Wonder if he tried any of this stuff with his TRA fans.
Sci FI and fantasy, as that Vulture article notes, is full of people who are vulnerable and initially offering themselves to their hero who's written some book that speaks to them. It's why online culture becomes so toxic as they inhabit that world as what they seeas a safe space, and are so easily driven to rage over criticism of their beloved text (doctor who, star trek fandom etc, of which many overlap on gender, mental health, abuse survivors #BeKind and General Activism and etc)
People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’” It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual. .”