Bill Veneble
With apologies to Russ Watkins, I am not going to join his "Crusade to Clean Up Fandom". In fact, with added apologies, I am going to try to dissuade its further progress. Watkins' motives may be fine, but --- horrors! --- can you imagine a Fandom without Boggs, Laney, Nelson, and all the others that have made fandom what it is --- the most unique group of people in the country?
Actually the question seems to center around fan literature. As the co-editor of an NFFF-sponsored fanzine, I have had perhaps more than my share of woe from the League of Childish Innocence. The NFFF is a lively organization, but a few crackpots writing in to the Directorate about the "indecency" of something or another can make more of a splash than you think. The trouble with these people, of course, is that they really don't know the difference between good and bad literature.
They don't know what they are talking about.
An editor has a hard job. He has to choose material that will please an overwhelming majority of his readers; he has to present that material in such a format as to please the eyes of those readers; and he has to print up the magazine so that it is readable and pleasing.
Hardest of all, though, is choosing the material in the first place. It must be, at once, pleasing and entertaining and unoffensive. Hardly an editor exists who has not been accused by someone of publishing indecent literature or pornographic artwork.
In drawing the line between undesirable material and printable stuff the editor is walking on eggshells. He can't please everybody, but it is his job to please most of his readers. Also, he has to take into consideration that the author might get very angry at having his pet work rejected or changed.
But in general, the main question is, where is the line to be drawn?
We try to set up a critique of literature that will please everybody and only pass high quality writing and art. For instance, I recently rejected a story written by a girl whom I would judge to be around high school age. The title of the story was SIGNIFYING NOTHING. It was an apt title, for the story certainly signified nothing at all. The writing was passable as far as word handling and usage went, but there was no plot, no reader-sympathy, no central theme, no motivation, no idea at all, nothing to make rewarding reading. Worse than that, however, the poor girl's use of obscenity was unbridled. It was also crude and in most cases awkwardly used. The description, where there was any, was exaggerated to the point of absurdity and the sequence of events was disconnected and incoherent. And the whole thing was juvenile in thought and idea.
I mention this to serve as an example where the use of obscenity is unsuitable. It is a fact that a skillful author can use profane and obscene expressions at will without being offensive about it. He does so, however, with a purpose in mind. And he must show clearly that he is not in sympathy with the use of such language. It is used, in its acceptable form in literature, to lend realism and emphasis to any point or description in the story and as such cannot offend the reader.
Juvenile ideas, also, can be very offensive if handled with open-author-sympathy. The proper treatment of such themes is to use them as supports for the realism of the story or to make their significance clearer. Likewise an attack on anything, particularly in the realm of fiction, must be presented in such a way as to not be all-inclusive and to offend the general audience.
For instance, the above-mentioned rejected story contained such statements as : "In my mind brothers are ... vicious ... sadists that are a necessary feature of the Master Plan," or a statement to that effect; made, incidentally, by the author herself. And made in such a way that the author did not show clearly that she had no sympathy with the statement. In this case the whole idea is absurd, offensive, and cannot be passed; similar unbridled attacks on religion, politics, etc. must necessarily be so all-inclusive as to offend anybody who reads them, and so cannot be used.
On the other hand, sex, the great taboo for so many years, is breaking down under the pressure of logic; the use of sex as a theme for a joke, a bit of humor, or a story is certainly not "wrong" unless the use is so perverted as to be disgusting. In art also drawings of nudes are no longer, generally, "wrong" in the sense that they represent corruption or pornography. There can be pornographic drawings, but I have never seen one in a fanzine; and on the whole the use of sex as a basis for humor and laughs is wholesome enough, and certainly cannot be objected to except on the grounds that some person doesn't like it. Which throws the whole decency issue on the level of personal tastes, and as everyone knows, tastes differ.
In that case, your definition of decency depends mostly on your tastes in literature, and therefore may differ from mine; and therefore, each is as good in its own right as the other, and no absolute standard for decency exists. Thus the problem of editing becomes one of choosing material that first entertains most of the readership and second fits the definition of decency held by the majority of readers.
Few advocates of "decency" realize this fact, however, and so they go on clamoring as if their standard of decency was the BEST standard of decency; if they would realize that the best they can say about an indecent ((by whose standards?)) piece is, "Well, I didn't like it," a lot of the feuding that results over such matters would be eliminated.
That is why the choice of what to be published must be left up to the judgement of the fanzine editor, who will choose that material which best suits his readers; and in general the editor is a pretty good judge, considering that you can't please everybody, anyway. However it would make his job easier if he didn't have to fight all the time with people who shreik: "Indecent!" instead of merely saying, "I didn't like it." If a piece of literature is really disgusting to any one but a pervert the chances are the editor will reject it. If he doesn't reject it, his readers will overwhelmingly clamor to have the magazine's policy changed.
And that is why I urge you not to join any crusade to "clean up" fandom. Fandom's color and appeal partly result from the fact that fannish tastes differ, as far as from Ray Nelson's Sexocracy to Manly Bannister's astute wierdisms. All those elements belong, and sexocracy in its own right is no more indecent than anything else. And if Russ doesn't plan to clean up that, there is nothing left to clean up. It is well known that any fan who becomes too offensive to general fandom soon gets thrown out of fandom, in effect, since all other fans sever ties with him. Let's keep fandom's skeletoned closets and dark corners; it is part of our tradition and it helped make fandom what it is today.
-Bill Venable (co-editor of FanVariety)
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated June 17, 2001. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.