The history of slashfic as the internet knows it today, is in large part, the history of Star Trek. Queer readings of literature have existed since approximately five minutes after literature did; Frederic Wertham interviewed gay men in the '40s who read Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson as a couple, fans have been speculating about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson forever, and I'm sure there was a bard somewhere in ancient Sumer who was renowned for their smutty stories about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. But Kirk and Spock were the first couple to go "mainstream", at least on the convention circuit, with stories and essays on the topic published, samizdat-style, in mimeographed fanzines. The term "slash", in fact, comes from the punctuation in "K/S", which is what the stores and 'zines were marked.
Star Trek is unusual in that it's a science-fiction property based very much in the ideals of the 1960s that has survived into an era when many of the topics that had to be handled via allegory at the time -- race, religion, gender, sexuality, etc -- can be openly discussed. And so far as I know, it's unique in that the creator was asked about slashy interpretation of Kirk and Spock even Back In The Day, when the questions had to be whispered, and gave an answer that wasn't a blanket "no".
There are a few things things the K/S shippers tend to focus on when making the argument for "super gay and doing it on purpose," all of which stem from Gene Roddenberry himself. Shocking nobody, one of them is the entirety of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Once upon a time, the Wikipedia article for slashfic was illustrated with a screenshot of the scene in sick bay where Spock wakes up after he tries to have a friendly chat with V'Ger and conks out from slitscan overload, when he grabs for Kirk's hand while rambling about feelings. You see where the slashfen are going with that, obvs, but the novelization (written by Roddenberry) is even more blatant. I can't really recommend it for entertainment purposes; it's not great as a book, and has that clumsy, bare-bones telegraphic quality I recognize from old Shadow pulps that were churned out by ghostwriters on very short deadlines, consisting of a vague outline of a plot interrupted by a few lovingly-crafted set pieces. Which is unsurprising, as the movie is perhaps best described as a sequence of events that had happened, rather passive-aggressively, in the pluperfect tense, in between ads for the model department of their FX house.
The content, however, very clear on the Kirk + Spock 4EVA angle, albeit not quite as the smutty fic writers usually view it. Sexuality was in general a forbidden topic on the TV show, being produced by Desilu Studios and aired on a network, and anything past a kiss was vaguely alluded to at best. The movie touched on it much more explicitly, with Lt Ilia being from a species that involved sexuality in just about all their interactions and therefore had to promise to keep their mitts off the lesser humanoids while in Starfleet, lest everything devolve into chaos. I wouldn't say the sex in the novelization is handled very gracefully, but I still watch cats for a lady whose entire job is handling sex in science-fiction gracefully, so I may be spoiled.
The fangirl screaming you hear in the distance is mainly centered around the Vulcan word t'hy'la, which is defined in a footnote to mean "friend, brother, or lover". It pops up several times in the text of the novelization, but nowhere else in the canon that I know of, and certainly not in the movie, where they had enough trouble re-dubbing the Vulcan-language lines to match lip movements after they decided that bit shouldn't really be in English.
The slashfen argue from Chekov's Gun, that there's no reason to include "lover" among the potential translations if it's not relevant to the reason the word was invented in the first place. My view as a linguist is slightly different. If I had to take a stab, I'd guess it's probably a category term for any relationship close enough to give rise to a spontaneous mind link, a thing for which Vulcans have a native capacity, and humans do not. We're told that t'hy'la has no good translation in human languages -- so, probably it's a concept humans wouldn't readily come up with on their own -- but that the three best contextual matches are "friend", "brother", and "lover", all Gemeinschaft relationships that involve some measure of trust and emotional intimacy. Further, Spock thinks this is an appropriate kinship term to use for Jim Kirk, who at that point in the novel is missing him so loudly from several star systems away that Spock can hear it, and it makes him flunk his logic monk finals.
This is all confirmed by the both of them in-universe; the foreword establishes a "literary agent" framework, that the novel was penned by a historian who was concerned enough with accuracy to pass the manuscript around the principal actors for notes, and both Kirk and Spock evidently thought "yeah, that's a thing I'm okay having in print".
A specific term for a mind-linked bond suggests that the defining quality of "intimacy" in Vulcan relationships is not necessarily a sexual involvement, but a psychic one. In which case, yeah, the two of them clearly went ass over teakettle into that shortly after meeting. Spock previously served on the Enterprise under Captain Pike, so they didn't meet until Kirk took over; TOS is not great at keeping track of time, but they do mention the ship is on a 5-year mission, and the very first aired episode of TOS starts with Kirk and Spock teasing each other over a chess game, in a way that Spock wouldn't put up with from anyone else, much less participate in. The novelization for the movie makes it clear that they do have a mental link of some kind, and both are aware of it; Kirk notes that it's the kind of thing Vulcans think of as a 'better than sex' (which Vulcans frankly find embarrassing), which sounds a lot like a cultural observation he'd have had to hear from Spock.
