Subject: [VP] Just Moved In
Date:  Wed, 14 Oct 1998 16:19:59 -0600
From: regmoore
To: veniceplace@jbx.com


Hi All,

The letterzine FRIENZ is ceasing publication with the next issue, 
and I thought I needed another way of trying to keep abreast of 
fans' thoughts regarding S/H zines and fandom in general.

I admit I'm a little nervous about joining this list.  Since 
becoming involved in S/H fandom with the publication of HEART AND 
SOUL 1 in 1994, I've preferred to be primarily a hermit; and 
leave the expression of my views on the characters and various 
episodes to my stories. Nevertheless, any discussion forum 
obviously can't exist without participants being willing to 
discuss things openly, so... here I am.

I'll leave it at that for now and just see what happens.

Regina 
(a.k.a. Charlotte Frost)



From: regmoore
Subject: Re:  Re: [VP] and how did YOU get into slash?
Sender: owner-veniceplace@jbx.com

I thought I had nothing of interest to contribute to this topic, 
since my introduction was so common for those of us who started 
out in K/S (Kirk/Spock).  But then I realized the newer fans 
might get a kick out of it.

In 1984, the same year the third Star Trek movie came out, an 
updated version of the book "World of Star Trek" was published.  
It was written by David Gerrold, who wrote the famous "tribble" 
episode for the original ST series. The updated version of the 
book contained a chapter on fandom and conventions, and mentioned 
the K/S concept in a ridiculing way, complete with exclamation 
marks to express the author's exasperation at the entire concept 
(and clearly intending the reader to also feel that way about 
it). Well, I was one of many fans who knew, deep down inside, 
when I read the chapter that this "slash" concept was what I'd 
been waiting for my entire life, and that I had to find out more 
about it.  Many, many other K/S fans got into fandom via reading 
that book.  So, Gerrold's attempt to ridicule K/S backfired.  He 
was probably responsible for more fans getting into slash than 
any other single individual.

Regarding being in the closet, I guess I'm mainly in, because I 
certainly don't go around telling people about fanzines and 
slash.  But if I have a friendship -- even just a casual 
friendship -- over an extended length of time, there usually 
comes a point where I end up telling them about it (and the 
telling is always a Big Deal to me).  A few years ago, I went to 
lunch with a fairly new co-worker for the first time.  I felt so 
comfortable with her that I went ahead and told her about my 
writing of zine stories and slash at that first lunch.  I was 
amazed that she *already knew* about K/S, and had read a few 
zines.  For me, it was like coming full circle.  For the first 
time (and the only time, so far) a "real world" person knew about 
it without me having told them.

When I first got so avidly into K/S, I was living with a longtime 
boyfriend. He felt very threatened by it and was never able to 
handle it.  It was "that stuff you write".  The fact that it 
didn't bring in an income was all the more reason to dislike it.  
We broke up ten years ago but are still friends. To this day, if 
I make any comment along the lines of having not written anything 
in a while, his face will light up and he'll say, so hopefully, 
"So, you're losing interest in it?"  It's amazing how badly he 
wants me to not like "that stuff", even though we haven't been in 
a relationship for a decade.

When I was so active in K/S, there were quite a few avid fans who 
had to hide the zines from their husbands.   

 
>Why did it appeal to you?

How can one answer this question without going into their whole 
background? I'm going to *try* to keep this as short as possible, 
and the only reason I'm bothering to answer at all is in case 
someone else recognizes themselves and can benefit in some 
positive way from my experience.

David Soul, in various interviews (well after the series), has 
referred to his parents as "emotional midgets". I can relate, 
because I had come to think of my parents (and therefore our 
whole family) as "emotionally retarded".  I think we're talking 
about the same thing.  Anyway, my parents were the champions of 
Indifference. Nothing was more important to my mother than 
downplaying everything that happened in life, whether good or 
bad. She got uncomfortable, even angry, if she was ever expected 
to interact with other people.  So, she relegated every little 
childhood trauma or eager obsession to "a phase" so that it 
wasn't worth her involvement.  My father was a medical doctor who 
yearned to be a standup comedian.  Nothing was more important to 
him than being funny.  (He patients loved his humor, and so did 
most everyone else who didn't have to be around him for an 
extended length of time.)  In order to be funny, he needed to 
humiliate.  If something traumatic and upsetting happened to 
another person, then it was Show Time. He loved kicking people 
when they were already down.  For him, that was the most fun. If 
there wasn't a real situation worthy of humiliation, he would 
create one.  (Eg, he would have me and my older brother, when we 
were 5 and 6yo, call up the bowling alley over and over ten or 
fifteen minutes before closing time and have us ask them what 
time they closed.  Of course, the bowling alley would know they 
were talking to little kids and their tone would be puzzled and 
annoyed.  My father would tape record the conversations and then 
play them back over and over and laugh at all three of us -- my 
brother and me, and the poor schmuck who answered the phone each 
time.)  We kids (three boys and me) learned early to be as stone-
faced as possible. Any emotion was ammunition for my father to 
humiliate, and for my mother to be disgusted with us for "being 
silly" for having feelings about something. (And, yet, if *she* 
got upset about something, she seemed hurt that her own children 
showed total indifference or perhaps even laughed.)

