Ignyte 2021 Header

I Am An IGNYTE Award Nominee!

Best birthday week news! FIYAHcon announced the IGNYTE Awards shortlist and I am a double nominee. WOOOOOOT

Writing the Other got a second Community Award nomination, an honor I’m sharing with the amazing Nisi Shawl. I’m also nominated for the Ember Award for unsung contributions to genre. EEEEEE

I’m so thrilled and humbled by this. Especially as I’m in categories with so many people and entities I admire and love. How can I deal with being in the same category as Michi Trota or Tananarive Due or Diana M. Pho or L.L. McKinney & Tochi Onyebuchi or or or? Just… this is 100% wonderful.

Beyond that, the entire ballot is fire and I don’t care if that’s an overused pun! hee. So much thoughtfulness went into all the categories so that they celebrate a myriad of important contributions to the genre. Fiction AND non-fiction AND thoughtful criticism/reviews AND media AND community.

Voting is now open to all. I highly suggest you go down the ballot and read, watch, or listen to the things you haven’t already. There’s stuff on here I haven’t gotten to yet. Once I do, I’m going to share what I intend to vote for.

And finally: thanks to the FIYAH team and folks on the selection committee for this honor. ??????????

I Am Not A Strong Black Woman

I Am Not A Strong Black Woman

This post was originally a Twitter thread. After this week’s events, I decided it needed to be a blog post, too.

Let’s start with this video by TikToker ebonie_qt/Cindy Noir:

Watch the whole thing before you continue (it’s a minute long and closed captioned).

Watched? Okay let’s go.

Like Cindy Noir, I am also NOT a strong Black woman.

Continue reading “I Am Not A Strong Black Woman”

Black famous

Big Names, Anthology Covers, and Being “Black Famous”

Do you know about the concept of “Black Famous”? One of my favorite TikTokers, @Straw_Hat_Goofy, did an awesome video series on Black actors that are very well-known within the Black community even if they aren’t so much in the mainstream. They’re known to us through TV shows and movies made for Black folks. Sometimes an actor who is Black Famous becomes mainstream famous, but us Black folk will always hold them dear cuz we knew and loved them back when.

There are tons of Black Famous actors that white folks have no idea about or maybe saw them in a thing once. White folks don’t necessarily see these actors as famous, and probably wouldn’t name them as being important. However, put that actor in something? Black folks will watch.

I’m sure every marginalized community has some version of this. It’s not limited to actors. It goes for music, dance, poetry, and (most importantly to this post), fiction. There are Black authors Black readers know and love that white folks have little to no clue about.

Continue reading “Big Names, Anthology Covers, and Being “Black Famous””

World Fantasy, the Convention That Keeps On Failing

On social media (mostly on Twitter, I believe) there are several ongoing conversations about the problems with the initial programming lineup for the 2020 World Fantasy Convention. One of the first people to bring up the vast number of serious issues publicly1 was Miyuki Jane Pinckard. She wrote a long thread on October 4 as she spotted issues, then compiled an open letter which she posted on Google Docs.

As she and others began raising the alarm on panel titles and descriptions, the official Twitter account for the con started posting tone-deaf responses that made it seem as though the con Chair didn’t really grok what might be wrong but also extending an invitation for people, especially marginalized people, to help WFC fix the problematic panels. And if you knew absolutely nothing else about this situation, that might seem reasonable and like some honest mistakes were made.

I’m here to tell you that this is not the case. That, in truth, WFC Chair Ginny Smith was warned that this exact scenario would happen unless she took specific steps to avoid it. This advice, which was based on the experience of many years, was ignored. And so the situation the WFC 2020 convention committee finds itself in right now is not the result of honest mistakes, but willful ignorance and likely some ingrained bigotry.

I’m going to lay out what I know–not just about this World Fantasy debacle, but some of the history behind it. I want people who are, in good faith, trying to fix WFC’s programming and think that they can somehow pull this con out of the tar pit to know that this situation cannot be fixed ad hoc, cannot just be addressed at the level of this one concom, and cannot be solved by continuing to attend.

