Next weekend, SMOFCon 37 will take place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Most likely, you have no idea what that means or what it has to do with the future health of polytheism. In truth, SMOFCon doesn’t directly affect our traditions at all, but it provides a starting point for me to articulate a vision that I’ve struggled to put into words.
tl;dr: A lot of the problems our polytheisms and the larger “paganoverse” are analogous to issues that fans of genre fiction fought through over the course of the 20th Century. We don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel as far as our practical organizing goes. Also, read the damn article.
Note: My account of certain events referenced in this article are my understanding of how they occurred. In many cases, I learned about them secondhand. I don’t intend this as a historical document- instead, I include these events for the sake of the “scar tissue” wisdom they produced. The goal here is to learn from others’ challenges, not to perpetuate the bad blood of a bygone age.
Photo by PopCultureGeek, CC 2.0 BY
“Fandom” generally refers to the broader subculture of persons who are fans of genre fiction such as sci-fi, fantasy, mysteries, and the various manifestations of those- books, film, television, games, and so on. With a capital “F”, it connotes a large and diverse array of sub-subcultures in much the way that many people use “Paganism” to discuss what is a hugely complex, diverse, and muddled set of different religions and spiritual practices. Modern Fandom dates back at least to the late 19th Century and has its roots in older literary appreciation societies. How the outcasts of Victorian intellectual circles wound up creating one of the dominant cultural forces of the 21st Century is worth studying.
I certainly don’t want to give the impression that Fandom is perfect. Issues such as racism, sexual predation, and sexism still persist, though they are increasingly being addressed by leaders and fans alike. Rather, my focus in this article is on it as a cultural force- more specifically how making experience accessible across divisions and to younger generations made today’s Fandom possible.
By that, I mean that most Americans no longer feel they have to hide their interest in genre fandoms. The top grossing films in recent history are all genre films. Walking down the street carrying a comic book or Dungeons & Dragons manual is no longer likely to elicit character assassination- or even violence. For fans of a certain age, characters like Magneto and Mr. Glass make sympathetic antagonists because of their crusades against erasure. Many of the problems and bad blood that still plague Fandom today stems from the incomplete healing of that trauma.
But for the average fan today, that’s ancient history. Which is where I want the persecution of polytheists to go as soon as possible. If you’d clicked the “Dungeons & Dragons” link above, you’d have seen how related this really is.
A humorous attempt at a fannish pecking order. Image by Lore Sjöberg
Until sometime in the 2000s, Fandom was pretty heavily balkanized. Those divisions still exist today, but they are much more transparent and easily-crossed than in previous decades. Part of this is obviously the Internet and how many of its creators were part of Fandom. Part of this is how big businesses recognized a marketable niche and ran with it. To my mind, the biggest part is the stuff nobody sees.
The acronym “SMOF” stands for “Secret Masters Of Fandom”, a tongue-in-cheek nickname for the people who make conventions and other events happen. While the name conjures images of a secret cabal, in truth they are only secret by obscurity. Most people don’t want to know how the sausage is made and so most people don’t see the folks behind the curtain. Many conventions now have a “Fan Guest of Honor” specifically to recognize persons for their work in serving and promoting the community.
The best organized and longest lasting groups of SMOFs tend to be involved in literary fandom (small “f”), specifically organizations in the orbit of the World Science Fiction Convention, better known as “Worldcon”. Worldcon today is a truly international event. Running one is a bit like a microcosm of the Olympics. Organizing committees prepare bids to run a Worldcon years in advance and must convince thousands of other Worldcon members to support their bid in order to be authorized to hold one.
The logistics are truly staggering. I’m not going to go into them, but anyone who’s worked on a pagan festival or renaissance faire probably has some idea. The insurance requirements alone are breathtaking, as are the costs in blood (well, usually sweat) and treasure.
Yet Worldcon is not the largest event in Fandom, not by a long shot. The largest Worldcon had about 8,300 attendees and most of the recent ones fell in the range of 4,000 to 6,000. That is less than a tenth the size of Dragon Con in Atlanta, less than 1/20 the size of San Diego Comic-Con, and a little under 2% the attendance of Gamescom in Koln, Germany.
The latter two are vastly more important economically. Quite literally billions of dollars can hinge on how a family of genre products (a “franchise”) performs at those events.
Culturally though, Worldcon and its myriad network of smaller, related conventions exert a massive amount of influence- one that is as transparent as gravity to many fans. Worldcon awards the Hugos, Fandom’s prestige-equivalent of the Academy Awards. Even more importantly, because Worldcon-bidding committees have to show off their experience in organizing conventions, there are hundreds of local and regional conventions that run in a similar fashion.
