Catching Up: That WindyCon Panel

[jimhines]

One of the posted panels at WindyCon, a Chicago convention that took place this past weekend, was called “Tutti Frutti Literature.” The panel description read, “With changing social norms and lifestyles, how is this affecting our literature?”

Annalee Flower Horne tagged the convention about this on Twitter, saying this was not okay. A number of people agreed, including WindyCon attendees and former guests of honor.

When I saw the panel write-up, my mind went to the anti-gay slur. The reference to changing lifestyles also made me think this could be a panel about how “the gay” was getting all over our books.

I knew one of the listed panelists, Chris Barkley, and tagged him to ask if he knew what was going on here.

Barkley ended up posting his thoughts on the matter at File770. He spoke with Louisa Feimster, who explained:

“We were under a lot of pressure to come up with titles for panels and we kinda finished up in the middle of the night. Really, we didn’t mean to offend anybody, we were just tired.” She also went on to explain that in her end of the BDSM world, “tutti frutti” does not have a negative connotations and she thought it would be an interesting way to title a panel on the changing forms of literature.

Fair enough. I’m glad it was a mistake, as opposed to a deliberate slam on the LGBT community.

However, Barkley also calls this a witch hunt, and gave a statement at the panel (reproduced in the column), saying, “The main point is that damage has been done to the honor and reputation of Windycon because someone was offended. To which I respond : BIG DEAL!” Basically, if I’m reading his statement correctly, people were offended over nothing, and should save their energy for real injustices.

Panelist Mari Brighe ended up walking out of the panel after Barkley’s statement there. She’s written a blog post about what happened. She says about the panel title and description:

“My general assumption with this panel is that it had been proposed by a queer and/or trans person who was couching their language to make the panel sound more widely applicable, and that the panel title was something of an attempt to reclaim some previously hurtful language.”

She also explains her reasons for leaving the panel:

“Mr Barkley’s egregious tone-policing of queer concerns made me feel quite unwelcome. As a young queer trans woman on panel of unfamiliar older men who clearly had some anger at my community and were predisposed to thinking we were overly-sensitive, I did not feel especially safe. I’ve been in similar panel situations before (including one at Windycon several years ago), and the usual result is me being shouted down by men until I’m nearly in tears. Given that I already had one clearly angry, hostile panelist harboring very negative beliefs about someone like me, I made the decision that I would recuse myself from the panel for my own safety and emotional well-being, and in protest of the kinds of over-the-top tone-policing and complete dismissal (and denigration) of the concerns of queer folks that Mr Barkley had engaged in.”

Finally, WindyCon posted an apology on their website.

“Now that the convention is over, we have had the opportunity to read through the many posts and comments on the subject. We have taken to heart the hurt and anger caused by the poor choice of wording used in the title and description of this panel. We are very sorry we offended. While this was not our intention, it was the result, and for this we sincerely apologize. We will be working to ensure this does not happen in the future. These are some specific steps we will take moving forward…”

###

Speaking as someone who was not at this WindyCon, but who has attended many of them in the past (including as a Guest of Honor), I’m impressed with the convention’s apology. I believe the offense was unintentional. I appreciate that they recognize unintentional hurt is still hurt. There are no excuses, and they give concrete steps they’ll be taking in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

In an age of excuses and fauxpologies, I thought this was very well done.

I’m disappointed by Barkley’s response. As he says:

“[T]here was no grand conspiracy to offend the gay community. While the choice of the term ‘tutti frutti’ may be regrettable, it was NOT done in any sense of malice, at least from my point of view.”

I believe him. But he seems to presume that because no harm was intended, no harm was done, and therefore everyone should just STFU about it. He acknowledges being angry and enraged, while telling people who were offended to save their anger and rage for bigger targets.

Of course, it’s possible to be angry about big issues like national politics and also be angry about things like a convention panel description at the same time.

Nobody was calling for WindyCon to be burnt at the stake. They were calling out a panel description which, intentional or not, came off as hurtful, insulting, and dismissive.

