![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
- How We Got To Where We Are -
One Trek list that I'm on has been discussing zines vs. netfic--not exactly a new subject, but this discussion has at least one unusual twist. Someone suggested that had the internet existed in its present form when K/S was first getting its start, fanfic would have spread primarily on the net rather than through zines. And much to my surprise, most of the group--or at least most of those who are participating in the discussion--seem to accept that premise.
I wasn't there at the very beginning--if it's possible to pinpoint one moment in time as the beginning of K/S (and thence slash)--but I was on the scene early enough in its development to be familiar with the attitudes and environment of the time. Moreover, I was on the internet long before most people had ever heard of it, so I think I can comment knowledgeably. My opinion is that zines would still have been the primary venue for K/S fiction.
The factor which most affected the distribution of K/S was not technological limitation, but the culture of the time. We take the existence of homosexuality so much for granted now that it's hard for some people to imagine a society where the only mention of gayfolk came in the form of offensive jokes or pulpit-pounding diatribe. This was the climate in which K/S was born.
All of us in the early days were women, though I knew one man who participated in K/S during the mid 80's. Most of us were housewives, with husband and children to keep in the dark about our strange deviant hobby. Most of us risked the loss of jobs, family relationships--even personal freedom, if we were caught mailing 'obscene' materials. I was fortunate in that my significant other at the time was a K/S writer herself, but few others had that luxury. One listmember said that she knew of women who had never told their families or friends of their involvement in slash, who hid that part of their lives even today. That's a good indication of how paranoid we were.
We lived a strange alternate-universe sort of life. By day we were mothers, wives, co-workers. In our spare time, we wrote K/S, or we wrote letters of comment about other people's stories. Some of us were artists, some editors. We helped to publish zines on mimeographs we borrowed from church, school or community organization (I wonder how many church mimeo's were used to run off K/S stories!). We attended cons where we piled into in each other's rooms and discussed K/S until the early hours. We belonged to a tiny and mis-understood counter-culture that we had to hide from everyone but a trusted few. I was lucky to belong to a local group of K/S fans, but many others saw fellow fans only once or twice a year, at cons.
We lived in fear that Paramount, who owned Trek at that time, would file a cease-and-desist order against K/S fans, as Lucasfilms had done against fans of Star Wars. Individually, we lived in fear that if family members or spouse found out about our activities, we could lose our children. My ex-husband knew of my involvement and said he had no problem with it, but if he had decided to fight me for custody of our children, he would certainly have used it against me.
We lied about what we were writing, or wrote at those few times when we could be sure of not being observed. We spent a lot of time at the library, one of the few places where we could write for extended periods without being interrogated about what we were doing. We mailed each other madly. I do suspect that email would have entered into fandom if the net had been widely available then, even if we didn't publish our fiction on the net! But no--we might well have feared that our mail would be intercepted and traced back to us.
To mail zines overseas, we took the staples out of the binding and mailed the pages one or two at a time in letters (and I know of one country where people still have to do that). In spite of those precautions, zines were sometimes intercepted by postal inspectors. Some of us wrote both K/S and gen stories, maintaining completely different identities for the two genres. We were schizophrenic, paranoid and addicted to K/S.
A very young listmember wrote that it "must have been exciting to be a young person at that time," adding, "the APA had declared that homosexuality was not a disease in 1973." All I can say is that if homosexuality was no longer a disease, it still was, in most people's minds, a state of such moral repugnance that to reveal one's involvement in same-gender erotica was to risk the loss of everything--families, jobs, social relationships.
No, I really do not think we would have had the courage to distribute fan fiction on the internet, to put it out there for everyone to see.
But I'm damn glad the world isn't like that any more, and that young fans don't know what it was like "back then." I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
I wasn't there at the very beginning--if it's possible to pinpoint one moment in time as the beginning of K/S (and thence slash)--but I was on the scene early enough in its development to be familiar with the attitudes and environment of the time. Moreover, I was on the internet long before most people had ever heard of it, so I think I can comment knowledgeably. My opinion is that zines would still have been the primary venue for K/S fiction.
The factor which most affected the distribution of K/S was not technological limitation, but the culture of the time. We take the existence of homosexuality so much for granted now that it's hard for some people to imagine a society where the only mention of gayfolk came in the form of offensive jokes or pulpit-pounding diatribe. This was the climate in which K/S was born.
All of us in the early days were women, though I knew one man who participated in K/S during the mid 80's. Most of us were housewives, with husband and children to keep in the dark about our strange deviant hobby. Most of us risked the loss of jobs, family relationships--even personal freedom, if we were caught mailing 'obscene' materials. I was fortunate in that my significant other at the time was a K/S writer herself, but few others had that luxury. One listmember said that she knew of women who had never told their families or friends of their involvement in slash, who hid that part of their lives even today. That's a good indication of how paranoid we were.