Not everyone can get to Worldcon, or San Diego Comic-Con, or the others. Yet millions of people live within a short car ride of a convention built on the same model as one of these two. Even more millions live near a convention that is not Worldcon-related, but still incorporates some of the culture that grows out of Worldcon.
Here, I feel like I need to pause and point out that Worldcon is a literary fandom event, Comic-Cons are multi-fandom media events, Dragon Con is a hybrid cross-fandom event, GenCon is a tabletop gaming fandom event, and Gamescom is video gaming fandom event. Remember how I said that Fandom still has divisions? While there is considerably less bad blood these days, each of these still has their own way of doing things- their own traditions.
If one attends a local hobby gaming convention, its culture will more likely reflect GenCon and to a lesser extent Gamescom. The same for, Star Trek, anime, or comic book conventions and San Diego Comic-Con. But the subtle influence of Worldcon is probably there, behind the scenes. For example, Ken Krueger, one of the founders of San Diego Comic-Con attended the very first Worldcon in 1939 and went on to become a publisher of genre literature before moving to San Diego. Another of the founders, Greg Bear, went on to become a Hugo Award-winning author with a long pedigree in literary fandom events.
That’s not to say that Worldcon or its SMOFs came up with all the good ideas. Indeed, the first was full of needless drama and some of today’s culture wars still get fought there. Rather, they became aggregators of best practices. Elements within the “Worldconosphere” kept reaching out to other fandoms and some members of those other fandoms were also reaching out to literary fandom. Some folks already crossed those boundaries, so they made natural go-betweens.
This was not at all without problems. All of the fandoms within Fandom had their past and present traumas- working across these subcultures was deeply straining. It often required different perspectives, different ways of thinking, even totally different vocabulary. Sometimes that led to schisms and divisiveness.
In 1987, a fairly large convention called Boskone was the dominant multi-fandom convention in the Boston area. Originally founded as a literary conference in the style of Worldcon, some of the organizers felt that other fandoms were taking too much of the energy and focus away from the event’s original purpose. In the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” (Boskone is held mid-February), the 1988 convention was deliberately moved about 100 miles away to a smaller venue.
In reaction, other “fen” (plural for “fan” in literary fandom) founded a competing convention to continue the earlier trajectory of Boskone. They named this new event Arisia after the protagonists who fight against Boskone in the Lensman series, an influential set of “Golden Age” science fiction novels.
While both conventions had ties with the New England Science Fiction Association, for a time there was serious animosity between some of the organizers of the two events. When I first started dealing with Arisia in the late 1990s, that wound was still fresh in some folks’ minds. I got to hear quite a few stories.
By the time I first attended Boskone a few years later, the relationships were beginning to mend. I also got to hear some alternate perspectives on what had happened and why.
Okay, what the hell does any of this have to do with SMOFCon?
I’m getting to that, though I need to give a little bit of personal exposition first.
In the early 1990s, I became a leader of gamers- gaming fans. Explicitly tabletop fans, though most of us played a few video games, too.
My first foray into fandom leadership came when I convinced the Excalibur science fiction club at Hampshire College to go in with me and some friends to run a gaming convention- Convocation. In large part because of my own teenage ego, that relationship did not survive the convention.
I ran a gaming convention (later renamed OurCon) at UMass the following year whilst Excalibur ran 5-Con, a mixed-genre convention- does this split sound familiar? Thankfully, with help from some of the people who still went between clubs, that rift healed over time. I worked on some of the 5-Cons a few years later. Heck, I married one of the later 5-Con chairs!
Part of the reason that first Convocation caused such bad blood was rooted in the sort of trauma I mentioned earlier- the perceived need to fight against erasure. In the pre-Internet days, finding other gamers was hard (and potentially risky), so I created an impressive-sounding organization with some friends, the primary purpose of which was connecting gamers. That was the organization I ostensibly represented when approaching Excalibur.
The vision for Convocation was great. The execution, not so much. I accept full responsibility for creating that bad blood.
Yet, Convocation spawned both OurCon (later ConQuest) and 5-Con (later ConBust). At UMass, that convention ran for 22 years straight. ConBust is still going on at Smith College nearly 30 years later.
Once I started working on 5-Con and NJAC (another event in the area), it forced me out of my “home” fandom. Instead of dealing solely with the internal problems and grudges of gaming fandom, I had to organize gamers in entirely new ways to deal with the needs of mixed-genre Fandom with a strong basis in Worldcon culture. I started to learn to speak Worldconese.