I’m glad it wasn’t intentional. I would have been much more pissed if this had been a deliberate thing. But we’ve got to stop thinking “I didn’t mean to hurt you” is some kind of magic eraser. “I told you I didn’t intentionally run over your goat. How dare you continue to be upset!”

While I understand the convention was this weekend and everyone was hellabusy, I wish WindyCon had posted their apology sooner. I wish Barkley hadn’t attacked people who were upset about the panel title/description.

I also feel like my tagging Barkley into the conversation on Twitter was one factor in this becoming a larger blow-up than it needed to be, and for that I apologize.

Personally, I appreciate people calling out problematic and troublesome stuff like this. And I very much appreciate WindyCon’s apology. This is how we grow and do better.

from Jim C. Hines http://ift.tt/2yIdq9Z
via IFTTT

Comments

[mount_oregano]

I was there, and I left astounded and disappointed by the way that everyone got so angry so fast over something so small. As someone in the audience said, we are all trying to practice good behavior, but practice makes perfect only after mistakes.

Yet there is no forgiveness and no kindness for mistakes, even when our friends make them in all good faith. I hate what we are becoming.

[jimhines]

No forgiveness from whom, to whom? I haven't seen anyone refusing to accept WindyCon's apology...

[mount_oregano]

People could have been forgiving and presumed goodwill from the moment anyone noticed the title to the panel. You were not: “When I saw the panel write-up, my mind went to the anti-gay slur. The reference to changing lifestyles also made me think this could be a panel about how “the gay” was getting all over our books. ... I’m glad it was a mistake, as opposed to a deliberate slam on the LGBT community.”

You know the people who run Windycon. They even made you a guest of honor once. Aren’t these people your friends? Don’t you trust them? Do you really think they would do something to slam the LGBT community? As Louisa explained, that was the farthest thing on her mind. But she got no benefit of the doubt, not from you, not from many other people.

The convention’s theme was dystopia, and at another panel on social media, someone said that Twitter and Facebook are today’s dystopias. They’re making our lives worse. I think this is a good example. People who were not at the convention used social media to exacerbate a problem that we who were actually present no longer had the power to solve face to face. What could have been a constructive and interesting panel was destroyed. I could only sit there at Windycon helpless and full of regret watching innocent people be hurt.

You, who were not there, have taken it upon yourself to decide whether the people who run Windycon must apologize, and to decide whether you can accept their apology or not. You, whose first response was suspicion and blame, present yourself as the voice of reason.

I repeat, aren’t the people at Windycon your friends? Is this how we treat our friends?

[jimhines]

When I screw up, my friends call me on it, yes. I think it's helped me grow as a person.

Intentional or not, Windycon screwed up. Am I supposed to pretend otherwise because I know some of the people running the convention? Of course I don't believe the people I know and worked with would *intentionally* slam the LGBT community. But as has been repeated again and again, hurt doesn't have to be intentional to be hurtful.

Do you think friendships are so fragile they can't endure the slightest criticism?

You're welcome to try to paint me as some judgemental prick if it makes you feel better. And yes, I think when people screw up they should apologize. I was raised to think that was part of being a grown-up. Windycon has admitted they screwed up -- whatever you think of me, why won't you take their word for it?

As for whether or not I can accept their apology? That's nonsense. I'm not one of the people who were directly hurt by what Windycon themselves have admitted was an error on their part.

You're obviously angry about this. I'm curious, though, why you seem to think people on social media destroyed the panel. Nobody on social media opened the panel with criticism and insults strong enough to drive the moderator from the room.

People complained about the use of a slur in a panel title, and a vague panel description that did nothing to provide context for that slur. I have a hard time seeing that as dystopian.

[mount_oregano]

"Nobody on social media opened the panel with criticism and insults strong enough to drive the moderator from the room."

