Scary Trousers

Neil Gaiman on being dubbed 

"Scary Trousers" by Alan Moore

“A descendant of Polish Jewish immigrants, Gaiman had gotten his start in the ’80s as a journalist for hire in London covering Duran Duran, Lou Reed, and other brooding lords of rock, and in the world of comic conventions, he was the closest thing there was to that archetype. 

Women would turn up to his signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth 

attire of his characters and beg him 

to sign their breasts or slip him key 

cards to their hotel rooms. 

One writer recounts running into Gaiman at a World Fantasy Convention in 2011. 

His assistant wasn’t around, and 

he was late to a reading. “I can’t get to it 

if I walk by myself,” he told her. 

As they made their way through the convention side by side, “the whole floor 

full of people tilted and slid toward 

him,” she says. “They wanted to be entwined with him in ways 

I was not prepared to 

defend him against.” 

A woman fell to her 

knees and wept.

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. As one prominent editor in the field puts it, 

“The one thing I hear again and 

again, largely from women, 

is ‘He was always nice to me. 

He was always a gentleman.’” 

The writer Kelly Link, who met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. “He was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,” she says, “but also made him seem very harmless.” Someone who had a sexual relationship with Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”: “He read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He’d be very demure.”

But there were some who saw another side of the author. One woman, Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The Sandman where she was working. On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for connecting with each individual. 

He would ask questions, laugh, and assure them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman sat next to Brenda. “Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser focused on me,” she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist. 

The night after the awards ceremony, she 

and Gaiman ended up in bed together. 

As soon as they began to hook up, 

the feeling that had drawn her to him — 

the magical spell of his interest 

in her individuality — vanished. 

“He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. 

“He wanted me to call him 

‘Master’ immediately.” 

He demanded that she promise him her soul. 

“It was like he’d gone into this ritual 

that had nothing to do with me.”