Con Fans and Mainstream Fans

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Title:	Con Fans and Mainstream Fans
Creator:	Bev Clark
Date(s):	May 1977
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
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Con Fans and Mainstream Fans is a 1977 Star Trek: TOS essay by Bev Clark.

It was printed in Spectrum #32.

Some Topics Discussed

• status and cliques in fandom
• con fans = fans who get their energy from attending cons and rubbing elbows with celebrities, mainstream fans = active fans involved in the creative side of fandom
• the rise of the professional fan concom

From the Essay

It occurred to me that there are really two different Star Trek fandoms: con fandom, and mainstream fandom. Most of us are mainstream fans — involved with fanzines as editors, writers, artists, or readers; involved in correspondence with other ST fans to a greater or lesser degree; and basically, involved with the matter of Star Trek in a creative sense. (By "us" I mean the people reading this article.) We have our own unofficial hierarchy, etiquette, and pattern of acceptable behavior; on the whole it is not the same as that of con fandom, although there is some overlap of participants.

And then there are con fans... Active con fandom, at least of the kind I've seen on the West Coast (and I should admit that my remarks may be applicable only to the West Coast) involves more than simply going to a lot of cons, although con-going is certainly a part of it. The con fan like being involved with a convention, as a gofer, a committee member, or just someone "in the know;" she doesn't just attend a convention.

The mainstream fan tends to go to conventions to meet people whom she may not be able to see in person any other way because they live halfway across the country; for her the most important part of the convention will probably be the meetings and/or parties in rooms of various fans. The con fan seems to end up working for the convention, whether or not she originally intended to, and often in a fairly responsible or "cushy" job—in fact, the more responsible the position, the better. For one thing, after a certain number of cons attended/worked, the con fan is known to committee members as someone who can be counted on to work her tushie off, not for her membership back, but for love (and a certain amount of martyr complex, I suspect). And it's natural for a committee to want people they know and can trust for responsible or sensitive positions.

This can lead to an interesting phenomenon — the traveling con committee, which has made its advent already on the West Coast. If you look at committee lists, you can find familiar names working on almost any convention in California, large or small, professional or fan-run. My friend, for instance, lives in Los Angeles, but has been on committees for conventions in San Fransisco and Oakland as well as in Los Angeles. Another acquaintance who lives near San Francisco has been on committees in Los Angeles. Neither of them has yet shown up on an out-of-state committee, but I wouldn't be surprised if one did, as has Sharon Ferraro [Short], for example...one of the few crossovers.

The situation is, I think, indicative of an incipient professionalism in convention fandom; one may also notice that these traveling committee numbers usually have the same jobs at each convention. Sharon Ferraro is an excellent example; I use her because she is familiar to everyone, and also one of the more traveled committee members, mostly because she is damn good at what she does. In fact, she and other perennial concom members are no different in kind than a freelance management consultant, who has a particular area of expertise, and is called in when a more specialized knowledge is required in order to make a business run more smoothly. The reasoning is perfectly sound—any well-intentioned committee wants to run the best con possible— especially considering the current trend in ST cons. In the last couple of years the majority of ST cons have been professional, in the sense of profit-making, and oriented toward show and spectacle; they have to be carefully orchestrated and run, just as any other business must be, and they have to get the best, most experienced committee members possible, even if that means bringing in people from out of state. There seems to be little place for the enthusiastic and possibly talented novice except in small fancons, which are virtually nonexistent on the West Coast at the moment. We seem to be more show biz oriented here — even a small one-day con may have 2,000 attendees. Hence the "professional" celebrity handlers, security forces, registration crews, and what-have-you.

