Don’t imagine that the likes of you get to tell us where that line is, youngling. Or attempt to cite the Old Fandom Magic to us. We were there when it was written. In fact, some of us wrote it.
…Let’s stay inside the 20th century for the moment (though it would be possible to take this further back). I come of the generation of fans who invented media fandom. I remember the laboriously printed fanzines piled up on convention dealers’ tables (and the fanzines that were kept out of sight under those tables… the source of the descriptor “slash”). I remember the letter campaign that first saved Star Trek. (And am proud to say that Bjo and John Trimble were fandom-neighbors of mine.)
I remember the great New York Trek conventions where the power of that fandom first began to reveal itself: the conventions where big center-city hotels got so oversubscribed that the fire marshals had to intervene. I remember the legendary Trek con at the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan where the ladies who normally worked a nearby brothel bought memberships and started working convention registration because they saw us having so much fun with our fandom. I was twenty feet away when Bill Shatner got hit with that pie during his GoH speech (and I know who paid for it to happen). I was there the time a guy dressed as the Starship Enterprise and another one dressed as a Klingon battle cruiser got into a (staged) fistfight during a costume competition and fell off the runway onto the guests.
I was at the Sunday morning con-committee breakfast when somebody came up with a note Nichelle Nichols had pushed under the con suite door (while plastered, she later told us), asking for champagne and eggs Benedict for breakfast. I saw the distraught expressions among the concom—and some other guests: seriously, what was Fred Pohl doing there?—since unfortunately there was no room service in the hotel on Sunday. And then, among the groans, heard the unexpected response (since the first McDonald’s in Manhattan had just opened across the road): “I know. Let’s get her an Egg McMuffin and a Colt 45.”*
But under all this light-hearted stuff lay a lot of hard work and commitment to sharing the fun with others. With my contemporaries, a majority of whom were female, I watched the fandom we’d built start to grow and thrive and spread to other shows, other media, building on the blueprints we’d drawn. I watched other Trek fans turn into professional writers and editors and even a few showrunners (some of them even writing for Trek, which gave a lot of us the chuckles). I’ve seen mass-media fandom as a whole become a worldwide phenomenon, now taken for granted everywhere, and treated like something that’s always existed. Except—before us—it didn’t.
More to the point: the ever-increasing attendance at such public events, and then the sheer size and undiminished drive of online fandom when it finally got started, had the effect of emboldening the studios that would eventually start making even more shows that would leverage the power of that fandom, and the advertisers who would indirectly help pay for them. Meanwhile, the fellowship built among fans of all ages during that growth has remained, and it too has grown and spread.
So my coevals and I assert the inalienable right to keep on being part of what we helped make. We’re in our fifties and sixties and even sometimes our seventies, now, this founder-generation of fans and its immediate descendants. We built this superstructure of passion. We continue to participate in it because we’ve made lifelong friendships in it, and because we haven’t stopped finding enjoyment in the characters and media we came to love as younger people. We welcome the influx of new fans (in their twenties, or thirties, or forties, or whatever) into old fandoms… as long as they don’t start acting like they think they have the right to dictate who else will be there, on the basis of some utterly specious premise like being “too old” to have “Young People Fun” any more.
Youth is not about how many years you’ve been on the planet. Joy is not about being young. If you honestly think it is, you’d better find out who lied to you, and get yourselves sorted out—before a horrible dry joyless age of, like thirty or forty, descends upon you, and you find yourself stuck in it forever, trapped in your own ageism with no way out.
Meanwhile, if you imagine we’re going to be run off a whole half-century old way of life by a crowd of humorless, self-important, overentitled babes in arms who think people (especially women over twenty) shouldn’t be allowed to continue having whatever kind of fun they choose to in their (soi-disant) “old age”…?
Think again. We’re not going anywhere. And as for you, with your pouting and whining that we should go home and make our spouses sandwiches or something, and abandon what we founded?
Make no mistake. We’re not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with us. Don’t like it? (points) The fire escape doors are thataway, leading into other platforms you may find less threatening. As for us, we’re keeping this one. (We’ve just barely got the decorating the way we want it…!) Here we will stay and continue to celebrate the fandoms we love. We have a right to exist, and to be part of the phenomena we helped create. We’ll welcome you as you grow up enough to appreciate it.
*…Which she loved, BTW. She’d forgotten about the note and was delighted to find that someone had brought her any breakfast at all.