Continue reading “World Fantasy, the Convention That Keeps On Failing”


Footnotes

  1. Trust, there have been a ton of people backchanneling about this in private spaces. []
Squad Goals

Squad Goals – Or: We Need Better Communities

Recently, I finished 2+ weeks of amazing conference experiences. It started with the XOXO Festival in Portland, OR, which I attended for the first time this year. And then a few days later I sailed off for my fourth stint on the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat Cruise. Having these back to back gave me more insights into a thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: the value of communities; how we need both large ones and micro communities; how the two types serve different but necessary purposes; and how to foster the best parts of both. Recent events also have me thinking about where communities and friend groups fall down, why that happens, and who tends to feel the impact of it the most.

Ride or Die

On the second Conference day at XOXO YouTube star and insightful film critic Lindsay Ellis delivered her talk on how she dealt with being attacked by an online mob of Nazis over a year-old, snarky tweet. The incident is summarized well over on Wired1, or you can watch her full talk online:

The bottom line is that hundreds or thousands of neo-Nazis and GamerGaters and similar ilk coordinated an attack on her designed to make her lose her job and fear for her safety. She did not lose her job, but the emotional impact was huge.

And the worst part was that most of her friends did not speak up for her on Twitter and other public online spaces because they knew the attackers would go after anyone who interacted with Lindsay in a positive way. There was one big exception: Hank Green. He tweeted: “This is a Lindsay Ellis appreciation post” which then brought hundreds of positive messages into her mentions. Hank also responded to some of the big names who shared the disingenuous, attacking tweets and posts about her in an attempt to make them understand the real situation. It didn’t always work, but he did that thing.

Lindsay stated that this was the first time in her life as a professional online personage that someone who was higher than her in the power structure–be it in a workplace sense or a social power sense–had stood up for her in this way.

That shocked me. Because I know Lindsay knows many, many of the high profile geeks and online celebs that run in those circles. Many of them are cis-het white dudes; i.e. people with privilege and some measure of protection from these kind of attackers. But Hank Green is, apparently, the only one who stepped up.

Continue reading “Squad Goals – Or: We Need Better Communities”


Footnotes

  1. About halfway down the article. You can search for ‘white genocide’ to find it. []
Broken antique stairs - by Simon Agozzino

Not Everyone Can Skip That Missing Stair

I posted a version of this a year ago on Facebook and, a few days ago, it came up in my On This Day. I decided to refresh it for the blog because this issue continues to be a problem.

Last year, author Jon Del Arroz was banned from the 2018 WorldCon for reasons. Previous to this, I’d been aware of him and that he was Sad/Rabid Puppy-adjacent, thus probably someone I should avoid and block where possible. As the news spread about this banning, I came to understand that he had, for several years previous, been severely harassing several people in the SFF community. I knew about one of them, I didn’t know about the many others.

The reason I didn’t know is in part because of my scattershot participation on social media and also because the events in this community over the past few years have made it so my anxiety is often triggered by reading about the actions of the folks Del Arroz admires and rolls with, so I tend to just not keep up.

Thing is, it’s really easy not to keep up.

Continue reading “Not Everyone Can Skip That Missing Stair”

My #GivingTuesday Recommendations

It’s the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and the hashtag of the day is #GivingTuesday. This is the day to raise awareness for charitable causes that could use your dollars just as much (or more!) as retail stores. I am intimately involved with many charitable causes that I think deserve your donations. Some are 501(c)3 orgs, so you get a tax deduction, some are not. All of them come with my highest endorsement and recommendation. Click here to read the full list.

World Fantasy Convention Board Thinks People of Color Were Invented Five Years Ago

World Fantasy Convention is fucking up again, color me surprised.

The most recent entry in the history of WFC fucking up starts with author Silvia Moreno-Garcia sending a message to the World Fantasy Board (an entity that oversees the con but doesn’t run the specific cons each year) about the lack of diversity in the guest of honor lineup for 2019’s convention, especially after having a decent lineup this year. The response they gave? Well…

text follows this image

You can click to enlarge. Here’s the text pulled from the screenshot:

Thank you for your letter.

You probably know that the Board of the World Fantasy Convention oversees the annual convention, solicits bids, and awards the convention to individual convention committees. While we provide guidelines in many areas including guest selection, decisions that pertain to individual conversions are made by the con-running committee, not the Board.