We lived a strange alternate-universe sort of life. By day we were mothers, wives, co-workers. In our spare time, we wrote K/S, or we wrote letters of comment about other people's stories. Some of us were artists, some editors. We helped to publish zines on mimeographs we borrowed from church, school or community organization (I wonder how many church mimeo's were used to run off K/S stories!). We attended cons where we piled into in each other's rooms and discussed K/S until the early hours. We belonged to a tiny and mis-understood counter-culture that we had to hide from everyone but a trusted few. I was lucky to belong to a local group of K/S fans, but many others saw fellow fans only once or twice a year, at cons.
We lived in fear that Paramount, who owned Trek at that time, would file a cease-and-desist order against K/S fans, as Lucasfilms had done against fans of Star Wars. Individually, we lived in fear that if family members or spouse found out about our activities, we could lose our children. My ex-husband knew of my involvement and said he had no problem with it, but if he had decided to fight me for custody of our children, he would certainly have used it against me.
We lied about what we were writing, or wrote at those few times when we could be sure of not being observed. We spent a lot of time at the library, one of the few places where we could write for extended periods without being interrogated about what we were doing. We mailed each other madly. I do suspect that email would have entered into fandom if the net had been widely available then, even if we didn't publish our fiction on the net! But no--we might well have feared that our mail would be intercepted and traced back to us.
To mail zines overseas, we took the staples out of the binding and mailed the pages one or two at a time in letters (and I know of one country where people still have to do that). In spite of those precautions, zines were sometimes intercepted by postal inspectors. Some of us wrote both K/S and gen stories, maintaining completely different identities for the two genres. We were schizophrenic, paranoid and addicted to K/S.
A very young listmember wrote that it "must have been exciting to be a young person at that time," adding, "the APA had declared that homosexuality was not a disease in 1973." All I can say is that if homosexuality was no longer a disease, it still was, in most people's minds, a state of such moral repugnance that to reveal one's involvement in same-gender erotica was to risk the loss of everything--families, jobs, social relationships.
No, I really do not think we would have had the courage to distribute fan fiction on the internet, to put it out there for everyone to see.
But I'm damn glad the world isn't like that any more, and that young fans don't know what it was like "back then." I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
- -
The server where allslash.org resides is getting to be a real irritation. When I moved my files from the previous server (after it bit the dust and disappeared without warning), all my counter code had to be changed to reflect the new paths. Fine, I'd expected that. I installed the counter scripts in the scgi-bin directory, as appeared to be required, and . . . hmm. None of them worked. I piddled around for a while checking the code and the permissions and the paths and everything was correct. So I moved them all into the cgi-bin directory that had been there when I first logged in. Bingo! They all worked.
Recently I happened to check one of the pages that was supposed to have a counter. Four little boxes with 'X' in the middle stared back at me. The counter wasn't working. I snarled, looked all the code over again, verified that all the paths were correct, and moved everything back to the scgi-bin directory. They all began working again.
Tonight, just to be sure everything was still all right, I checked again. No counters. I fired up ws-ftp, double-clicked on the scgi-bin directory to open it, and was rewarded with "Permission denied." WHAAAT??
I don't yet know "what." I sent off an indignant letter to the support address, but have heard nothing back so far. I don't have time to screw around with stuff like this. My own time is pretty thin right now--more than enough writing assignments to fill it up without having to deal with flaky servers too.
On that subject, I have about six WIP's running around on my hard drive. One Jim/Artie (Wild Wild West) for a zine, two stories for kira's holiday slash fest (the one that used to be the Slash Advent Calendar), and a Kirk/McCoy for Acidqueen and T'Len's K/Mc Fest. Wait, that's only four. Well, but there is the Jim/Artie continuing universe story that takes up where Night of New Beginnings leaves off and the long list of unfinished K/S/Mc stories in the Trinity universe.
I need a long vacation from everything else but writing.
Recently I happened to check one of the pages that was supposed to have a counter. Four little boxes with 'X' in the middle stared back at me. The counter wasn't working. I snarled, looked all the code over again, verified that all the paths were correct, and moved everything back to the scgi-bin directory. They all began working again.
Tonight, just to be sure everything was still all right, I checked again. No counters. I fired up ws-ftp, double-clicked on the scgi-bin directory to open it, and was rewarded with "Permission denied." WHAAAT??
I don't yet know "what." I sent off an indignant letter to the support address, but have heard nothing back so far. I don't have time to screw around with stuff like this. My own time is pretty thin right now--more than enough writing assignments to fill it up without having to deal with flaky servers too.
On that subject, I have about six WIP's running around on my hard drive. One Jim/Artie (Wild Wild West) for a zine, two stories for kira's holiday slash fest (the one that used to be the Slash Advent Calendar), and a Kirk/McCoy for Acidqueen and T'Len's K/Mc Fest. Wait, that's only four. Well, but there is the Jim/Artie continuing universe story that takes up where Night of New Beginnings leaves off and the long list of unfinished K/S/Mc stories in the Trinity universe.
