I'm sure this wasn’t easy to write — or to first remember and analyze before that — but it was good of you to do it. I thank you for the effort.
For the record, I too enjoyed Sandman but found that Neil's prose fiction left me cold. I never did figure out why. Still, there was a time I envied a publishing couple of our mutual acquaintance their close friendship with Neil, who at the time seemed to be a dazzling, sterling guy. Now I'm relieved to have dodged that bullet, grateful to be surveying a tragic situation from the periphery. I feel for all his friends and passionate fans who have been so rudely disillusioned. Our heroes often have feet of clay, but in cases like this the clay extends much higher, and we feel as if our hands have been soiled.
Speaking of people close to him, I noticed that the New York Times contacted Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman for their article, who hosted the Palmer/Gaiman wedding at their home:
" 'I’m just trying to absorb all this and don’t know what to say,' Waldman wrote in an email.
"Chabon responded similarly: “I just don’t have it in me to talk about it.' "
Definitely a sci-fi reader, which doesn't mean much in this context because I never read Gaiman. Always meant to, you know, never did.
But I've also been on Tumblr longer than Gaiman has been--which is a long time indeed.
I frequently came across his posts, which always seemed kindly, urbane, progressive. And he *definitely* had the "adorers" with "faith in his benevolence" over there. Hundreds if not thousands of them.
And they turned on him instantly. Last I saw, his page was still up, and it doesn't take schadenfreude to find interest in the many many many comments left by his former fans after he skedaddled.
A different thing, I know. Virtuality as opposed to IRL. But just to say, most people make a choice to give that adoration. They completely realize what they're doing and they're usually ready to withhold at the drop of a hat.
Secondly, if I might be so gauche: how do you do the footnote thing? You know, with the inpage links? #Child's play in HTML, but I don't know how to do it on this platform. A quick Google led to information that was simply incorrect. Could you indulge me?
I'm glad fans and writers alike have been taking the accusations seriously. I just wish there had been some way for the writing community, which knew part of the story, to demand better behavior from him a long time ago. (Of course, he would probably have just urbanely wriggled off the hook.)
Footnotes are pretty simple. On the composition screen, put the cursor where you want the footnote. Click the More dropdown in the top menu, then click Footnote. You get popped right down to the bottom of the page to type the footnote, which gets automatically numbered.
Sorry to be commenting so late (I've been copy-editing my novel and am now catching up on my reading). Anyway, what Moshe said: thanks for writing this.
I didn't have a clue about Gaiman's misbehaviours, mainly because I paid little attention to him (didn't read him apart from "Good Omens" which I read because of Terry Pratchett). The Shadow Army is a sharp observation. There are Shadow Armies in the music industry, in Hollywood and, indeed, in the SF/F/H world.
Personally, I witnesssed one male writer (married) trying to charm a young female admirer into his hotel room until I called out his bluff. When she asked him if his fiction had been rejected, he said--in order to impress her--"Never." As an Interzone editor at the time I knew this was bullshit and I called him out on it (and I had the proof, as we had rejected one of his stories).
She ultimately didn't fall for it, yet it made me think this might not have been the first time this--supposedly happily married--male writer had tried it. Typically, he was such a nice guy in public, so I suppose many predators know how to hide their bad sides most of the time.
Finally, a bad person can be a good writer. So should we separate the author from their work? If the answer is "No!" then the whole SF/F/H community should immediately ban every mention of the Lovecraftian Mythos. Needless to say, this hasn't happened. It is, as always, complicated.
I still had a copy of Good Omens on my shelf until a couple of weeks ago, also because of Pratchett’s name on the cover. Ultimately I didn’t feel good about Gaiman’s name having a place on my shelf, so I took it downstairs to the exchange table in my apartment building.
I’m glad you ran interference on that old pro. This is the other shadow army I hope stays sharp — the one looking out for victims, or for people who could become victims.
Hi, thank you for writing this. I have read a few different takes on this man (most written by feminist or conservative-feminist women).