Naturally all these people know each other, often fairly well because of the enforced comradeship of a convention. Like most such groups, the con-fan group has turned into a sort of clique on the West Coast, though it is possible to become a member, if one becomes known to enough of the members. My friend is a good example, and I'll use her experience to point out some of the traits of this clique. ...Last summer was on the committee of a large con, but she complained about the attitude of some of the other committee members—for instance, she observed that there was a degree of exclusiveness in the committee that some other committee members were not entirely aware of what was going on, that some people were misusing their committee membership, and sort of as the expression of all of this, that some committee members were not allowed into the committee room because it was also being used as a celebrity lounge—yet friends and hangers-on of the committee elite were given its use. Next convention—she was "in," and though she was not even on the committee this time, she had free access to the committee room-cum-celebrity lounge (whose location was a secret), the parties, and the guests, and she had adopted the very attitudes about which she had complained before. I am led to suspect that her objections were personal rather than moral— she objected because she was not a part of what was going on, not because she thought it was wrong per se. She may be unique, but I don't think so—I've seen a couple of other people make the same sort of shift and I imagine that in their places, I would do the same thing.

At the most recent convention, I noticed the change in my friend particularly in her attitude toward me and towards other people who were not in the elite group. Last summer she was pretty free in her comments to me, and I knew as much as she did about what was happening, most of the time, though I was a mere gofer. This winter, I knew almost nothing beyond what I could gather from rather vague conversations and a few concrete remarks; I didn't particularly care, you understand, but I found the changed attitude curious. Everyone talked around me—and I was not just another Trekkie-in-the-hall to them; I had worked with many of them before, and they knew me. But I was an outsider, and they were unwilling to let me in; occasionally I got the feeling that their conversation was constructed deliberately to exclude me, with comments of the "you know what I mean" variety.

A more graphic example involves another friend [friend #2], who is an active and fairly well-known mainstream fan, but who, like me, has no status within con fandom. Friend 1 objected to Friend 2's attitude that she was important because she was, in the words of Friend 1, "a nobody;" Friend 1 had a similar comment about Jacqueline Lichtenberg, whom she only knew as a co-author of Star Trek Lives! and hence a minor guest. I found it odd to think that, were the situations reversed—i.e. were the current judge of status one's standing within mainstream fandom—Friends 1 and Friend 2 would find their positions exactly reversed, and Friend I's behavior would seem as inappropriate as Friend 2's did at the convention.

And both would be correct in their self-estimations. Mainstream fandom and con fandom in this extreme sense are really two entirely different fandoms. Status in one means nothing in the other. What's more, the two fandoms don't seem to regard each other very highly, and they regard even less well attempts to transfer status in one fandom to the other—how would we react if Al Schuster, for instance, tried to exert his influence in mainstream fandom? My con-fan acquaintances regard mainstream fandom—what they know of it—with something like pity for its disregard of the "real world," which they, of course, are living in. They consider mainstream fandom to be escapism, deliberate or unconscious. My acquaintances in the mainstream, on the other hand, sometimes looks at confandom as superficial, and at con fans as fake fans, who are interested only in the glamorous aspects of ST, and in getting a piece of the actions for themselves.

From their own perspectives, and to a degree, both sides are right. It is natural to assert the primary importance of that which gives one the most status. There are mainstream fans who have used fandom to escape from the real world, no doubt, and [there are] con fans who are concerned with glamour and getting to know the stars. (An aside: I have noticed among con fans, even more than among mainstream fans, a contempt for the stars, and a feeling of superiority; I have heard gossip that gleefully related what so-and-so did that would ruin his image if only "they" — the great mass of unwashed Trekkies — knew. And I thought mainstream fans were beginning to get cynical.) There are also mainstream fans who would like to become Big Name Fans in a hurry, and con fans, even on pro-con committees, who are genuinely trying to insure that everyone is [having] a good time at a convention.

I don't expect the two fandoms to ever merge, or even to recognize each other; I may be an idealist, but I'm not that idealistic. I would like to point out that we all began as fans of Star Trek, with a couple of possible exceptions, and that there was something about the fandom that touched us enough to involve us in it. Some of us, including me. were fascinated by the internal reality of ST, and hence by the zines, the correspondence, and the other aspects of fandom focusing our interests. Some were caught up in the isolated, rarefied atmosphere of conventions, wanted to become more deeply involved with them, and became con fans. It's very easy to become overcome by the glamour — in both senses — of a con; it took me at least a week to come down from my first one, and it still takes a while to return to normal after one. It's also very easy to become involved over one's head in mainstream fandom. Separate but equal may be Invalid in education, but it's still operative in fandom — with emphasis on equal, please.