that also may have been a function of my age at the time

How old were you? I was 19 when I got into fandom, and thought I was about the youngest...but have since run into people who were writing all kinds of porn on those lists and they're all five or six years younger than me! I was scared of the flamewars, though, because I find a lot of Americans argue much harder and louder than I'm comfortable with, and my fandom then was majority American.