That said, as a Board we not only encourage diversity we insist on it wherever possible. Convention committees select Special Guests and specially Guests of Honor in order to recognize and my tribute to their body of work within the genre over a significant period of time, usually consisting of decades in the field. Currently we find ourselves in the position of having a limited number of non-white/male authors, artists, agents, and editors to call on to balance the slates. However much we all wish it were different, and however glad we are to see things changing, the fact remains that only recently have a significant number of diverse writers, artists, agents, and editors entered the field.

Thirty years ago we were having the same conversations, but in that case it was about trying to get name women involved. Things have progressed and that’s no longer an issue. When it comes to diversity, we’re pleased with the progress we’ve seen—the 2018 convention may well have been the most diverse World Fantasy yet—but progress can’t always happen overnight. Ten years from now convention organizers will have a much easier task of it than we do right now.

We are also dependent on potential GoHs and Special Guests having space in their diaries – not to mention an interest in participating. A number of people of diverse backgrounds have recently turned down invitations, for a variety of reasons.

We also understand that in the case of LA, they have not yet completed their Special Guest lineup. Indeed, it is quite common for the World Fantasy Convention to announce their headlining guests over the space of a few months.

The same goes for panel participants. Of course you are absolutely right that LA is a vastly diverse city – but if people don’t join the convention, they’re not going to be on panels. WFC panelists are selected from among the attending members to that year’s convention. The more we can encourage writers, artists, agents, and editors of different race, creed, and color to attend, the wider the pool we will have to draw on and the more diverse and rich the field will become.

There is so much wrong here, and if you look at the replies to Silvia’s tweet you’ll find people listing off all of them. There’s one aspect to this that I want to address outside of a tweet thread1, and that is the idea that there aren’t enough non-white, non-male writers, editors, agents, or artists who have been around for long enough to merit a guest of honor nod, but maybe in a decade there will be! This argument, on top of being repugnant, wrong-headed, and gross, is not particularly novel. It’s a variation on a theme I’ve heard quite often over the *counts in my head* two decades I’ve been part of the SFF community. That theme goes:

Black people and/or other People of Color haven’t been part of this community/writing/publishing for very long. It’s a recent thing, them showing up to conventions and getting their writing out there! Why, I hardly ever saw any until like, last year.

I have heard this claim from white people in this genre at least four times that I remember, the first time being around 15 years ago. Think about that. 15 years ago brown people in SFF were brand new. And now today, in 2018, we’re still brand new.

Guess what! When I first started going to cons, Black people and other folks of color were there. And decades before I started going to cons, they were there. Before I was born, they were there. If all these non-white folk meandering around seem like a new development to you, that means you haven’t been paying attention or maybe, just maybe, you haven’t been reading widely enough.

I once suggested a cure for that. And then the Internet told me I was a racist.

Another aspect to this is something N. K. Jemisin brought up in response to Silvia’s tweet:

I am one of the people who turned down a Special Guest invite (for 2020). This is why: a) because as one of this select group that WFC finds desirable, I am BUSY. Cons eat guests alive and I don’t have time or energy for them anymore. That’s the thing abt being a writer from a marginalized group: we have to work harder than privileged folks to thrive. By the end of 2018 I will have published 9 books in 8 years. Lately 4 separate projects in gaming, comics, review, and editing. This is what it takes for us.

And that WFC statement notes that marginalized writers only started getting published in “significant” numbers recently. Whose goddamn fault is that?

So to demand the same standards of marginalized writers — who, I repeat, have had to work amid institutional bigotry and higher expectations — is not fairness. It’s just adding to the burden. Which leads to the other reason I said no to the WFC invite: b) Because they keep pulling shit like this. They keep telling us they want to do better, but they show no understanding whatsoever of what inclusivity really requires — and no willingness to make anything more than reactive, reluctant changes.

This is so on point on so many levels.

First, that when marginalized writers do rise up enough that cons and other entities take notice, they get inundated with requests. This can be a good problem to have as a writer in general, and obviously anyone should be falling all over themselves to have Nora at their event – she’s awesome. But she is not the only fantasy writer from a marginalized background that exists.

