Vulture Report on Neil Gaiman Makes it All Too Real

The Vulture article about the Neil Gaiman allegations goes into extreme detail. I cannot recommend one read it without mental preparation. At the same time, I can not fault these decisions. I understand the graphic detail and why the author, and likely one or more of the alleged victims, feels the need for this extreme detail.

When this was first reported, it was reported under muddled, bad conditions. Obviously, I cannot fault the actual reporting work that went in to the Tortoise Media podcast, but it had been under doubt for a bunch of reasons. Tortoise Media does not have a good reputation as an outlet, and has been--if one is generous--motivated in what it has decided to report in the past and how it has framed it. Tortoise Media, if you are familiar with it at all, is not the sort of place one would assume would be sympathetic to MeToo.

When the podcast first came out, therefore, I dismissed it un-listened. At this period in history the assumption that Gaiman was an abuser wasn't surprising, even with zero knowledge of any specifics, so I filed it away as 'sure, prob' and continued to not purchase any Gaiman media, of which I wasn't much of a fan anyway.

I'm not saying that I was already suspicious of Gaiman or knew his work was low quality all along or something like that, it just wasn't my vibe and I can take no credit for that and don't think it makes sense to go into the detail of why here. But it did mean that I didn't think a lot about how he was likely another corrupt abuser, even if the proof seemed, tenuous.

As fan-circles began to further illuminate the accusations and reporting slowly continued in more and more legitimate publications it became more and more just a fact of life that Gaiman was a creep of some flavor. This seemed likely even as the accusations, when I tried to listen to them via the Tortoise Media podcast, were provided under extremely poor production.

The whole character of the accusations didn't feel solid this whole time, even while I and more people steadily accepted them and believed the accusers. It's a hard dichotomy to describe: how does one believe the women involved while also feeling like it isn't all quite real?

I guess, in the retrospective view from this moment, there was always the sense that the argument might just fall apart. That we could wake up one day and find out that--though we virtuously believed it to be true--it had all been false. I don't think I was even conscious of that feeling in myself until the extremely hard reality of this graphic article crashed it to the ground with its terrible but clearly necessary detail.

The thing of this article is that even if it is mostly composed of additional detail to existing allegations, that detail matters, it was needed because when it is reported in Vulture, a legitimate mainstream publication, and put on the cover of the print edition, that detail is made real. You know that it wasn't just reported; it was also reviewed by editors, reviewed by lawyers, ready to be defended in a court, and proven out fully. The article is detailed because the reporting up to this point had acquired an air of believed rumor, people who knew about it generally thought it was all true (I'm sure there are gross exceptions) but its status as a discussion mostly confined to the fan space made it feel all a little unsteady. There's no feeling of that now. It is as solid as these things get, and even more than that, because without the extra solidity the reporting might have failed to make the impact it needed to in a world where the internet seems all too likely to jump to the defense of shitty accused famous men.

But still it is another terrible abusive man in a decade of abusive men. It hit me different, and not just because of the graphicness of the article. I had to take a step back because I don't consider myself a Gaiman fan. I didn't feel this way earlier or later in the process of other MeToo events, so the revelation that I had been, in the back of my head, holding out some hope that it was false was sort of shocking.

I guess it is worth getting into what it is about Gaiman particularly for me, and I suspect others, that hits different.

As a teen in the suburbs I was very much into writing fiction and so deeply involved with deviantArt writing communities for years. One weekend I departed the house under false pretenses, because I definitely would not have been allowed to go meet a bunch of strangers from the internet, to go to a New York City deviantArt meetup. When I got there, it was a small group of other awkward people (a lot of whom were also teens) who found each other in Union Square, went through the extreme cringe activity of deciding to refer to each other by screen or real names, and talked about art, writing, and deviantArt gossip. From there, the organizer, a leather-clad and well-pierced goth woman whose age likely fell somewhere between high school senior and college senior (but I had no idea, and we were all from the internet, so you wouldn't ask) led those of us who had stuck around to the end of the event to the Forbidden Planet comic store.