How do you know this? I was there. The weight of the internet fell on that room. Everything that had been said before on social media created the situation in which this happened. We who were there could have been given a voice and a chance to solve this. But we were outshouted by the internet.

People were hurt, a room full of people who were eager to discuss how literature has grown to include more people, and to discuss the double meanings of the title. But we could do nothing anymore.

I am angry with you. I'm angry with everyone on the internet who got involved on this, because you took my power from me, and you still are. I was there. You weren't. But all of you did more to control and now to interpret what happened than I and the other people at the convention could. By the time we arrived in that room, the damage had been done.

Will all of you apologize for silencing all of us? For taking from us the opportunity to set things right as the people most directly affected?

[jimhines]

"Will all of you apologize for silencing all of us? For taking from us the opportunity to set things right as the people most directly affected?"

Could you clarify something for me, first? Here is everything I wrote about Windycon prior to this blog post.

Damn... @cmzhang42 - any idea what the heck's going on with this one? (Twitter - 7:18 p.m. on November 10)

How exactly did those dozen words take your power from you, silence everyone, and rob the people involved of the opportunity to set things right?

[mount_oregano]

You already know the answer to that question. You wrote: “I also feel like my tagging Barkley into the conversation on Twitter was one factor in this becoming a larger blow-up than it needed to be, and for that I apologize.”

And I thank you for the apology, but do you know what you’re apologizing for? You didn’t see Louisa’s face and her pain. More people than you created this blow-up, and I want to be clear about that, but it was a disaster. A room full of people came innocently and discovered a drama had already been scripted. Had you been there, you would have seen that we had no chance to act. We all felt hurt and blindsided. We had hoped to come and learn, and the person who had the most to teach walked out.

I’d like to correct the remarks by djonn, who also doesn’t seem to have been there. Mari Brighe came with a prepared statement and, with obvious hostility, asked both Louisa and Chris Barkley to speak first. Then she read her statement and left. It didn’t occur the way that djonn imagines. If he had been there, for example, he wouldn’t have said Louisa “walked” into the room. She uses a wheelchair.

But what bothers me the most is your apparent belief that this was a good thing. You said, “Personally, I appreciate people calling out problematic and troublesome stuff like this. And I very much appreciate WindyCon’s apology. This is how we grow and do better.”

I’m calling you out on this. You said you want people to do that when you make a mistake. This incident was destructive, not constructive. We did not grow, we were diminished. What will we do better? What did we learn? That we must do everything flawlessly?

I think Louisa learned that no good deed goes unpunished. She worked hard, did her best, and when she was misinterpreted (“tutti frutti” did not mean what accusers decided it did), she was humiliated. I think she learned to think twice about volunteering again. We all learned that what happens in real life is not as important or powerful as what people on the internet think happened, and control is in the hands of people whose faces we will not see. We learned that no matter how hard we try to do the right thing, if we don’t please everyone, we’ll get into more trouble than our effort was worth. Why would I ever volunteer to do anything at a con again if people are just waiting for me to make a mistake so they can pounce?

We can’t keep treating each other this way. This doesn’t feed fandom, it poisons it. We have to find a way to solve issues without acrimony and damage. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, and I hope that’s what you hear.

[jimhines]

"You wrote: 'I also feel like my tagging Barkley into the conversation on Twitter was one factor in this becoming a larger blow-up than it needed to be, and for that I apologize.'"

Yes, I had hoped Barkley would be able to facilitate a quicker and more productive response from the convention. He chose to go a different route, which resulted in the moderator walking out. Or are you blaming me for Barkley's words and actions?

And you haven't answered my question. How exactly did those dozen words I posted on Twitter take your power from you, silence everyone, and rob the people involved of the opportunity to set things right?

[mount_oregano]

I've told you more than once. I don't believe you don't want to understand what I'm saying. You keep telling me that what I saw didn't happen and doesn't matter. I give up.

(frozen)

[jimhines]

"I've told you more than once."