Canonically, Spock's gone rummaging around in Kirk's head a few times, usually after someone else has evil-hypnotized their way in first and they really need their captain back, but at least once solely because he couldn't stand to see Kirk so broken up after finding out his girl of the week was a robot, who then shorted out after declaring her love for him. It doesn't take Spock more than a couple of seconds to get in; contrast pretty much every other time he tries it, where the target rarely if ever knows what's going on or who the hell this dude even is to be ringing the doorbell trying to get into their brains. (He also doesn't ask Kirk before doing that last one, which is interesting, as Spock is pretty skittish about banging around other people's heads if it's not an emergency. Suggests he has either standing permission to be in there, that he has some way of knowing Kirk was serious about wanting to forget her, or both.) Kirk doesn't seem to mind too much, although it is apparently pretty noisy in there.
Also confirmed (in footnotes following the framing convention) is that rumors about Kirk and Spock exist in-universe. Kirk says nobody ever said anything to his face, but Spock was asked a few times. Neither of them deny it; Spock apparently just did the eyebrow thing and gave people a look that meant something like 'goodness, do you know you just said that out loud?'. Kirk's response is to point out that he's really into women, and it would be stupid of him to settle down with someone who only goes into heat once every seven years.
[Why you would ask the introverted one with the unbreakable poker face instead of Captain Whoopsie I May Have Left My Pants On Rigel IV about it, I don't know. Popular belief is that Vulcans cannot lie, but 1) they totally can, ask Valeris, although maybe don't trust whatever answer she gives you, and 2) suggesting that you should pretend you didn't ask that, and furthermore ought to fuck right off, is really more of a personal opinion than a fact.]
This reeks of two people who don't want to answer 'no' but also don't think this is anyone else's goddamn business. Speaking personally, the reason I give annoyingly non-Boolean answers like that is because people ask about sex as a proxy for other things like "availability" and "emotional involvement" and the like, which certainly can be related, but are not necessarily so. And usually they're asking about someone whom I may or may not be hooking up with specifically because it wouldn't change the fundamental nature of the relationship if I did. If I got (or gave) these answers IRL, I'd translate Kirk's as "yes, I am still on the market, and no, I am not going to discuss Mr Spock with you," and Spock's as "I don't care why you're inquiring, but you are barking up the wrong tree."
[I should mention here that a good segment of the K/S community does a lot of that thing that makes me grind my teeth, where they many people read (correctly) that the actors are portraying a relationship with a lot of intimacy, and automatically assume that means it's not platonic anymore. It's like they think that if affection levels spike off the scale it'll automatically rollover the counter, with the carry bit set to 'sex'. When people do this to real humans, we call them creepy, and make fun of them on the internet. When they do it to fictional characters, we call them shippers, and camp on their tumblrs. Some of them also get into the thing where they're so convinced that they're right, and it was all totally on purpose, that they claim various small dialogue choices and background details in the work are some kind of shout-out to people who totally called that conspiracy!!!11!!1!1!!1!
I find this rampant apophenia disquieting. It is perhaps the biggest reason I am a fan of a lot of things, but avoid fandom like the plague.]
Out-of-universe, Roddenberry was asked about whether Kirk and Spock were lovers quite a bit, by both the hopeful and the outraged. His most famous quotes on the subject (and the ones to which the actors tend to refer when pressed) are collected here, but the tl;dr is 'sure, I guess if they felt like it?' with an implied shrug of 'you're missing the point'. If you're asking whether the relationship is that close, then yes it is; if you're asking specifically what they get up to in their free time, then your headcanon is as good as anyone's. My own personal take on the matter is annoyance at the fans who insist that intimacy is always equivalent to sex, but also that it's perfectly plausible, though probably nothing happened until after they survived V'Ger and Spock got a grip on the whole feelings thing.
[And, I mean, y'know: James T. Kirk. If T'Pau had just mentioned he had a choice between 'fight to the death' and 'roll in the hay', he'd have been peeling his shirt off before she finished that sentence. He's done worse, and less potentially interesting, things to keep Spock alive.
I also get the feeling that Spock's family as a whole is a little bit weird about collecting humans. His father, Ambassador Sarek, not only married his mother Amanda, but after Amanda's death he appeared in TNG with another human wife, Perrin. When asked what led him to wed Amanda, his answer was, "It was only logical" -- which pretty much only makes sense as a wry way of acknowledging that he loved her. He and both wives are seen making the affectionate little finger-touch gesture on-screen, which is like whoa cuddly for a Vulcan. As of Star Trek: Discovery, he's known to have taken in a human foster daughter as well.]
If you're hoping to use that classical reference to 'Alexander and Hephastion' to clear things up, BTW, you are out of luck. Both contemporaneous writers and historians are in agreement that Alexander the Great and his personal bodyguard Hephastion loved each other intensely, but they have also spent the past 1700 years arguing over whether the two were sexually involved. Alexander and Hephastion were said to have viewed themselves as like Achilles and Patroclus, who have been subject to the exact same debate since the original publication of the Iliad.
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