The Forbidden Star Trek Fanfiction [from Very Special Episodes]

26:24KS fandom, I would imagine almost any of these fandoms, were so welcoming once you managed to find them and get in. And it was never easy to find them. People, you know, have told me so many stories about how frustrated they were. It took them years to gain entree, to get the information that they needed. But once you had a name, a telephone number, an address, maybe the name of a KSZ, then you were in. And you were in the sisterhood. And that, as almost any person in a fandom will tell you, that's the most important part.

27:01Dana Schwartz:These women were carving out their own secret spaces within a massive male-dominated fandom. And as the 80s progressed, the energy did too. It's the community that thinks like you think, that is energized the way you are energized. So, boy, did I ever get energized. Through the 90s, I was invited to one of the big Star Trek conventions in Baltimore called Shore Leave. And I would go every year to Shore Leave and a contingent of KS fans would always meet there. There would be, I would say, 60 KS fans who would have a convention within a convention. And I decided that we needed to organize ourselves a little bit better than just meeting in the hallways and having room parties.

27:53I organized a party for us on Saturday nights where I had a specified gathering room at the hotel. And we put up art. We sang songs. Eventually, we had wine. That was a good one. We had art auctions. We had other creative work auctions. And of course, we talked.

28:20Dana Schwartz:For Jenna and many others, the KS fandom became a source of lifelong friendships and endless creativity. I met somebody by writing letters back and forth to her. And we each wanted to sing. We didn't know what each other's voices sounded like. We wanted to write filk songs about Kirk and Spock. And we agreed that we would go to the Shore Leave convention and in their talent show, we would get up on the stage and we'd sing. We met for the first time at that convention. We sang together with the guitar anyway at that convention. And yet you meet them and you are instantly friends. I have so many deep relationships which came from fandom.

29:08I have been asked, what was the happiest time of your life, Jenna? My happiest time was my deep involvement in KS fandom. Other than, you know, family. But it's true. The things that the fandom gave me the opportunity to do with people who were smart, engaged, so creative, open-minded like I am, was priceless.

29:40Dana Schwartz:As the community grew, so did the fanzines. fan fictions that were once passed around from friend to friend under the radar were now being distributed on a larger scale, with all the benefits and challenges you'd imagine going along with that. To illustrate just how challenging it could be to bring one of these slash zines to life, Jenna shared a story about her journey to publish her first slash zine on a wider scale in the late 90s. Of course, to get hundreds of copies of a 200 or so page fanzine, you're going to need a printer. But these zines were filled with sexual poetry, writing, and art of the not-safe-for-work variety.

30:27Dana Schwartz:Jenna was turned away from print shop after print shop, toting this thick stack of pages with her as she went. At last, she found a print shop staffed with female employees who were happy to get the business, no matter the content. But just as she thought she was in the clear, I get a call, come and get this stuff. I go down to the print shop, and I am told to go into the office with the boss, who was male. And he looked at me in total indignation, pulled out the original piece of art, shoved it under my nose, And he said, do you know what this is showing? And I said, yes, I certainly do. It's two men naked hugging.

31:17And I said, I was given the okay. I was told that you would, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. We have printed your text, but take this smut away. And let me tell you something, that was a moderate picture. Okay. So did I finally find a printer? Obviously I did. I went to an all-female shop. And sure, they had no problem. They also had no interest, but they had no problem. And I used them for almost 15 years.

31:54Dana Schwartz:Hundreds of zines managed to overcome these challenges and find circulation among this dedicated group of mostly female fans. And it was in the heyday of KS story writing that a familiar story would resurface. But the editor of a zine, which was called Alien Brothers, somehow got her hands on a copy of Ring of Sosherne. And the presumption is that there was some sort of contact with the author so that it was indeed printed. In the zine? Alien Brothers was 275 pages of stories and art. It cost$25, over$70 in today's money. And there, on page 9, was Ring of Soshern. In an introduction, the editor wrote, Written probably before 1976, this story has never before appeared in a fanzine.

32:52It is one of the first and certainly the best underground KS tales, circulated very privately and discreetly in manuscript photocopies only. Ring of Soshern set the pattern for many early KS stories and had many imitators, but none surpassed it.

33:08Dana Schwartz:The zine was controversial on a few different levels. While some praised the writing and variety, others criticized it heavily. It was too violent, too expensive, and the editor was pretty unpopular at the time. But one troubling question surfaced after the zine's publication. We wouldn't be talking about this if there were not some sort of controversy about it, because I think the author was shocked from what I have taken from the little bit of research that is available and did not want to have her story printed. Remember, she wrote this in 1968. Okay, so she had the attitude, people from the 60s, from the 70s, from the 80s, that this was an extremely dangerous thing, even to have it printed in a zine.