All were thought-provoking but yours actually resonated the most. I have met "shadow armies" but not with anyone famous: just with very charming, popular and untrustworthy men. Not just the experiences themselves, but the dismissal and the twisted perceptions of other people stay with you. The narrative is suddenly in someone else's control.
It would be wrong to say it's just women who all have some level of involvement with the man being jealous of one another because while I think that is a component, as you mention, men do it too: downplay what went on, gaslight women etc, sometimes quite aggressively. It is an odd fact of life that the people who need social protection the least seem to get it the most.
I think a lot of people do engage in this kind of thing without really realising what they're doing.
The thought process might be "she's not attractive enough to catch his attention, so maybe she misunderstood what he meant" or "he hasn't shared this with me and I'm his best friend" or "she's not his type, so she must be driving this" . It's a petty but harmless thought to have until you actually start vocalising it without really knowing what's going on.
For men maybe it's more that they don't like to see a woman making a big fuss about another man, or (as they might see it) disturbing the group's harmony or just a woman being comfortable in her own sexuality? I understand why someone in your situation would be unhappy, less so C.
I had one of my characters speak of him VERY respectfully of him in one of my novellas (a reflection on my feelings on his work, not necessarily the man himself). So I guess if I'm going to serialize that novella on Substack that reference has to go...
That's another part of what's so insidious. The icon sinks his roots so deeply into the field that it's almost impossible to weed him out without a lot of pain.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." If we didn't treat these people as godly figures to begin with, a lot of them wouldn't have drunk the Kool-Aid and misbehaved so badly.
Thank you for writing about this. I’ve been following a certain older group of fantasy writers and artists for more than 30 years that have worked with him and/or were in his orbit. Been thinking a lot about who knew, and when. I find that it’s not a tough decision to leave them all behind.
I’ve read a lot of Gaiman books and attended a couple of his talks. Whilst not an obsessive, I’d enjoyed most of his writing and American Gods was a favourite book. I feel so stupid now. And disappointed but I find myself not so surprised.
New to writing, I received a gift of MASTERCLASS from my son. I found I could not look at Neil Gaimon. I tried to just listen to his voice but couldn’t do that either. I didn’t mention it to my son because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Now I hear the news and a complete understanding evolved. My new writing project is a memoir set around my father that worked with L Ron Hubbard during the creation of Dianetics. My father was an auditor, one that hypnotized and brainwashed unsuspecting students. The feelings I experienced trying to watch or listen to Gaimon I realize now were feelings of being groomed that triggered me.
I would be very interested if any of you has further insight on the effects Dianetics. The comparisons to my father’s behavior and life choices are appalling.
I don’t have any particular insights into Scientology — I escaped from a Mormon background myself — but I can tell you that Gaiman was raised among Scientologists and underwent a lot of their training when he was young, being groomed for leadership. Maybe you’re picking up on some of that in the way he speaks.
Bill, thanks for this post. I don’t know how to respond, except to offer you my support for bringing it to us.
I cannot sort out what’s attributable to new-new media, what’s down to basic human nature, and what’s down to power-madness. It’s facile to refer to it as weaponized gossip against the women he lured and flattered. The fact that your friend decided to “live out loud” about his approach to her suggests that we still don’t know what living out loud can do in the real world, what its purpose is, its limitations are.
I’ve seen forms of this from grammar school into adulthood. It starts with picking teams for kickball. If a girl in kindergarten receives praise for her drawing, then kindergarten-I can get her (the teacher’s or the student’s, either way - edited) attention by seconding that praise. In my creative writing classes, I tried to extinguish the impulse to critique one another’s work, because to my ear it only leads to, “I agree with what she said,” or “Vivian’s writing is really cool,” and so on. I called it interpersonal politics. I couldn’t say it but I thought it: "Why don’t you two just go on a date and get it over with.”
I’ve seen teachers groom students unconsciously - creating teachers’ pets - not always for sex but often for the satisfaction of team building among those who are dependent upon the teacher for a grade and feel it’s right and normal to give back for praise given. “Let’s form a mutual admiration society."