I need a long vacation from everything else but writing.
Saturday, October 18, 2003
- -
Now that I'm watching the server logs on a regular basis, I see how often people are going to various stories of mine--far more often than I'd had any idea of. I'd like to put up a counter for each one, but replicating the counter.cgi program for each page is going to eat up more space than I want to devote to it. Guess I'll have to change the program so it can tell which file it was called from. Then I'll only have to set up a totals file for each story.
The AllSlash on the Net pages are being hit multiple times per day as well. Time to get back on those and add some more links. After the ball game, at any rate.
On another subject altogether, I came across one of those "test-your-learning-style-and-hemisphere-dominance" sites, and was surprised at how well it matched my own perception of myself. It's at http://www.mindmedia.com/brainworks/profiler. My summary says I am "mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing."
It says that a conflict between how I feel and how I think will generally be resolved in favor of what I think. And that . . .
There weren't enough questions to create a definitive evaluation, but it was fun anyway. Some of the questions could have been answered in more than one way, with an individual's choice showing a preference for visual or auditory styles.
The AllSlash on the Net pages are being hit multiple times per day as well. Time to get back on those and add some more links. After the ball game, at any rate.
On another subject altogether, I came across one of those "test-your-learning-style-and-hemisphere-dominance" sites, and was surprised at how well it matched my own perception of myself. It's at http://www.mindmedia.com/brainworks/profiler. My summary says I am "mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing."
It says that a conflict between how I feel and how I think will generally be resolved in favor of what I think. And that . . .
"You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in. "Pretty much right on the nose, though I would have said I was more strongly auditory and more strongly left-hemisphere-dominant.
Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory. "
To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management."
There weren't enough questions to create a definitive evaluation, but it was fun anyway. Some of the questions could have been answered in more than one way, with an individual's choice showing a preference for visual or auditory styles.
Saturday, October 11, 2003
- Update on the allSlash on the Net Links List -
I've updated every page on the list over the past week, and now have story links for all the listed fandoms. I also added a robots.txt file to the domain root to keep robots out of my own fiction, something I should have done a long time ago. As of today, the site is being spidered by Google, Scooter (Altavista's webbot), Grub, Alexa, and Inktomi Slurp (which provides content to Microsoft and Hotbot). All of them are observing the robots.txt file and accessing only the pages with links.
Next project: upgrade all the pages to HTML 4.01. That's going to be a daunting task, because the number of pages is growing like kudzu, but it needs to be done. I've managed to get to about three of them so far.
Next project: upgrade all the pages to HTML 4.01. That's going to be a daunting task, because the number of pages is growing like kudzu, but it needs to be done. I've managed to get to about three of them so far.
Saturday, October 04, 2003
- -
To my great amazement, one of the K/S lists I'm on has a Mennonite and an Amish member. The Amish woman doesn't post often--she mentioned that she watched television at a neighbor's house and used the library for internet access. She is apparently not "out" --out in the world at large, that is. The other woman lives on a farm, but works as a computer programmer. Her mother married "out" so she grew up with one foot in the Mennonite world and one in the secular world.
There's an interesting twist on the idomatic meaning of "out." For homosexuals, it means to be visible in the community. For some religious groups, it means to have left, or been excluded from, the community. I'm really tempted to find a K/S story in there.
I would have been surprised just to see these two women on the list, but in fact, I have a strong connection to the Mennonite community myself. I sold computer systems to several Mennonite businesses, and for many years wrote software for them and maintained networks. It's only been in the last two years that I've had no business contacts there, and I still go back to visit the folk at one of the businesses when I'm in the area.
Small world.
There's an interesting twist on the idomatic meaning of "out." For homosexuals, it means to be visible in the community. For some religious groups, it means to have left, or been excluded from, the community. I'm really tempted to find a K/S story in there.
I would have been surprised just to see these two women on the list, but in fact, I have a strong connection to the Mennonite community myself. I sold computer systems to several Mennonite businesses, and for many years wrote software for them and maintained networks. It's only been in the last two years that I've had no business contacts there, and I still go back to visit the folk at one of the businesses when I'm in the area.
Small world.
Thursday, October 02, 2003
- -
No, I haven't failed to post since May. I just failed to make a backup local copy of my blog. My hosting server went belly up and I've lost everything that was posted since then. One hopes I've learned from that.
Quick note--I set up a web site for Sin and Salvation, the Wild Wild West mailing list on Yahoo, wherein is posted most of the episode guides and fiction that appeared on the mailing list, as well as info about zines. The site still needs a fair amount of work, but it's worth visiting if you're a fan of WWW.
Quick note--I set up a web site for Sin and Salvation, the Wild Wild West mailing list on Yahoo, wherein is posted most of the episode guides and fiction that appeared on the mailing list, as well as info about zines. The site still needs a fair amount of work, but it's worth visiting if you're a fan of WWW.