You really haven't. You've made various accusations and thrown blame at me and any number of people, but you haven't explained how a single Tweet from me was so powerful as to silence everyone and steal everyone's power and so on.

Not sure what your second sentence means, but I agree that this is a waste of time. If you want to keep being angry at me and everyone else who dared to say anything about Windycon's mistake, that's your right.

[jimhines]

"We have to find a way to solve issues without acrimony and damage."

What you don't seem to be hearing is that Windycon had already done damage.

People weren't "waiting to pounce." They were hurt by the convention's carelessness. Does their pain count less because they were on the internet as opposed to being people in "real life"?

There was no witch hunt. Nobody wanted anyone burnt at the stake. They wanted acknowledgement, an apology, and to not have a convention casually tossing about hurtful slurs -- even unintentionally.

That's pretty much what they got from Windycon. And that's great. If others had followed suit, this would have been a minor blip.

Instead, others took it upon themselves to loudly and angrily defend the convention from an imagined attack -- because apparently some people see any complaint or criticism as a declaration of war. And apparently the way to defend the con was to angrily attack anyone and everyone who dared to complain.

[djonn]

You're correct that I was not at Windycon, and therefore also correct to note that I used (unknowingly) an inaccurate descriptor for Ms. Feimster.

I based my comments on the sources available to me online -- Ms. Brighe's account, Mr. Barkley's published material, the Windycon apology, and Jim's post. I made the assumption that both Ms. Brighe and Mr. Barkley were recounting the events more or less accurately, largely because Jim noted no other competing accounts of the events and he's usually fairly thorough about calling out discrepancies in the record. I obviously can't speak to matters of atmosphere or tone, but your description of the order of events appears to tally with the others I read. (I suspect that if I had been there, I might have read Ms. Brighe's "hostility" differently than you did, but I don't think we need or want to get sidetracked in that direction.)

While you may not see it this way, I also believe we're actually in agreement that the seeds of the disaster-to-be had already been sown by the time the panelists, audience, and other principals arrived at the panel. We simply disagree on the cause of the implosion: you blame the 'Net kerfuffle, whereas I submit that Ms. Brighe and Ms. Feimster share primary responsibility for what happened.

In particular, this is where you and I part company:

She worked hard, did her best, and when she was misinterpreted (“tutti frutti” did not mean what accusers decided it did), she was humiliated.

I very strongly disagree. Here's why: Words can have multiple and different meanings to different people. Both Jim and Ms. Brighe read "tutti frutti" as a term with negative connotations in parts of the gay community; both also checked that assumption with members of that community. That's not a MISinterpretation; that's a different interpretation, and by all appearances a valid interpretation. There was only one way for Ms. Brighe to be aware that Ms. Feimster was using the term in the context of a different subculture, where it had a different meaning -- specifically, she would have had to get that information from Ms. Feimster directly. But that didn't happen until the very moment the panel was beginning, and that was much, much too late.

You say "We have to find a way to solve issues without acrimony and damage." That way exists. It's called "open & honest communication", and the reason this particular panel imploded is that, based on the available record, Ms. Brighe and Ms. Feimster completely failed to communicate effectively with one another prior to the con. Had they done so, they could have discovered and addressed their differing concepts of "tutti frutti" far enough in advance to reconcile them and present a consistent, constructive panel, and more than likely disposed of the 'Net-based criticism in the process. They both failed to do so, and I don't think it's inappropriate to call them out for those mistakes.

Moving past pain is important. Forgiving those who inadvertently cause pain (and who acknowledge having done so) is important. But part of pain avoidance is also not shooting oneself in the (metaphorical) foot, and this looks to me like a case where the principals brought a good deal of the pain on themselves.

[djonn]

First, note to Jim: the links-to-sources on your Web blog didn't make it into the DW post.

Second, disclosures: I've been on concoms as programming staff and in many publications roles, including editing pocket programs; I have seen lots of panel titles/descriptions go by over the years, and written many as well. I have also been a panelist at cons, mostly here in the Northwest, for many years.