On the dark side, I also think of Lewis Carrol and his pictures of naked little girls, his art photographs. Artists and writers have many such cover stories at their disposal, with which to bury their wishes and intentions under tons of rose petals. I can’t tell you how sickened I was every time I heard a teacher say of a student, “She has an ancient soul.” It often led to pregnancy and marriage. But most such cases were about co-dependence. Both sides had to live with the consequences. But if the man really does have power, which hs teachers don’t really have; if he’s really a Neil Gaiman, then everything’s changed by that real power.
I mean, my power over my students ended with the semester. Children who had looked up to me with admiration and affection forgot my name within 72 hours. As it ought to be! My days of fooling myself were short-lived. But if I’d had Gaiman power, I could have gone on fooling myself right into court and jail time.
Neil Gaiman reminds me of Lewis Carrol in photographer’s scrubs, leaning on his artistic license to be licentious. Clearly licentious, although in Victorian times he could get away with calling it art.
PS: The few times I had that, “She has an ancient soul” feeling, I cross-examined it seriously, and in every case there was sexual abuse in the girl’s family. It also did lasting damage. One girl developed multiple personality disorder. Many such girls are highly manipulative as a defense against abuse, but the defensiveness itself often attracts abusers, who later cry, “I was manipulated."
They came to high school prepped with an unconscious knowledge of what men respond to in terms of power/dominance. I don’t blame them. In every case I had to believe that they wanted only one thing: a good father figure instead of the father they had.
That they couldn’t get what they wanted from a lot of men they met is not against them. Adolescence has but one purpose when it comes to girls interacting with men - to learn how to be with each other without doing harm. It doesn’t happen in one year or overnight. It develops from kindergarten onward, and it can be short-circuited by abuse in the family, which sets the pattern of looking for abusers: the known males.
It isn’t their fault that’s how they regard men, as “the known male." It’s up to the older men to be good older men, to replace dads and uncles for a short while, and then to let the women go find someone their own emotional and mental age. That is normal, and I am a fan of normal.
People who joke about daddy issues often have no idea what that means in human terms.
I'm sure this wasn’t easy to write — or to first remember and analyze before that — but it was good of you to do it. I thank you for the effort.
For the record, I too enjoyed Sandman but found that Neil's prose fiction left me cold. I never did figure out why. Still, there was a time I envied a publishing couple of our mutual acquaintance their close friendship with Neil, who at the time seemed to be a dazzling, sterling guy. Now I'm relieved to have dodged that bullet, grateful to be surveying a tragic situation from the periphery. I feel for all his friends and passionate fans who have been so rudely disillusioned. Our heroes often have feet of clay, but in cases like this the clay extends much higher, and we feel as if our hands have been soiled.
Speaking of people close to him, I noticed that the New York Times contacted Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman for their article, who hosted the Palmer/Gaiman wedding at their home:
" 'I’m just trying to absorb all this and don’t know what to say,' Waldman wrote in an email.
"Chabon responded similarly: “I just don’t have it in me to talk about it.' "
Not envious.
Definitely a sci-fi reader, which doesn't mean much in this context because I never read Gaiman. Always meant to, you know, never did.
But I've also been on Tumblr longer than Gaiman has been--which is a long time indeed.
I frequently came across his posts, which always seemed kindly, urbane, progressive. And he *definitely* had the "adorers" with "faith in his benevolence" over there. Hundreds if not thousands of them.
And they turned on him instantly. Last I saw, his page was still up, and it doesn't take schadenfreude to find interest in the many many many comments left by his former fans after he skedaddled.
A different thing, I know. Virtuality as opposed to IRL. But just to say, most people make a choice to give that adoration. They completely realize what they're doing and they're usually ready to withhold at the drop of a hat.
Secondly, if I might be so gauche: how do you do the footnote thing? You know, with the inpage links? #Child's play in HTML, but I don't know how to do it on this platform. A quick Google led to information that was simply incorrect. Could you indulge me?
I'm glad fans and writers alike have been taking the accusations seriously. I just wish there had been some way for the writing community, which knew part of the story, to demand better behavior from him a long time ago. (Of course, he would probably have just urbanely wriggled off the hook.)
