How I Learned About Adult Star Trek Fanzines

A Trek Through the Weird 1970s

In the 1970s, I could read wild paperback novels with bonkers sex scenes and violent fight scenes. But I was too young to buy adult Star Trek fanzines.

Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner as Spock and Kirk in a Photo from NBC Television. (Source: Wikimedia; Public Domain.)

But First, an Interlude About 1970s Weirdness

I’ve said before that the 1970s were weird for us kids. Here are some other ways they were weird. And boy, they were weird!

When I was in my early teens, I could go into all types of stores and encounter some truly weird books and magazines. No one would say, “You can’t look at this.” They were more likely to get upset because they thought I might be a would-be shoplifter or (gasp!) a browser.

In a hotel gift shop in the 1970s, a cranky woman once scolded at me for taking too long to browse in the store. How dare I look at the magazines they had on sale? Coincidentally, that was where I bought my first magazine about Star Trek. I’m pretty sure it was the now collectible All About Star Trek Fan Clubs magazine. But it wasn’t your typical fanzine — it received news stand distribution, and it didn’t contain fiction.

In my early teens, I stumbled upon dirty adult greeting cards in stores. Even worse, in a gift shop, I once stumbled upon a raunchy parody of the Curious George books. What on earth?! This … book-like object … was displayed on a metal spinner rack. I’ve put the illustrations out of my head, but I’m pretty sure it was at least R-rated. And probably “rapey.” Eww.

OK, while I could stumble (unwillingly) onto Curious George erotica (eww), I couldn’t go into a bookstore and buy an actual porn magazine. But at that time, most stores weren’t hiding the covers yet, so I … uhm, learned a lot. I might have learned better lessons from adult Star Trek fan fiction.

So I couldn’t buy adult magazines. But in my mid-teens, I bought an early paperback edition of The Leatherman’s Handbook by Larry Townsend at a flea market. This is a seminal (pun intended?) book about the gay male leather scene. Yet the guy who sold it to me didn’t bat an eye. (Good for him!)

I was also old enough to go into the library or a bookstore and read books with adult content. Bodice ripper romances full of…