Taking Leave
I hate every single possible thing about this, and I'm heartbroken about all of it. http://www.vulture.com/article/neil…;
- John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2025-01-13T11:35:26.996Z
If you want to know when I pretty much drew a line though my friendship with Neil Gaiman, it was when Neil acknowledged that he made moves on his early-20s nanny on her first day of employment. This meant that the absolute best case scenario of this whole situation was that he didn’t have the sense or wisdom to understand that making a move on a woman 40 years his junior, economically dependent on him, and whom he had met just literally hours before, was an extremely questionable idea. And by extremely questionable I mean dude what the fuck how do you not understand the actual consent issues involved here. The answer I came to is he probably did understand, and that when all was said and done, the “absolute best case scenario,” which is still very terrible, was not where we would end up. And indeed, that’s not where we are today.
And, while you should in no way consider me anywhere but on the periphery of any of this, please direct your attention and care to those who rather persuasively allege harm at his hand, it still fucking hurts. Neil’s been a friend, he’s someone whose work I’ve admired immensely, and it’s not entirely inaccurate to say that I owe a fair amount of the trajectory of my career to him. In 2006, he declined a spot on the finalist list for the Best Novel Hugo, which meant that the next book in the vote tally moved into the list. That book was Old Man’s War. We didn’t know each other at the time and he didn’t know which book would benefit from his action, but that doesn’t matter. It was a huge boost for me in the SFF community, and I thanked him for it when we finally did meet in 2009. He’s been kind to me and to my family and I’ve been happy to know him, and I think he was happy to know me.
Nothing about him having been my friend or boosting my career excuses or mitigates his actions, both alleged and admitted. This is not a defense of him. He’s done what he’s done and as noted above, the absolute best case scenario is still terrifically bad. The acknowledgement of friendship is context.
Here are two things about me, one which you know and one which you may not. The first is that I’m well-known for having public opinions on the internet, and the second is that when I get stressed and upset about things in my personal life I get real quiet and internal about it. I acknowledge this seems at least superficially contradictory, but I don’t think it is: there’s “public persona” me and there’s “private life” me. They’re both me, tuned differently, and I’ve made the point over the years that both modes exist. Usually having both is not a problem! But when someone you consider a pretty good friend who is also a public individual fucks up badly, well, then it becomes a problem. Or at least, complicated.
When the first set of allegations came out last year, I made a brief post about it and then otherwise kept quiet, because this was my friend and I needed to work out what was going on, and how a person I had as a friend had this other part to his life that was for me new and rotten information, and also there was the rest of my life to deal with, which is not insignificant. This was not enough for some people and maybe still isn’t, and that’s their opinion to have. Likewise, when I decided for myself that I was out, I didn’t make a public declaration of it. No matter how public he or I are, our friendship existed in that other sphere too, and that sphere is where I made that decision. I was out, and when it was done, in my head, it was done. Again, this will not be enough for some people, and again, that’s their opinion to have.
Why bring it up now? One, because I know other people who are being run through the same wringer with this, dealing with the person they knew and this other person they didn’t, but they’re actually the same person and now they have to integrate all of it into their understanding. I want them to know, from the bottom of my heart: fucking same. Some of these folks are friends of his. Some are fans. Some are both! All of us are sitting with it, and while, again, we are all on the periphery of harm here, it’s still something we have to work on. Some will do it publicly, some will do it privately, some will take more time than others to get where they’re going with this. They should be able to do it how they want. Maybe others should offer them some grace about it.
Two, because I’ve done my thinking about it, made my decisions, and have had time to live those decisions and am at a point where talking about it doesn’t make me feel sick or pressured to say something more than I’m prepared to say. Neil’s been a friend, and an important person to me, and someone I’ve been happy to know. But the friendship has been drawn down and done, and at this point, given everything I’ve written above, I don’t think he’ll complain much about that. He’s got a lot of work to do, and I hope he gets to it soon.
(Three, because I see some deeply shitty people hoping I’m “next,” which among other things means they are explicitly hoping that I’ve done things close to what Neil is credibly accused of, to actual other people, just so they can have the satisfaction of seeing me “owned.” And, well. Those people can go fuck themselves.)
This has been a bad crazy week, and it’s just Wednesday, in a year that’s been pretty terrible a mere fifteen days in, and which I don’t think is going to get any better from here. Take care of yourselves out there, folks.
- JS
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/01/15/taking-leave/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=54134