My parents had no friends.  They had no use for other people.  My 
father thought everybody else was an asshole and an S.O.B. just 
because they were somebody else.  My mother thought most other 
people were Stupid and not worthy of her time.  (She had a near-
genius IQ, and my father had a near-genius IQ, so she told us 
that she'd read that when you breed a near-genius IQ to a near-
genius IQ, you get offspring with near-genius IQs. So, there was 
no excuse for us kids to not do well in school.  It was very 
important to her that the line of Intelligence be continued.  She 
seemed to truly believe that Intelligence was the only human 
quality worth having. She was an elementary school teacher for a 
few years.  I remember her sneering once about how she knew who 
all the smart kids in her class were, because they *read* during 
their free time.  Stupid kids *drew pictures*. It wasn't until I 
was in my twenties that I got over automatically assuming that 
great artists were borderline retarded.  [Hi there, Ms. Lovett!])

Neither of my parents knew how to communicate with other people 
(including their children), except for the subject of sex.  They 
both were obsessed with sex.  They tried to bring almost any 
subject or conversation around to sex, as then they would be in 
charge of the conversation and could be comfortable talking about 
it. They loved being comfortable talking about it while the 
listener was *un*comfortable.  My father loved saying words like 
"vagina" as loudly as he could in a crowded restaurant.  My 
mother was very comfortable with her kids reading her pornography 
collection as preteens. The only relationship between two people 
either of my parents felt was worth talking about was a romantic 
one; ie, where sex was involved.  It was the ultimate form of 
communication between two people, my father lectured us. My 
mother was also very thrilled about the subject of sex, but she 
would lecture morality.  Sex before marriage was very bad; but 
she'd always, in the same breath, brag about how she and my 
father were Doing It before they were married.  (I guess, 
perhaps, it was all she had to brag about.  My bedroom was 
beneath my parent's and the bed squeaked only once every six 
months or so.  My mother was very frustrated.  "Doctors have a 
difficult time getting erections", she would tell us.  Yet, if 
that was true, I wondered, why did my father have girlfriends on 
the side?)

Sex and having children were wonderful things, as far as my 
mother was concerned.  (My father wasn't so crazy about the 
children part.)  In fact, as Intelligent people, it was our duty 
to carry on the line.  Yet, whenever she spoke about sex or 
childbirth in reference to me specifically, her voice would drip 
with disgust.  I was female and therefore an automatic whore.  It 
was a foregone conclusion that I would get pregnant before 
marriage.  Never mind that I never went on a single date in high 
school or even talked to boys after the age of ten or so (I had 
three boyfriends in the 4th grade, and my older brother informed 
me that our mother had said [in reference to me] whenever a woman 
is with more than one man, it makes her look like a whore.  Being 
a whore was the most awful thing on Earth, and I wanted nothing 
to do with it.)  Since I was the only female child, I was Daddy's 
Girl, which I hated, because attention from him made me feel like 
a whore. I was never sexually abused, but he was obsessed with me 
being appropriately pleasing to men (which my mother wasn't).  
That was the whole reason any female existed.  I always hated 
dresses and preferred to wear pants, and in the fourth grade he 
was asking me when I was going to start wearing makeup and panty 
hose.  In the fifth grade, he was trying to lecture me on how to 
flirt. My weight was a constant source of consternation.  He 
wanted me to be a beauty pageant queen. I hated all that "beauty" 
stuff, and didn't understand why he wanted to make me into the 
very thing that my mother detested so much.  Thankfully, my 
mother's influence was strongest.

Wake Up!  This is the *good* part....