And though the person who wrote that email to Silvia tries to act like everyone they asked was busy, I’m gonna bet $100 that they didn’t ask all that many people. They probably asked a handful, at best. The same handful that gets the majority of attention from white folks. The same handful who are very busy with these kinds of requests, with writing, with other projects, as Nora said. Meanwhile, there are folks – both up and coming and those who’ve been around for decades – who are ignored, never asked, or dismissed.

Second, Nora phrases this as a question: “…marginalized writers only started getting published in ‘significant’ numbers recently. Whose goddamn fault is that?” It’s clear (to me) that he answer is: entities such as the World Fantasy Convention and Board.

WFC is not the most welcoming of conventions. At times, it’s outright hostile to people and groups deemed not worthy of sullying the convention halls. This pervasive attitude affects everything from who gets reading slots, who gets to be on panels, who gets to decide what the panels are, and who is “allowed” to come once the convention is technically full2. That’s not even getting into who gets to decide which works get awards – the World Fantasy Award is juried and also voted on by the membership and the winners are determined by some mix of the two. How many marginalized people are on that jury each year? And, of those who are asked, how many are in that handful of people always asked and therefore overcommitted?

WFC is an over-expensive convention by design (to keep it exclusive and discourage fans), which impacts marginalized authors far more than their privileged counterparts. Same goes for newer writers.

Awards and convention attendance don’t determine a writer’s career, of course. However, opportunity, exposure, accolades all feed into success. World Fantasy is a gathering of what we now call Influencers – industry professionals or folks who want to be professionals in the field. Those who can get there have more opportunity to meet and get to know these influencers, which can lead to more opportunity and exposure and etc. It’s not the only con, it’s not the most important one, it’s not a make or break situation. Still, it’s certainly part of the problem, and the World Fantasy Board has done little to nothing to change this. As that email shows they’re waiting for another decade to go by before they address this problem.

As I said before, I’ve been in the SFF community for about 20 years now. And this January it’ll be 10 years since RaceFail. Anyone who is involved in this community, especially as a conrunner, who thinks that there aren’t many writers, artists, editors, or agents of color with a long history in this genre is disgustingly out of touch with the books and short stories that have been published, the discussions that have been ongoing for over a decade, and the guest of honor lists of conventions worth attending. That’s not acceptable.

And as World Fantasy has spent the last decade or so giving us all lessons in What Not To Do when putting on a convention (accessibility issues, racist programming, non-existent harassment policies, terrible hotels, the list goes on), my only question is this:

When are we all going to stop giving the Board or each city’s concom the benefit of the doubt? When are you, attendees of WFC, going to stop giving them money? Stop benefiting them with your influence? How many fuck ups is enough? How many broken promises of “we’ll do better next year?” will you forgive?


Footnotes

  1. If you want my unfiltered, immediate reaction? My tweets are not kind, filled with profanity, and are an expression of the rage I feel every time we have to deal with this kind of nonsense, which is almost daily. []
  2. WFC has a pretty low cap for an SFF convention: 750 people last I looked into it. Once they hit that cap there’s a waiting list. It’s been well known since forever that you can get off that list and get a membership even if no one drops out if you’re deemed worthy by whoever is running the convention. []
compilation of images from Sirens

I Spent Two Weeks Attending Two Women-Focused Geek Cons And It Was Pretty Awesome [Repost]

Five years ago I attended my first Sirens conference. The theme: Reunion. In a couple of weeks I’ll be back at Sirens teaching and sitting on a panel. The theme this year? Reunion. <3

I love the fact that when I started going to SFF conventions there was one prominent and overtly feminist convention (WisCon) and now there are multiple conventions that center women SFF writers and women readers. This is why I was excited to go to Sirens the first time and even more excited to go to GeekGirlCon that same month. On the very next weekend, even.

My feelings about GeekGirlCon are more complicated, five years on. Sirens has just gotten better. Both cons give women and people of all genders the chance to experience what it’s like when a con centers women and their voices and their contributions. Both help make the space for other conventions and gatherings to do so. And after the past month? Hell, past three years? This is needed.

