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Fanfic, and slash fiction in particular, is a huge part of SF fandom history – and its overlapping communities have mostly been built and shared by women.
Diane Marchant is generally regarded as the writer of the first published fic featuring Kirk/Spock – the ship which popularised slashfic as a fan phenonenon. And she was Australian, to boot!
You’re welcome, rest of the world.
The story, “A Fragment Out of Time,” published in Grup #3 in 1974, contained a steamy sex scene but named no names (and played the pronoun game, so it wasn’t even clearly marked out as a m/m relationship).
Still, the piece was illustrated with a Kirk & Spock picture drawn by Diane, making her intentions fairly obvious, and a cartoon underneath the final page of the story shows Bones saying to Kirk: “Impossible….. No, Jim. I warned you about messing with aliens…….. especially Vulcans.” (The look on Kirk’s face in the cartoon implies he has just been told about the existence of slash fiction. Oh, sweetie.)
Slash fans have been vocal in their support of LGBTQ+ civil rights and representation in media, causes which have seen significant advancement in recent years. And Kirk/Spock was one of the first modern slash pairings. Read more about slash on fanlore!
I remember when I finally got a copy of the 2 page story and realized that the art added an additional layer of meaning to the story. Up to that point, none of articles about the story had ever mentioned the art and the clear signal is was sending [SLASH!!!] which is why I added the info to Fanlore. One of the many reasons to include as much as we can about the original source text.
Tags:fandom history, star trek history, slash history, DWCrosspost, fanlore, kirk/spock
Tumblr post (this is likely a reblog, and may have more pictures over there)
