Langdon Chart
A Langdon Chart is a diagram showing romantic or sexual relationships among fen.
The orginal was a map showing the sexual liaisons of 1960s fans in the San Francisco Bay Area that Bay Area fan Kevin Langdon knew about, a diagram of who had slept with whom.
In 2009, Langdon recalled, "I was active in fandom in the early-to-mid 1960s. There were a lot of young people in fandom then, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, who were into "free love," and people spoke quite openly about their affairs. I decided to try to put together a graphical representation of all the sexual connections I knew about, with solid lines for male/female connections and dotted lines for gay connections. My diagram got around and others began doing the same thing for the circles they knew."
Nobody seemed upset by the Chart, which became a source of entertainment, as some fans maintained they had been short-changed in their number of Chart connections.
The idea caught on in fandom, and soon other areas had their own charts. Bruce Pelz created one for Los Angeles fandom, but mapped only the interactions that had been mentioned in public by both participants. Still, this created several relationship problems. Bruce said afterwards that creating the Langdon charts was one of the two dumbest things he had ever done in fandom.
Somewhat later, there was a rumor of a chart that had been planned for Minneapolis fandom that had to be abandoned because it proved impossible to find sheets of paper larger than 6 feet by 6 feet, so that names of all the people involved could be printed large enough to be legible.
Langdon charts did not differentiate between casual encounters and serious relationships.
See Sex.
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