I was recently talking about the Star Trek: Voyager episode "State of Flux" with someone, and that made me go look up the retro review I wrote of it in 2015, after a long and delightful conversation on Facebook mostly with the people with whom I originally watched the show in the 1990s. On that rewatch, I had discovered that Tuvok used the phrase "defined parameters" in a conversation with Chakotay in this first season episode -- a phrase that any Janeway/Chakotay fan can tell you is extremely loaded because of the second season episode "Resolutions", in which Janeway tells Chakotay that they need to "define some parameters...about us" and Chakotay responds by telling her the Angry Warrior story. There is no way to read it other than a love scene, even if you decide that love is not romantic. It made me think about all the ways the Voyager writers had seemed very deliberately to be setting up a Janeway/Chakotay relationship that was more than platonic, which they scrapped and sabotaged in later seasons in ways that seemed not only just as deliberate but deliberately nasty, particularly toward Janeway and a lot of her female fans. (Certainly there were some fans who wanted Janeway to be proudly asexual or celibate, and others who wanted to see her in a relationship with Seven of Nine, and the writers seemed even more determined to upset the latter, but that's a different rant.) It all made me remember how Trek "professionals" had often treated shippers, long before "shippers" was a fannish term -- particularly the original Kirk/Spock fans, whom the pros had spent years ridiculing, insulting, and belittling in print. One of the biggest examples of that trend occurs in David Gerrold's book The World of Star Trek. Gerrold is most famous for having written the original series episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" when he was quite young, and he spent many years coasting on his fame from that and some interesting but not genre-shaking sci-fi novels. In The World of Star Trek, he wrote about "a disturbing phenomenon...among a group of female Star Trek fans" who "entertain themselves by writing stories in which Kirk and Spock are homosexual lovers." (He footnotes this with "I am not making this up. Honest.") Gerrold adds that "their projection of their own sexual fantasies onto Star Trek has at times been a nuisance for those who actually have to produce the show" and claims that Roddenberry had to "acknowledge their unwelcome invasion of the universe he had created" with a footnote in his novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Now, the Roddenberry footnote is a topic of discourse by academics as well as fans. Suffice to say that Gerrold is not only summarizing it incorrectly, he is actively sabotaging the way Roddenberry presents Kirk/Spock and the possibility of a romantic relationship. It's worth quoting the footnote in full:
Editor's note: The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t'hy'la, which can also mean brother and lover. Spock's recollection (from which this chapter has drawn) is that is that it was a most difficult moment for him since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However, because t'hy'la can be used to mean lover, and since Kirk's and Spock's friendship was unusually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually indeed become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject:
'I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.'This footnote -- look up the discussion on Fanlore, it's worth it -- accomplishes several things that do the opposite of presenting Kirk/Spock speculation as an unwelcome invasion. First, it indicates that the phenomenon is significant enough that it has come to the attention of the creator of Star Trek and he finds it worth addressing in a lighthearted manner in an official novelization. Second, it leads to the invention of a Vulcan concept that COULD mean Kirk and Spock were lovers to fans who might never once have considered the possibility before. Third, it gives the supposed final word on the subject to legendary horndog James T. Kirk, who does not say anything like it's ridiculous or it never happened -- quite the contrary, he suggests that he's open to all forms of consensual love, that he has tried enough to find that women are most likely to give him what he wants physically, and that his primary source of embarrassment about the rumor with Spock is that people might believe Spock is only really into him once every seven years. Roddenberry could hardly have written anything in an all-ages novel to suggest more directly that Kirk and Spock might have been lovers at some point before the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Gerrold, however, wrote in The World of Star Trek, "When you start messing around in other people's universes...you have to follow the rules of the local creator. If nothing else, it's good manners." (That doesn't seem to have applied to Gerrold's own Star Trek writings, which include "The Cloud Minders" in which Spock goes along with a woman's description of herself as a work of art instead of noting what an illogical description that is, but that's really neither here nor there -- I'm all in favor of professional writers pushing the boundaries of source material just as much as fan writers.) A lot of fans took umbrage to Gerrold's last statement even if Kirk/Spock wasn't their particular interest. Once a fictional universe is on our TVs and in our books, it's ours to interpret and play with as we wish, whether we want to imagine new alien species stranger than the strange new worlds of the show or to think about how Star Trek characters would interact with Doctor Who. So Gerrold got asked about these quotes repeatedly, and he often got cranky replying. At one point Gerrold reportedly wrote that the fact some people saw the K/S relationship as gay was "equally as disturbing" as an incident where a fan committed suicide. Ten years ago, he wrote a post on his Facebook page slamming female viewers with whom he did not agree, calling two of them -- Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, who like him have published professional Star Trek fiction -- fubba-wubbas ("fat ugly broads with unbelievably bad attitude"). He said similar things at conventions and writers' conferences before he codified this in print. Anyway, when I was reviewing "State of Flux", I was thinking about all the ways in which fans read shows, and how many of them, particularly shippers, have been dismissed and insulted by so-called professionals. So I wrote, "The experience of how [a] relationship plays out is significant to so many fans I’ve known over the years – particularly women – and I don’t care how many tantrums people like David Gerrold throw about how the creators’ statements about the characters are more important than the fans’ perceptions; the creators are not allowed to tell viewers that their lived experience of a story is invalid." (See: Viggo Mortensen on how every reader shares a secret with The Lord of the Rings when they see it, or Daniel Radcliffe on how what readers find in a Harry Potter book is private and sacred no matter what bigoted things the book's author may later say.) By the time my "State of Flux" review went live, I knew better than ever to go back and read the comments on it, let alone to engage with such comments. So it wasn't until my very recent conversation about the episode that I discovered David Gerrold had found and commented on my review: "Nice cheap shot. But I don’t throw tantrums. I respect fans. I celebrate the enthusiasm of fans. I continue to be amazed and astonished at what fans are creating that keeps the Star Trek phenomenon alive even half a century later...I’m as big a fan as anyone. I’ve been a Star Trek fan longer than most. And I really believe in the original vision — that we can be better. So even when I’m misquoted, misinterpreted, or simply lied about, I still don’t throw tantrums. I just raise an eyebrow and say, “Fascinating.” (signed) David Gerrold" You all will have to excuse me if I disbelieve him when he says he respects fans and complains that he's been lied about. In fact, if I were David Gerrold, I would look at my 2016 fubba-wubba comments, apologize profusely, and say yes, indeed, that was a temper tantrum. Because if I look at the things he wrote and accept them as deeply thought out rather than spur of the moment annoyance, I have to conclude that he's deeply misogynistic and does not, in fact, respect fans in the least. But, if the latter is the case, then, belatedly, I'm the one who must apologize for accusing Gerrold of throwing a tantrum; it's possible that he just does hate Star Trek's most devoted viewing audience, and all independent-thinking women who don't let male creators 'splain how they should view the world and imagine the future, that much. Unfortunately, the comments on my review were closed years ago, so I can't say this to Gerrold there. But I can say it to the rest of fandom here.
