The Brick In The Wall Theory

I have a theory about fandom and visibility: the brick in the wall theory. But instead of adding bricks to build a privacy wall, online life is more like removing bricks from the privacy wall. At least that is the case for many of the pre-Internet fans.  For those of us who joined fandom after the introduction of the Internet and after the use of pseuds became more common, the story plays out a bit differently.

* In the late 1990s Judith Proctor compiled a comprehensive Blake’s 7 fanzine catalog (gen and slash), complete with detailed tables of contents that, in some cases, included full real names (if published in the actual fanzine). That website is still online today. 

* In 2000, Beauty and the Beast fans lovingly transferred the contents of the Qfer, a print zine listing that contained publisher, author and artist names, online. 

* In the 2000s, a fan began cataloging her Star Trek zines with authors , artists and publishers names.

* Around the same time the Qfer was put online,  fanzine sellers – both publishers and agents-- began posting their zine info with tables of contents and full (often real) names.  The two largest agents, Knightwriter Press and Agent With Style began agenting some of the older fanzines, many of them slash and many with full or partial tables of contents. 

* In the mid-2000s Star Trek slash fanzine publishers began posting their tables of contents online.   Other Star Trek fanzine publishers who did the same: Pon Farr Press, Merry  Men Press, Beyond Dreams Press. 

* In 2008, a Starsky & Hutch fan posted a complete zine catalog online (just recently offline). 

* While many Sentinel zine publishers and writers used pseuds, not all writers or publishers did. This did not stop Sentinel fans from creating the Sentinel slash zine guide which lists the names of all the contributors. 

* Online zine listings pop up for almost every fandoms imaginable (see my fanzine list) and what is posted there (real names, pseuds, abbreviated name, partial listings, full listings, home addresses and email addresses) has been uncontrolled,  unmonitored, and largely uncommented upon by fandom for years.

* Libraries have been receiving and accepting donations of fanzines from the mid-1970s. Their catalogs too went online in the late 1990s: Bowling Green, the National Library of Australia, and the British library.  Because these are library catalogs, the authors and artists and publishers full names (as printed in the zines) are often listed. In some case the online library listings even include the publisher’s address.

* Fans have been talking about fanzines  and the people who created them since the dawn of the Internet – a search of public Usenet newsgroups (and later Yahoo groups) often shows fanzine listings complete with addresses and full (often real) names.  Even subscription mailing lists are appearing online – this Forever Knight mailing list and these Beauty and the Beast OLOH digests.

 * On the commercial side, as books about fandom and slash are entered into online catalogs, fanzine contributor names and addresses can occasionally pop up.

* Fans have been selling their zines on eBay and Amazon since the mid-2000s and third party eBay services collect and store this info which also contains fanzine publishing info such as authors and artists name.  Ebay’s content is always highly visible. For example, the sixth hit on a search for “Miami Vice” “fanzines” brings up this.

Many of these posts, pages, and catalogs were made by members of the fandom community,  person by person and group by group. They were made people who never thought that there would be a publicly central searchable database (Google) or a permanent website archiving service (Internet Archive/Wayback Machine).  But the tools and the data do exist and every day more and more historical data is being added. And in most cases, this data is here to stay.

 

 Updated 1/30/2019 - replaced dead links with WayBack Machine links where available

Fannish Taboos: Let me Show You One

I recently came across a discussion from the mid 1990s on a mailing list I co-moderated. The topic was fans photocopying fanzines for one another and other forms of sharing fanworks  (a topic which began long before the 1990s) and the general outcry was how horrible it was and how everyone in fandom universally condemned the practice and everyone knew THAT IT WAS JUST NOT DONE.

The comment that sticks with me today is this one: "The taboo is not the copying, the taboo is admitting that it is being done." And, although this was not actually spelled out at the time,  the second taboo was admitting that most of us had, at one point copied a zine for ourselves or a friend or had shared something we were not supposed to share,

So in the spirit of talking about things we do not talk about, I made a post about fandom and visibility. A post that I won't be actually talking about, but that you might find illuminating.