How Sci-Fi Fandom Got Queer

Before Star Trek fan fiction, Flame Con and AO3, there was an underground network of fanzines, occult circles and speculative visions that tied sci-fi to queer identity. Kyle Turner traces the coded language, hidden gatherings and radical ideas that shaped a subculture

Grand Prospect Hall – which sat in Park Slope, west of Prospect Park, as a reminder of the Gilded Age, when Brooklyn had to entice New York’s wealthy away from middle and lower Manhattan – was, until its demolition in 2022, old enough for its turn-of-the-century design to feel like another world. Gilt edges, sparkling chandeliers, balconies encrusted in gold paint – all sensibilities of a still very young America. The Industrial Age could give birth to extravagances like this beautiful banquet hall, first built by entrepreneur John Kolle and designed by Ulrich J Huberty in 1892, while draping other parts of the city, the country, in poverty. A character in Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid reflects, “All that I thought American in a true sense is gone, and I see nothing but vain-glory, crassness and a total ignorance.”

The American Federation of Labor had emerged in the late-1880s as a redirection of the priorities of the Knights of Labor, and Karl Marx’s third volume of Das Kapital, which was published in 1894, heavily influenced those Knights members who jumped to the AFL. New worlds, hopeful visions of justice for workers and all people, were being sketched out even as New York, across its boroughs, looked towards greatness and majesty. Grand Prospect Hall could be seen as a totem of Brooklyn’s seriousness as a social space – just as appealing as Carnegie Hall (founded the year before) – and a locale where history and tradition provided a foundation for what was to come. At least in the sense that in June 2015, what had been used for myriad events – weddings, performances, rallies by the likes of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst and politicians like William Jennings Bryan – could also become the new and first home of Flame Con, the first LGBTQ+ science-fiction/fantasy convention.

A modest event effort on the part of Geeks OUT, a non-profit organisation for self-identified “queer geeks”, Flame Con began as a Kickstarter campaign seeking to raise $15,000 for event costs. Geeks OUT handily raised $20,000, and booked Grand Prospect Hall, welcoming over 2,000 attendees in all manners of cosplay and adoration. The line connecting emergent labour movements in the late-19th century and gay nerds in Sailor Moon attire is less circuitous than one might assume.

LGBTQ+ sci-fi fandom is arguably the powerful undertow beneath the dominant, straight forces of genre fan communities. For every message board or group chat that either doesn’t directly appeal to LGBTQ+ people or actively disregards them, there are dozens of splinter groups with queers in tow. Queer people’s relationship with science fiction, occultism and magic(k), stretches even further back than the advent of Star Trek fan fiction in the 1960s.

Around the same time Wharton was documenting a changing upper-class New York in the mid-1920s, magazine publisher Hugo Gernsback launched what is considered the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Gernsback, who is the namesake of the prestigious Hugo Award for speculative fiction writing, had gone bankrupt in 1929, but when body builder-cum-eugenicist Bernarr McFadden acquired Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing Co, it allowed science fiction and sexuality to begin to, shall we say, cross-breed.

While McFadden was already a purveyor of, if not outrightly gay, then at least homoerotic content, vis-à-vis his magazine Physical Culture, the consolidation of all of McFadden and Gernsback’s titles together would mean that the latter’s title Sexology would be under the same umbrella, and therefore, produced by the same workforce.

Gernsback’s daughter Tina and Frank R Paul handled art direction for all the titles that comprised Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing Co, meaning that the same eyes and creative minds that imagined the covers of Amazing Stories would also do so for Sexology. Robert Silverberg, the author of such speculative fiction works as Nightwings (1969) and Downward to the Earth (1970), wrote for both Gernsback’s sci-fi magazine and his sex one, under the pen name LT Woodward. And as successful as Amazing Stories was, sometimes reaching a circulation as high as 110,000, Sexology edged out its fantastical sibling by nearly double that at 200,000.

These connected dots are crucial, particularly in sketching out sci-fi fandoms and queer communities as effectively subcultural. It is easy to take for granted the prominence of sci-fi titles, spaces, properties and ancillary products today, or at least the ones that capitalise on existing intellectual property which are then thrown into a meat grinder of perpetuity. But the combination of the lack of mass telecommunication and much stricter social mores around sexuality and identity invited these clandestine communes, initially disparate though they were, to intersect and inform one another. And that was done the old-fashioned way: in print.