Earlier this week I found out that the media company that owned xoJane deleted the entire website. I went and saved all my posts, and in doing so re-read the piece below. It was my first for xoJane, and I’m still proud of it and also still find it relevant for the commentary on Sirens, GeekGirlCon, New York Comicon, PAX, and other SFF conventions. So I’m republishing it here on my blog.

Click here to read the whole thing.

On WisCon, and Who Is Allowed To Feel Welcome

Before WisCon I was having a conversation with a person who used to come to the con but does not, anymore. I asked why and they said, “WisCon isn’t fun, anymore,” and I thought about that for a while.

This person is not the only person to have expressed such a sentiment to me before that moment. I’ve heard from others over the years, usually people who have stopped coming since MoonFail1 but a few are people who stopped coming in the last couple of years during the major shakeup that started with FrenkelFail and that the con is still emerging from.

  • WisCon isn’t that fun.
  • I’m not comfortable there.
  • I feel unwelcome.
  • I don’t like the vibe, anymore.

I’ve listened to these people and, in some cases, internalized these complaints and thought about whether or not there is something that needs to be done.

That’s what happened right before the con got started. I internalized that person’s issues.

And then the POC Dinner happened.

Okay, I say happened like Woop, it appeared! No. I organized it this year, as I have done in many previous years, and several wonderful and amazing volunteers helped me out at con.

The room was packed. I think we had 80 people all told. It was loud. There was so much joyous conversation and laughter. It was a room full of People of Color and Native folk having a good time and I loved it.

Loved it even though I stress myself out a bit every year trying to pull it together. Because each year since it went from being an informal lunch to a coordinated dinner in 2009, more and more and more POC have come to the con. We’ve had to switch locations and food plans and even how we collect the money many times to accommodate all the people who come. I can’t really complain about that.

Because there is this beautiful space, this wonderful moment, right before the con gets underway where we can all be together and see each other and know that the people in the room have our backs at the con.

Every year someone or two someones or half a dozen someones comes up to me to say:

  • Thank you.
  • This was amazing.
  • I’ve never experienced anything like this at an SF convention before.
  • I never felt so welcomed and like I belong.
  • When I first heard about this I thought it was gonna be 20 people but it was so many!
  • I didn’t think a con could be like this for a person like me.
  • This meant the world to me.

Almost as long as we’ve been having a POC Dinner, we’ve had the POC Safer Space at the con. It’s a place where POC and Native people can go to just be around each other and have discussions about our own stuff. A place where we acknowledge that we come from many different backgrounds, even as we all huddle under this one umbrella, and that it’s important to be able to talk and have community and decompress away from the white gaze. That doesn’t mean we’re all only ever going to be in that room—we came to WisCon, after all, and want to participate in all of it. It does mean that there are still people at the con giving us reason to want to talk amongst ourselves.

Every year I hear from people:

  • Thank you for that space.
  • Thank you for fighting for that space.
  • It was important for me to be able to process what happened on that panel.
  • It was crucial that I have somewhere to go besides my room so I could be calm and safe but not alone.

When I first started coming to WisCon in 2003 there were a handful of non-white people in attendance. I don’t think I counted that year. I did the next year. Still a handful. Other folks remember when it was a literal handful—five people out of 800-1000.

This is still the case at a lot of other SF cons right now. Small, midsized, local, regional, large, allegedly global…

People who go to them can often count the POC because they stand out. They recognize (or think they recognize) those people the next time and the time after because they are so few. That was WisCon. Until we changed it.

I think it started in earnest around 2009 after that horrendous winter of RaceFail and a bunch of white folks showing their asses on the Internet. Some of those white folks were WisCon regulars. And some of us were determined they weren’t going to chase us away.

The first time I came to WisCon I knew I wanted to come every year, again and again, for the rest of my life. Yes, there were few brown people. I was used to that. Yes, there were incidents around me and my brown-ness. I was used to that. It was much less terrible than WorldCon. And the wonderful experiences far, far outweighed the unpleasant ones. The panels were amazing, the speeches were amazing, the people I met were amazing.

I wasn’t gonna give that up over Faily McFailerson and her cronies.

I wasn’t the only one to feel that way.

