A longtime Neil Gaiman fan explains where we go from here: NPR

Two things can be true at once:

A: The allegations of sexual and emotional abuse against author Neil Gaiman – as well as allegations regarding a relationship with his son’s nanny – are viscerally repulsive. They were published in an admirably well reported article In new York Magazine and its website Vulture this week – and Gaiman denies most of them.

B: Neil Gaiman’s body of work, which includes the comic book series The Sandman and the novels American Gods And The ocean at the end of the roadis compelling, insightful and inspiring to a lot of people, myself included.

A does not make B’s essential and constant truth disappear. Nor does B do anything to lessen A’s horror.

Last year, on the Tortoise Media podcast Master: The allegations against Neil Gaiman, five women came forward with allegations that they had previously encountered unwanted and often violent sexual behavior from Gaiman. A journalist from new York The magazine spoke to four of those women as well as four new people for a story this week, which includes allegations of forced sex, violent sexual assault and even unwanted sexual advances and sex in the presence of Gaiman’s young son. Gaiman denied this. The accusers are adults, most of whom are much younger than Gaiman, including his son’s former nanny, who was in her 20s when she met the perpetrator, who was 61 at the time.

“As I read this latest collection of stories, there are moments I half recognize and others I don’t, descriptions of things that happened alongside things that absolutely did not happen,” Gaiman said. wrote in an article on his website after the new York A magazine article was published. “I’m far from a perfect person, but I’ve never had non-consensual sex with anyone.” He added: “I don’t accept that there was any abuse.”

While we don’t know if these disturbing allegations are true, knowing them naturally leads us to a deeply personal and complex question: How do we deal with allegations about artists whose work we admire, even revere?

I should note: this is a complicated question for most of us. It is not at all complicated for those who rush to social networks to declare that they never really liked the creator’s work, or that they always suspected him, or that the only possible answer for absolutely everyone is getting rid of the present. a poisoned art that they loved so much, before learning of the allegations made against the creator.

Nor is it complicated for those who insist that a creator’s personal life has no bearing on how we choose to respond to their work, and that art history is a dark and incessant litany of monstrous individuals who created works of enduring and inviolable beauty. .

However, most of us will find ourselves mired in the in-between. We will make individual choices, on a case-by-case basis, we will select from the works of art, we will imagine ourselves, in years to come, tasting lightly at the salad bar of the artist’s collected works and feeling a little lousy. about this.

Closing the door to an artist’s future work

Here’s my personal approach, whenever allegations arise about an artist whose work is important to me: I view the moment I heard about it as an inflection point. From this moment on, it’s my fault.

Knowledge of the allegations will color their past works, when and if I choose to revisit them in the future. It won’t change the way these works affected me at the time, and there’s no point in pretending that it will. But my new understanding of the claims can and will change how this work affects me today and tomorrow.

To put this in practical perspective: if I have a physical record of their past work, I feel free to revisit it, while leaving enough room for new claims to color my impressions. But as far as any future work goes, it’s a door I’m all too willing to close.

Take Gaiman. I’ve written and podcasted extensively about how Gaiman The Sandman unlocked something in me – a love for big swinging stories, for big mythical themes and characters rooted in the everyday, for locating magic in the mundane. If I ever go back and pull these graphic novels off the shelves, I’ll remember my younger self marveling at how a series that began as a macabre little horror comic – so indebted to the works of Stephen King that it seemed usurious – could turn into an epic tale that used anthropomorphic representations of abstract concepts like dreams, death, and desire to address all-too-human issues of family, alienation, guilt, and duty. Reading it was like watching an artist shed his adolescent influences and find his own, quietly assured voice.

This will never change. But with my understanding of the allegations so far, how I give him, or his future work, thought and attention – and, most importantly, money – will change. This will end. A second season of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman seems to be on its way, and I loved almost everything about the first one. But I’m going to walk away.

It’s an arbitrary distinction, I admit. But choosing the moment I learned of the allegations against Gaiman as the dividing line between engaging with him or not is, most importantly, a choice. This seems declarative, to some extent. The smallest of flags, firmly planted.

I did the same thing with JK Rowling. I have never connected as deeply with his work as I have with Gaiman’s, but once she took to Twitter to embark on her strangely animated campaign against the the idea that trans women are women, I decided that she no longer needed my support going forward. THE Hogwarts Legacy The game really looks like fun, based on the clips I see on TikTok. And I wondered if a trip to the Harry Potter theme park to get a wand might be worth it. But committing to these properties could mean putting even more money in his pocket and represent an explicit affirmation of his resentful positions. And for me, giving up a game, a ride, or a wand-choosing experience just doesn’t equate to sacrifice; it’s almost literally the least I can do.

Alice Munro’s work delved into the human soul in a way that made me want to become a writer. I was chilled when his daughter wrote that she had been sexually assaulted by Munro’s second husband and that the author had done nothing about it. How could such an insightful, thorough and completely truthful writer spend her daily life lying to herself? To his own daughter?

Munro’s situation is different, of course – she died before these allegations became public, so I have no future work to avoid – but they will forever color every word she wrote.

I understand that there will be those who believe that a creator’s entire canon should be declared banned, once accusations regarding their behavior come to light. In Gaiman’s case, he allegedly abused his victims even though I was enjoying this first season of Netflix so much. The SandmanAnd American Godsand his books Coraline And The ocean at the end of the road. Why should it matter that I didn’t know about the allegations at the time? Now that my blinders are off, why should these works stay on my bookshelf?

My only answer is this: they stay in my physical library because they stay in my memory. Removing them from one won’t make them disappear from the other. How these works affected me when I first encountered them cannot change, but how they affect me today and in the future can and will change. And – most importantly, I think – my struggle with his past work, now and in the future, will not put a single penny in Gaiman’s pocket.

But give The Sandman Season 2, my eyes on the notes, or the start Hogwarts Legacy – these actions would represent, in even an infinitesimal way, a kind of lucid and fully informed endorsement of Gaiman and Rowling that I am no longer willing to grant.

I can’t separate the art from the artist, it’s impossible for me. But knowing what I know now about the allegations, I can and will part with the artist’s future work. This work will undoubtedly continue and continue to be devoured by the fans who support it. The fact that I am not one of these fans will make no difference to Gaiman, or to his alleged victims. But it will make a difference – a small but palpable difference – to me.

This piece also appeared on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one and receive weekly recommendations on what makes us happy.

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