I’m reading a biography of the amazing James Tiptree, Jr., a huge influence in modern science fiction and, well, readers like me. JTJ was really Alice Sheldon, a ex-deb, ex-CIA photo analyst, never-did-anything-much-about-it lesbian whose stories in the early 70s helped make science fiction a whole new deal. Back In ’91 they created an award named the Tiptree – the first that honored a woman author – and it has to do with gender and all those murky issues.

In reading this book, I’m seeing the names of dozens of old friends and acquaintances. I wasn’t one of those kids who found science fiction or fantasy as a kid. Yeah, I read A Wrinkle In Time, but I never discovered the Heinlein juveniles, or Andre Norton. I came to sf as a college student, lured, in no small part, by liking Star Trek enough that I thought going to a Trek convention sounded like a hoot. And while there, I heard some authors. And started reading.

Have you ever been in the middle of, or the beginning of something HUGE? Did you know it at the time? Did you ever say to yourself “oh, my god, this is amazing, this will change things, X will never be the same?” Lucky you. I don’t know what to offer as an example – the Beatles? Do you remember how stunningly different they seemed? Maybe there’s a science equivalent, or music, or theater. For me, I was THERE when science fiction changed. I didn’t know it at the time, but dear god almighty, I was there, I look back now and I’m so fucking glad I WENT to that Star Trek convention in New York. Not so much because well, yes, I found this entire genre to read and it was oh SO much what I was desperately looking for. That’s no small thing; I don’t know what I would have READ in those years when I got out of grad school and started really growing up. But in reading this Tiptree bio, and seeing all those names – some of which belong to old friends, some acquaintances and some to people I still talk with on a regular or irregular basis, I saw how much influence the science fiction um, experience? had on my LIFE. And I seriously wonder what I would have done, what I would have become without it.

There are, of course, readers of sf and fantasy just as there of readers of mystery who never need or discover or find the community that has developed out of the literature. They just read – and buy and take out of the library and it’s what they read. Then there are the folks more like me. It’s not just what I read, but it’s turned into who I am. When I found the Albany State Science Fiction Society back in grad school, it was a couple years post Trek conventions. Grad school was intense, so finding this small gathering of people who didn’t talk about serious stuff was simply a letting-off-of steam. ( Little did I know that at least one person in that group would still be my friend 30 damn years later.) And it wasn’t really until I moved to Oakland in ’76 that this became my community, my world. When I moved and discovered that there was a Star Trek store on Telegraph Avenue, I went, out of amusement. In early years in my living in the bay area, I worked on/ran really (there was a convention chair, he was a egocentric lazy jackass) Trek conventions. But more important, I found the “real” crowd I didn’t even quite know I was looking for.

I still say it; I don’t know how people, once they’re out of school, find friends, find community. I know how I did it and I know it’s not normal. But what WOULD I have done without the sf community? I don’t go to synagogue/church, so there’s no way to connect there. I don’t have children, so I don’t do PTA/soccer/girl scouts/classroom/carpool. The longest I ever held a job was 2 years and 8 months – I moved a lot and I changed jobs a lot. How do you find friends?

This discovery was, remember, pre-internet. SF fandom created the sf convention and the community out of a desire to connect and communicate. Which we do awfully damn well. Most of the best writers I know come out of that place.

So looking back, I came out of grad school and moved 3000 miles from home, school, contacts, just about everything I knew. Brave maybe – I mean my sister was out in California – I don’t know I just knew I did not want to live on the east coast, or in New England specifically. I hated the weather, I had no special place I wanted to be – four years in New London topped by a year and a half in Albany, the rest of it lived in the Hartford area. There was nothing that drew me and California did. So I headed west to places where they had Star Trek stores and lettuce boycotts, people sitting on steps singing and used book stores. Gay pride parades, co-op markets.

And I met writers out the yin-yang, from Anderson and Bradley to Silverberg and Yarbro. I met FANS – booksellers and fanzine editors, serious readers and serious convention goers. I found intellectual peers – people who thought playing Scrabble was fun and who also thought being silly was fun. And I found – really FOUND – science fiction. McIntyre and Lynn, Moore and Russ, Charnas and Randall, Wilhelm and Le Guin, Vinge and Piercy. And Varley and Sturgeon, Delany and Tiptree. For starters.

My social life, my peers were the fans and writers of the bay area; the Andersons and the Lupoffs, Quinn Yarbro and don Simpson, Terry and Carol Carr, Bob Silverberg. Fritz Leiber, and the fans, the best damn fans in the world. Friends with whom you could and did talk anything from books to ice cream, sexuality to opera, cats to privacy, the meaning of life and the meaning of hot food.