34:03Dana Schwartz:Some fans claimed that the editor had permission, while others claimed she didn't. Remember, this was 1987, the pre-World Wide Web days. We're talking about an American supposedly communicating with someone in the UK. It's hard to know exactly what happened. And there is really a question as to whether Ring of Sosherne, which has such a special place in our fandom that basically helped found it, might have been published without permission. It's a very murky subject. I don't think that anybody can say for sure what the real story was there. Believe it or not, the Alien Brothers controversy doesn't end there.

34:47Dana Schwartz:To understand how this story evolved over time, we also need to hear from a fan who dove into Star Trek later on, a sort of modern-day archivist. There is a way in fandom that stories can spiral and escalate and become legend. That's Edie, the producer who reported on this story. She's been a Star Trek fan for a decade now, following the lore and developments around the Ring of Soshern every step of the way. That gives her a bird's-eye view of the role this fanfiction plays in the 21st century. Though many old-school KS fans knew about the Ring of Soshern for quite a while before it was published, coming out in Alien Brothers was a turning point for the story.

35:43Dana Schwartz:This is the beginning of The Ring of Sosharn as an online urban legend in the fanfiction community, an example of what happens when a drawer fic is released into the world. Back in the 80s, somebody did apparently write in a fanzine that one vindictive fan in the southern U.S. was so offended that she wanted to censor the fic and, like, burned copies. On one hand, both the zine and the fanfiction itself were controversial. At the same time, though, sometimes these things aren't what they seem. And I've also talked to a lot of fans, sort of specifically, and there are a lot of people that knew of Alien Brothers but hadn't heard of this controversy and or just contended that maybe this didn't happen at all or that maybe it wasn't on as large of a scale as perhaps the fandom legend snowballed into it being.

36:49Dana Schwartz:Whether or not a fan went on a vindictive destruction campaign, over the next few decades, something strange happened. The zine and the famous story inside of it became very hard to find. Of course, we know these zines didn't have a huge circulation, even if they were famous within the KS fandom. But this zine just seemed to vanish in a way that felt out of place for how famous the story inside it really was. And the zine stayed disappeared, even as the World Wide Web came to be. Decades passed. The 90s tipped into the 2000s. Windbreakers fell in and out of fashion, and the Ring of Sochern stayed gone.

37:42Dana Schwartz:The naughties turned into the 2010s. Low-rise jeans became skinny jeans, became high-waisted jeans, and the Ring of Sochern stayed gone. I stumbled upon this fan lore article. Fan lore is a wiki that has a lot of fan and fandom related pages. And there's a really extensive article on the Ring of Sosherne. It's been there for many years. And there are even segments of the fanfic in the article. It describes the history, like where it wound up, where it was published. So, of course, I see this and I'm like, oh, like, there are segments, there are photos, there are scans of the original publication.

38:29But it's not there in its entirety. So I'm like, well, they have segments, they have quotes, they have a lot of things. It must be online somewhere. So I go digging and I don't find a thing. There is no Ring of Soshern on the Internet.

38:47Dana Schwartz:In an era where we're used to being able to Google and find essentially everything we want, it's hard to believe that something can truly be impossible to track down. Sure, someone may have had an old copy kicking around the house, but no one thought, hey, I'll put this online. So I looked everywhere. I couldn't find it. And I ultimately stumbled upon a Reddit post, as folks often do when they are traversing the Internet, from somebody else who is trying to find this story. and the title of the reddit post is simply where can i read the ring of sochern and someone in that reddit post responds this could be a challenge apparently it was so controversial that one fan acquired as many copies as she could to get her hands on just to burn them the author didn't intend for it to be published but shared privately among friends someone else responds essentially saying the same thing you're gonna have a really hard time finding this it wasn't meant to be published in the first place.

39:55And they go on to say, I did, however, find the zine. It was published in the holdings of Texas A &M University. If any enterprising person is able to go there, copy it and upload it, I'd love a copy. So at this point, I'm like, oh, someone's going to have to go to Texas A &M University.

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42:22Good morning, Tumblr. I just woke up in my hotel room in College Station, Texas. It's morning. The library where Alien Brothers is housed will open shortly.

42:36Dana Schwartz:It's 2020, and someone is on the hunt for Alien Brothers. The audio you heard is from a Tumblr user called Prince Nimoy, our fanfiction anthropologist, on the hunt for this long-lost copy of Alien Brothers. And I stumble upon a Tumblr post from March 6, 2020, essentially saying that they are going to make the pilgrimage to Texas to find and scan the Ring of Sosherne. Prince Nimoy writes Monday I'm driving 15 hours round trip to finally meet Alien Brothers Hopefully I will be allowed to scan it or take photos Worst case scenario I type it up word for word All of it I really can't believe it The fandom has mourned its loss for decades and now it's back from the dead The next video update from Prince Nimoy shows her flipping through the pages of the legendary Alien Brothers zine.

