Be warned – Today’s Topic is Ugly

I wish I could summon more sympathy for some of the writers I’ve read who are expressing their angst over the Neil Gaiman allegations. The emotional range of the pieces runs a short spectrum from, “I really admired Neil, and now I can’t,” to “I really enjoyed Neil’s work, and now I can’t.” They are personal pieces, so it’s understandable that they focus on personal feelings.

So to break down some of my own emotions around this, I should start by saying that I have never been a reader of Gaiman’s work, with which I have only a glancing familiarity. I haven’t read anything besides Coraline, which I found creepy but not all that compelling. I’ve always meant to watch the movie because I love Laika movies. I watched Stardust, and it was okay. There’s a copy of American Gods somewhere in my behemoth to-read pile, and my husband read that and liked it. Neither of us felt like watching the series, but we loved Good Omens.

I was always aware of Gaiman, even though I’m not conversant in his work. I’m friends with a fair amount of science fiction/fantasy writers, and for them, Gaiman is iconic. But the world is huge and so is that to-read pile, and I read across all boundaries of genre. I have never gotten around to Gaiman.

Let’s go back to a previous sentence.

“I’m friends with a fair amount of science fiction/fantasy writers…” I have been much friendlier with them in the past than I am now. I was in a sf/f writing group and book group for years, both of which disbanded. And I was close friends with a midlist SF/F writer who I don’t talk about much because we were great friends for four years, and then we weren’t, and then he died. He was brilliant and complicated and I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I think he was representative.

Here’s what I mean by that. He had early family trauma. As a child and teen, he never fit in socially. As a young man, he despaired of ever finding a girlfriend. In his thirties, he found a compelling voice when he wrote (though he was also a hell of a talker). He won some awards for his early work and was a genius at self-promotion. Through conventions, he attained a good share of public adoration. He became a presence. With that came women, lots of women, more women than his lonely teen self could ever have imagined. And he went through those women mercilessly under the guise of polyamory.

I was his friend. He often cited me as his best friend. I watched this romantic rodeo and shook my head. Woman after woman, several at a time, most of whom were devastated when it ended. One of them had a gun and showed up at his house. And I thought, wow, these women are just nuts, aren’t they? Everyone knows this guy is a player. Everyone knew this about the guy, didn’t they? The women got on the ride, and now it’s over.

What did they expect?

His success rate with women was a mystery to many. They knew his public self, not his one-on-one self. That’s where he really shone. What a dazzling conversationalist he was. How much he knew, and how freely he shared it. I could ask him anything and he never made me feel stupid or lesser-than while explaining it. Do you know what a rare gift that is?

Yes, he was a shameless attention whore, but he was also generous with his time, money, and publishing expertise. He was a social galvanizer, gathering people up and making things happen. That was who he was, at least to me. I ignored the love-bombing, the pursuit of highly vulnerable women, the promises about the future. I put that over in a different column, somehow. A column what didn’t balance out with how much I enjoyed the man.

I’ve tried to reckon up how to judge people. By everything they did right, or by everything they did wrong?  By everything wonderful about the man, or everything not-so-wonderful?

The Root of it All

In time I came to understand that, more than a player, my former friend was a big black hole into which you could bulldoze in all the women, all the publication credits, all the GOH convention spots, awards, invitations, and that hole would never fill. This understanding made me sad, but it mostly made me sad for him. Not the women he left in his wake.

And then, there came a serious romantic situation so tangled, so unfair, and so devastating to another dear friend of mine that my entire perspective changed. I could feel it shift, physically, like someone angled a lens and my vision clarified. I saw all these past romantic occurrences in a different light.

The situation got really messy, because the woman he hurt had some standing in his world of conventions and writers. He had messed up big time, and he looked bad, and he was panicking about it. I calmly told him he was wrong, doing what he did to her. I also told him that what he did was human, we are all human, and we are all wrong sometimes. But it was important for him to understand that in this situation, he was not the good guy and he never would be.

I also asked for a week’s break from hearing about it all, because I was exhausted. He never forgave me for that.

End of friendship.

The Line Between Creep and Criminal

So as I read about Gaiman, I returned to thoughts of my former friend. How clueless and lonely he was when high school romance began around him, and he wasn’t part of it. How he married the first girl who gave him the time of day, and then left her a few years later. How he married again, and then separated from her so he could pursue the women he met at conventions. How he acted at those conventions, relentless and entitled, as if being a writer gave him a Droit de Seigner with any girl in an anime costume.

I have read that Gaiman defends himself with a similar story of social rejection and general cluelessness about how to handle his own fame and power.

But times change. When #MeToo happened, my former friend was no longer here, but anyone who knew him said, “He’d never have survived this.” We shook our heads, imagining what the whisper network would have had to say about him. Even worse, the #MeToo lens would have been applied to his work.

Oh dear. The work.

His writing was where his darkest rivers ran. Brutalized women and sexualized children. Incest, rape, murder. When he applied to Clarion, he was rejected when one of the judges said, “I would never let a person who could write this story into Clarion.” Another story was so dark, he said, “You probably won’t want anything to do with me after you read this.” It was terrible. Kind of an all-of-the-above, plus self-mutilation and murder. But…it was published.

