Aside from big-city art theaters, the only way to see vintage SF movies was at a con, an experience I couldn’t bear. Fans had watched the movies so often that they competed by making loud comments intended as humorous, thereby ruining the films for anyone else. I preferred an area called the Huckster Room, set aside for dealers in books, magazines, comic books, original art, and posters. Already an avid comic collector, I saw cons as a way to improve my holdings. My brother and I shared an old leather suitcase with a hinged flap that separated the two sides. He filled his half with clothes and extra underwear. I stocked my section with comics to swap, and wore the same outfit the entire time. Now and then I caught an untoward glimpse of the politics of fandom—hucksters who didn’t like my father drove me off with rude comments.
At the time I didn’t know I was at the forefront of what would become a massively popular “geek culture” as cons splintered into subgroups, evolving to widespread acceptance. Comic Con currently draws over 150,000 attendees. The Society for Creative Anachronism has its own formal gatherings, as do Star Trek, anime, pulps, fantasy, cyberpunk, steam punk, alternate history, and gaming. In the early 1970s, they were all huddled beneath the ragged tent of SF cons, which doubled as sexual free-for-alls. Mom and Dad lodged themselves on a separate floor from us. They shared two rooms with a linking door. Years later my father told me it was a means to accommodate private liaisons on both their parts.
My mother’s seamless veneer of politesse was unusual among fans, whose interpersonal skills were on a par with those of chess players and degenerate gamblers. Fans revered my father as royalty, granting him constant attention. They gave him swords and daggers, homemade chain mail, whips and leather cuffs, bottle after bottle of bourbon, plaques, statues, and original art. Dad was charismatic and funny until someone failed to grant the proper respect, usually by having the audacity to speak. Dad then subjected that person to a public humiliation that made others uncomfortable, an interaction that enhanced my father’s notoriety. I learned to avoid Dad, who gave me dirty looks and deliberately turned his back if I didn’t vacate the area quickly. It was similar to our home life, except the hotel offered an alternative to the woods as refuge.
My parents cultivated a special con wardrobe. Dad dressed in dashikis or open-necked shirts with giant collars, zipper boots, wide leather belts, and flared pants. Mom wore short skirts and low-cut blouses that zipped up the front with no bra, high boots, and tight belts. John Cleve wore a long djellaba with nothing underneath, while Mom wore a floor-length polyester gown. To complement Dad’s leather-and-denim leisure suit, Mom had a leather miniskirt. My parents were a compelling pair, and I was awestruck by the figures they cut. Though they ignored me at cons, I never loved them more, drawn to the personas they’d crafted for public consumption.
As with any subculture, a particular argot developed, insider talk that marked familiarity and experience on the part of the speakers. The vocabulary served a purpose similar to Cockney rhyming slang and the Irish travelers’ shelta, cryptolects that excluded strangers. The lingo of fandom enjoyed puns, acronyms, deep insider jokes, and the unusual habit of adding the letter “h” to words in order to make them more “fhannish.” Fan slang was molten, shifting from verb to noun to modifier at will, used orally and in print.
In the cleverly agile minds of SF fans, the word “fan” underwent many permutations, including pluralizing it to “fen.” Newcomers were “neo-fen.” The word “fannish” was used as a compliment, “unfannish” as a pejorative. The language itself was called “fanspeak,” and included “corflu,” an abbreviation for the correction fluid used when typing fanzines; “filking,” which referred to the playing and singing of songs; and “LoC,” which meant “letter of comment” to a fanzine and begat “locced” and “loccer.”
Eager to fit in, I learned fanspeak rapidly, becoming well versed in this clandestine coded language, unknown in the hills. Like my parents, I had no one with whom to share it. Unlike them, I didn’t crave further contact with speakers of the cant.