Some More on Gaiman

Given my role as LGM’s envoy to the nerds, I can understand Paul’s Rob’s assumption (echoed by several people in the comments) that I would have something to say about Neil Gaiman and the allegations against him. Truthfully, I’m not sure how much I can add to the conversation. The allegations against Gaiman were plausible when they were made last year, and now seem to have been thoroughly confirmed. While I certainly can’t claim to have insight into the whole of SFF fandom, the parts of it I’m seeing seem united in sadness and disgust. I have little fear that Gaiman will be able to worm his way back into a position of prominence—unlike certain politicians we could all name. On that front, of course, it probably helps that Gaiman’s career has been on a bit of a downslope. His last published novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, came out in 2013. His focus in recent years has been on TV adaptations of his work, most of which were only quasi-successful even before their production companies hastened to pull the plug when the revelations about him came to light. (Those of you hoping that the Sandman TV adaptation will last beyond its currently-in-production second season should probably prepare for disappointment.) As with Harvey Weinstein, this may turn out to be a case of a powerful creative whose utility had run out, which made him easier to topple.

Another reason I’ve been hesitant to write about Gaiman is that although I’ve read a lot of his writing and even admire some of it, overall my feelings towards it are decidedly lukewarm. As we all know, one of the most common, and least useful, reactions when a popular artist is revealed as a sexual predator are the cries of “I never liked his stuff!” Or, “he always sucked and I was the only one willing to say it!” Or, most unhelpfully, “you could tell he was a creep by the way he wrote about X!” (The Vulture article quite cannily draws a comparison between Gaiman and Richard Madoc, but that character is something of an aberration in Gaiman’s writing; unlike someone like Junot Díaz, whose novels now practically read like a signed confession, I’m not finding myself looking back at Gaiman’s writing and going “oh shit”.) I sort of get why Gaiman amassed the devoted fandom he did—as with Joss Whedon and feminism, his period of creative flourishing was one in which queer or even crypto-queer representation was pretty thin on the ground, and he maintained the goodwill from that work well past the point where other writers had superseded it. But I’ve never felt that kind of enthusiasm for either him or his writing. (If anything, as a still-fervent admirer of the CW series Jane the Virgin, I’ve been far more upset by the revelations about Justin Baldoni.) Which—since it’s really more a matter of luck than virtue—hardly seems like the sort of thing to crow about.

At the same time, even those of us who never got the big deal about Neil Gaiman can’t deny how influential his writing has been, how much its tendrils run through much of the fantastic writing of the last forty years. His one undeniable masterpiece, The Sandman, was at least as influential on modern comics as the work of Alan Moore, drawing a blueprint for long-form comics storytelling, for the incorporation of myth and fantasy into real-world settings, and for the creation of a modern myth from whole cloth, that writers in comics and prose are still following. Neverwhere, though a slight work in its own right, is practically the ur-novel for a large chunk of urban fantasy. Stardust introduced a strain of pre-Tolkien, English fantasy writing to a whole new generation of readers. American Gods, baggy and meandering as it is, was nevertheless a new thing in fantasy, a Great American Novel from the fantastic point of view. (Weirdly, Gaiman’s best novel, Anansi Boys, seems to have had the least longevity and cultural footprint of all his work.) Not unlike J.K. Rowling, Gaiman is the sort of writer where for almost everything he’s written, you can point to glaring, seemingly insurmountable flaws, and yet in the aggregate his work is both impactful and wildly important.

Just as important, of course, is Gaiman’s role within, and as an ambassador for, the SFF community. He was one of the first high-profile writers to make himself available to fans online, well before the advent of social media made that common and even required, and continuing until last year when the first allegations against him emerged. It was not uncommon to interact with Gaiman on tumblr, and I myself received congratulations last spring when he retweeted some of my writing about the scandal surrounding the 2023 Hugo awards. As his mainstream visibility grew, Gaiman became a sort of bridge between the fannish community and the greater world of entertainment and even arts and letters, the sort of person who could speak to fans as one of their own, but also be called upon to comment in Variety, or contribute an op-ed to the Guardian. Like other writers who have played the same role, a group that includes George R.R. Martin and John Scalzi, this made him an important voice within fandom, above and beyond his work as a writer. He was someone who was listened to on matters of both fandom politics and real-world politics, and mostly with a progressive slant. We now know that he was using that position, and the positive reputation that came with it, to scout victims.

As for the lessons to be drawn from this terrible story, and a path forward from it, I’m afraid I have little to offer. I find the endless conversation about whether it’s OK to consume art by terrible people rather tedious—most of the time it seems to be a way to beat on people who hold a different opinion than you, rather than a meaningful engagement with an extremely thorny question. But, as I’ve already noted, I am probably the wrong person to ask this question where Neil Gaiman is concerned. I doubt I will ever read or review another novel by him, but that was probably just as true a year ago as it is now. A more pertinent issue, it seems to me, is the question of how abusers flourish within tight-knit communities, but there too, I’m not sure that anyone has lit on a solution. Kneejerk reactions of “don’t trust men!”, “don’t trust big stars!”, or “don’t trust men who call themselves feminists!” are understandable, but not, I suspect, terribly useful—in fact, Gaiman’s very visible support for trans rights has given ammunition to the transphobic brigade (led, of course, by J.K. Rowling) who are now holding him up as “proof” that trans people and their supporters are sexual predators. I wish there was a hard and fast rule that would allow us to identify and expose these people wherever they crop up (which is everywhere), but I don’t think it exists. In the meantime, I think we have the same tools we always did—listen to victims, provide space for people who may be in a bad situation, and don’t treat anyone as if they are above basic human decency—if we choose to use them.