It was in the pages and between the lines of magazines in the first half of the 20th century that queer people and sci-fi fans found ways to interact, creating a compelling meta-commentary. If speculative fiction is built on imagining new worlds and new kinds of people – or perhaps new kinds of relationships – then readers of Amazing Stories or ONE Magazine (published by members of the Mattachine Society) had to navigate the limits of print to connect. They sent letters to the editor or to classified sections, hoping to find like-minded individuals, but the gaps between publication cycles meant that much of this interaction took place in the space between the printed word and the reader’s imagination. Without direct, immediate contact, they had no choice but to conjure the people they were reaching out to in their minds.

It was maybe this curious lack of immediacy, and the time and intentionality needed to craft these real and imagined communities, these made-up yet possible worlds, that appealed to early queer, gay and homophile activists. Chuck Rowland and Harry Hay, co-founding members of the Mattachine Society and both magazine and fanzine publishers, as well as gay rights historian Jim Kepner and sci-fi illustrator Edith Eyde (aka Tigrina), all had abiding love for sci-fi and occultism. Hay dabbled in Aleister Crowley’s Magick, Rowland was an avid reader of Amazing Stories, Kepner published fanzines with socialist and Marxist attitudes like Toward Tomorrow, and Tigrina published the first American lesbian-focused zine Vice Versa. Kepner and Tigrina met at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society (LASFS), while Rowland and Hay, both communist leaning, would help to found the Mattachine Society, and then, as the gay rights group took a turn towards the liberal assimilationist in 1953, be purged from the community they both helped codify.

The steps from fanzines and magazines to in-person meetings were an important part of the process for queer people and sci-fi fans. Forrest J Ackerman, co-founder of LASFS with Gernsback, wrote for Tigrina’s lesbian zine Vice Versa as well as The Ladder after meeting Tigrina and Kepner at LASFS meetings. He was also given the title of ‘honorary lesbian’ by the lesbian homophile group Daughters of Bilitis, for his support of LGBTQ+ people.

It was at these parties and gatherings that those who felt ostracised by society and yearned to imagine something more free and just, even as they transformed real-world systematic issues and anxieties into the work, could under plausible deniability meet one another off the pages of the editor’s letters. Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a homosexual, would attend parties with sci-fi fan Peter Reaney, who would appear as his female alter ego Rita Peaney. And while rocket scientist Jack Parsons was less of a sci-fi person, his interest in the genre – via Jules Verne – intersected with his Thelemite beliefs, a philosophy founded by Aleister Crowley that emphasised individual will and spiritual transcendence.

This connection was further deepened by his participation in the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secretive occult society that incorporated elements of Thelema into its rituals and teachings, which provided space for sexual exploration with his wife, the mononymic Cameron, and L Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was a sci-fi writer who had written Final Blackout in 1940, To the Stars in 1954, would publish Battlefield Earth in 1982, and who also founded Scientology in the 1950s. According to Kelly Filreis in an essay called Supernatural Sex: The Visionary Life and Art of Cameron included in the book Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer LA, Parsons and Hubbard “performed a sex magick ritual called ‘The Babalon Working’ to summon the goddess Babalon, who, according to Crowley, was ‘a messianic figure who would end religious and sexual tyranny and manifest a new age of love and liberty’.”

The triangulation between fandoms, sci-fi and queerness comes into focus when one considers not merely the queer content that exists in much science fiction, implicitly or explicitly, but rather the shared goals between these three elements. Desire is unrestricted or at least not necessarily beneath the boot of authoritarian constraint; mutual benefit and communal success are foregrounded objectives; and the chaos of the transforming world is counterbalanced by a vision of others as fluid and free – ready to take society in their hands and break the shackles that prevent justice or peace from coming to fruition.

There are hundreds of thousands of users on AO3, the primary platform for fan fiction on the internet, with contributions written by and/or for queer people. Flame Con, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, might be held back by the way that current media ecosystems function in late capitalism and fall short of the fully realised utopias imagined in speculative fiction. But, with all the games, booths, writers, illustrators, panels, artists and, of course, cosplayers, it will have to settle for being an amazing story.

Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A. Sexual Science and the Imagination can be purchased here. 

All images courtesy Inventory Press.

This article is taken from Port issue 36. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here