I don’t know what made me think of this today, but maybe it’s all the talk of harassment at conventions. A bunch of years ago I was at a Worldcon and saw a certain well-known male figure from the community -- you don’t need to know who he is, because I don’t think he meant to come off the way he did; suffice it to say that he is a man of considerable size, horizontally and vertically -- at the moment, a sweaty neckbeard -- yelling at a local TV reporter who had been filming costumers in the hallway. He was irate, and rightfully irate as so many of us are, that local news coverage so frequently turns features on SF conventions into exercises in filming the freaks, that it is often impossible to find any reference to an actual field of literature in their stories. (This has gotten fitfully better in recent years; local coverage of Worldcons in San Antonio and Reno and Los Angeles was actually quite good. But a local indie paper in Toronto published an article so contemptuous of us, by a reporter who bragged that she stayed only two hours and hated everybody she saw; so it’s a concern.) The problem, again, is that this guy getting so irate was a looming, sweaty, angry, bearded presence, and that the woman he was yelling at happened to be one of the most petite women I have ever seen. If she hit five feet it was a lot, and she was, in the way of some small ladies, tiny even for her size. She protested that her report was only going to be sixty seconds long, and that the costumers were clearly the most visual element; and he yelled at her for making the whole field look like a bunch of infantile idiots. But he was so loud about it, so irate, that I wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking he was about to get violent. I took about a minute of this before I said to him, “*****, you’re not helping. You’re scaring the lady.” He stormed off. She thanked me. I told her, “I wouldn’t do it the way he did, but he had a point.” She repeated that her report was only going to be a minute long; should she NOT film the costumers? Why were they walking around if not to be seen? I said, “I understand your issue. The costumers are colorful. But would it kill you, in the one minute you have, to insert one sentence saying that this convention is also about books and that the field gathers to give awards to the writers of the best stories and novels published in the prior year? Say that, maybe include a one-sentence soundbite from one of those figures, and you have a balanced report.” She asked me if I was one of those writers. I said, “I am, but I’m not one of the legendary ones.” I pointed to a certain iconic figure. “That guy over there: he is.” She thanked me. I have absolutely no idea whether the story ended up looking the way I wanted it to look. I do know that if it was a commendable story, MY means of public relations had a greater chance of success than Sweaty Neckbeard’s. Getting in somebody’s face is not always the best way of presenting your case.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 14:23:46 +0000