Two things can be true at once:
A: The allegations of sexual and emotional abuse against author Neil Gaiman — along with claims about a relationship with his son's nanny — are viscerally repellant. 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 series The Sandman and the novels American Gods and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, is compelling, insightful and inspirational to a great many people, including me.
A does not make the essential, abiding truth of B go away. Neither does B do anything to ameliorate the horror of A.
Last year, on the Tortoise Media podcast Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, five women came forward with allegations that they had previously faced unwanted and often violent sexual behavior from Gaiman. A reporter from New York Magazine spoke to four of those women along with four new people for a piece this week, which includes allegations of coerced sexual encounters, violent sexual assault and even sexual advances and unwanted sex in the presence of Gaiman's young son. Gaiman has denied this. The accusers are adults, most of whom are much younger than Gaiman, including his son's former nanny, who was in her early 20s when she met the author, who was 61 at the time.
"As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don't, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen," Gaiman wrote in a post on his website after the New York Magazine article was published. "I'm far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone." He added, "I don't accept there was any abuse."
While we don't know whether these disturbing allegations are true, learning of them naturally leads to a deeply personal, complicated question: How do we deal with allegations about artists whose work we admire — even revere?
I should note: It's a complicated question for most of us. It's not remotely complicated for those who rush to social media to declare that they never truly liked the creator's work in the first place, or that they always suspected them, or that the only possible response for absolutely everyone is to rid themselves of the now-poisoned art that, before learning of the allegations against the creator, they loved so dearly.
Nor is it complicated for those who will insist that a creator's personal life has no bearing on how we choose to respond to their work, and that the history of art is a grim, unremitting litany of monstrous individuals who created works of enduring, inviolate beauty.
Most of us, however, will find ourselves mired in the hand-wringing of the in-between. We'll make individual, case-by-case choices, we'll cherry-pick from the art, we'll envision ourselves, in years ahead, sampling lightly from the salad bar of the artist's collected works, and feeling a little lousy about it.
Closing the door on an artist's future work
Here's my personal approach, whenever allegations come out about an artist whose work is important to me: I see the moment I learned of them as an inflection point. From that very instant, it's on me.
The knowledge of the allegations will color their past works, when and if I choose to revisit them in the future. It won't change how those works affected me back then, and there's no point in pretending it will. But my newfound understanding of the claims can and will change how those works affect me today, and tomorrow.
To put that in practical perspective: If I own any physical media of their past work, I feel free to revisit it, while leaving plenty of room for the new allegations to color my impressions. But as for any future work — that's a door I'm only too willing to shut.
Take Gaiman. I have written and podcasted extensively on how Gaiman's The Sandman unlocked something in me — a love of big swing storytelling, of grand mythic themes and characters grounded in the everyday, of locating magic in the mundane. Should I ever go back and pull those graphic novels down from the shelf, I will remember my younger self marveling at how a series that began as a grisly little horror comic – one so indebted to the works of Stephen King that it felt usurious — could transform into an epic tale that used anthropomorphic representations of abstract concepts like Dream, Death and Desire to grapple with all-too human issues of family, alienation, guilt and duty. The act of reading it was like witnessing an artist shaking off his adolescent influences and finding his own, quietly assured voice.
That will never change. But with my understanding of the allegations so far, my giving him or his future work thought and attention — and, crucially, money — will change. It will end. A second season of Netflix's adaptation of The Sandman appears to be on the way, and I loved pretty much everything about the first. But I will be stepping 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 and not is, importantly, a choice. It feels declarative, in a small way. The very tiniest of flags, firmly planted.
I did the same thing with J.K. Rowling. Now, I was never as deeply connected to her work as I was with Gaiman's, but once she took to Twitter to launch into her weirdly spirited campaign against the idea that trans women are women, I decided she didn't need my support, going forward. The Hogwarts Legacy game sure looks fun, from the clips I see on TikTok. And I'd idly wondered if a trip to the Harry Potter theme park to score myself a wand might be worthwhile. But engaging with those properties could mean putting even more money into her pocket and represent an explicit affirmation of her rancorous positions. And for me, forgoing a game or a ride or a wand-choosing-the-wizard experience simply doesn't amount to anything like a sacrifice; it's almost literally the least I can do.
Alice Munro's work excavated the human soul in ways that made me want to be a writer. I was chilled when her daughter wrote that she had been sexually abused by Munro's second husband and that the author had done nothing about it. How could such an insightful, searching and consummately truthful writer seemingly spend her daily life lying to herself? To her own daughter?
The Munro situation is different, of course — she died before these allegations came out, so there's no future work of hers for me to avoid — but they will forever color every word she's ever written.
I understand that there will be those who believe that a creator's entire canon should be declared off-limits, once accusations about their behavior comes to light. In Gaiman's case, he was allegedly abusing his victims while I was so enjoying that first season of Netflix's The Sandman, and American Gods, and his books Coraline and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Why should the fact that I didn't know about the allegations at the time matter? Now that my blinders have dropped away, why should those works remain in my library?
My only response is this: They remain in my physical library because they remain in my memory. Removing them from one won't make them disappear from the other. How those works affected me when I first encountered them can't change, but how they affect me today and in the future can and will. And — crucially, I think — my grappling with his past work, now and in the future, won't put a single dime in Gaiman's pocket.
But giving The Sandman Season 2 my ratings eyeballs, or booting up Hogwarts Legacy – those acts would, in some however infinitesimal way, represent a kind of clear-eyed, fully knowledgeable endorsement of Gaiman and Rowling that I'm no longer willing to bestow.
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 separate myself from the artist's future work. That work will doubtlessly continue, and will continue to be devoured by fans who stand by him. The fact that I'm not among those fans will make no difference to Gaiman, nor will it matter in the slightest to his alleged victims. But it will make a difference — a small but palpable difference — to me.
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