How Friendships Onscreen and Off Fueled Half a Century of Fandom
For the admins of the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive, preserving fanworks and fannish community go hand in hand.
by Jay Castello
David Soul as Hutch and Paul Michael Glaser as Starsky. Courtesy ABC/Columbia Pictures Television.
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Flamingo only saw one episode of Starsky & Hutch during its original run on TV in the 1970s. “I remember seeing the episode ‘Gillian’ with a friend of mine,” she says. In it, the titular pair of detectives hug, and Starsky tells Hutch, “You're the best friend I got in the whole world.” Flamingo and her friend looked at each other. “Our friendship was new, and we burst into tears,” she says. “We’re still friends today.”
It was that onscreen friendship that she credits with sustaining a fandom that’s now been running for 50 years. “You just don’t see that level of closeness [in most media],” she says. “And don’t we all long for that? Isn’t that a human need?”
When the Starsky & Hutch pilot aired in 1975, fandom in its modern iteration was just beginning to grow, centered on shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and, of course, Star Trek. S&H developed a small following, and fans were producing zines as early as 1977, when issue #1 of Zebra Three was released.
As with many fandoms, though, it was widespread internet adoption in the ’90s that led the S&H fandom to grow exponentially. This was amplified many times over by a coinciding rerun of the show on TNT, which led a fresh wave of viewers towards its central characters.
At the time, Flamingo was involved in the Miami Vice fandom, but wasn’t a particularly devoted fan until she was “pulled into” Starsky & Hutch by friends who considered it a “nicer, kinder place.” She met many other fic writers there—and one of them, Alexis Rogers, decided that she wanted to put her fic online.
“The rest of us were still like, what’s the internet?” says Flamingo. “Why would you want that?” But Rodgers, “wanted her stories where people could get to them.” Flamingo was keen to keep the fandom alive—which meant new people had to get involved, made more difficult since the show had finished airing. Thinking the internet might be a new way to do that, she and several of her friends established the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive, and it’s been running ever since.
The Archive hosts thousands of stories from all eras of the fandom, divided into gen and slash; it can be further broken down into length, related season, and genre (hurt/comfort is massively popular, for example). It also hosts videos, art, zines, and even themed nonograms and wordsearches.
The site also has many references to SHareCon, an S&H convention that was established in the ’80s and picked up by Flamingo in 2000, running once every two years ever since. In 2012, they started running virtual cons as well—initially simultaneously, now in the physical con’s off-years. 2025 is a physical year: in Maryland this September, a group of fans will gather to watch panels, play games, attend video and art shows, and reconnect in a fandom that’s been bringing people together for 50 years.
Much of that longevity can be attributed to the Archive and SHareCon—and, through them, to Flamingo herself. Although fandom has changed shape dramatically since the show’s pilot, its focus on connection and the impact of individual fans’ dedication remains at its core.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” Flamingo says of taking over SHareCon two and a half decades ago.
In their early years, they were aiming to have 35 attendees to pay the bills—which was considered tricky, because most in-person cons for a single fandom could expect 20 to 25 attendees. But she credits a single decision with the con’s success. “I offered in-person registration, so you didn’t have to register in advance. 75 people showed up,” says Flamingo. “It was almost too much for the space.”
Every year at SHareCon, Flamingo spoke to older fandom members about having their work scanned and uploaded to the Archive. “Everybody was like, hell no,” she says of her early responses. Writers and zine creators were concerned that online archives would stop people from buying zines, which would mean their creation costs wouldn’t be covered. “I think it was close to a year before I could get anybody else to give me their fic.”
But eventually, Suzan Lovett, a prolific writer across many fandoms, agreed, and the Archive started to grow. Newer writers were more interested in posting their fics online, because it meant you didn’t have to wait for a long time for a zine to come out. And Flamingo began to develop her web skills to keep up.
Of the six members who originally started the Archive, Flamingo was the only one left 18 months later. But she was devoted: “Little by little, we started getting new writers on the Archive,” she says. “I took classes on HTML… But eventually, the internet got more complicated, and other people had to help me.”
Many fans have worked on the Archive over the years, but one of the three current administrators is Lisa A, who started helping in 2018. Lisa fell in love with the show as a teenager during its first run in the ‘70s, but she only discovered fanfiction much later. In the early 2000s, the show was being released on DVD, and Lisa had bought the first three seasons and was wondering when the fourth came out. When she googled, she “saw something called Starsky & Hutch fanfiction.”
At the time, she was busy with her family and didn’t look into it any further. But almost a decade later, still thinking about the show she had watched 40 years prior, she searched again, this time for fanpages on Facebook. “There’s a lot of them,” she laughs. Some of them were talking about fanfiction, and she says that, “2014 to 2018 was just reading whatever I could find.”
Hutch, Starsky, and their famous Ford Gran Torino. Courtesy ABC/Columbia Pictures Television.
After getting into fanfic spaces, Lisa saw a call for volunteers in fic archiving, and she decided that she wanted to help preserve the stories that meant so much to her. She was put in touch with Flamingo, and she’s volunteered for the Archive ever since. “I found out that I love editing and proofing,” she says.
