My favorite pre-Trek pairings are the super-predictable Holmes/Watson, Sam/Frodo, Achilles/Patroclus, Alexander/Hephaestion, and Enjolras/Grantaire, and the less common James Bond/Felix Leiter (original Ian Flemming book versions), Anne of Green Gables and her various "bosom friends," Robin Hood/Little John (Howard Pyle version), Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday (historical RPS and every film depiction ever) and Porthos/Aramis from the d'Artagnan romances. And Wonder Woman/other women, which is... debatably canon in William Marston's original Golden Age Wonder Woman comics.
DC comics might be worth a mention in the "Slash through the ages" panel, in that while I don't think any actual Batman/Robin fanfic predates the internet, thanks to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, homophobic freakouts from conservative politicians over how very, very gay Batman and Robin surely had to be were instrumental in creating the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s. Batman & Robin's relationship and how homoerotic it was or wasn't was actually discussed before a congressional committee.
There's also Victor J. Banis's "The Man from C.A.M.P." books from the 1960s/70s, which are basically gay James Bond/Man from UNCLE parodies (so, not quite full-blown fanfic, but in the same ballpark). (on his website here, scroll way down the page to almost the bottom)
(Something that might be worth mentioning in the case of some of these ships is the cultural history of insistently interpreting them as or reframing them as platonic friendship&devotion and continually shutting down gay/lesbian readings even in cases where that requires deliberate denial - as with Alexander the Great - and how suffocating that can feel to LGBT readers. There's an interesting discussion about appropriation and the persistent desexualization/straightwashing of homoerotic relationships to be had about the fact that it's most often characters like Sherlock Holmes and Enjolras who have strong cases for an LGB reading in canon who are most frequently interpreted as aromantic/asexual - sometimes historically, as with Holmes, in a deliberate attempt to shut down LGBT readings. You know, the "Holmes is uninterested in relationships, period, so he and Watson can't be gay!" argument+)
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DC comics might be worth a mention in the "Slash through the ages" panel, in that while I don't think any actual Batman/Robin fanfic predates the internet, thanks to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, homophobic freakouts from conservative politicians over how very, very gay Batman and Robin surely had to be were instrumental in creating the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s. Batman & Robin's relationship and how homoerotic it was or wasn't was actually discussed before a congressional committee.
There's also Victor J. Banis's "The Man from C.A.M.P." books from the 1960s/70s, which are basically gay James Bond/Man from UNCLE parodies (so, not quite full-blown fanfic, but in the same ballpark). (on his website here, scroll way down the page to almost the bottom)
(Something that might be worth mentioning in the case of some of these ships is the cultural history of insistently interpreting them as or reframing them as platonic friendship&devotion and continually shutting down gay/lesbian readings even in cases where that requires deliberate denial - as with Alexander the Great - and how suffocating that can feel to LGBT readers. There's an interesting discussion about appropriation and the persistent desexualization/straightwashing of homoerotic relationships to be had about the fact that it's most often characters like Sherlock Holmes and Enjolras who have strong cases for an LGB reading in canon who are most frequently interpreted as aromantic/asexual - sometimes historically, as with Holmes, in a deliberate attempt to shut down LGBT readings. You know, the "Holmes is uninterested in relationships, period, so he and Watson can't be gay!" argument+)