January 13, 2025

The Desolation of the American Gods

Do not create idols for they will always let you down

It took me the entire day to decide whether I should write this. Chances are I am not the right (forget about the best) person to opine on the issue but it hit too close to home, it hurt too deeply, and resonated too much.

I should have skipped writing this one.

You should skip reading it.

Today is the first day of our major construction project. I woke up sore and achy from packing the entirety of the first floor yesterday. Neither my mind nor my body wanted to be awake. Even the strong coffee was not doing it.

Then I read THAT article.

Yeah.

No amount of coffee, no nothing will snap you out of your dreamlike state quicker than reading “There Is No Safe Word.”

Since then I’ve read plenty of hot takes and serious takes. I’ve seen lots of claims that it is a must read. Marie Le Conte is absolutely right: “It’s going to sound gimmicky but I think that women shouldn’t have to read the Gaiman piece but all men should read it to the end, just as all men should have read all the long reads about the Pelicot case, so many seem to still not realize the extent to which so many men hate and want to hurt us.” It is a must read if you are a cishet male. Doubly so if you happen to be white and a GenXer or Boomer.

The article is very well written but you 100% do not have to read it if you are a woman or if you are a survivor of sexual abuse. The article includes a whole lot of very disturbing content, described in every bloody detail. If you are contemplating reading the article it describes how Neil Gaiman exploited the concepts of BDSM to abuse vulnerable women without consent. His quest for gratification truly had no boundaries as he abused his own son in the process of abusing women.

I saw somewhere today that content warnings for THAT article would require a separate essay just to be comprehensive. If you haven’t read it yet, consider that rape, sexual assault, child abuse, Scientology, grooming, suicide, and more seriously shitty, at times quite literally, things, are described in great detail.

Seriously, I needed to put the phone down twice to finish reading the entire article.

It hit hard.

Of course it is nowhere near as hard as what the women he abused have gone through and are still going through. It's a different kind of pain. One day I may feel enough courage to write about my own experience with sexual assault and abuse. Today is not that day and that’s precisely why I am not the right person to write this, yet I feel that I must.

If Gaiman’s work means or meant anything to you, this is rough. But it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you because you liked his work. Or liked him, for that matter. Same with Amanda Palmer. In a twist of sad irony, Gaiman’s American Gods was one of the books that strongly impacted me (and I was going to include in my 20 days of books on Bluesky) and more importantly served as one of the first connections between me and my spouse: we bonded over the book and I don’t know if my life would have been the same now if the book did not exist because of this. Because my spouse knows me better than anyone, for my recent “big number” birthday, she gifted me a hand signed first edition of the American Gods.

Today, we were joking that if she would have waited till this week, it would have been a whole lot cheaper to get that book.

It MUST be stated that NONE OF Gaiman’s sexual kinks ARE BAD. What is not just BAD, BUT HORRIBLE is the LACK OF CONSENT, and targeting on vulnerable young people. What is absolutely fucking vile is the predatory behavior and the enablement from his ex-spouse, Amanda Palmer, another one of my 90s heroes. What is absolutely unforgiveable is doing all that in front of a fucking child!!!!

What makes it worse is that he had a public persona of someone deeply caring, empathetic, and feminist. Granted, Gaiman is not an exception, unfortunately, for as much as I love sci-fi and comics, the genre has been full of horrible misogynists, homophobes, and predators for decades. As the Bard wrote, “nothing is ever new under the sun.”

I was today’s years old when I learned that Lila Shapiro, who wrote today's exposé, also wrote the 2022 investigation into Joss Whedon that I am sure we all have read.

Yes, Gaiman wrote some amazing stories, from Sandman to Stardust to American Gods.

Monsters can and often do make great art.

Dali was well, Dali; Caravaggio’s was allegedly a murderer; Degas was a raging antisemite; Dostoyevsky was a horrendous racist; Count Leo Tolstoy was a disgusting misogynist, and let’s not even get into Cellini and others.

Earlier today I saw a post by someone saying "we should all admit that Neil Gaiman has always been a shitty writer."

That a tremendous knee jerk revisionism.

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Regardless of what he has done as a human being, he is an internationally recognized and objectively good writer.

Yes, he's also a fucking monster.