I moved to Oakland in 1976. In the 30 years since, while I’ve spent years away from the active convention scene, I’ve never left science fiction. In the years when I lived with Bob and was politically active I still headed to Norwescon for a convention fix. And while I’ve said it’s my home, and I’ve said that I often am reminded that I feel like a very strange outsider in mainstream culture (because I’m not married, with a mortgage, because I don’t have children or a job, because I don’t DO what most people seem to do) in reading this Tiptree bio, and seeing all the familiar names – from Jeff Smith to Vonda to Joanna to Jessica to Mog to Harlan to Suzy – I really gotta wonder. If I had not found science fiction, what would I have found?

I wonder if I would have found fandom. If I hadn’t, my life would have been so different as to be unimaginable. The only other “crowd” I ever knew was politics and while - oh man - that’s huge fun and can be exhilarating and has the advantage of being a social mileu where you start out already having something in common to talk about (as opposed to just sharing a car or a playing field or a common attribute, the political thing means you choose to express support for a belief or a candidate or a party whatever….) but it was often exhausting. It can also be enervating to work on stuff where you keep getting trampled; you still have stuff in common but working for losing causes can be hard on the psyche.

In sf and to some extent mystery, which has become a smaller neighborhood to live in, somewhat within the larger borders of the sf world, there’s always a conversation willing and waiting to happen. There’s always laughter available – this was true way before blog and email. There were fanzines with brilliant essays and snarky letters and gorgeous cover art. There were convention reports that made me hoot with recognition and groan with, well, recognition. And while I won’t pretend that these communities – spread out though they are throughout continents, in gobs of cities and some countries- are utopian, they are so much where I like living.

In science fiction (and this isn’t all true, but it is how it is/was for ME) feminism was relatively natural (there’s much evidence to the contrary, believe me, as I’m reminded of the flaming assholism of “women can’t be in space because their breasts are distracting” typical shit cited in the Tiptree bio). But in MY part of sf and fandom, coming out was welcome or at least accepted and friendships did not crash. It was expected that women were as intelligent as men. Feminism was encouraged – by women and by a large gang of men. In many/most societies, In much of our culture, women and men can’t be, aren’t friends or such relationships are suspect. There’s an assumption of sexual attraction or a burden or whatever that means we can’t talk and outside of fandom, I’ve seldom seen men and women who are friends. From pretty much day one, I had male FRIENDS as well as female friends. People with whom I did what friends did; laughed, talked, confided, played games, supported, ate, listened, cried. Sometimes it segued into more with some of the men; most often it did not. And while some of the men were gay and thus the THING wasn’t in the way, often they were not. I can look even now at the email address book and count a couple dozen MEN who are my friends; to whom I turn for advice, or have coffee with talk to in complete comfort. I don’t know how much that works outside these invisible walls. It’s still true that I can fly into any number of cities in the US and if something happened, I’d have a place to stay – six degrees of separation is a joke in my community. Two at most.

I found my long-ago husband in science fiction (don’t worry those who didn’t know – it lasted technically 2 years and was a long ago mistake). I found lovers there and I found my partner for 18 years plus and going on to infinity. It was way easier when I was able-bodied to up and go and attend parties and conventions. To hang out at the Magic Cellar – it’s so impossible to describe how wonderful that was. Every weekend with the best people I knew, having fun. Safe, welcomed, among people you wanted to spend time with. To spend hours with someone who did something I admired – wrote books, wow – and have a great time, talking books or not. Being treated as a peer or equal. As a friend. When books matter to you, this is coolness writ big.

At the heart of things, I guess, it’s knowing that as an intellectual (I don’t know exactly what it is but I R one), a feminist, a leftist, a not-very-Jewish Jew, a woman with a disability, I don’t know how many places I’d fit if I didn’t have fandom. While there sure isn’t enough diversity in fandom as my utopia would ideally have, I have had the experience and the pleasures of getting to know people who were different from me. And among whom I fit and get to contribute and feel at home. Fandom is pretty much the ONLY place I feel at home; most of the rest of the world tends to make me feel out of place and weird and exotic. That gets tiring, you know? But fandom? It’s the first place where I felt that being smart was something to be appreciated (not that my parents didn’t raise me right, they did but in general we’re talking here….being teased and nyah-nyahed from day one for being “smart”). It’s a safe world for hugging, it’s a generous world – in terms of giving emotionally, sharing information (and that one’s important – having someone explain something to you clearly without sneering because you don’t know, not talking up or down) and yes, money – that I don’t see in the day to day society I live in. Even in the cause-oriented political world there was often a touch of “I know more than you do” or the “I’m more important because I’ve got the keys”.

No great conclusion to draw here, just a huge huge sigh of relief that I found my karass, my mishpocha, relatively early and that it still is the structure of my life.