I discovered the Gripe Session, which is sometimes called a “Dead Dog“- though that is more often an afterparty. Gripe sessions or feedback panels are a bit like “360 degree feedback” for the convention staff in that the chair and department heads have to stand in front of the membership and listen to what they have to say. When run well, the convention chair and team get a strong mix of encouragement and constructive criticism. Obviously, they can be run badly, but it’s proved to be an extremely useful device both for improving operations and staunching bad blood before it festers.
In my experience, gaming conventions didn’t generally do this sort of thing back then. I soon incorporated it into OurCon’s closing ceremonies. In researching this article, I also found out that San Diego Comic-Con has had a feedback panel for some time.
Then, as part of my work with these other conventions, I attended SMOFCon 15 in Boston.
It was revelatory. These people took to their activities with professionalism. They were still goofy, nerdy, fun people, but they knew when and how to get down to business.
They approached their hobby, or rather their lifestyle, with the seriousness it required- when seriousness was required.
Not that I wasn’t serious, but I was used to being one a few people trying hard to learn how to herd cats in near isolation. Now I was in a hotel full of them! Even more strangely, these experienced people wanted to learn from young people as well as sharing their own knowledge and experience.
Imagine what it means for a young person trying to do good work to be welcomed into a space filled with tons of experienced cat-herders who also happen to be functioning adults!
THIS is the vision I’m trying to convey.
I have Imposter Syndrome the same as many of you. But I’ve come to realize how vitally important it is to the future of any subculture that new and potential leaders be able to enter a welcoming space filled with elders who genuinely want their culture to survive- not just their narrow version of it, but the larger environment that supports it. Fandom did it, indigenous American nations did it, and so should we.
Yes, “Big Tent Paganism” has frequently been pretty anti-polytheist, stressing homogeneity over diversity. I do not advocate for erasure, which is what that was. I’m not aiming for a big tent. I’m aiming for an unassailable horde of allied “campgrounds”.
My goal is the survival and success of our diverse traditions.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that cultures that want to survive erasure require allies. It requires a network.
There’s been a lot of discussion about how the Jewish people survived thousands of years of attempted erasure. Some of that was textual orthodoxy, sure. Some of that was also their ability to adapt to new places by forming new Jewish subcultures. A huge part of it was the network of Jewish enclaves all over the known world that often made it possible to relocate if repression got too bad in one area.
That resilience is something we need to cultivate.
I believe we can best cultivate that in two ways- a network of welcoming, local polytheist leadership groups and a convention that brings some of the members of those groups together on a regular basis.
I’ll start with the latter:
Take a look at this year’s SMOFCon schedule. By changing just a word or two, how many of those topics would be relevant to organizing polytheistic groups or events? “Honoring the Past / Respecting the Present”? How about “Who Wants the Con Ritual / Who is it For”?
Based on the effectiveness of SMOFCon (and Worldcon), as well as the success of the 2014 PLC and the recent shutdown of its controversial successor, I thought it made sense for me to put my efforts into organizing another conference. SMOFCon is a conference and a Polytheist Leadership Conference was, and still is, a reasonable analog.
Such a conference also would be useful for strengthening the connections we’ve made with other polytheists online and for knitting the network together in much the way that SMOFCon unites the various local Worldcon organizing committees.
Unfortunately, my personal finances put bankrolling even a small event out of reach at this time. Why front the money myself? On Convocation, I asked Excalibur to assume the risk- I didn’t want to pass the buck this time.
Thus, my current focus is on starting a MAPLE (Metro-Area Polytheist Leadership Exchange) here in Austin and using it to create a template for other communities to use. My goal has been to create a space for the SMOFCon style of bidirectional learning, but closer to home.
I’m trying to bring together “the people who do the work” (or want to) from as wide a range of local polytheisms as possible. It’s always rough in the beginning and one of the struggles has been explaining what I’m trying to build and why people who are already very busy should care.
What I’m trying to build is an environment that ensures their legacy survives- that their hard work for the Gods isn’t undone and lost in a year, or a generation.
Just last week we learned of the sudden death of a Santero who’d been doing important work both in decolonizing traditional knowledge and in building ties between his tradition and others. Only time will tell how much of that work survives and continues, but if it does, it will be because of the networks he built.
In trying to organize both the Hearthingstone conference and Austin MAPLE, I’ve struggled to articulate my vision.
I hope this helps.
-In Deos Confidimus
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