Footnotes are pretty simple. On the composition screen, put the cursor where you want the footnote. Click the More dropdown in the top menu, then click Footnote. You get popped right down to the bottom of the page to type the footnote, which gets automatically numbered.
Thanks very much for the reply
Sorry to be commenting so late (I've been copy-editing my novel and am now catching up on my reading). Anyway, what Moshe said: thanks for writing this.
I didn't have a clue about Gaiman's misbehaviours, mainly because I paid little attention to him (didn't read him apart from "Good Omens" which I read because of Terry Pratchett). The Shadow Army is a sharp observation. There are Shadow Armies in the music industry, in Hollywood and, indeed, in the SF/F/H world.
Personally, I witnesssed one male writer (married) trying to charm a young female admirer into his hotel room until I called out his bluff. When she asked him if his fiction had been rejected, he said--in order to impress her--"Never." As an Interzone editor at the time I knew this was bullshit and I called him out on it (and I had the proof, as we had rejected one of his stories).
She ultimately didn't fall for it, yet it made me think this might not have been the first time this--supposedly happily married--male writer had tried it. Typically, he was such a nice guy in public, so I suppose many predators know how to hide their bad sides most of the time.
Finally, a bad person can be a good writer. So should we separate the author from their work? If the answer is "No!" then the whole SF/F/H community should immediately ban every mention of the Lovecraftian Mythos. Needless to say, this hasn't happened. It is, as always, complicated.
I still had a copy of Good Omens on my shelf until a couple of weeks ago, also because of Pratchett’s name on the cover. Ultimately I didn’t feel good about Gaiman’s name having a place on my shelf, so I took it downstairs to the exchange table in my apartment building.
I’m glad you ran interference on that old pro. This is the other shadow army I hope stays sharp — the one looking out for victims, or for people who could become victims.
Hi, thank you for writing this. I have read a few different takes on this man (most written by feminist or conservative-feminist women).
All were thought-provoking but yours actually resonated the most. I have met "shadow armies" but not with anyone famous: just with very charming, popular and untrustworthy men. Not just the experiences themselves, but the dismissal and the twisted perceptions of other people stay with you. The narrative is suddenly in someone else's control.
It would be wrong to say it's just women who all have some level of involvement with the man being jealous of one another because while I think that is a component, as you mention, men do it too: downplay what went on, gaslight women etc, sometimes quite aggressively. It is an odd fact of life that the people who need social protection the least seem to get it the most.
I’m glad you found it relevant. It wasn’t until I was writing it that I really confronted my own complicity in the problem.
I think a lot of people do engage in this kind of thing without really realising what they're doing.
The thought process might be "she's not attractive enough to catch his attention, so maybe she misunderstood what he meant" or "he hasn't shared this with me and I'm his best friend" or "she's not his type, so she must be driving this" . It's a petty but harmless thought to have until you actually start vocalising it without really knowing what's going on.
For men maybe it's more that they don't like to see a woman making a big fuss about another man, or (as they might see it) disturbing the group's harmony or just a woman being comfortable in her own sexuality? I understand why someone in your situation would be unhappy, less so C.
I had one of my characters speak of him VERY respectfully of him in one of my novellas (a reflection on my feelings on his work, not necessarily the man himself). So I guess if I'm going to serialize that novella on Substack that reference has to go...
That's another part of what's so insidious. The icon sinks his roots so deeply into the field that it's almost impossible to weed him out without a lot of pain.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." If we didn't treat these people as godly figures to begin with, a lot of them wouldn't have drunk the Kool-Aid and misbehaved so badly.
Thank you for writing about this. I’ve been following a certain older group of fantasy writers and artists for more than 30 years that have worked with him and/or were in his orbit. Been thinking a lot about who knew, and when. I find that it’s not a tough decision to leave them all behind.
I’ve read a lot of Gaiman books and attended a couple of his talks. Whilst not an obsessive, I’d enjoyed most of his writing and American Gods was a favourite book. I feel so stupid now. And disappointed but I find myself not so surprised.
I wouldnt feel too stupid. He was supremely charming and a consummate con artist. Fooled a whole lot of people.
