So it's the first day of the Worldcon, and I watched an all-Zoom virtual panel, on the topic of "Can We Enjoy the Art of Unethical People?" The Zoom worked very well, everybody was clearly visible as well as audible. The Discord comment channel sucked, though. I couldn't figure out how to submit a post; no instructions I found online worked, and the con's e-mail help line was worse than useless.
In another universe, I'd haven taken notes and submitted a summary, but I think it's been recorded and you can watch it later. What I have instead is some of my own thoughts in response.
First I should say, that we in classical music have faced this dilemma for centuries. Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven are unquestionably two of the greatest composers there ever were; we could not do without their music; yet they were both thoroughly unsatisfactory human beings.
Our answer has been yes, we listen to their music, while acknowledging their personal failings. The only exception is in Israel, which maintains an unofficial boycott against Wagner.
Of course, the fact that they're both long dead makes it easier; they're not making any money off our purchases, and this distinction was made at the panel; one panelist mentioned that the estate of Roald Dahl is trying to make amends or at least apologies for his failings.
Yet I'm a little uncomfortable with the dead v. alive distinction. If they're not in prison, a person needs to be able to make a living; is it right to withhold money you would otherwise spend on their work because of their past misdeeds? On the other hand, continuing unapologetic offenders like Rowling - the idea of giving them money is repulsive, and there's probably enough cretins who agree with them that they won't starve.
The panel also talked a lot about the difference between misdeeds in life and as depicted in fiction. Stories being as they are, you have to expect repulsive things to happen often enough. How does the author convey that they don't approve? General opinion was, don't worry about it; you can't control what people think. Nobody mentioned Resnick's Kirinyaga, but that would have been a good example. Koriba gets his comeuppance, but not until the last story; the first one seemed to a lot of readers as if he had authorial approval.
Sometimes you have to depict misbehavior to convey the point. Someone brought up the n-word in Huck Finn. It would have been false to the setting of the story to leave that out; that's the way people talked then, and we need to know it. That the word didn't have the encoding then that it does now was one important point.
On the difference between life and fiction in general, I remember an old comment: "Murder is illegal. Writing about murder is not. Sex is not illegal. Writing about sex is." Of course restrictions on writing about sex have loosened over the years, but it's still a good distinction.
The question was asked, should we write about authors we disfavor? Yes, we should; people need to know. One panelist recounted having been, in her youth, a big David Eddings fan, only much later learning of his unethical behavior and being taken aback. I was taken aback by that, as I hadn't heard anything about Eddings. So I looked him up and found he'd been imprisoned for child abuse before he became an author. This was on the public record but was not generally known until after he died - or by me until just now.
Tim Curry, who just died, got a mention. His original fame was for Rocky Horror, which surprises some people today, though it's where I first heard of him. He recently wrote: Is Rocky Horror problematic today? Yes it is. But remember it was written just a few years after being actively gay ceased being illegal in England, and it was daring and necessarily transgressive at the time.
There was much more to the panel, but that's enough for a post.
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