incognitajones

Continuing from J's and my re-watch (for me, after a good 20 years) of The Motion Picture:

So, uh, well, I finished it, though my overall feeling is “what the fuck did I just see?” I feel like this conversation J and I had afterwards sort of illustrates our general mood:

J: Even by Star Trek standards, this was incredibly horny in a very 70s way. I’m pretty sure the entire female reproductive system was cosmically represented.

me: RIGHT? So many labia and yonic tunnels and barely metaphorical orgasms and uhhh

J: Many clits also.

me: SO MANY.

J: Though I think the Voyager craft was the, you know, main one.

me: …maybe Voyager was the real clit all along?

Despite this, Spock’s navigation of the horny cosmic feminine is the gayest shit ever, including him icily referring to the various uhhh openings in the tunnels as “orifices” and one of the shippiest scenes with Kirk he’s ever had (a high bar for them!!).

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Despite stumbling into passionately shipping the original Star Trek ship of ultimate destiny that spawned fandom as we know it, I've found my interests and preferences a bit at odds with general ST fandom, which naturally has meant that I had to make my own silly TOS icons reflecting what I'm personally into. I promisedelperian that I'd get around to posting them here—they're up for grabs for anyone who wants them, and I'm sick and miserable for asthma reasons, so it's something that doesn't take a lot of brain power.

1. You know the infamous scene from S3 where the terribly written alien spawns a terribly written Kirk meltdown only for it to become one of the most incredible and certainly gayest scenes in all of TOS ft. Kirk and Spock's shadows leaning in and eventually overlapping? I definitely needed that one:



2. Perhaps the most purely surprising and purely delightful revelation from the TOS watch was that Uhura doesn't do much more with Spock than hit on him a few times in some early episodes, but she and Kirk have a really charming platonic friendship where they're only ever on a last name/rank basis, yet are genuinely close and are persistently shown to care very deeply about each other. And they're also absolute joys when their subtle background rapport as mutually smooth-talking, stylish, high-strung but controlled professionals gets to flourish into what I can only describe as bisexual guile diva chaos gremlin energy. There are multiple occasions when one of them is finally starting to crumble under the pressure and the other is an absolute rock until the crisis passes (which one takes which role actually varies), but I have a real soft spot for Kirk reminding Uhura of how important and valuable she is in "Mirror, Mirror," so that's the scene I chose for my first Kirk-Uhura brotp icon:



3. The great thing about "Amok Time" is—well, there are many great things, but you know how you sometimes watch something, and you just end up kind of hating everyone and siding with a meteor destroying all concerned? "Amok Time" is the opposite of that. It's one of few episodes of anything where I'm pretty much Team Everyone, and this very much includes one of my absolute favorite Vulcans of all time and one of my favorite women in TOS, my girl T'Pring:



Yes, she did all that, and good for her, too. Spock himself talks about the prospect of having sex with her with about as much enthusiasm as a death sentence and T'Pring doesn't want to be his property/consort, so win/win. Maybe Vulcan should have better divorce laws if they don't want fantastically stylish women scheming for personal autonomy!!

4. There was no way in hell I wasn't going to have an icon for my beloved episode of episodes, "The Conscience of the King" (a fantastically acted and structured episode in general, obviously a great Kirk episode specifically, with an intense and intriguing villain in Kodos/Karidian, but also in true TOS fashion about the then-highly topical subject matter of what to do with elderly Nazis escaped eugenicist war criminals, an emphasis on Spock immediately recognizing the strangeness of Kirk's behavior and quickly grasping the weight of genocide for the survivors where McCoy desperately wants to filter Kirk's actions through familiar, relatable, pedestrian motives right up to the end, all interlaced with early modern revenge tragedy aka my academic specialization and other great love—truly, no episode could be more perfect for me specifically). So I went with an icon for one of my absolute favorite scenes from the whole damn thing, the magnificent confrontation between Kirk and Kodos:



"You're an actor now. What were you twenty years ago?"
"Younger, captain. Much younger."
"So was I. But I remember."

5. I really wanted a gay Spock icon that was not necessarily a Kirk/Spock icon (he is mostly Kirksexual, sure, but he's also so aggressively Not Into Women on so many occasions that I felt it deserved its own separate icon). And so many of those scenes don't really get across the level of bitchy indifference without the movement of his head tilt or shrug or whatnot... but I found one that I felt truly encapsulated the particular gay energy of Spock:



6. While I was at it, I couldn't resist the other supremely bitchy gay Spock scene (this is when Kirk invites him to join a party of dudes going to a hot lady cafe and Spock very slowly tilts his head and projects intensely passive-aggressive confusion at the idea that he could possibly find this appealing):