43:47Dana Schwartz:She flips slowly through the title page, a page granting awards to submissions and finally to the table of contents. She points at the title and zooms in. Ring of Sochern by Jay Guttridge, page nine. She finds the zine. They don't necessarily let her scan it or like use any of their equipment, but she takes a picture of every page of the fanfiction, and she put it first on a Dropbox, and then she put it on Internet Archive. So now, when you Google Ring of Sochern, you can just read it online. It's just there in PDF form. Years after first hearing of this fabled tale, Edie finally read it. And how was it?

44:42Dana Schwartz:That's a good question. I think that as a piece of history, it is fascinating to read the fledgling sort of versions of tropes that have become well-known in the fandom. So it's fine. Ring of Soshern is a pretty run-of-the-mill, well-written, entertaining piece of fanfiction. There's nothing particularly standout about it if you place it next to a piece of KS fanfic from today. And that's the point. No small part of this story's legacy is the fact that 60 years after a fan penned it and stashed it away in a drawer, it still resonates. It is beautiful to see how fans have always explored dark themes and written stories that are messy and grittily realistic and human or Vulcan, as it were.

45:47And yeah, like, would we have a heated rivalry if we didn't have, you know, the sort of middle-aged moms in the 60s and 70s who were blazing this trail? and that is beautiful to read. I love to imagine this community of people, a bunch of women independently, maybe watching the same thing that I watched, feeling like, hang on, I can have angst in my queer romance between an alien and a human. It's like the same sort of recurring themes and motifs that we see throughout fan literature. And now those things have hit the mainstream. So to see the baby version of those things, the early version of those things coming independently out of someone's brain, that is like fascinating to see.

46:48Dana Schwartz:So The Ring of Soshern is online now. In many ways, it is a thread connecting fans today to fans from 60 years ago. But keen-eared listeners may remember a key detail, a detail that's easy to forget in the frenzy of finding a piece of history that had been so hard to find for so many decades. Jennifer Guttridge may have never wanted the story published in the first place. She died in 2004, and now there's no way to ask if she wanted it put online. Oh, it's such a difficult subject, and I have such mixed feelings. That's Jenna again. There was this hunger for the older zines that were not still available, because these were only out-of-print zines.

47:39And there were a lot of out-of-print zines. It hurts my heart that they are not available. But considering the environment in which so many of these zines were written, published, the stories, you know, this was a deep fear that many of the writers had, that they would be outed in a sense. And I am so sorry, these stories will not be read and enjoyed. It's so interesting to see the evolution of the writing, how it changed over the many long years. But where I come down on is that we have to respect the wishes of the writer. And I don't think it was right to just put that up online. Sorry to say that.

48:25I can't say I'm terribly upset about it, but you know, it's always like the right to privacy. Where does it end? I still haven't worked out my own thoughts about it completely. I see both sides of the issue for sure. And ultimately where I land is that I think it's sad when things become lost media and that we should find ways to archive things and make sure that they are not lost, that we should tell our history, remember our history, archive things where possible in sort of safe and accessible ways.

49:00Dana Schwartz:Whether or not it was the right thing to put Ring of Soshern online is up for debate. But one thing is certain, it is a piece of history. When you read about Ring of Sosharn or Alien Brothers, the reviews, the controversy, the excitement, you get a window into a vibrant fandom that has existed for decades. You can almost imagine hanging out with Jenna and 60 of her friends at a convention within a convention, being part of the sisterhood. And it's so easy for these stories to be dismissed and erased. We had one KS writer. She was really a good writer and a marvelous artist who died quite suddenly.

49:50And those of her friends did not find out about it for a couple of weeks because the intention would have been to get into her apartment and take all the KS stuff out. And instead what happened was her family, obviously, you know, along with their grief, found that their dear daughter was writing and drawing Kirk and Spock stories in art, and all of it was trashed. Her original artwork was trashed. That hurts me even today to say that there is something precious about original artwork. It was so important that somebody took the time to sit down and create this new world because you put something of yourself in these novels and in these stories.

50:43So when you lose the fiction, you lose the person. And you also lose the place of the story within the community because every single one of these stories and every single one of these zines stood next to the human beings who were in the fandom too.

51:06Dana Schwartz:In the 1960s, it wasn't clear whether fanfiction was even legal. Thanks to stigma about writing fanwork and about gay relationships, everything had to be done completely under the table. But now we see stories that were once fanfictions becoming published novels, like the After series, The Love Hypothesis, maybe even City of Bones, and even hitting the big screen. Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone? This once secretive art form is now mainstream. Sure, fan fiction isn't necessarily seen as high art by society at large, but maybe people are starting to understand that there's more to it than meets the eye.