Those two things ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

We have to recognize that there are skillfully crafted, artistically stunning, culturally important works of arts created by VERY HORRIBLE PEOPLE.

How do you reconcile the reader's (or viewer’s or listener’s) relationship with the work where the artists fingerprints have done a whole lot of very bad things? There isn't and never will be an easy answer. I was never a huge fan of the Harry Potter series, but I know a lot of people who felt betrayed, felt that the proverbial rug was pulled from under their feet once they realized the truth about J.K. Rowling.

That was actually in real time!!

Personally, from contemporary artists where I had the same realization in real time, it was Orson Scott Card. Once I knew what kind of a horrible person he is, I never bothered to read another word that he wrote from that point on. Do I think that looking back perhaps the grotesque abuse depicted in the Ender’s Game may have been a red flag? No! One does not have to be a monster in order to be able to imagine horrible things. Yet, once you know that an artist is a monster, from that point on, their art is not simply tainted, it is a full representation of them, of their evil, whatever it may be in each specific case.

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There are times when I still nostalgically reread Ender’s Game or contemplate upon a Degas or Dali paintings. I still enjoy listening to Dark Side of the Moon even though I bloody despise Roger Waters and the fascism he represents. My son’s favorite musician of all time is Kanye West. Yes, my son is very much aware of the things Kanye have said and done. I have mentioned to him many a time that Kanye will likely happily see people like our family be extinguished from the face of the earth and yet my son feels that the music Kanye wrote before his “heel’s turn” is worthy of enjoyment. He is not wrong, though I’ll admit to not knowing all of the details of Kanye’s fall from grace until a few years ago when he decided to join forces and be led by yet another black Nazi, Candence Owens.

If you were a fan of Gaiman or one of his works was really meaningful to you. What do you do now? Let’s start with this, regardless of the parallels drawn in THAT article, YOU did NOT miss anything in his work. Now you have new and horrible information about them and of course it changes it NOW. But you do not need to lose what it was.

Yes, of course, this new horrible information casts a gigantic dark shadow over YOUR OLD experience, however, what YOU took from that piece of art, before you knew anything about the monster, was in fact pure and good and innocent and positive. That cannot be taken away from you.

How do you move forward?

If you were a huge fan, if you were very much personally impacted by Gaiman’s or Palmer’s work, it is ROUGH. Here’s my opinion, which is exactly the same what I tell my son in regards to Kanye. You absolutely cannot support such people going forward. I’ve told my son that even if Kanye is not getting a dime from a purchase of Ye sneaks, it is still normalizing who he is and what he represents - Nazis. People who will see my kid wearing such sneaks would have no way of knowing whether he is wearing them because of the past Kanye great art or because he is a raging antisemitic piece of Nazi shit.

Continued support of monsters is NORMALIZATION of them. Just like it is with Gaiman and Palmer now: don’t buy anything new from either of them even if you still love the old art, books, characters, etc.

In time it will gradually go away. I remember wanting to sign up for one of Card’s writing workshops back when I was in college. Now? I hardly think of his name and yet Ender’s Game is one of the 25 or so books that impacted me the most.

Art helps us be human.

And the art we consumed as kids and young adults has helped to shape the people we are today in more ways than one.

Don’t normalize or legitimize monsters.

But don’t be ashamed of feeling nostalgia of things from time not too long ago…

Yet, as we have seen time and again, in 2024 and in 2016, misogyny is still a major force in our culture and politics. #MeToo has exposed some of the ghastly reality, pulling the proverbial curtain to expose some of the evil, but judging by the election results last year or Gisele Pelicot case, we, as a society, are yet to truly and properly recognize the insidious depth and width of hatred, especially hatred toward women.

We are better than this.

As I started writing this essay, the construction crew found posters that my spouse created for the Women’s March in 2019 in DC. We feared of what the future may bring and here we are now with Roe overturned and Project 2025 fascists seriously implying if not yet outright calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

We are better than this.

We are better than Weinsteins and Gaimans and Epsteins and all the other monsters.

In the end it is one of the most brutal things I have ever read, and I’ve read some horrendous shit over the years.

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If you still follow Gaiman or Palmer on any platform, STOP IMMEDIATELY. Process your trauma at your own pace but cut the cord.

Until we draw a line, the more things change, the more things will stay the same.