I Always Forget That Lisa Bowerman Was In Classic Dw Before She Was Audio Benny - Tumblr Posts

Can you remember the first femmeslash fanfiction you ever read or heard about back in the day?

Yes! WIth a bit of brain-scraping, yes I can. Both must've been around 1989/1990. Sadly, I don't remember the titles or the authors.

One was Blake's 7 pairing Cally with Jenna, sort of unrequited love/very requited smut. Not quite PWP, but not deep into the plotty side of B7 either. Not particularly explicit by today's AO3 rating standards, but properly raunchy space ladies doing ladies in space.

The other was Doctor Who - Ace and Karra from Survival, with flashbacks to Ace's friend who was burned in the racially-aggravated arson attack (was her name Manisha?) as a framing device. That one was gen- or teen- rated (or would be now - all slash was treated as risque and labelled as adult back then), but had lots of intense teen feels and self-discovery going on.

What I don't remember is where I found them. In print, because everything was at that time. A B7 newsletter for the Cally/Jenna, I'd guess, but I honestly don't remember anything 'shippy at all from a Doctor Who fanzine pre-internet-era.

Very little Doctor Who fanfiction of any kind came my way until the late 90s, well into the Wilderness Years and the New Adventures/Missing Adventures/EDAs, and what little fic there was never focused on character stuff before those novels came along. Lots of Ice Warrior worldbuilding nerdery and endless political Daleks, and nearly exclusively male writers in the zines I had access to - very different from my experience of Star Trek and Blake's 7 fanfiction. So that 'shippy DW piece I remember might've been something a friend/penpal wrote and shared?? Reading room at a con?

So I encountered femmeslash young, but then it was actually quite a while before I encountered any more. Maybe Buffy the Vampire Slayer's early years, my first couple of years online? Before Willow/Tara, definitely.