51:53Fan fiction has gone through such an evolution over the last 50 years plus, 60 years. and so has its place in society, starting out being absolutely anathema for the content, but also because primarily it is a woman's space, it has been dismissed through misogyny and through our position as, you know, not people who are doing anything serious creatively. Okay, times have changed and I think people are beginning to understand that the work itself is worth something. It is a creative explosion from the heart, okay? Regardless of the source, regardless of what has compelled people to write, they are writing, they are drawing, they are singing, okay?

52:48And I don't know, can we ever dismiss an upwelling of creativity? I don't think so.

52:55Dana Schwartz:And that's to say nothing of the real-world impact communities like this may have had on the perception of queer relationships in real life. For community members like Jenna, fighting to make space in sometimes hostile fandoms and supporting friends experiencing the effect of stigma in their lives, that impact is real. There is a streaming series called Heated Rivalry, which is about a gay relationship between two hockey players, and it has taken the internet by storm. People are not afraid of the content of this series. I can think that this is nothing but good, and I frankly think that my role and other fans' roles in keeping slash fandom going through tough times, encouraging it, proselytizing for it, getting it up online, making archives online, contributing to Archive of Our Own has played a part in this openness and the opening of understanding about homosexuality.

54:04So yeah, we're in the middle of a wonderful story, and I'm glad that I was part of it.

54:14All right. You know, if we were still in the era of podcasting where we were doing a lot of limited series. I think we could have stretched this one out into eight episodes. The whole search, head down to Texas A &M, that could have been like a three episode arc.

54:29Dana Schwartz:We did a whole podcast about looking for one comic book. That's right. This was our thing. This was our lane. Right in the wheelhouse with this one. Zarin, were you able to think about this as a motion picture or a series? I did, actually. And I have to say, I really liked the characters in it, As I said earlier, I was like, this is just a new world to me. So I had some fun trying to cast it for Jenna Sinclair, the fan fiction writer and the passionate advocate. I went with one of my favorites, Rooney Mara, because I didn't think she could hold down anything literary. And then for Jennifer Guttridge, the author of the fanfic, I went with Tilda Swinton.

55:06I know she's Scottish, but I think it still works for an English lady.

55:09Dana Schwartz:Oh, Tilda Swinton can do anything. Right? That was my thought. I was like, you know, come on. Like, I think she would just eat this up. And Prince Nimoy, our female fanfic anthropologist, the one who goes on the hunt for the copy of Alien Brothers, I thought Kristen Stewart. And that would be a sly shout out to Fifty Shades of Grey being a fanfic of Twilight. So you get it all. Love it. That's smart casting there. Right. Did you guys have any favorite special moments? I had two. But if you need time to think, I can tell you mine or I'd love to hear yours. Yeah. What are your moments? All right.

55:40For one, I loved how far would you go to help a buddy out? Just that question alone was like awesome, right? And then the other one was, how far would you drive to help out a fellow fan online? And both of them were just such like beautiful little moments. And I love that it's 15 hours round trip to go and do this. I was like, I would totally be that person. So I love that Prince Nimoy is like, put it on my shoulders and give me a map. I'm gone.

56:05Dana Schwartz:I love it. I love the camaraderie and the community and the sense of belonging that fandom can give people. And something that I learned was how female this community was. I loved it. Totally. I didn't know that it leans so female, but I then wanted to almost kind of like safeguard it. Like just let them cook. This is amazing. Oh, also, I have a very special question of ethics that came up in this. Yes. Was it or was it not the right thing to put Ring of Sashurn online? I think it was the right thing. I think it's like a museum piece. I agree. It's history. It's history. I think it's kind of like one of those things, I mean, as creators, we know this.

56:43Once you create something, it no longer belongs to you. I mean, yes, maybe the rights belong to you, but the actual work doesn't. It now is given to the audience. So it's like kind of their call. And I agree with you. This deserves to be in a museum.

56:55Dana Schwartz:Yeah. I want to give a quick shout out to iHeart's Outspoken Slate for inviting us to participate in their Pride Month programming, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, Pride. We are always down for a theme. So thank them and bring it on. Any other network here at iHeart, let us know. We're game. Totally. Happy Pride Month, y 'all. Very special episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zarin Burnett, and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Edie Allard And edited by Carmen Borca Carrillo Editing and sound design by Chris Childs Additional editing by Mary Du Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher Original music by Elise McCoy Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla Social clips by Yarberry Media Executive producer is Jason English Today's episode was produced in partnership with ACAST Creative Studios.

58:00Very special episodes as a production of iHeart Podcasts.

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