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BL: The History of Shipping, How Gay Pairings Built Modern Fandom Culture [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-16
Hello readers, today I thought I would do something different and look at way that gay shipping has affected media that was not written as gay.
We have previously covered queer coding and how a lot of media has gay readings whether or not they were intentional. Those previous diaries were mostly about how people surreptitiously hid gay content to sneak it past censors or how gay fans could find representation in an extremely straight media, but today I want to talk about how gay fan pairings actually affect the fandom spaces that are popular with many today and how fan culture grew up around gay liberation. Popular fiction can reflect social changes and broaden people’s exposure to those changes with the contents, so we should all thank shippers for causing so many people encounter people they might not in everyday life.
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Modern fan culture is most easily traced back to Star Trek. In the late sixties Star Trek was cult hit, it got canceled after two seasons but a fan movement to bring it back helped get a third off the ground. It would still be canceled again after that third season, but it gave Star Trek enough episodes to be sold under syndication and get more fans with each repeat broadcast. This same enthusiasm is what lead Star Trek fans to make zines (an abbreviation of magazine that implies a tiny, independently made magazine, often made by fans before to share fan content before the internet) including a wide assortment of gay fan fiction starring Kirk and Spock.
There was plenty of fan culture around ST in general, but it is also the first show to have a fan base that consistently makes gay content revolving around the stars. Within a decade of the show’s release there were zines dedicated solely to musing about the gay nature of Kirk and Spock. Many people considered this paring canon, as the deep friendship between Kirk and Spock implies something much more intimate than many have with their best friend.
This is a running theme of media about well written leading men. Plenty of popular franchises that are extremely masculine such as Marvel and Lord of the Rings have fandoms that are dedicated to teasing the romantic meaning out of the interactions between men. Even medieval knights and their stories talk of the deep bonds between men, people historically even read gay intentions into those at times! Though the intention was to defame and not to support, I guarantee that there would people gossiping in hushed tones about which knights are the strongest couple. If it would have been acceptable at the time I am sure we would even have records of shipping wars between knight fandoms.
Star Trek was an even more pronounced case of this because the fandom welcomed so many women. These women were interested in romance and applying it to stories, so when the story presented two men who are compelling characters and are written to be closer than anyone else in the story, all of the romance fans in the audience didn’t have very far to leap to end up writing gay fan fiction (especially with the shifting cultural tides that made gay content more acceptable), also know as Slash Fiction.
Here’s a quote regarding Kirk and Spock shipping from Fanlore.org, bolded parts are my addition:
Gene Roddenberry [creator of Star Trek] explained it this way. When he created the bridge crew, he created the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate from fragments of his own mind. He could identify with each character, they were components of his own creative view of the world. So when Trekkers studied the TV series, they saw Kirk and Spock as a unit. As one entity, as needing to “get together,” as two poles of a magnet, because GR created them to be two halves of a whole.... Human nature being what it is, sexuality is the expression of that "get together" and "irresistible attraction." The soul mate hypothesis runs deep in romance literature. Many of the women drawn to Star Trek fandom, who wrote fanfic, were not science-fiction readers or fans nearly as much as they were romance readers and fans. The other factions of Star Trek's female fandom were scientists, often working in science labs. Many others were librarians and teachers whose education and professions include sociology as a science. Given that Kirk and Spock belong together -- well, then..." maybe... uh, no, but..." -- one fan wrote a story where that hypothesis was brought to the fore, played with, and suggested. That story circulated on carbon copies, then got printed -- today we’d say it "went viral" -- and all of a sudden people everywhere were arguing the hypothesis by writing stories. Simultaneously, the gay community was in the process of coming out of the closet, so while many Trek stories were fem-lib based, others were gay-lib based. My thesis is that popular fiction follows and reflects social trends but does not cause them. Popular fiction can and does help people who are not part of a particular social trend to understand the people who are part of that social trend. - Jacqueline Lichtenberg, quoted in Edward Gross & Mark Altman's The Fifty-Year Mission Volume 1 (St. Martin's Press 2017).
This all probably looks very familiar to you if you have spent anytime in fandom culture, this culture of consumption, production through a personal view of the story, and sharing that personal construction with other fans is the basic way fandom operates to this day. There were even people upset about the presence of gay content, much like we have today! Some because they didn’t think fandom needed to focus on “sexual abnormalities” and even some gay people who found the depictions offensive.
It is important to note that authors were potentially placing themselves in legal jeopardy by doing this as well. We have long had the first amendment as protection, but obscenity isn’t covered and is determined by a very subjective test that is left up to community standards. So, in a homophobic society, gay pornography (or even non-pornographic gay material) might be considered obscene by the wider community and thus worthy of censorship or criminal penalties.
Because of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which states that Congress can make no law abridging freedoms of speech or press, there is no federal obscenity law in the United States. In each state, obscenity is determined by applying what the "average person" for that area[note 12], applying "community standards" deems obscene or not, and whether or not the work contains sufficient "artistic merit". This extremely subjective standard is called the Miller test after the author Henry Miller, whose book Tropic of Cancer was ruled not obscene after considerable scrutiny in Miller vs. State of California 1973. Zine publishers in the United States were thus bound by the laws of their states and communities as to whether or not they could accept slash. Any and all fiction depicting homosexual relations at that time was generally considered obscene by the aforesaid community standards, even if non-explicit. In many places, it could be construed as using the mails to distribute obscenity or pornography, leading to a big court case which no fan publisher had the money to defend in court. It is difficult to convey to modern readers just how controversial this all was at the time. At the time of the Stonewall Riots of 1969 which sparked the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, being homosexual was illegal in most states. Before the sodomy laws were repealed, state by state[11], most gay people, especially young people, lived in fear of discovery. Being gay was legal grounds for imprisonment and/or commitment to insane asylums. In many U.S. cities it was also illegal simply to wear clothing associated with the opposite physical gender, the rationale being "fraud"; in other words, to protect men from unwitting attraction to a man in drag.[12] Groups such as the Mattachine Society had to be extremely discreet and nearly everything was published anonymously. It is unknown whether slash fan fiction made any sort of impression or had any influence on public opinion in favor of normalizing homosexuality.[13][14][15][note 13]
Although the quote ends with a statement that it is unknown whether slash fan fiction made and an impression or had an influence on public opinion, I think it very clearly had a cultural normalizing effect even if it didn’t change opinion directly, having more people sending and sharing gay stories is a good thing. If people were in danger for trying to share stories about everyday gay life, than people that enjoy sending gay fan fiction make it so there is more gay content in transit and logically means it’s harder to single anyone out.
It also provided an opportunity to argue about the supposed obscenity of gay relationships in fandom space. Slash fiction itself may not represent always represent the experiences of real gay people, but it did give people a chance to argue that gay relationships deserved to be discussed which makes space for real gay people to discuss their experiences as well. That gay fan may have disagreed with Kirk and Spock being together, but that still gave him a chance to talk about the depictions and why he disagreed. Gay disagreement is always better than gay silence in an era where people want us to shut up, although if you get to trying to silence the gay people/fans of gay content you disagree with you have gone too far. Make sure to discuss politely and not bully or silence others.
That’s all from me for this week! Sorry this ended up being more about Star Trek without much Lord of the Rings, I will still cover that another time but the importance of Kirk and Spock to early gay fan stories ended up being even more in-depth than I had expected. Be safe out there and watch something gay if you have time.
Coming up …
Next week, Krotor will guide us on a journey through the multiverses in a pair of intriguing sci-fi short films, Love You In Every Multiverse. Join us next Tuesday at Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love.
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