More people of color started to come because they wanted to meet this one person, because they had a friend going, because high profile brown folks told other brown folks to come and see how a con could be.

They came and saw that WisCon wasn’t a perfect con but that it had potential. That there were some panels about POC-specific issues. That there was a group of us who tried to make it our business to be welcoming. And when those moments of the con going south happened, some of us made it our business to fight to make change to that WisCon could be a better space for everyone. Everyone.

I say again: Everyone.

Unless.

Unless you’re a person who makes a space worse for certain people. People you know you can step on because they’re stepped on everywhere. People who are marginalized even in spaces that are supposed to be a refuge for marginalized people. But you know, like I know, that there are hierarchies, and intersections, and even in a feminist space some feminists are “less important” than others. Or, at least, that’s how things were for some for a long while. Until we changed it. And that right there is what’s making some people mad. And the people mad about that? Are not going to see WisCon as a better space for them.

Kanye Shrug

Oh well.

Because here’s the thing: 99% of the people I have seen or heard complaining about how WisCon isn’t comfortable for them and WisCon isn’t fun are white people. Not 100%. But 99%. It’s a bunch.

You know what else I’ve noticed about the people making these complaints? A lot of them are cisgender, a lot of them are men, a lot of them are people with privilege along multiple axes. Funny that.

And while it makes me sad at any time for folks to feel excluded, or like a space has been taken away from them, I have to say:

Where were you when this was other people feeling this way?

Where were you when people who are marginalized in nearly every other fandom space and came to WisCon thinking it would be different said they felt uncomfortable, unwelcome, threatened, unsafe?

I don’t remember seeing some of your faces when the fight for the Safer Space happened2. I don’t remember you chiming in when a guy on the concom3 was abusing members of the concom (those who weren’t his friends…) and then people at the convention. I don’t recall you having any kind of problem when volunteers were leaving left and right because they were treated horribly by the “Old Guard” runners of the con4. I don’t remember you standing up to the woman the co-chairs had to ban last year5 because she verbally abused everyone from hotel staff to volunteers at the reg desk every single year6.

I don’t even remember some of you ever saying “Hey, I’ll do some work to make WisCon run smoothly for all attendees.7

Meanwhile, the people who I and others have worked hard to make feel welcome and relatively safe and empowered to report incidents of microagression or just plain old aggression have said:

  • Thank you.
  • This was so important to me.
  • How can I help?
  • You do so much and you look exhausted, can I get you something?
  • Can I be part of making this all work next time?

As N K Jemisin said in her speech at WisCon 38: “If you won’t ride or die for anyone else, how can you expect them to ride or die for you?8

I ride or die for the people who have felt uncomfortable and pushed out and marginalized historically in this community, and at this con. I ride or die for the people who have come to me, sometimes with tears in their eyes, to tell me they’ve never felt more welcome and wanted and embraced by a con before this one9.

I am not unwilling to ride or die for all y’all. I’ll say it again: I want WisCon to be a better space for everyone. I want you to surf this wave of change with us. But only if you’re willing to make the con better for both you and yours as well as me and mine, she and hers, they and theirs, Jackie an’ ’em, and all the other folks who want it to be great for all of us together.

If you’re uncomfortable now, but weren’t before, then think about that. Really think about it. Consider if you were making people uncomfortable before, even without thought or intention. Consider that you’re feeling left out because, in the course of our claiming a space for ourselves, we made clear to you just how much you or people like you contributed to our pain, our lack of fun, our lack of safety. Ponder the puzzle of how a con dedicated to feminism, populated by many amazing people, somehow ended up being a place where people who weren’t the right color, the right class, the right age, the right level of ability, the right gender presentation felt like they didn’t fully belong. And delve deep into the mystery of how fixing that problem is the thing that’s made you run away10.


