she was the first, at least in this manner, the pairing she wrote about gets the distinction of being the first queer ship in modern history: Spork (sometimes called Spirk, which I’d argue is worse!), aka Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock. The two men remain the most popular ship in all of Star Trek, across every iteration. They get the kind of tried-and-true “soulmate” trope, but on a somewhat grander scale. No matter how long it’s been, no matter what their lives are like, fans will always ship Kirk and Spock.

A quick sidebar, though, to talk about women, queer shipping, and where we’re all at with that!

So, the injection, through fanzines, of queerness into Star Trek, where it never existed canonically, is actually the stepping stone to a larger conversation in fandom, and within the queer community, that we’ve been having since the apparent dawn of time. Which is, of course, why do so many women ship men - and what’s the vibe with that?

Given that I cannot confirm, for various reasons, the sexuality of many women who participated in the queer Star Trek fandom, I can only speculate as to the original reason. But I imagine it’s similar to today, or at least to the era that I was coming up in, being a queer woman who ships men. So, while it’s a more common practice than any of us would like these days for heterosexual women to sexuality objectify queer men, I’d argue that the women of the 1970s, when queer shipping came into its own, probably weren’t in that category? (But, like, correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to hear from straight women who shipped Spork in the 1970s. I need to pick your brain!) Anyway, my assumption is that, like many queer women operating on the slash side of fandom, there were two reasons for this.

First is the sexism! More often than not, men are the center of stories. This is starting to change, but is still generally true, and was certainly the case in Star Trek: The Original Series. Because of this, men are the lens through which most people, regardless of their gender, view the world as it exists in the media. And that worldview gets brought into their real lives and then is projected back on the media they’re consuming. So, men are the emotional buoys through which most of us view self actualization, romance, friendship, anger, love, family, etc. It is through fictional men that we start to understand the world, as messy as that very narrow viewpoint might be.

Second is the unmitigated queer factor! Queer identity is only now starting to become more mainstream. It’s painful how long it’s taken, and there are equally painful steps backward happening in legislation presently. And even when we get representation… it’s often, bafflingly, through a straight perspective. But, because men make up most of the characters in media, and most of the actually developed relationships are between men, queer women often ship Achillean romance in media because it was often the only piece of meaningful queer romance, canon or not, that we had access to.

Complex and interesting women are deeply underrepresented, queer ones even less so. And so, there must be some understanding that queer women end up deciding, subconciously or not, which part of their identity they’d prefer to see represented in fandom works. And the queer one takes less work to produce and consume, since there’s no added work of building interior lives for characters - we’re trying to write fanfiction here, not build a whole new world!

However, even outside of slash fiction, the actual content of Star Trek, especially season two, led to a lot of tropes that are still in fandom at large today. Like, for instance, “Amok Time” and its place in the history of A/B/O fiction. Now, I don’t feel like I have either the time, or the mental capacity, to explain what that genre of fanfiction is, but Lindsay Ellis made a video about a recent lawsuit involving A/B/O fiction that was both very real, and extremely bananas.

And there’s no accounting for the impact Star Trek and its episodic nature had on the existence of different AU (or alternate universe) scenarios, like taking the characters of the series and putting them in a coffee shop, or in college. “Mirror, Mirror,” on its own, created the idea of the Mirror!Verse (where everything and everyone is a bit darker than normal), and gave us sexy Spock with a beard. Two tropes all their own that still occur, in some part, today.

There’s no amount of thanks and praise that can be given to the women who watched Star Trek and felt inspired to create. Not that can adequately express the impact that those choices have on us, over 50 years later. Anything your fandom did can be traced back to the Enterprise - and in some ways creating this type of fandom was, perhaps, the final frontier for how the audience would interact with media. It certainly feels like it, when you realize that every argument, question, and creative endeavor that is produced in the modern context can find its equivalent in the Star Trek fandom.

But even with its very vocal and active fanbase, Star Trek was on the chopping block after season two. However, Star Trek fans don’t take things sitting down, which led to one of the first recorded efforts of a fandom trying to stave off cancellation. A monumental success, and one that we turn to in order to save shows today - but more on that with the start of season three!