20 May 2002

How Is Wiscon Different from Other Cons?
by Amy Axt Hanson

Her senior year in college, Amy Axt Hanson applied for jobs in Berkeley and Madison. The Berkeley job came through one day before the Madison job, thus delaying her hearing about Wiscon by two full decades. She's been trying to make up for it ever since.

It's hard to pin down exactly what makes Wiscon different from other science fiction and fantasy conventions. We have panels, they have panels. We have art shows, auctions, dealer's rooms, voodoo message boards, consuites, evening parties, and slow elevators. And so do they.

Maybe Wiscon is different from other science fiction/fantasy conventions because it's a sea of women, and only here and there are the guys. Which means that a panel on menstruating in space would not at all be unusual. Where you can go to "Costuming For The Real World: Or Your Leather Jacket Will Find You" and browse the treasures gleaned by thrifters. Want a new look? Try on the silk kimono or the purple wig or here's how you drape the paisley scarf. Laugh until your cheeks hurt when Jeanne Gomoll tries on a dress from the '40s that makes her look like her mother.

Panels are a gas at Wiscon, maybe because we're all so much at ease with each other. Or else we're just demented. We've got "Mixing Elves and Electric Guitars" and "When Bad Things Happen to Good Witches" and "Fat, Feminism, and Fandom." We talk about "That Which Cannot Be Spoken" and flock to the Lady Poetesses From Hell.

We've got pocket programs designed by Jeanne Gomoll and Debbie Notkin and Jane Hawkins, the most highly organized and extremely useful convention programs on the planet — no, in the solar system — no in the entire universe. We always know where we're going, but it's such agony trying to decide!

The Tiptree Award grew out of Pat Murphy's guest of honor speech at Wiscon, and Wiscon reciprocates by hosting fundraisers for the award. Not only do they hold a bake sale — the traditional domain of female fundraising — but there's the auction from another dimension. Auctioneer Ellen Klages has a style like none other as she coordinates bids on Vonda McIntyre's beaded totem bag, Brenda Clough's knitted uterus, and the red satin bra worn in successive years by Karen Joy Fowler and Ellen Klages and Mary Doria Russell.

You can tell, can't you? Wiscon is not much on formality, which eases the frayed nerves of us younger-generation writers. We can sign up for round-table critique sessions and meet a whole bunch of other writers who will soon become our friends. We'll see them over and over, at panels, at parties, and at afternoon "living rooms" where we sit on couches and comfy chairs, eating bon bons and drinking tea with editors and other luminaries who laugh and chat about their favorite topic.

Wiscon actively rejects the pro/non-pro distinctions of other conventions and works hard to make it an egalitarian experience. Everyone pays registration fees, even people-at-other-conventions-formerly-known-as-pros. Anyone can suggest a panel and then be on it. Anyone can organize a fun event. As Jeanne said to me once, "that's just the way we do things here."

Though thinking about it, one difference does stand above others. At other cons, it's not uncommon to see fans spending their weekend dressed as Starfleet captains or vampire queens or medieval baronesses — in short, being someone else. At Wiscon, we go to be ourselves. We're there to be truly who we are: women who are feminists and who love science fiction and fantasy. And men who love feminist literature. And anyone else who's interested in gender issues and alienation and unlimited possibilities for change.

Interestingly enough, it's that lack of pretense that sets us up for one evening that is truly weird. Saturday night: Wiscon and a wedding reception sharing the same hotel. Year after year. It turns the table on the usual skiffy convention, where mundanes find themselves trapped in an elevator with a bunch of Klingons and vampires and breast-plated vixens with swords. But at Wiscon, we're in street clothes and they're in costume.So there we are, running in from dinner and bolting to the bathroom before hitting the evening panels and parties, and finding ourselves getting ice-pick stares by the tux-and-slinky-dress crowd because...well...aren't we a tad bit underdressed? The cosmic joke being that we're flocking to Wiscon precisely because we don't care to cinch ourselves up in firm-support nylons, or hide behind gobs of makeup and starched hair. We really don't care what size clothing our friends wear. That's not something we really even notice. But there we are, stared down in our own haven by the most stereotypical of our culture's expectations, accompanied by loud dance music down the hall.

Well, we just shake our heads and duck into a bathroom crammed full of the bride's friends glued to the mirror, primping and twittering over the hunky best man. The bathroom where one wedding guest is always sobbing in a stall because her boyfriend is flirting with some slut. We wedge past them and yell to each other over the stalls "Wasn't the Lesbomania slideshow great?"

"And the Buffy panel — I'm can't believe I missed the bridesmaid episode where she kicked demon butt with high heels and a cake knife!"

"Where are you going next?"

"You think I'd miss Worlds Without Men?"

The wedding guests give us wide berth as we stride out, cackling like crones all the way to the feminist utopia panel and the young trollopes panel and the writing realistic kids panel and the evening Broad Universe party and the booklaunch celebration and more of the collective group hug that will last us a whole 'nother year.