On the Graying of Fandom

I notice every so often these posts pop up: that fandom's getting older, that we need to do something to draw the young folks in, that this generally terribly involves sacrificing doing the things we love to do to *gasp* anime or *gasp* costuming or whatever's the flavour of the month, because those kids don't read or we're being too exclusive or whatever. And yes, this post is spurred by a comment I left on a locked post, although it's in no way at all directed to the author of that post. It's just...directed to the cognitive framework we have about this. To the idea, and how that discussion is handled.

Look. I attended my first con at 19, unless you count that Star Trek thing my mother took me to when I was eight or so where I remember being very clearly annoyed because I couldn't see over the Klingons. I have been a reader all my life and a writer since my early teens. I'm 27 years old right now, and fully conversant in that other cultural track that is anime, costuming, visual media; I was on programming for what's shaping up to be one of the biggest anime cons in North America for several years, and I have a few masquerade awards sitting in my closet somewhere.

This past weekend, I went to Readercon. I hung out there in a swirling gaggle of women around my age or a little younger; my roommate for the con is 23 and some of the other people we hung with are 24, 25. None of us are new to fandom or prodom.

I know this isn't what people are going for when they bring this topic up, but...please stop writing me out of existence. I was The Kids. I am The Kids, the way the discussion's framed. And so are a lot of my friends. Every time I read "Oh, The Kids don't know how to dance to rock and roll come to cons, or read, O woe and fandom is greying--" I can feel my space in this community get smaller and more pinched and less visible. I can feel myself getting snipped out of the official histories and ceasing to be. Cutting-room floor.

We're around, you know. We exist.

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And having got that off my chest, I'm going to finish up at work and go have some dinner with my friends in the sunshine.

In other news...

...this evening featured a giant Buddha Bowl with soba at Fresh with ginny_t and monkeyman, preceded by the purchase of both a fantastically girly black floaty skirt with ribbon hems (!) and a loaf of herbed Turkish bread from Cobs. Sadly, they are not making my lemon pepper Turkish loaf anymore. I lodged protest (read: made extremely sad puppy eyes) and will eat this other, inferior Turkish loaf tomorrow.

After dinner, it also featured getting my hot little hands on some ARCs from ChiZine Publications, which jack_yoniga kindly dropped off to me: Claude Lalumiere's Objects of Worship and Daniel Rabuzzi's The Choir Boats, both for review at Ideomancer. These books, even in ARC format, are crazy pretty. I'm looking forward.

The rest of the evening's been a muddle of Ideo mail and organization (we close to slush in two weeks, and switch to production mode for August to put together the September issue) and futsing around with Syberia, which is also crazy pretty. Pages, I think, need to wait until tomorrow. My inbox needs clearing, and so does my brain, and I have too many projects. And need to do something about that, sooner or later.

Goodnight, internet.