I don’t know why I even tried to encourage him write something less ghastly. I was not alone in this.  Most of the people who knew and loved him tried to get him to write just one novel that didn’t contain anal rape. I mean, we tried, but we failed.

He asked me to be a first reader for one of his last published books and sent me the Word document. I read the first part of it, which dazzled and disgusted me, then stopped and did a word search on a particularly ugly word for female private parts. When it showed up, I stopped reading.

Contrasts and Conundrums

I knew him well enough that I sort of understood how this sunny, gregarious man produced such macabre, misogynistic work, but I didn’t understand how it was routinely published. He explained by telling me, “Today, it’s all in who you know. Not part of it. All of it.” And he knew a lot of people.

I don’t think those same dark rivers run through Gaiman’s work. As I said, I haven’t read much of it. People who are in mourning talk about finding themselves in stories that featured children who save themselves from dark places. There is an intense identification with his heroes that no one seemed to find while reading the work of my late ex-friend.

This does not surprise me. But what does surprise me? That anyone is shocked by the predatory behavior of a man who finds himself elevated from socially unacceptable geek to revered icon. Think Woody Allen. Think Harvey Weinstein. Think Sherman Alexie.

And now, think about a further marginalized group: geeky, unpopular kids who eschewed sports in favor of comic books and Isaac Asimov. Add glasses and (often) poor complexions. They grow up, find their people, calm down about women. After years of social rejection, they write stories, and they are somehow redeemed! Beloved! Pursued! Important!

A convention (or writing workshop) was almost set up to serve as a sexual banquet for these men.

How do I know?

When I was twenty, I went to my first sf/f convention (OryCon, which is still the only convention I have ever attended). I was presented like a fresh and tasty dish to a few of the writers. You know. The writers. The important men. I was firmly encouraged to make the writers happy.

I didn’t, much to the puzzlement of the people urging me to make myself available. Apparently it was a badge of honor to be chosen. Just like a rock and roll groupie, I’d have bragging rights.

Seriously? No, seriously? Did these people know me at all?

I opted out with bemusement and a little irritation. I realized that science fiction conventions were where people who love to read, write, and watch science fiction went to have sex with other people who read, write, and watch science fiction. The air crackled with it, and I had my own fun that weekend. But I had no interest in being a groupie.

I’ve been to a few more iterations of this same convention over the decades, usually with my brother or Adrienne. I long ago aged out of the groupie category. I haven’t been in ten years, but back when I went, I saw old friends and had long boisterous conversations in the bar. It wasn’t part of the convention for me, but I watched some entitled behaviors, some intense pursuits. I know it’s still part of the deal.

Or it was. It’s possible that #MeToo changed all that. Or maybe it didn’t, because some of these allegations about Gaiman are relatively recent.

No Excuses

None of this is meant as an excuse for this kind of behavior. It is meant as an exploration of it, because I’m trying to understand. I also wonder about the transactional nature of power. I know there were plenty of women who understood the quid pro quo nature of Weinstein’s predation. You do this with me, I give you these opportunities. I know this went on with Alexie, too. I can make you or break you. Some women chose to be made, and others were simply broken.  

I imagine that some women held their noses and did what they needed to do in order to gain an opportunity. Most of them won’t be coming forward, because in their own minds, they got what they got in exchange for what they gave. The problem is, men like Weinstein assumed everyone was for sale, thanks to the occasional complicity. If anyone resisted, these men didn’t care.

There’s a line. On one side, he’s just a creep. But when he crosses that line, he’s a criminal. My friend’s behavior was creepy. I’m not making any pronouncements about Gaiman’s.

So, Just Where is That Line?

Where is it? Where does behavior stop being creepy, and start being criminal? Outright predation is easier to spot, like Bill Cosby and his drugs. Oh, I was such a fan of The Cosby Show back in the day, but there was no grey area here, nothing that could be considered creepy or sketchy. It was all a straightforward crime.

Even so, I keep trying to contextualize his very specific approach. I imagine he had one encounter early on with a woman who had just gotten out of the shower after taking something that made her sleepy. He spent fifty years trying to recreate the high of whatever that encounter was. “This worked once and I loved it. Let’s make it happen again.”

The male effort to recreate a sexual high fuels serial killers. It also fuels more pathetic efforts, like Louis C.K., or Senator Bob Packwood, an Oregon politician. He would stand on women’s feet, snap their girdles, and expect that sex would follow. He did this repeatedly to many different women, until someone finally came forward and exposed him. It appears to me that at some point, he must have had success with this approach. He kept trying to recreate it and it cost him his career.

These are the most obvious examples. With a bit of googling, I could add name after name to the list. I could also throw in a few men I know personally; a trusted relative, a friend’s father, men I babysat for as a young teen. I don’t have the heart to do it. The court of public opinion is where these people are usually tried. Occasionally they end up in prison, and occasionally they end up as President.

So my other question is, why am I ever surprised?

My answer embarrasses me. I have rock-solid faith in the basic decency of humankind, despite so much evidence to the contrary. It is absurd how much I believe in us, despite the dictators and the genocides and the serial killers, the garden-variety grifters, con men, and liars out there. And the predators.

Somehow, despite all these creeps and criminals, all this evidence to the contrary, I still believe in humanity. I have no idea how I maintain this faith, but it’s there. And I am not giving it up.