Langdon Chart

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Langdon Chart ("Langdon Diagram") is a fanwork showing romantic or sexual relationships among fen.

It was created in the 1960s by Kevin Langdon and originally represented traditional science fiction fans and fandom in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Some fans viewed the chart as proof of the insular nature of fandom and the interconnections among fans, reinforcing the cliquishness of fandom. Others questioned the rigid definitions of gender. Other fans appeared to find it a charming memory of the "free love" days of yesteryear.

From Fancyclopedia:

In 2009, Langdon recalled, "I was active in fandom in the early-to-mid 1960s. There were a lot of young people in fandom then, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, who were into "free love," and people spoke quite openly about their affairs. I decided to try to put together a graphical representation of all the sexual connections I knew about, with solid lines for male/female connections and dotted lines for gay connections. My diagram got around and others began doing the same thing for the circles they knew."

Nobody seemed upset by the Chart, which became a source of entertainment, as some fans maintained they had been short-changed in their number of Chart connections.

The idea caught on in fandom, and soon other areas had their own charts. Bruce Pelz created one for Los Angeles fandom, but mapped only the interactions that had been mentioned in public by both participants. Still, this created several relationship problems. Bruce said afterwards that creating the Langdon charts was one of the two dumbest things he had ever done in fandom.

Somewhat later, there was a rumor of a chart that had been planned for Minneapolis fandom that had to be abandoned because it proved impossible to find sheets of paper larger than 6 feet by 6 feet, so that names of all the people involved could be printed large enough to be legible.

Langdon charts did not differentiate between casual encounters and serious relationships.

Fan Comments

A 1999 Discussion

A Langdon chart is a chart showing the sexual interconnectedness of a given fan group. The OE of one of my former apas, LASFAPA, had a three-dimensional Langdon chart for the apa featuring pipe cleaners (pink for boys, blue for girls) and styrofoam balls -- the OE would only tell you which styrofoam ball was yours and you had to figure the rest out for yourself.

Ah, the 60s and 70s...

It's a graph that starts with one node of a single person, with each edge being a current or historical sexual relationship (your pick, but usually the latter), and each new node having the process repeated on it. Keep recursing until you've filled in the graph or discovered a connection to a particular person (depending on your goal).

Some fanhistorical nitpicking follows: "Langdon chart" is a conflation of two different things.

First there was the Langdon Diagram. Kevin Langdon tried to chart who in fandom had had "real sex" (my phrase, not his) with whom, and connect them all up. I believe this was in the 50's, when fandom was a lot smaller.

Then there was the LASFS Chart -- a more modest effort, which attempted to do this only for members of LASFS. (LASFS was also rather smaller then.)

Kevin Langdon went on to design board games. And then to start an organization for people with really high IQ's -- not mere MENSAns.

<blink><blink> How does pink/blue work for the *edges*???

Chris has slept with Pat, Robin, and Sam.

Chris' styrofoam ball has three pipe cleaners coming out of it; the pipe cleaners can be pink or blue as appropriate.

Yes, but Pat, Robin, and Sam have also slept with Chris; now what color should the pipe cleaners be?

First of all, let me correct a previous error: it was the styrofoam balls that were pink or blue, not the pipe cleaners. However, there *were* no edges -- it was a free-form 3D sculpture of styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Chris and Pat are of different genders - what color is their pipe cleaner? Or does one use two pipe cleaners in this case?

Presumably, since you know your own gender, you can figure out that the pipe cleaners of the contrary colour represent heterosexual relationships, but the others are ambiguous.

2002

Langdon chart: A chart tracing fannish romantic or sexual alliances, which theoretically could connect nearly all of fandom — especially during the promiscuous 1960s and ’70s. Even then, they were built out of much speculation and innuendo. “Not to mention,” Ted White said, “the fact that there’s sex and there are relationships, and the Chart treats them as the same thing.” Kevin Langdon, then a teen-age protégé of Walter Breen’s, created the first such chart in the 1960s. The LASFS Langdon chart was legendary. {Post-1950s.}