In December of 1975, when I was fourteen, I had made a conscious 
decision to watch some show called "Starsky and Hutch".  (Being 
thoroughly anal and neurotic -- and, of course, Intelligent -- 
there was nothing I did without Conscious Decision.)  I was 
obsessed with Hawkeye on M*A*S*H (Alan Alda was my introduction 
to "the sensitive man") and kept track of godawful important 
things like ratings and such.  (Yes, that's called not having a 
life.)  The show S&H was much talked about, and I overheard kids 
at school talking about it a lot. (Of course, I didn't interact 
with those kids, because I didn't have any friends -- other than 
very casual ones -- because friendship was something that only 
needy, Stupid people got involved in.)  Having made the Conscious 
Decision to watch, merely out of curiosity, I looked at the 
little blurb in the TV Guide for the S&H episode the upcoming 
Wednesday.  It said something about the character named Starsky 
being shot in a restaurant.  A secret little thrill went through 
me.  I always harbored late night fantasies of caring and nurture 
whenever I saw, on any show, Character A getting hurt and 
Character B showing intense caring and concern by saying things 
like, "Oh, no, he might die." Little lines of dialogue like that 
were special and savored and embellished in my late night 
fantasies of Generic Person A caring about Generic Person B.  

Needless to say, on that December night when "Shootout" was 
aired, my life was forever changed.  The caring and concern that 
happened between the two blew past anything I was even capable of 
imagining in my late night fantasies.  Those guys actually 
*touched* each other.  And they were MEN. Weren't men supposed to 
always be competitive with each other and think each other were 
assholes and not show any feelings?  Even more incredible, there 
was an important female character in the show (the waitress), and 
the blond guy was more interested in being tender and sweet to 
the curly-haired guy than he was in wooing the waitress. (In 
fact, he even got annoyed with the waitress!)  How could that be?  
How could something this wonderful exist on a Stupid cop show on 
television (all of which, my father had informed me, was geared 
toward a lowly 8th grade mentality)?

I figured out how all this wonderfulness happened.  It really 
hadn't.  That was back when VCRs cost $2,000 and weren't 
commonplace.  Once you watched something, you couldn't see it 
again until it was rerun six months later. In the minutes, then 
hours, then days that followed my having seen "Shootout", I ran 
the tender moments -- so many! -- over and over in my mind. I 
knew I was mentally embellishing what I'd seen.  The blond guy 
hadn't *really* used that tender of a tone when he talked to the 
hurt guy. I was making it up, because that was what I wanted to 
believe.  I know there had been touching, but the further I got 
away from having actually seen the episode, the more convinced I 
was that I'd made up a lot of those touches. After all, when 
overhearing kids at school talking about S&H, the girls all 
talked about how good-looking the guys were, and the boys talked 
about the car and the action.  I was the Only Person On Earth who 
cared about them *caring* about each other.  The only person who 
noticed it.  So, obviously, I was making it up in my own mind.  
If I ever saw "Shootout" again, I knew I'd be disappointed 
because there wouldn't be near as much caring and concern as my 
memory wanted to believe.         

At the very least, I knew I would be disappointed when the 
"normal" episodes (not somebody getting hurt) aired in the weeks 
that followed.  I watched with detached curiosity and tried not 
to be hopeful.  In "Death Ride", they were driving in the car 
(with a Female Character) and they actually seemed annoyed with 
her. There was a moment when Hutch tried to soothe Starsky and 
reached forward from the back seat and touched him on the 
shoulder.  In that episode and the ones that followed, I kept 
shaking my head in disbelief at how *relaxed* the characters 
seemed around each other.  Dialogue shot back and fourth easily.  
Almost like they weren't acting.  Rather than competing with each 
other, or just outright hating each other, they seemed to 
genuinely enjoy each other.  In almost every single scene, they 
seemed so *aware* of each other.  They seemed to truly listen to 
each other, rather than being indifferent to every little whine 
or protest or grumble that was expressed.  Even when they *were* 
annoyed with each other, at least they were listening enough to 
have reason to be annoyed. 

After seeing just two episodes, I read Cleveland Amory's review 
on S&H in TV GUIDE.  Even though it was a Stupid cop show, he had 
some good things to say about it.  And he mentioned an episode 
where Hutch was addicted to heroin, and was "weak as a kitten", 
and that Starsky helped him recover from "the drugging and the 
mugging". My mind went into overdrive with the possibilities.  
And then I'd have to, just as quickly, try not to think about it 
so I wouldn't be disappointed when the episode was aired during 
rerun season.  Because it could never own up to my fantasies 
(which marveled at the idea of someone helping someone else, even 
though the someone else was "weak as a kitten").