Footnotes

  1. For context, please read my post and Jim C. Hines’ follow up post. []
  2. Yes, this is something that we had to fight for. And the person talked about in the footnote below this? Was the main person fighting against it. I believe the spectre of a lawsuit against the con if the Safer Space happened was brought up in public to other concom members. []
  3. There’s an entire other post in the footnotes to follow. I felt it was important to give actual names here. If you say “I feel uncomfortable/unwelcome at WisCon because of what you did to Richard Russell”? Then what you’re saying is you feel unwelcome because Richard violated the Statement of Principles, which we explicitly made apply to the concom and not just the convention itself. You’re saying you side with a person who routinely abused concom members who were younger, who were not white, who were essentially not the friend group/local community he was a part of. And while you may have heard all kinds of stories from Richard about what we did and why, the bottom line is that he was told, repeatedly, over years, to stop. He did not stop. He was told, repeatedly, over years, why his words and actions were harmful and harmful mostly to People of Color on the concom. He did not stop. He was told, repeatedly, that his abusive behavior drove volunteers away from the concom and attendees away from WisCon. He did not stop. And let’s be clear on one point: We didn’t ban him from WisCon, we removed him from the concom because he was abusive. So if you feel unwelcome because of what we did to Richard Russell, then you are okay with Richard making others feel unwelcome and unsafe. And to that I say: Fuck you. []
  4. Once again, I am gonna name names. In my post, Sometimes Allies Are Bad Actors, I quote Mikki Kendall pointing out that just because a person has done work, good work, for the con, for fandom, for the people they love, doesn’t mean they can’t be problematic and doesn’t mean they have treated everyone equally. Jeanne Gomoll started WisCon and has been a friend to many people and has done much good work. Jeanne also sometimes shit all over the work and contributions of WisCon volunteers and concom members who were not in her friend group/local community (do you see a theme emerging?). There were people who tried to volunteer and felt disrespected and dismissed by Jeanne and then left because of that. There were people who left upset because of Jeanne’s unwavering support of Richard Russell, who, as I have mentioned, was verbally abusive to members of the concom. But not to her. But not to her friends. And so we were terrible people for deciding that members of the concom had to be held to the same standards of conduct that we hold our attendees to. And so Jeanne decided to leave the concom over this. No one tossed her out. Another long time WisCon runner? Hope of ConSuite fame. Another person saying far and wide how horrendously the new WisCon runners have treated her. Hope harassed the person who took over running the ConSuite (a position Hope vacated officially a month before the con last year) several times during WisCon 39 and had to be restricted to food access only so she had less opportunity to harass folks there. She then repeated this behavior at this year’s con. And, beyond that, my understanding is that there were volunteers that felt some kind of way about how Hope treated them for years and years. Not a new problem. So if you’re feeling unwelcome because your good friend Jeanne or your good friend Hope were drummed out of WisCon and made to feel unwelcome, then what you’re saying is that the people they harassed or made to feel unwelcome don’t matter. That it only matters how they feel, because they’re your friends. And to that I say: Fuck you. []
  5. The woman’s name is Alyson L. Abramowitz. She was banned last year for screaming at the hotel staff before she even got to WisCon. This was not out of character for her, since she’s been yelling and screaming at hotel folks, Reg folks, and plenty of other folks—volunteers and attendees—for all the many years she’d been coming to the con. This is why she was banned. And, when it happened, so many people went: phew! Glad she’s not coming. She made my con experience terrible when I was around her. One of those people was me. If you feel unwelcome because your good friend Alyson was so cruelly banned from the con for making other people feel unwelcome, then you’re saying that her behavior towards others doesn’t matter because she’s your friend. And to that I say: Fuck you. []
  6. We had a panel at WisCon 39 in which a lot of the stuff from the above footnotes was discussed. Here’s a Storify of the live tweets from it. []
  7. Anyone wanna place bets on how many people will respond to this by saying: “But I did do yadda yadda!” and ignore the qualifiers there and everywhere in this post? []
  8. Just want to point out here that Nora publicly left the concom because of MoonFail, and that her experience and reaction was emblematic of the way many people felt. Those volunteers I mentioned in footnotes above? The ones who left because of the Bad Actors? Listen to what Nora has to say and then multiply by many. []
  9. There’s an entire side conversation to be had about how, years ago, this was the experience of many of the (now) long-time attendees. A con the centers feminism? Where we talk about women and science fiction and writing? There’s nothing like this anywhere else! How many of you experienced that back then? Why then do you not understand why this is important for the people experiencing it now? []
  10. There are a ton of links I want you to read in relation to this post: