The Halloween We Went as Kirk / Spock

Dear Friends:

Weeks ago, on the phone with my mom, she said, ‘Wait hang on’ and I heard Dad in the background: ‘Tell Dave I voted for Kamala.’

Dad grew up in the South (of Maryland). He’s a Vietnam vet who spent his career working for the Department of Defense. Sometimes we get into it about politics, and the last time we did, when I said, ‘Dad, we live in a deeply conservative country,’ he looked at me like I was bullshitting him.

We disagree about so much, is the point. But not this election.

Dad on the phone pronounced Kamala like ‘Pamela’, which is my mom’s name, which I thought was sweet. I love him very much, and I understood his message relayed through Mom was his way of loving me too.

When, in this scary season, I feel the dread coming, I’ve remembered that even my dad is voting Harris-Walz (Mom too, of course)¹, and I think we all might be okay. It’s frustrating that pres elections have become moments not to effect change (if they ever were) but instead to ward off disaster. The upside is more energy to focus on local and state elections. Change from the ground up.

See you on the other side of this.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Ultra-Last-Minute Costume Edition

1. Spooky Approach: ‘Satanist’
All you need is black eyeliner and a mirror. Make your eyes as dark as you can, and then draw something evil and cultish in the center of your forehead:

2. Sexy Approach: The Nerdy Girl Nobody Realizes Is Pretty
All you need is a hair tie and some eyeglasses. (They don’t have to be prescription.) Put your hair up and wear the glasses, and when people ask who you are, remove both and coyly say, ‘Who, me?’

The Halloween We Went as Kirk / Spock

Lucas was a local in our grad program in Lincoln. Well, he didn’t live in Lincoln but north of town, near the Platte, in a house he shared with friends that sat next to some farmland owned, he once told me, by ‘relations’. Lucas was blond and burly, ‘cornfed’ as the cliche goes, given where we were, and given our school’s mascot: the Cornhuskers. He was great to have in workshop, generous with his feedback. We wrote very different kinds of fiction, but he knew, unlike some, that you should believe in every manuscript you’re handed, no matter what you believe about writing and what it should be.

Another generosity: he invited some of us to the annual Halloween party he and those friends threw. They had access to a tractor for what Nebraskans call ‘hayrack rides’, and living near the Platte gave them a dark and trees-y stretch of land beside the house to lead their guests through and scare the hell out of them. They ran powerlines out there and everything, cornfed dudes in torn-bloody sweatshirts and ghoul makeup crouched in the shadows near a trunk for the right second to burst out and growl at us.

Plus beer and a whole dinner spread in the garage. N & I had such a great time the year we got invited (it was 2008; we went as Flight of the Conchords), that I hoped to get an invite the next year. The direction this story is going, you’ll guess that we did. It was N’s idea this time to go as Kirk and Spock. (The JJ Abrams reboot Star Trek had come out that summer.) As the blond, he got to be Kirk, the handsome one. Though if you know me, you’ll understand I had little problem being Mr. Spock.

The joke I decided on—because when anxious I have a habit of leaning on cleverness to get me through, and not being a huge Star Trek fan² I was a little anxious about the costume—was that we weren’t going as Kirk and Spock, we were going as K/S Fiction.

Nobody loves a visual-pun costume that has to be explained, but let me explain.

‘Slash’ is the term the fanfiction community has long decided on to describe stories where same-gender characters have a sexual relationship, one that’s likely Not Canon. (Do those terms need further explanation? Wikipedia’s got you.) The origin of the term comes from ‘K/S Stories’, written as early as the 1960s by fans of the original Star Trek series. The slash indicated these were different from ‘K&S Stories’, which were about Kirk and Spock’s enduring friendship.

K/S stories let those dudes fuck. And the thing that’s always fascinated me about K/S fiction is that it was originally written by straight women. Starting in the 1970s, women began publishing in fanzines their own stories about Kirk and Spock’s brotherly love for each other turning physical, playing off an erotic subtext they saw in the show.

Star Trek’s creators and writers kept insisting they were just friends, comrades. But certain fans weren’t having it, and certain women wanted to create something more. There’s been much speculation on what drew straight women to write erotica about two men fucking, with many folks suggesting that K/S allowed writers to explore a loving and sexual relationship between two equal partners, which heterosexuality and the patriarchy make near impossible.³

Anyway, K/S fiction refuses the dominant narrative, centers sex without binary gender dynamics, and, often, is hot. (Here’s a cool one from 1976, where Kirk and Spock unwittingly fuck with a witness.) I love the idea of the slash, the fact that it’s slanted a bit, not balanced, a little uneasy. And the violence of the word countered by the round and agreeable friendliness of the ampersand.⁴ And I love that slash is a form of queer culture created by straight allies. (Or what do I know, maybe slash writers vote Republican.)

N and I recruited our friend emily, another gradschool friend and fan of Lucas’s parties, to go as a Vulcan and make us a Star Trek trio. Sure, it complicated my slash idea, but group costumes make parties more fun—as emily knew better than anyone; the previous year she was Blanche in a Golden Girls group, and I congratulated her on the right best choice of Girl.

At any rate, we timed it to arrive about an hour into the party, parked the car in a field in front of the house, and walked toward the light from the garage spilling into the dark night.

We saw nobody in costume. Just not a single person.

There’d been so many fun costumes last year! But also, had there been more of us gradschool friends? We got beers and sat at a faraway picnic table. Should we stay?

Have you heard of people cosplaying as Star Trek characters at a Ren Faire? The idea, I guess, is that it’s fun to pretend you’ve encountered a planet where people have curious customs you and the Enterprise team need to investigate. ‘Very peculiar, Captain,’ &c. &c. Being the only people in costume, and looking as we did, I tried to pretend that’s what we were doing, but mostly we felt both overdressed and underdressed, given the cold temperatures that night.

We stayed for what we thought was an amicable amount of time, and then drove home. It wasn’t, I don’t think, the last Halloween party we went to, but it was the last time we went in a couple’s costume. Once, we went as Mr. and Mrs. Roper. Another time we were Bob Ross and a paintbrush. We were young(er) and in love, and paired costumes was one way to show that off.

Now we’re old(er) and in love, and people in their 40s and 50s need to throw more Halloween parties. Yours likely were last weekend. I hope in one way or another you showed yourselves off.

This week’s thing I didn’t buy at the antique store is this even hotter bit of slash:

1. To be fair, they also voted for Obama. Like all of Virginia, they’ve drifted leftward since the Aughts.

2. Nor for the record is N. But I’ll take anything Star Trek over anything Star Wars any day.

3. The idea is similar to the one on why lesbians watch gay-male porn, per that scene in Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right

4. You likely know already that the ampersand’s origins are in the Latin word et for ‘and’, which you can see easily when you italicize the thing in better fonts: