Sandy Herrold's 1996 Slash Fandom Survey

Fan Survey
Title:	Sandy Herrold's 1996 Slash Fandom Survey
Surveyor:	Sandy Herrold
Date(s):	December 1996
Medium:	online, mailing lists
Fandom(s):	Slash
External Links:
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In 1996 Sandy Herrold asked members of the Virgule-L mailing list to anonymously fill out a survey. She posted the results to the mailing list on December 12, 1996. It is reposted here with permission.

An amazing 73 of 152 list members responded. Thank you all very much. (Remember as you are looking at totals that not all respondents answered every question.) My comments are in (parenthesis).

1) Do you feel like a 'real' fan?

• Yes: 67
• No: 2
• Sometimes/Not Sure: 4

[Question 2 - missing]

3) Do you consider yourself part of a fannish community?

• Yes: 66
• No: 4
• Sometimes/Not Sure: 3

(The 'No's' here were not necessarily the same people who said 'No' in the previous question.)

4) Would you call yourself a Net Fan, or Print fan?

• Net: 6 8%
• Print: 39 56%
• Both: 24 35%

(I didn't correlate the Net fans and No to community fans, and now I wish I had. Sorry.)

5) How long have you been in fandom?

• 1-5 years: 18 26%
• 6-10 years: 21 30%
• 11-15 years: 13 18%
• 16-20 years: 11 15%
• 20+ years: 6 8%

(69 people answered this. More people answered 6 years than any other answer. This wins the prize for worst written question. Some people answered how long they'd been in slash fandom, others in gen fandom, so these numbers mean even less than the rest of the survey.)

6) Do you write in fandom?

• Yes: 51 69% (!)
• No: 20 21%

(I have no idea if this number is representative of the list as a whole, but it amazed me. I wonder what the % is across fandom?)

6.5) Have you ever posted your own netfic?

• Yes: 17
• No: 52

7) Do you do fan art?

• Yes: 5
• No: 63

(This proportion surprised me, even with LOTS of answers like, "I wish"...)

7.5) Have you ever posted net fanart? Would you?

• Yes: 1
• No: 53

8) Do you belong to other slash discussion lists (other than erotica/fiction lists)

• Yes: 56 (76%)
• No: 17 (24%)

(This was divided: about 2/3rd belong to single show lists (CI5, QL, SH, etc.), and one 1/3rd belong to other general slash-related lists (Slash-sis and Slashpoint and private lists. (I wonder what these percentages would have been 6 months ago. I think there has been an explosion recently in other fannish areas to play in on the net.)