7. There's a post that periodically goes around about Shatner's wildly erratic positions on Kirk's sexuality over the last 50-odd years that's like... dude, you're the one who kept looking at Nimoy like you wanted to eat him, you're the one who played Kirk as the queerest dude in space, you did this, Bill, and—yeah, it's not wrong. One of the other big surprises from watching all of TOS was realizing that the intense queer vibes of K/S has every bit as much to do with Shatner's performance as Nimoy's, along with the framing and writing and so on. No other Kirk actor (and few ST actors period) has even remotely approached the off-the-charts queer energy of the original, and so I made a silly icon about it:



8. I wanted a K/S icon that captured how much of their dynamic is like—

Kirk: I'll admit that part of me seeks the blood of my enemies and every day I choose not to murder
Spock: um, I ... have questions
Kirk: well it's just - LOOK A FLOWER!!!!!!
Spock: Jim please stop sniffing flowers they keep trying to kill you



Truly, no one's doing it like them.

9. One of my other favorite Kirk-Uhura brotp moments is when he casually promotes her to the local racist's position controlling the Enterprise's weapons and navigation in the middle of the Romulan crisis in "Balance of Terror." Kirk and Uhura are visually framed together a lot in that episode and lit very similarly, so I wanted to pair Uhura confidently stepping up in that episode with his affirmation of her importance in "Mirror, Mirror":



10. I had been talking with elperian about the hunt for Kirk icons, and we both hadn't found any that used the much-quoted description of him from the pilot as "a stack of books with legs" and his notoriety at the Academy as the demanding teacher of a course (implied to be a philosophy class) in which cadets would either "think or sink." Despite his more easy-going manner in the present, his conviction that noping out of critical thinking and creativity is not an option, ethically, remains absolutely non-negotiable and central to his worldview in TOS, so I wanted to come up with a "think or sink" icon. However, when I was collecting some screenshots from "Court Martial" for unrelated meta, one of them was so perfect for "stack of books with legs" that I couldn't resist going with that one instead!

I enjoy headcanoning both Kirk and Spock as nonbinary in the same "technically but badly closeted" way that I interpret them as very much bi4gay—but also, as pretty different types of nonbinary. Spock describes himself as both a man and not a man (within the same episode, the iconic "Amok Time"). In many respects, he possesses the most purely unassailable masculinity of anyone in the show (this is a significant plot point in one of the Maximally Gender episodes, "Charlie X"). He wears make-up in the style of female Vulcans like T'Pring and T'Pau more than like how most men wear make-up, while surrounded by people who don't even know the difference, and at the same time, he's not at all uncomfortable with being identified as a man. To describe Spock as a man is incomplete information, not false. His "nonbinariness" consists very specifically of Man and Not-Man, and he tends to be marked by a highly consistent presentation of himself that blends gendered conventions, as suits his unique experience, but also makes him the most supremely masculine figure around when that's an issue at hand—a specific sort of bigender quality with some pretty obvious resonance with his experience as a biracial Vulcan.

Kirk, I think, doesn't consciously consider that he could be anything but a man, and is broadly okay with that, if the range of his gender performance isn't compromised by external pressures. But when he is pressured to occupy some specific gendered role, his resistance seems to go from 0 to 100 very fast. I imagine nb!Kirk as the kind of closeted-even-to-himself nonbinary person who assumes everyone's experience of gender is as tied to performance as his own, and surely, it's just obvious that it's all kind of fake outside of social dynamics, it's just that social dynamics affect people's lives and psychologies, and thus matter (the reality is more complicated, obviously, but it is a not-uncommon perspective among some kinds of nb people still figuring our shit out, cf. Judith Butler—my headcanon is that he's less bigender or multigender than "agender diva who likes to fuck around with conventions around masculinity and femininity and whatever else, but feels little allegiance to any of them as a stable state of being"). I do think that being reduced to a specific, exclusively masculine role by forces outside himself (despite being sometimes useful) pretty evidently grates on him more than the somewhat effeminate roles he sometimes gets steamrollered into (also sometimes useful), but since he's strongly implied to be AMAB, that wouldn't necessarily be unusual (assigned gender often has more baggage for obvious reasons, even if it's not more or less "wrong").

I do tend to think of him as transfem-leaning nonbinary at heart (one of my many quibbles with Tumblr TOS fanon is that I genuinely think Kirk makes 100x more sense as transfem than transmasc, and that his presentation in the peak Kirk Enrichment Enclosure episodes is far closer to femme than butch too when accounting for the limitations of the era), but the cisheteronormativity of the 23rd century is alive and well. The specifics of how he would fully express his actual sense of gender in a less restrictive world don't preoccupy him much as long as he gets to be the diva he was born to be and doesn't feel (gender-wise) like someone is actively clipping his wings. So he's just sometimes going to slip into announcing that gender is an insignificant distraction from the common personhood of all people, if a fun one, before breezing onto picking flowers or throwing himself into the occasional community theatre production or fluttering his eyelashes to escape the third trap of that week.