What’s So Autistic About Neil Gaiman?

Let Matt Lowry, licensed psychological practitioner, and Dr. Angela Lauria, “the linguistic autistic,” teach you the long way of spelling whoops: “This episode was recorded prior to the allegations against Neil Gaiman breaking. TACP stands with victims of assault and wish[es] the Autistic community comfort and healing as we grapple with our feelings, both individually and collectively[.] Please, listen with care. For more support and resources, please read our guest blog ‘When Your Special Interest Turns Out to be Problematic.’”

This fraught boilerplate stands below episode 65 of the Autistic Culture Podcast, “Neil Gaiman Is Autistic.” The episode has little to say regarding what’s so autistic about Gaiman. Mainly it’s a recap of the writer’s career combined with a celebration that he’s part of the tribe. Gaiman fans on social media had already posted “Not surprised but also pleasantly delighted” and “ONE OF US, ONE OF US!! adore you, as always, sir x,” among similar thoughts. The podcast episode is the one-hour-and-nine-minutes version of these comments. Then came news that two women say the beloved autist sexually abused them.

The occasion for the original outpouring was a remark Gaiman posted to his Tumblr account in March of this year. (The podcast’s website says it was March 2023, but various posts by social media users indicate otherwise.) A terse Tumblr denizen named human-thing-person asked, “Thoughts on autism?” Gaiman replied, “From my point of view, it’s both my super powers and it’s my kryptonite. Your mileage (as they say sensibly) may vary.” He hasn’t added much since then. He told a fan on Bluesky that he’s known for “About 7 years now” and said, “It made more sense of my childhood and life.” Also on Bluesky, he responded to a post by Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes, by saying his “beloved copy” of the book had been “bought originally in order to better understand certain family members.” The phrasing of Silberman’s post shows the deference with which Gaiman is, or was, regarded: “@neilhimself.neilgaiman.com, forgive me, but I only learned today that you identify as autistic. If you haven't read my history of autism, NeuroTribes, I’d be honored to send you a signed copy.” Silberman posted in April, not so long after the first news.

What’s so autistic about Neil Gaiman? He hasn’t really said and neither have his fans. The Slow Newscast, in reporting on the abuse allegations, cites an unnamed friend of Gaiman as saying that his autism shows up in his naivete, but he’s naïve like Wilt Chamberlain was short. Two of the most striking, even admirable, things about Gaiman are his alertness to how people behave and his sensitivity to how they individually make sense of their experience. More practically, he’s someone who knows his way around a business deal, which helps to explain how a producer of puckish, unsettling little fantasy works turned his predilection into an industry. The downside is that when he plops into a bathtub with an acquaintance it’s not because he’s unfamiliar with our human ways, it’s because he senses an opportunity.

The podcast offers a couple of possibilities, but that’s all. Gaiman was terrible at gym—“Proprioceptive challenges!” calls out Dr. Lauria. His start as a professional writer took the form of freelance journalism assignments, but he says he dropped that line because of the way British newspapers keep printing falsehoods. “Justice sensitivity,” notes Matt Lowry. Gaiman had to choose between being an artist and a writer, so whatever clumsiness he has may not be so defining; the truly clumsy are stuck with words and that’s it. As for his justice sensitivity, recent news indicates that it resembles most people’s in being highly variable.

In general the Autistic Culture Podcast seems more interested in affirming than in checking. “He is one of the great American writers, to be sure,” says Dr. Lauria. If so, Gaiman’s an American writer with British citizenship and not American citizenship. He owns a home in Minnesota, but he also owns homes in New Zealand and Scotland; his first wife and first set of children are American, and he lived with them there in Minnesota, but that was a while ago. Matt Lowry goes overboard regarding Gaiman’s social media profile: “Everything he posts are things that I totally agree with. He is in very much support of trans rights, he is very much in support of, you know, all the things that make life worthwhile—libraries, treating people nicely, making bigots angry… I agree with literally everything the man says, so in every situation I will be on his side.” Not every situation.

The two of them are so eager to stake a claim that they don’t think. Being autistic myself, I find this approach to autism depressing. Autists, or self-proclaimed autists, talk on social media about their need for truth, their habit of looking past the group’s preconceptions to see the bare facts. But the cheerleading of the Autism Culture Podcast and the Tumblr comments strikes me as the opposite. For me the “one of us” approach creates a “them,” a group that’s going to see what it wants to see and expect its members to go along. Hence the comfort and healing now necessary because the Gaiman facts didn’t match the Gaiman celebration. The gang’s hero left his first wife a long time ago for somebody who was decades younger; they could’ve noticed but didn’t.

Then there’s “treating people nicely, making bigots angry.” What I’d expect autistic people to notice, and it looks like I’m wrong to expect it, is that treating people nicely doesn’t go with inflicting bad feelings on them and gloating about it. This is an odd-shaped, not very useful realization and a bad fit for the debate at hand, since the people being infuriated are bigots and therefore wrong and often dangerous in large and small ways. It’s not a realization that leads to useful action, so far as I can tell. But it’s true, so (shrugging helplessly) people should keep it in mind. Niceness is a fine reason for respecting the rights and worth of minorities, but there are others, good and bad. When people say niceness is the reason for their views, they imply that they themselves are nice, and that’s an easy way to be wrong. An example would be Neil Gaiman. “Quite nice really,” his Tumblr account tells us. Yes, but your mileage may vary.