Why people think I ship Kirk/Spock:
Why I actually ship Kirk/Spock:
Mutual support, respect, admiration, trust, love, slow burn, best friend turned love of your life, ultimate sacrifice, the depth of loyalty, being the most important to each other, showing our differences and vulnerabilities are strengths instead of weaknesses, depending on others isnāt wrong, willingness to connect, ālet me helpā ā¦
Soulmates, t'hy'la, found family, lgbt+ representation, domestic bliss at least for a few years for two people who really f**inā earned it ā¦Ā
Both guys not ending up canonically sad and lonely as they grow older bc they never really āsettleā long term with anyone else besides each other.
Like what did you genuinely want us to do with that, like ā our boys deserve to be happy and they mutually love each other so much.Ā
Heck yeah, I love the idea of the two of them growing older together while still being in love and best friends.
Having adventures, solving problems and writing history all over the universe together.
Having a stellar time doing it because being next to each other is their favourite place to be; on a Starship, being the best team ever. Itās beautiful.
Another very important reason why this fandom and K/S has been a safe place to land for me as a member of LGBT+:
My connection to Star Trek started through my family, but I loved it because it offered me a glimpse at the kind of world that Iād like to live in; more accurately, the world I was desperate to live in.Ā
The world I was raised in was bitterly cruel and violent to LGBT+ folks like myself. I visited far too many friends in the ICU, unrecognizably beaten after a gay hate crime, than I ever should have had to āĀ especially in my young life before the age of 20. Those are images and ugly moments burned into my memory that will haunt me until I die. People talk about how pro-LGBT things are these days, and sure, things are certainly better; but I think too many people have swiftly forgotten how dire things were for us even those short years ago, even now.Ā
Gene Roddenberry did something for me at that time when I was so bitterly lonely, conflicted about identity, and self-resentful in my life; I had genuinely considered ending it more than once. But TMP novel did something so huge for me back then when I was so turbulent and alone in the tiniest way possible.
I read TMP novel in high school; actually reading something that even remotely resembled a bisexual character when I first read this line from Jim Kirk in TMP novel was such a game changer for me at that time:
That small sentence might be next to nothing for some people, but that was huge for me. So huge that I donāt think Gene Roddenberry might have ever considered how big that it could be for some isolated, lonely kid out there reading it. Ā
I cried my heart out in my room stuck on that page when I first read it, because it really shook my soul. It was proof that at some point in time, someone out there had been brave enough to express the kind of feelings that I so fiercely hid in my mind.
That might sound really pathetic to the people reading this, but you have to understand how positively starved a person can be for commiseration or empathy when you are on the outside looking in constantly.
It is part of why I have always related to Spock so fiercely; that sense of belonging nowhere, being "weirdā, of not quite fitting in or meeting expectations ā and constantly being reminded of it.
All those moments growing up when you look around yourself seeking validation as a child and teen, looking for like minded people or kin; I looked around and found myself reflected literally nowhere.
Itās like that metaphorical hand suspended in the air, waiting for a high five, and not one single, solitary person meets you halfway. Not one crumb of validation.
Then everyone around you makes you feel like youāre weird and wrong and malfunctioning and not supposed to think that way and just be quiet and donāt talk about it ever. Just be ānormal."Ā
I was so damn lonely. And scared.
Nobody around me thought or felt like me. I was raised in a strict Pentecost upbringing. Everything to do with LGBT+ was unequivocally off the table.
If I tried to even tentatively broach the subject of bisexuality with folks, most people would respond with revulsion; as if it were some perverted, weird sex kink. When like everybody else, I simply hoped to be loved someday for exactly who I was. Plain and simple.
I was a closeted bisexual teen living in the bible belt. It was a sheltered, oppressive existence for anyone, but especially for someone who identified as LGBT+.Ā
Ā Sad as it might be, this was the closest thing Iād ever gotten in my life thus far to bisexual representation or validation. It was the first example I remember seeing in any of the stories that I loved growing up.Ā Up to that point, I hadnāt heard or seen anyone else in the world express exactly how I felt inside anywhere. Until James T. Kirk.
So forgive me if I somehow hurt or upset other fans when I read it through my own lens in my desperation to feel seen or understood. What other way can we look at the world and itās many stories, after all, other than through our own eyes?
To be quite frank, those few little ambiguous words from Jim Kirk in that footnote of that dusty old 1979 1st edition Star Trek: The Motion Picture novel that I still have on my bookshelf all these years later?
That tiny little sentence absolutely rocked my bisexual f**king world in high school.
That one tiny sentence meant so much to me. I re-read that page so many times. I even stuck a bookmark in the page and Iād pop it open after yet another long, shitty day of being harassed, chased, or called a "f@gā.
Call it pathetic, but Iād feel a little sear of camaraderie in my angry, lonely existence. āAt least Jim Kirk has my back, f**k those guys". And it made me feel a tiny bit less alone in this giant universe.
I can still recite it word for word. I used to read it over and over again, just to have that giddy feeling in my heart of: āOh God, what a relief. There it is. There I am. Someone else out there wrote down exactly how I feel inside. Itās right there in this book. Itās a real thing that exists somewhere outside my head.ā
For the first time in my life, I saw something even remotely like myself represented somewhere, and I found that in Jim Kirk.
Some people might call that āa reachā.
But do that bearing in mind the kind of reality that people like myself contended with when you get āupsetā that we might be āqueer washingā your character by pushing for representation:
- Homosexuality was listed as a mental illness in the DSM5 until 1974.
- Anti-sodomy laws were not considered unconstitutional until 2003 in the US (as in you could legally get arrested/charged for engaging in homosexual acts up to that time).
- The Netherlands was the 1st country to legalize gay marriage and that was only as recently as 2001. Canada legalized gay marriage in 2005. The US did not legalize gay marriage until 2015 and they are currently gunning to take that right away again.Ā
*It is important to note that the definition of spouse only included same-sex partners only starting in 2013; that means that if a person was dying in the ICU, you were prohibited from visiting them unless you were legal family. For decades right up until 2013, your right to visit your lover if either of you were on your deathbed was revoked on the basis that you were not married ā and that right was not even offered to LGBT+ folks till 2001.*
Maybe it is āa reachā through your privileged lens, having all the representation in the world at your disposal if you identify as straight - I mean, God forbid we might like a scattered one or two on our team.
But it is also very hard to secure legitimate representation when the society and culture you grow up in tells you that you should not exist in the first place.
Not only demands that you shouldnāt exist, but legally persecutes you for it or forces you into cruel, inhuman religious conversion therapy simply for existing. For trying to love someone else honestly.
So pardon me for being absolutely starved for even the slightest hint of a vapour that resembled representation during a time period when I was asked (moreso ordered) not to exist and barely wanted to as a product of it.
God forbid that my seeing potential bisexuality in Jim Kirk might actually put you off of your Star Trek chowder because āeeeewww, bisexual Jimā ⦠how very selfish of me. /s
Iām just mindlessly āh0rnyā, and all that.