This was a totally new experience to me, because while I had liked comics before high school I had mostly arbitrarily dropped reading them as something that wasn't 'adult' enough for being in high school. My Sci-Fi and Fantasy in book form only! The sort of self-censorship of growing up that I think most teens are guilty of. In that time, and all the time leading up to that point, I had never been in a comic shop. The suburb of NYC I lived in didn't have one then, and still doesn't today (an extremely weird thing looking back now). When I had purchased comics in the past it was either from a rotating display at the supermarket or from a general bookstore.

So I followed our leader around as she pointed out various stuff and when she made a recommendation to pick up the first volume of The Sandman I purchased it.

When I read it at home I found it... fine on a content level. I would not be motivated to get the second volume for years, and would not be motivated to finish the series until I started torrenting comic books towards the end of college. But it did have a big impact for reasons that had nothing to do with the writing. So much of 90s comics attempting to make themselves legible and acceptable to the teen audience was about grimdark bullshit. Stuff like the leaning in to Lobo and Spawn, the fridging of Alexandra DeWitt, or the Death of Superman which I found try-hard, adolescent, and cringe even as a teen. It was an adult attempt to sell adultness to people who they clearly did not consider their intellectual or even commercial-product-level equals.

The Sandman stood as something different, when I read it the story was full of references to both extremely deep cuts I recognized into comic book stories about superheroes and references to the ostensibly adult fiction that I was interested in from, reading in class, having a deep interest in writing, and that are considered literary standards. It felt like a bridge and it was, a bridge into reading comics again and accepting that there wasn't some sort of abstract line that, once crossed, made you an adult with specific adult interests.

Let's be clear, this wasn't about the plot of the comic itself, even before all this, the percentage of Sandman I liked was at most 20%, and I would later go on to find the much better version of this phenomenon in a bunch of places, most notably Fable by Bill Willingham and The Unwritten by Mike Carey. Also, deep in the much earlier tradition of Hellblazer and British horror comic writers from which Gaiman emerged, but which contained much better writers like Alan Moore. But for me, and I suspect many others, Sandman was a mix of what was traditionally considered low art with what we are told is high art and that made for a path towards accepting our own interests and therefor ourselves.

This is, I think, the true core of the Gaiman phenomenon. Gaiman's association with the true mainstreaming of nerd culture remained prominent and unchallenged until the rise of James Gunn. So much so that when my mother (not a comic reader) wanted to give me a gift a bunch of years ago, knowing my interest in comics, she spotted the Gaiman live reading events and thought to ask me if I wanted a ticket--because I was an adult who liked comics, I owned some Gaiman books, and therefor I would want to watch Gaiman read live (I think it was some sort of multimedia thing, but the core was him reading live). This is a good assumption for anyone at the time to make, even if it wasn't for me personally, because that's what his very public role in the culture was: the guy who made comics that it was ok for adults (and therefor people trying to become adults) to like. It is silly to write, and sillier still to think, but it was very much that for me and I know it also was for others.

What The Sandman did for thousands of people like me is not undermined by the solidification of Gaiman's status as a predator and creep. It is a shame that it is unlikely to continue doing that for teens like the type of teen I was, but there are better men, better writers, and better comics that do the same. I hope they rise to be the next volume recommended by the people who are ok being outsiders to the people who don't know that they even could be something other than the default mold of adult. I understand why that makes people doubt and perhaps become defensive of him, because he feels like part of their identity in some strange way. I didn't realize he felt like part of mine until this morning when it became clear that I needed to excise him.

There's no doubting the reality of Gaiman now. I hope his accusers get the justice they deserve. I hope that this graphic detail means they get the support that so many women in our culture have failed to get lately. I hope teen nerds still come from the internet to meet up in Union Square and I hope they still go to Forbidden Planet, and I hope they find something there that does for them what Sandman did for me. And I hope that thing isn't authored by Neil Gaiman.

I spoke with four of those women along with four others whose stories share elements with theirs. I also reviewed contemporaneous diary entries, texts and emails with friends, messages between Gaiman and the women, and police correspondence. Most of the women were in their 20s when they met Gaiman. The youngest was 18. Two of them worked for him. Five were his fans. With one exception, an allegation of forcible kissing from 1986, when Gaiman was in his mid-20s, the stories take place when Gaiman was in his 40s or older, a period in which he lived among the U.S., the U.K., and New Zealand. By then, he had a reputation as an outspoken champion of women