In the wake of the Hugo award ceremony debacle, I've been thinking about fandom and our perceptions of that history, what I've been told, what I've experienced, and what I know to be true, what I've been told is true, and how these are not always the same things.

I think that the progressive elements of fannish history have experienced something much like diverse writers at that same time. Women and people of color have always written sff. But when it comes to being included in the "Best Of" anthologies, or critical analysis

well, they don't show up. They get published. People read them. But when the canon gets formed, they aren't represented. So it's very easy, if you don't know the field really well, to assume that they weren't there. When the story of the field gets told, they get elided.

Likewise, there have always been fans that didn't revere Heinlein, didn't think that Campbell was a minor god, didn't support the white heteronormative view of either sff or fandom.

Lots of really influential con runners, fan writers, and other influential fans were pushing to create a fannish world where more diverse voices were heard, where more types of people could thrive and grow. And they won some battles, and lost a lot of them.

What is may not immediately obvious is that the _story_ of fandom which is told is usually told by the winners, by the status quo. And that story tends to elide the fights.

Where the progressives won, the _story_ tends to gloss over the change, imply that it was always like that. At the same time, where the progressives fucked up tends to be talked about a lot, as proof that they were wrong to kick against the status quo.

It's the standard playbook, really. Every misstep is portrayed as a combination of bad faith and stupidity. But every victory is subsumed as not really progress, not really the result of a fight, but just the way things have always been.

Thing is, fifty years ago fandom was a lot smaller, but it was way way way more diverse than the current story about fandom would have you believe. Fifty years ago, a lot of people were sick to the teeth of Campbell's quackery and racism.

Fifty years ago, a ton of people were infuriated with Heinlein. Fifty years ago, a lot of people were trying to figure out how to keep Asimov from groping women.

And, yes, fifty years ago, a lot of people were fighting grimly to keep that cishet white male heteronormative sterile environment from every changing one iota, because they liked things just exactly like that.

Here's the other thing about olds like me. I absolutely read Heinlein and loved him. I absolutely had incredibly regressive attitudes about...um...everything when I was 18. But I am 58, and I have changed. The books I loved when I was 18? Yeah, they haven't changed at all.

Stranger in a Strange Land remains exactly the same hot mess that it was in 1962 (the year I was born.) When I read it, the book and I were equally naive and foolish 14 year olds. But that book, it didn't change, and I did. And part of why I changed was fandom.

Part of why I changed, became a better person, was because the fannish community, for all its flaws, also had any number of ways to cherish and nurture me, as I struggled towards a more just and kind understanding of the world.

And as I grew and changed, so did the field. The writing now is SO MUCH BETTER. That didn't happen by accident, or in a vacuum. It happened because fans like me, and fans older than me and younger than me, strove for a better world.

Something we saw dimly in the stuff we were reading, something we understood imperfectly from being in the world, something that we tried to build within our communities. Oh, and my god, haven't we made mistakes as we went along!

But when you think about the "History of Fandom," I wish you would remember that, most often, you are looking at the official, sanitized, glossy, written by the winners, status-quo supporting story.

Our actual history is so much messier, so much weirder, and so much more human. But also, my god, I feel your pain. Because that Story has been used to beat you, marginalize you, make you feel unwelcome. It has been used to alienate and harm you.

There are days when I feel fucking gaslit by the Story of Fandom. And I wonder if one of the major accomplishments of that Story is to prevent olds like me from figuring out ways to be in solidarity with the much more vibrant and activist fans that are coming into the community.