Going into TOS, I already knew that Spirk was “The Big Thing” so naturally I ended up really shipping it. But I do wonder: if I had gone in blind, would I still ship it? Would I prefer Spones instead (I normally like “enemies-to-lovers” vibes in other shows), or maybe even a fully straight interpretation? It’s an interesting thought because just as much as we influence fandom culture, fandom culture influences us too.
For what it’s worth, I went into TOS completely “blind,” in the 90s, before I even knew fanfiction or online fandom was a thing at all.
And I didn’t ship them, at first. Because that was a time when very, very few mainstream movies or shows had any same-sex romances at all, and I knew the 60s had even less, and while I was aware of same-sex romance as a concept, I was pretty sheltered about it in terms of people I actually knew.
And I’d been raised on lots of old fiction – largely the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery – which I’m now aware has well-founded queer interpretations. But at the time, I was taught that those sorts of whole-hearted expressions of love (things that I think today would be interpreted as either gay or queerplatonic) were just normal between close friends, especially at that time in history. That, if the present day is any different, that’s just an aberration due to the particular types of repression we have today.
So when I saw anything that looked like that between Kirk and Spock, I viewed it through the lens of “this is just what friendship has looked like for most of history, and what it’ll probably look like centuries from now.”
And, while there is probably some truth in that, it did end up biasing me against ever interpreting a fictional relationship as queer unless it was very, very explicitly portrayed as such– more than anything from TOS-era ever was.
So, I had pretty much no cultural context for even theorizing that anyone in Star Trek could be having that sort of relationship. Sure, I fantasized about Spock– with me, with self-insert characters, and with the few female love interests he got onscreen– but imagining him with Kirk just simply didn’t occur to me, despite all the evidence.
Until I met other fans online… and let me tell you, then that mental block got obliterated. I was shipping those two real fast within a very short time after I was made to realize it was an option.