The seventh episode I saw was "The Omaha Tiger".  That did it.  I 
knew I was obsessed with this Stupid cop show and could never go 
back.  I'd seen too much.  In "Tiger", they were so playful in 
the wrestling ring.  They had fun without humiliating each other.  
At one point in the episode, Starsky asked Hutch "Are you okay?", 
even though Hutch wasn't injured.  Just feeling a little down.  
Starsky had asked it like it was okay to be down, and being down 
for No Particular Reason was even worthy of sympathy.  And then 
they were trapped in the air-tight room.  They both took 
different approaches to their predicament.  They were very 
different men.  Hutch the intellectual, doing the math to figure 
out how long they had left to live; Starsky the man of action who 
did what was necessary to get them out of there.  And then they 
were out and there was an explosion, and Starsky landed in 
Hutch's arms.  (No, wait, that didn't really happen.  I made it 
up after the fact.) Weren't the people who made the show afraid 
the public was going to think the guys were fags?

Somewhere in there, I accompanied my mother to the grocery store.  
By that time, mentally rerunning scenes from S&H thoroughly 
dominated my thoughts. I went to the magazine rack and felt 
horribly embarrassed as I desperately perused the movie magazines 
(they were tons back then) for something on S&H, wondering about 
the actors who played these men.  There was *a lot* of stuff.  
Frantically, sweating because I was doing something reserved for 
the realm of the Stupid, I read as I stood there.  My eyes ran 
across some interview with PMG where he said something to the 
effect of S&H being "first and foremost, a love story".  *That* 
word.  I blushed horribly.  He used That Word.  That Word that 
was only meant to be used between two people who were going to 
fuck each other.  Instinctively, I knew I had a lot to learn 
about That Word.  That my parents were the real pathetic idiots 
who knew nothing of this Love stuff.  That they were wrong that 
sex and Intelligence were everything that mattered. But I 
couldn't assimilate all that right then.  I just knew I couldn't 
bring myself to purchase the magazine. Besides, PMG hadn't 
*really* said that.  Movie magazines, my mother had informed me 
when I foolishly bought one a couple of years prior because Randy 
Mantooth from "Emergency" was on the cover, contained made up 
articles.  Nothing in those magazines was real.  Silly, married 
women bought them and, as the ultimate silliness, fantasized 
about those silly actors.  I remembered how terribly ashamed I'd 
felt that an Intelligent person like me had bought that magazine, 
before my mother had informed me of The Truth about them. I 
wasn't going to repeat that feeling of shame, no matter how badly 
I wanted the articles on PMG and DS.  So, I left the magazines on 
the rack.  But remembered what they'd said.  And kept reminding 
myself that they'd never *really* said those things I'd read that 
they'd said.  

Agony came in February.  S&H was pre-empted for two weeks because 
of the Olympics.  And then something incredibly wonderful 
happened during that drought.  PMG and DS were scheduled to be 
together on the Merv Griffin show.  I counted down the hours to 
show's airing, yet kept warning myself to not expect too much.  
After all, my mother had once informed us kids of The Truth about 
actors:  They were never friends off camera. They "got tired" of 
each other because they worked so many hours together and 
eventually came to hate each other.  (For that matter, brothers 
and sisters "got tired" of each other as they grew older and 
eventually became disinterested in each other. I remember looking 
at my older brother when she said that and feeling very sad about 
it.)  (I also remember my father lecturing about how Elvis 
Presley was superior to The Beatles, because in the latter case, 
it took *four* of them to become famous.  I got the message loud 
and clear from both my parents:  Working together was a bad 
thing, and any relationship coming from such eventually fell 
apart, so there was no point in participating in one in the first 
place.)  But at least PMG and DS apparently still tolerated each 
other enough to be willing to appear together on Merve Griffin.  

Even though I've since seen tons of tapes of talk show 
appearances from the 70's, I have never seen *that* particular 
episode of Merve Griffin.  I wonder if its lost to fandom 
forever.  I do have some notes about it in my journals.  If 
anyone out there has a MG episode where *both* guys are smoking, 
that's probably it.  (I have never seen Glaser smoke since, so I 
wonder if he quit shortly thereafter.)  Anyway, seeing them 
together blew me out of the water.  I don't recall them using 
That Word, but they said a lot of things similar to what they'd 
said in the movie magazines.  Even though they were "tired" of 
each other and surely had heard each other's opinions a zillion 
times, one actually seemed to listen when the other talked.  DS 
patted PMG's knee.  PMG got so tongue-tied when asked if he was 
"taken", then he eagerly agreed when Merv suggested that DS 
answer for him.  (DS then made it into a joke by naming off 
multiple names.  PMG then said he had two great loves in life, 
and one of them was his dog, a German Shepherd/Doberman mix, the 
other "a homo sapien" -- surely Elizabeth -- whose name he didn't 
mention).  PMG was greatly complimentary of DS's music (the 
latter hadn't yet put out his first album).  In short, I was 
thrilled beyond my greatest expectations.  And I started to 
wonder if my parents knew The Truth about anything.

