I would love to know more about when you first started thinking that there was more than friendship between Kirk and Spock and when fans first started talking about it. Was it Amok Time that first gave you the idea?
I started thinking about it before Amok Time aired.
In the summer of â67, watching the reruns of the first season, I very clearly remember a growing sense of, âThey really love each other.â I did not jump to âthey are in a romantic/sexual relationship,â but I was increasingly aware that there was love and devotion between them. I wrote a speculative essay about their platonic love in our summer fan club newsletter, which I remember being well-received.
With the start of Season 2, our whole fan club (and often others) watched the show together, at the house of the one person we knew with a color TV. The show was on Friday nights, so we would start the weekends by piling into her living room and watching âin living colorâ for the first time. Afterwords we would stay and discuss.
When Amok Time aired, we definitely had a lot to talk about. I am pretty sure no one suggested that they were gay â that would have been quite a scandalous suggestion at that time; and I donât think I thought it myself.  But we did have quite a discussion about how much Jim was willing to sacrifice for Spock, Spockâs reaction to seeing Jim alive, and what did Spock mean by âhaving not so pleasing a thing after all as wantingâŚ?â
Two camps formed: one believing that Spock was in love with Jim and was pining for him, the other believing no way! thatâs ridiculous!
Single copies of âSpock pines for Jimâ stories started appearing and being circulated hand-to-hand. Two other women and I were doing most of the writing in my circle of fan friends, and because distribution was so difficult, we started having Thursday night gatherings. Anyone could come and we would read the latest installments in our Spock-loves-Jim stories out loud to the group.
Sometime between the second and third season, my primary writing mentor â an established, published sci-fi writer who was much older than me â told me in private conversation that she thought their love was mutual, quite possibly physical, and that she thought their relationship was worth exploring in writing.
She and I each started working on long pieces exploring the Kirk/Spock relationship, and it was the first time I had seriously entertained the idea that their love was also physical. That was a very secret project. We only ever shared our work with each other for comment / revision, and never mentioned it to anyone else at the time.
The first time I realized that the K/S relationship â which was called âThe Premiseâ in those days â was being explored by other writers and even artists was in the summer of â69. Star Trek had been cancelled and I went to another state to meet with a handful of people who were forming a fan network to try to get Star Trek back on air. While there, a fellow fan showed me a set of drawings, all very tame by todayâs standards, that depicted a physical relationship between Jim and Spock. Â I remember how shocked I was â not by the subject matter, but by the fact that someone had dared depict it.
Slash stayed very much underground until late 1974, when the first published K/S story used very coded language to suggest a love relationship between them.
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