New to writing, I received a gift of MASTERCLASS from my son. I found I could not look at Neil Gaimon. I tried to just listen to his voice but couldn’t do that either. I didn’t mention it to my son because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Now I hear the news and a complete understanding evolved. My new writing project is a memoir set around my father that worked with L Ron Hubbard during the creation of Dianetics. My father was an auditor, one that hypnotized and brainwashed unsuspecting students. The feelings I experienced trying to watch or listen to Gaimon I realize now were feelings of being groomed that triggered me.
I would be very interested if any of you has further insight on the effects Dianetics. The comparisons to my father’s behavior and life choices are appalling.
I don’t have any particular insights into Scientology — I escaped from a Mormon background myself — but I can tell you that Gaiman was raised among Scientologists and underwent a lot of their training when he was young, being groomed for leadership. Maybe you’re picking up on some of that in the way he speaks.
Bill, thanks for this post. I don’t know how to respond, except to offer you my support for bringing it to us.
I cannot sort out what’s attributable to new-new media, what’s down to basic human nature, and what’s down to power-madness. It’s facile to refer to it as weaponized gossip against the women he lured and flattered. The fact that your friend decided to “live out loud” about his approach to her suggests that we still don’t know what living out loud can do in the real world, what its purpose is, its limitations are.
I’ve seen forms of this from grammar school into adulthood. It starts with picking teams for kickball. If a girl in kindergarten receives praise for her drawing, then kindergarten-I can get her (the teacher’s or the student’s, either way - edited) attention by seconding that praise. In my creative writing classes, I tried to extinguish the impulse to critique one another’s work, because to my ear it only leads to, “I agree with what she said,” or “Vivian’s writing is really cool,” and so on. I called it interpersonal politics. I couldn’t say it but I thought it: "Why don’t you two just go on a date and get it over with.”
I’ve seen teachers groom students unconsciously - creating teachers’ pets - not always for sex but often for the satisfaction of team building among those who are dependent upon the teacher for a grade and feel it’s right and normal to give back for praise given. “Let’s form a mutual admiration society."
On the dark side, I also think of Lewis Carrol and his pictures of naked little girls, his art photographs. Artists and writers have many such cover stories at their disposal, with which to bury their wishes and intentions under tons of rose petals. I can’t tell you how sickened I was every time I heard a teacher say of a student, “She has an ancient soul.” It often led to pregnancy and marriage. But most such cases were about co-dependence. Both sides had to live with the consequences. But if the man really does have power, which hs teachers don’t really have; if he’s really a Neil Gaiman, then everything’s changed by that real power.
I mean, my power over my students ended with the semester. Children who had looked up to me with admiration and affection forgot my name within 72 hours. As it ought to be! My days of fooling myself were short-lived. But if I’d had Gaiman power, I could have gone on fooling myself right into court and jail time.
Neil Gaiman reminds me of Lewis Carrol in photographer’s scrubs, leaning on his artistic license to be licentious. Clearly licentious, although in Victorian times he could get away with calling it art.
PS: The few times I had that, “She has an ancient soul” feeling, I cross-examined it seriously, and in every case there was sexual abuse in the girl’s family. It also did lasting damage. One girl developed multiple personality disorder. Many such girls are highly manipulative as a defense against abuse, but the defensiveness itself often attracts abusers, who later cry, “I was manipulated."
They came to high school prepped with an unconscious knowledge of what men respond to in terms of power/dominance. I don’t blame them. In every case I had to believe that they wanted only one thing: a good father figure instead of the father they had.
That they couldn’t get what they wanted from a lot of men they met is not against them. Adolescence has but one purpose when it comes to girls interacting with men - to learn how to be with each other without doing harm. It doesn’t happen in one year or overnight. It develops from kindergarten onward, and it can be short-circuited by abuse in the family, which sets the pattern of looking for abusers: the known males.
It isn’t their fault that’s how they regard men, as “the known male." It’s up to the older men to be good older men, to replace dads and uncles for a short while, and then to let the women go find someone their own emotional and mental age. That is normal, and I am a fan of normal.
People who joke about daddy issues often have no idea what that means in human terms.