The Sandman’s Neil Gaiman schools troll who told him to ‘ditch gay sex and accept Jesus’
Neil Gaiman ‘wishes he’d written more about gay sex’
The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman told a troll he wishes he’d “written more about gay sex” and honestly, same.
Netflix’s adaptation of the graphic novel has been critically acclaimed and widely well-received – though a small, but vocal, minority have lodged complaints about its diverse, inclusive casting.
Similarly, Amazon Prime’s new The Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, has also received racist backlash for adding Black characters into the mix of elves, hobbits and other mythical creatures.
Gaiman waded into the discourse after right-wing mouthpiece Darren Grimes complained about when “Black actors are cast in roles that the author of the series has described as not being Black”, referring to The Rings of Power.
Gaiman noted that the Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkein described the Harfoots, a breed of hobbit seen in the new series, as “browner of skin” than others.
While defending his view, he was eventually told: “Stop writing about gay sex and accept Jesus Christ. You will never be as good a writer as Tolkien because you reject Logos.”
Gaiman responded: “I don’t write much about gay sex, as people who have read my books would know. But, oddly, I don’t read a tweet like this and feel the urge to convert. Instead I read it and vaguely wish I’d actually written more about gay sex.”
I don't write much about gay sex, as people who have read my books would know. But, oddly, I don't read a tweet like this and feel the urge to convert. Instead I read it and vaguely wish I'd actually written more about gay sex. https://t.co/rNn86mgqo1
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) September 6, 2022
Gaiman has staunchly defended the diverse casting of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman, which stars non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park as the character desire Desire and The Good Place actor Kirby Howell-Baptiste, who is Black, as Death, drawn as white in the comics.
In response to these criticisms, Gaiman previously said: “I give zero f**ks about people who don’t understand/haven’t read Sandman whining about a non-binary Desire or that Death isn’t white enough”.
He has also explained that the – the first hardcover graphic novel by a comics publisher to ever land on the New York Times bestseller list – is, and has always been, packed full of LGBTQ+ characters.
Desire, played by Mason Alexander Park, in The Sandman. (Netflix).
“Sandman” creator Neil Gaiman, pictured in 2014 (Ulf Andersen/Getty)
“When I was writing it, and today, I had gay friends, I had trans friends. I wanted to see them represented in the comics that I was writing,” he told The Queer Review.
“And it felt like to me that if I wrote comics and left them out then I would not be representing my world or the world that I was perceiving accurately, bravely or truly and that was the point of art so for me that was a given.”