The Archive’s current administrators split the work of getting new stories online. Usually, Flamingo sources works and sends them to Lisa to be checked before they’re uploaded onto the newest version of the Archive, which was made stable and intuitive for the modern web by a third volunteer. (They declined to be interviewed, but both Flamingo and Lisa emphasised the crucial nature of their work.) Fics come in waves depending on how successful Flamingo has been with outreach, but Lisa says proofing and preparing them can be up to 20 or 25 hours of work per week.
“I want to preserve these stories,” she says. “There used to be several Starsky & Hutch archives, but I think now we’re the only one that’s left.” Maintaining an archive requires both time and money, and across the decades, both Lisa and Flamingo have seen a lot of fic lost completely. “Luckily,” Lisa says, “we’ve got a team that can handle it.”
Half a century after the show’s pilot, the Starsky & Hutch fandom has seen huge changes in fandom culture. In the ’70s, slash was a precarious thing to produce, no matter what fandom you were in.
Flamingo relates the story of one zine writer who was threatened with having her work sent to the board of the school where she worked. “She lived in a small town in Georgia, and this would have destroyed her career,” she says. Another time, a zine had its writers' names pulled out at the last minute “because someone was threatening to send it to [Starsky & Hutch producers] Spelling and Goldberg and the actors.”
Flamingo, who worked in a federal program raising whooping cranes, was herself concerned that she could be fired under her contract’s “moral clause.” “I was gay. I was living with my now wife at a time before marriage was legal, where people still couldn’t talk about gay issues openly.” She says her bosses and coworkers were deeply conservative. “I had to be very closeted at work, and if they found out I was producing slash material, they could easily have fired me.”
Against this background, the relative progressiveness of Starsky & Hutch drew in fans. David Soul, who played Hutch, reportedly called the show, “a love story between two men who happen to be cops.” Although the relationship in the show remained platonic, it was clearly a major consideration of the showrunners. “The way they relied on each other and they cared about each other, that really struck me and it stayed with me forever,” says Lisa. “I mean, honestly, the scripts back then, some of the [episodes] were pretty crap, you know? I realized I wasn’t watching it for the scripts or the plotline…it was that interaction.”
This of course lent itself to slash reimaginings, but it also produced a huge amount of gen fic. “Yeah, sex sells, but so does friendship. And yet there’s much less emphasis on that,” says Flamingo. “We want to believe someone's going to love us forever beyond marriage.”
Soul and Glasser in a legendary promotional shoot. In 2021, Glaser shared one particular photo from this series on Instagram with the caption, “Everyone needs a Hutch to their Starsky.”
Both Flamingo and Lisa point out that Soul and Paul Michael Glaser, who played Starsky, were very good friends in real life, lending to an onscreen chemistry that felt natural. According to Lisa, the Archive currently has slightly more gen fic than slash, and the ratio is also close on Archive of Our Own.
This focus on portraying a real, desirable example of friendship is one of the things that’s made the Starsky & Hutch fandom so durable. While it lends itself to both gen and slash exploration, it also stands up to scrutiny on its own in a way that shallower depictions might not—and it provided a model for members of the fandom.
“I kind of took that example when I was a teenager watching the show and made that my thing,” said Lisa. “I wanted to be that friend. I wanted to have that kind of friendship.” And she did: she still has friends she met in the ’70s. Flamingo, too, says the show influenced her close relationships: one friend she made through the fandom lived with her for 20 years.
These connections and the strength of the onscreen friendship have sustained a fandom that has had only a single film added to its canon since its original run ended in 1979. Although there have been rumors of a reboot, Flamingo remains unconvinced. “All the people talking about rebooting it do not understand why we watched it in the first place, which is the problem with almost all professional media. I've said this for decades. The people creating media do not understand why we watch it.”
With the advent of large general fic archives like fanfiction.net and especially AO3, modern fans don’t usually turn to smaller, single-fandom archives. But stories are still being added to the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive largely because of Flamingo’s dedicated outreach. “I try to encourage people to put it in both places,” she says of the Archive and AO3. “There are people who don’t use AO3. It’s a little formidable.”
Mostly, she’s concerned with archiving as a whole, having seen so much work lost in early internet days, as archives with single hosts folded and the work saved on them disappeared. “Anything that’s run by fans is ephemeral,” she says. There are plans to have the Archive shifted over to AO3 if its current runners become unable to continue to host it.
But for now, the Starsky & Hutch Fiction Archive continues to grow, preserving stories about love 50 years after the pilot first introduced this special relationship to viewers. New Starsky & Hutch fics appear both there and on AO3 at least every few days. At SHareCon, fans in their 20s meet fans in their 80s; the former often tell Lisa that they were introduced to the show by their grandmothers. “I’m so inspired,” she says. “I would like to think it could be around for another 50 years.”
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Jay Castello is a freelance journalist, media critic, fiction author, and editor. They’ve covered fandom at sites like Polygon, Slate, and the Verge. They are on Bluesky at @jaymcastello.