My friend Sharon S. and I went to the first Herc/Xena convention in January of 1997. She was there primarily for H:TLJ and I was there for X:WP, so we decided to go both days with each other. The two days couldn't have been more different. Saturday was "Herc" day and the seats were only about half occupied. Sunday was "Xena" day and it was completely sold out with people outside the Burbank Hilton Convention Center trying to buy a ticket -- and this was in the pouring rain, no less.
Another big difference in the audiences was that on Saturday, there were family groups in attendance and on Sunday, the audience was primarily women, and the lesbian contingent was very large. I hadn't seen this many lesbians in one place outside of a Pride event or a Women's Festival. Clearly, the show's subtext was being picked up by many more people than just me!
Even though we had purchased out tickets rather close to the event, we had 2nd row seats on the right side of the auditorium. The picture of LL above is an example of how good our seats were, lucky us! We started chatting with people sitting around us in the same row and we found, to our surprise, that a lot of us were scientists, and mostly working in biotech. We exchanged business cards and continued chatting the whole weekend.
We had been reading posts on the MCA NetForum by Sharon Delaney of Creation, telling us that a prop chakram was going to be auctioned off at the first convention. This created a huge amount of buzz in fandom, and there were many people posting speculative amounts that the chakram would eventually go for at the auction.
Eventually, the charity auction for the prop chakram started and the bidding was intense until it reached a certain level and then it came down to just 3 or 4 bidders, me among them. Eventually, it was between a fan I later learned had the internet handle "SheWho" (as in She Who Must be Obeyed) and myself. She quit and I ended up winning the auction. Here are a couple of pictures that fans took at the end of the auction and sent to me later:
The bottom one is of Sharon Delaney from Creation and me with the newly won chakram.
From this point on, in terms of my experience in fandom, things were different. For one thing, lots of fans wanted to hold the chakram and have their picture taken with it. Here's Margaret holding the chakram, taken at the same convention:
Standing in line for autographs (the only time Lucy Lawless has autographed at a convention) to get the chakram inscribed, people started approaching me with invitations to gatherings and parties. I was invited to join a secret fan email list, one that "dared not speak it's name" (which BTW, was created so fans could have a safe place to talk about the subtext, because open email lists were sometimes very hostile to subtext fans). I was an invited "fan guest" of the first NYC Xena Fest. So for me personally, the chakram auction win became the "in" to Xena fan groups.
The gathering that became the most important to me was the local southern California group, eventually called the Xena Gab Gatherings, that met monthly to watch the latest episode, chat about the show, swap photos, show off fan-made Xena Stuff. In the early period of this gathering, I always brought the chakram because there were always new people to the group who hadn't had a chance to see it. Here is the first gathering photo, dated Feb 23, 1997. This first X/G gathering took place at the Good Earth restaurant in Pasadena, CA (the restaurant is gone now). Xena University bills itself as the oldest Xena fan group in fandom, but Xena Gab was actually first. Grace wrote up a summary of the meeting, which was published in Kym Taborn's online Xena journal, Whoosh! (and Kym is in this picture, standing directly behind me). This was the first fan gathering I brought the chakram prop to display, but it wouldn't be the last.
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