That first year or so of watching S&H was both magical and 
horrible.  Like many generations of family members, I was 
severely depressed.  I thought it was *me* and simply a mistake 
that I'd ever been born, since I didn't "get" why other people 
found value in life.  (Looking back, I don't know how anyone can 
find value in life when they've had it ground into their soul 
that Nothing Matters.)  My whole being revolved around S&H.  
After each episode, I'd retell the episodes (at least as much as 
I could remember) in my journals, recreating pages of dialogue.  
Ditto talk show appearances.  In fact, DS was on some talk show 
almost every week.  He'd sit there, in front of God and 
everybody, and use That Word in reference to S&H's relationship. 
(And that's when I knew I hadn't been embellishing what I'd 
actually seen on screen.)  I was amazed at his courage, and 
puzzled over why he wasn't blushing when said those things.  
(Wasn't he *embarrassed*? Especially since he was a MAN?  Wasn't 
he afraid that people were going to think S&H were fags?)  Since 
only one hour a week could be spent actually watching S&H, I'd 
try to fill up the rest of the time by analyzing the episodes to 
death.  I assigned a Primary Concept (love, chemistry, action, 
humor, etc.) to each episode, and a Dominate Relationship 
(friend-to-friend, partner-to-partner [their working 
relationship], parent-to-child, etc).  I kept grids on the 
directors and writers, looking for patterns (which I never 
found).      

And S&H themselves continued to amaze me at the way they loved 
each other so openly, even though they didn't give each other 
orgasms.  They loved each other, even when one was vulnerable.  
In fact, they protected each other's vulnerabilities.  That, too, 
was an entirely new concept to me.  When I saw "The Fix" (which 
was an out-of-sequence rerun stuck in between some first-run 
episodes that spring of 76), it was beyond my greatest 
expectations.  That episode had what I think of as the Defining 
Scene. For me, if the importance of S&H had to be boiled down to 
one brief look or gesture, it would be the moment in "The Fix" 
when Hutch rests his head against Starsky's chest.  Yielding to 
another.  Before S&H, I had always thought that yielding to 
another was A Bad Thing, because the other person would take 
advantage of your weakness and destroy you.        

I Consciously Decided that my parents knew absolutely nothing 
about Real Life and stopped listening to them.  (Something I've 
never regretted.)  I bought movie magazines.  In fact, there were 
so many back then that you could go back to the same store every 
few days and find a new one. I gradually grew less embarrassed 
about purchasing them, but I still blushed horribly if I bought a 
"teen magazine", like 16 or TIGER BEAT.  After all, I was 
intellectually too old to be reading that "aren't they cute" 
stuff -- and never liked all that emphasis on their looks, anyway 
-- but I loved the full color pin-ups, especially the ones of 
them together.  I hung up the pin-ups in my room and put profound 
sayings about friendship beneath them. I started making friends 
at school, because I'd Consciously Decided that friendship was A 
Good Thing.  It took another year, but I eventually started 
seeing a counselor in high school, as I'd made the Conscious 
Decision to stop thinking about killing myself (which was a 
normal "phase", my mother had informed us) and do something with 
my life.             What was the question? <g>  Oh, why does 
slash appeal to me?  First I have to answer why S&H (and 
friendship in general) appealed.  In short, because the show 
taught me that love and sex weren't the same thing, and that 
there was value in other human beings. Mankind wasn't all bad.  
And those were the most important lessons I needed to learn at 
the time I discovered the show. I've had, of course, other 
important turning points in my life since seeing "Shootout" on 
that December evening when I was 14yo, but that Turning Point had 
to come first, or I wouldn't have known how to take advantage of 
the ones that came later.  (And, frankly, I don't think I would 
have lived long enough to get to the other Turning Points.)  
Without S&H, I would have been one of those women hopping from 
bed to bed, looking for love, because I would have thought that 
was the only place it existed.

So, S&H was vitally important to me because it taught me that 
Love is something different from Sex.  Now, as an adult, I want 
to write about them having sex.  A psychologist could probably 
have a field day explaining the dichotomy.  My layman's 
explanation is that I learned, via the relationship mentioned at 
the beginning of this post -- which, all in all, was an extremely 
positive one -- that sex *can* be the ultimate expression of 
love. I want S&H (or any slash pair I can believe in) to have 
that ultimate expression.  Since I can be secure in the fact that 
they love each other without sex, I'm therefore eager to let them 
have the sex.  Hence the appeal of slash.  
               
Regina          


