Like so many things, it began with “Star Trek.” When Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi adventure debuted to tepid reviews in 1966, no one had any inkling of the forces it would unleash. By dragging the world of sci-fi into the popular culture, the show created a whole new and wildly devoted fan base with an insatiable appetite for all things Trekkie.
Not content with just watching the show, fans began writing their own episodes, which they compiled and distributed in homemade “fanzines.”
Given human nature, it was only a matter of time before certain fans began wondering what would happen if Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock took their powerful friendship a step or two further. Highly romantic, detail-rich and usually pornographic, this sub-genre of plot lines began to boldly go where no scriptwriter had gone before.
Danger, Will Robinson
To warn their more Puritan brethren, these writers, most of them women, would mark their homoerotic tales with the characters’ initials separated by a slash — K/S — and thus “slash” fiction was born. From “Star Trek,” slash spread to buddy-cop shows — “Starsky and Hutch” and “Emergency!” were among early favorites — and other sci-fi offerings. As copying became cheaper, fanzines, including those devoted to slash fiction, proliferated. But then along came the Internet and slash was never the same again.
Hundreds of slash sites litter the Internet, some with art, graphic and otherwise, most of them with archives full of stories. Hundreds of stories. Thousands of stories. Stories that describe cooings and couplings of the most extraordinary nature. Nothing is sacred, everything is slashed. Wonder what it would be like if Hawkeye and Trapper ever got together? Luke and Han Solo? Mulder and Skinner? The cast of “Homicide: Life on the Street?” Easy to find out, in novellas that range from the sweetly romantic to the eye-poppingly hard-core — most sites open with an explanation of what they are, inviting those who might be offended to “leave now.”
While there remains an obvious leaning to sci-fi and fantasy — lots of slash deals with characters from ” Highlander,” “The Sentinel,” “The Pretender,” “Babylon 5” and even “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — if it has fans, it has been slashed. “The Lord of the Rings” (Sam and Frodo, Pippin and Merry), “The A-Team,” “Sports Night,” “Ally McBeal,” “ER,” even “Harry Potter” (although these stories all carry an explanation that the characters are now in their late teens.)
At a slash convention attended by 150 people earlier this year in Santa Barbara, Calif., “West Wing” was the topic of one panel discussion. The two most likely couples? Sam Seaborn and Josh Lyman — already there are several very well-written stories dealing with their romance — and the president and Leo McGarry.
“Although you have to take into consideration that the president is married, and seems happily married, so you wouldn’t want to disrespect that,” says one longtime slash writer. “There are rules, after all.”
And there are rules. And conferences. And much introspection and dialogue between the growing legion of slash writers, who often spend six hours a day working on their hobby. There are even several scholars who now claim slash as an area of expertise.
Constance Penley, a professor in the department of film studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, has been studying slash for 20 years. Her 1997 book “NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America” (Verso) ends with several chapters on the slash phenomenon. She discovered it while researching themes of gender in science fiction. She was drawn by the startling fact that most of this male-centered, homoerotic fiction is written by straight women, many of whom say that while they certainly enjoy the sexually explicit nature of the genre, they are more drawn to the emotional intensity of pairing strong male characters.
“It’s a place for writing that is comfortable for women,” Penley says. “It’s not a big-time writing workshop, it can be done anonymously.”
There is a small but growing genre of lesbian slash focused around such shows as “Xena: Warrior Princess,” and “ER,” but the vast majority of slash remains devoted to men. Many of the story lines are reminiscent of romance novels — with a striking difference. The main characters are truly equal. And the fact that women must turn to gay male relationships to find this equality says much about the way women are portrayed on TV and in the movies.
“There are nowhere near the number of interesting women characters on TV,” says one slash fan. “If you want to get two powerful people together and see what happens, it has to be men.”
Other slash writers say that resolving the unresolved tensions is part of the appeal. “Two male characters may have an intimacy, a tension that is never really resolved,” says another woman who has been writing slash for 15 years. Female characters, she adds, get to resolve their intimacy issues in a variety of ways — women still touch and kiss and express their love for each other, albeit nonsexually, much more frequently than men do. “Picking up where the show left off, or left out, is the major appeal of slash for me.”
Every writer interviewed for this article requested anonymity — “we’re teachers and nannies, business owners and bosses,” says one. “We can’t afford people knowing about this particular obsession.” But understanding why they do what they do is almost as interesting to slash writers as doing it.
A world of watchers
Not everyone struggles to find a deep inner meaning; for some it is simply proof that if men “like to watch,” women do too. With the explosion of Internet sites, the number of people who just watch, rather than write or otherwise participate, has grown exponentially.
For some this is a disquieting change in the subculture. Privacy, for instance, was a big issue among early slash fans — to “out” someone was the ultimate crime. And plagiarism of one slash writer by another was also a mortal sin. Both rules still stand, but ostracizing transgressors is almost impossible when identification, and communication, is all done electronically.