My observations?

#1: As all observers seem to agree, the unintentionally hurtful nature of the title is an artifact of a Feist's Law variant, to wit: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity excessive but inevitable haste." Deadlines and schedules often slip even in the best of conditions, and very often panel titles and descriptions are written or rewritten at the last moment and compressed to fit into smaller spaces than one would like. I think it's clear that there was no intent to offend on the concom's end; I would hope that any hurt caused by the title alone -- and I grant that hurt did occur -- could be as easily forgiven as it was readily acknowledged.

However.

#2: I think there was a much more serious failure to communicate here that seems to have been wholly overlooked -- and that led directly to the panel disintegrating as badly as it did. My concern is this: Given what both parties have acknowledged was an extremely vague and easily misinterpreted panel title and description, neither the assigned moderator nor Windycon programming staff made any attempt to clarify the intended scope and subject matter of the panel with one another prior to the con. Instead, Ms. Brighe walked into the room prepared to lead one panel, Ms. Feimster walked into the room prepared to introduce an entirely different panel.

That absolutely should not have happened. Speaking as a past panelist and moderator of panels, if I'd been presented with a description that vague and, particularly including a phrase whose meaning wasn't entirely clear from context, I would have promptly emailed my programming contact to ask for more detail about what their intentions for the panel might have been. It is clear that Ms. Brighe didn't do that.

It's also clear that she didn't, as I usually do when I moderate, send email to my assigned panelists well before the con outlining my sense of the panel's potential structure (if I have one) and asking for suggestions on how best to amplify, adapt, or change that structure based on their own knowledge and expertise. [That said, OryCon routinely includes contact information for one's fellow panelists with its schedule emails, explicitly facilitating that process; I don't know if Windycon does the same. They may well not do so, since evidently they didn't give Ms. Brighe enough information about her assigned panelists for her to realize in advance that she was the only woman assigned to the panel.]

And that's not the biggest thing that went wrong.

In all the years I've been attending conventions -- and that started well before I was a concom member or a panelist -- it's been my understanding that once a panel starts, the subject of the panel is what the panelists determine it to be. This is a tradition precisely because pocket-program descriptions are often so short and imprecise, and it can also be a useful hedge against (or springboard from) just the sort of social-media discussion that occurred in the present case. (Yes, this is a tradition that can be abused, and probably has been on occasion, but that's a separate discussion.)

And yet. It's clear from the accounts that Ms. Feimster came into the room without knowing what preparations Ms. Brighe had made as moderator, although she did have clear knowledge of how the panel title had been interpreted online. In those circumstances, I submit that it was completely inappropriate for her to say, at the very last possible moment, from the front of the room, "yes, well, but I meant this panel to be about SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY"...and *not* expect that statement to completely derail Ms. Brighe's ability to moderate the panel she had walked into the room prepared to moderate. At that point, whatever was originally intended DOES NOT MATTER; the right thing to do is to let the panelists and the moderator do the job they (hopefully) came prepared to do.

Ms. Feimster did just the opposite. She sandbagged Ms. Brighe, and I absolutely do not blame Ms. Brighe for walking out in those circumstances even if that isn't the expressed reason for the walking-out. In Ms. Brighe's case, I think I'd be wary of going back to WindyCon at all after that experience, barring proper acknowledgement of and apology for what happened to her both from Ms. Feimster personally and the concom as a whole. (I don't ask or expect that such apologies would be made publicly; that's a matter between Ms. Brighe and those involved. But I think that they're absolutely owed to Ms. Brighe in the wake of what she described.)

At the end of the day, I think the social-media kerfuffle is a side issue. The real damage was done by the principals' failure to communicate with one another...even though the social-media kerfuffle gave them a valid excuse to do just that.

[jimhines]

I've been able to get the blog posts from my main site to automatically post here, but haven't yet figured out how to preserve the links. I'm hoping to find a better solution, but no luck yet :-(