The Pre-History of Slash: a talk by Helen Raven
This is a very cool and entertaining talk (text with a few accompanying slides) by Helen Raven, who you may remember from Professionals or BTVS/Angel fandom. She gave this talk at a pub theatre in the UK, and I wish I could have been there to see her deliver it and to check out all the old zines. (I do still have a very small zine collection myself, from what I think was the last generation of printed slash zines.)
“I got my hands on slash fiction for the first time in the 1970s, when I was 15, and everything about the process of “getting your hands on slash fiction” differed radically in those days from the way it works now. In my case, there was something that made the process particularly complicated, and that’s the fact that I was born and brought up in the Falkland Islands. At that time the primary school was excellent but the secondary school might as well not have existed, and so, in 1973, when I was 9, I was sent away to a boarding school in North Wales. We were only allowed to watch TV at the weekends, and only allowed out into town every three weeks, for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. I don’t recommend being sent to a boarding school in North Wales in the 1970s – avoid it, if you can.”