The Archon 38 committee, responding to protests such as those written on its Facebook page, has revoked its invitation to Tim “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo, the fan guest of honor.
The action was taken May 20 after someone identified on Facebook only by an online handle posted a lengthy complaint, characterizing Bolgeo as a racist and providing examples of ethnic jokes and other relevant remarks published in Bolgeo’s zine Revenge of the Hump Day.
The author of the complaint said he had first e-mailed Archon’s board about his concerns in March after reading issues of Revenge online, and not satisfied with the response, he repeated them at an open meeting of Archon organizers this past weekend. The board voted to keep Bolgeo as a guest, he reports, therefore he resorted to social media in protest.
The committee promptly capitulated:
The board of directors has heard the voices of our attendees. We have decided that it is in the best interest of Archon to withdraw the invitation to Mr. Bolgeo as Fan Guest. We did not make this decision lightly, however. This situation is a lose-lose for Archon, for Mr. Tim Bolgeo, and fans in the Midwest and South. When we asked Mr. Bolgeo to be our guest last year, we made a commitment we were forced to break. Repercussions from these discussions and the resulting decision will affect everyone for months to come. However, this convention is not for the Committee or the Staff, it is for the fans and you have spoken.
Bolgeo’s name has been stricken from the Archon 38 website (though it still remains on Eventbrite.)
Finding these tasteless jokes in Bolgeo’s zine was a bit of a surprise to me because although I’ve never been on his distribution list, I’ve often seen news items from Revenge quoted in other publications and believed they were representative of the whole. Apparently not.
Bolgeo was completely taken aback by today’s complaint, and some of his friends are equal parts mystified and enraged. He set about trying to explain himself in this post, which says in part:
I have really tried my best to be color blind all my life. I think what torques me off the most is that The Revenge of Hump Day was called a Racist Rag by that dude. He even put one of the jokes on the page but left out the “Tacky Alert” point that I always put on something that is of a sensitive nature. Hell guys, I poke fun at Blacks, Whites, Indians, Baptists, Catholics, Italians, Irish, Jews, etc. I was raised with ethnic humor and I still enjoy it. He also cut and pasted all kinds of scandalous stuff from the Revenge only to leave out the headings on where it was or the complete article. I have always depended on the readership of the Revenge to keep me straight and balanced and I had thought that y’all had done a pretty good job of it. Yes, The Revenge of Hump Day is Politically Incorrect, but it is presented with tongue firmly planted in my cheek and hopefully will make people think about the ideas that are presented in it. A place where people can agree to disagree.
Times change. Archie Bunker got away with being an equal-opportunity-offender in 1971. That pose isn’t as widely accepted in the age of social media.
Archon will take place the first weekend in October.
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Revenge of Hump Day? Why have I never seen it posted on eFanzines? Or any other such archive? How are we supposed to know these things exist if we are neither on the distribution list nor are they available from a public utillity like eFanzines or Fanac.Org?
All in the Family was a show against bigotry. Archie Bunker didn’t “get away” with anything. His character was a caricature that showed the stupidity of prejudice.
I suspect that singular presentation of content prevailed here, rather than reason. Context and form can turn an ethnic joke into a racist joke. My wife’s Jewish. She tells Jewish jokes. Her father was blind: he told me some pretty funny jokes about blind people. There are words and intent in each joke that tells you what kind of person that teller is.
I’m recalling Bill Hicks here, who was approached after one of his stand up shows by a large gentleman on the red neck presuation. He said, “You said some things about Jesus I don’t agree with.” Bill Hicks looked at his size and said “Forgive me.”
There is no such thing as a bad joke. There are crude jokes. There are insulting jokes. However, jokes are one of the most effective forms of social criticism. Nobody dies from a joke. Maybe the object of the joke will wonder if there is something wrong with what they are doing. You don’t have to worry about people when they are telling jokes. You have to worry when they stop.
That’s hypocrisy in action right there. If John Stewart had told one of the jokes that Tim Bolgeo shared, it would have been a ratings bonanza. If it had been told on Modern Family, it would have nabbed them an Emmy. But because Uncle Timmy is a “white southern male”, everything he says must be racist and demeaning.
But hey, if lying and slandering an individual makes people feel better about themselves, then be my guest.
I think that the important isn’t the jokes that Tim Bolgeo published in his newsletter but why the controversy started. In order to find the material presented as “proof” of racism you had to dig really deep. You had to ignore literally hundreds of entries on all sorts of subjects to find a few lines that anybody would find objectionable and then take them out of context and drop the “He’s a racist” hammer. The problem with those tactics is that they reflect on the user as much as accused.
I don’t know Mr. Bolgeo. To my knowledge I have never met the man. I did look at his newsletter and found it by and large to be full of interesting material in the short time I took to look last night. But the kind of tactics used by his accusers were designed to suppress actual commentary. The intention of the accusers was to destroy, at any cost Mr. Bolgeo, more than likely because they disagreed with his political views. The problem with using these kind of destructive tactics is that using them suppresses diversity and scares potential fans away. I don’t know if anybody has looked around at cons recently, but the cons I have attended have far too many grey hairs for my comfort. And younger people don’t read like we did. This kind of controversy only hurts the fan community and creates a devisiveness the fan community does NOT need.
I’ve known Tom Bolgeo for many years and know him to be a good and honorable man and a dedicated fan. Anyone – including the thus-far anonomyous Archon protester – who thinks that Tim Bolgeo is racist is flat-out dead wrong. I am sick of anonomyous provocatures useing “political correctness” like an ugly stick to brutalize good people the way that Tim has been brutalized.
Further, I am ashamed of the Archon Committee for revoking their invitation to honor Tim Bolgeo as their Fan Guest of Honor. They have insulted a good man unjustly and they owe an apology to Tim and to all of us who know just how good a man he is.
This is a dark and shameful day for Fandom, thanks to the Archon Committee and to the bullying ranter in their midst.
Curt Phillips
For someone who said in his Archon 38 Fan GoH bio that “What I hate about fandom is the politics and I try my best to stay out of them”, his ezine sure has a lot of political content, most of it smelling of Limbaugh. The Craigslist rant that was passed along was very racist and can’t be excused by cloaking oneself in We’re-not-Politically-Correct garb. And that wasn’t the only such instance of bigotry in my own review of the archives this morning. Let’s have a little consideration for those in fandom who are black, please.
** (I wrote the following, with minor edits for clarity and in the form of address, in response to an Archon committee member claiming that Archon IS “safe and inclusive”; that they disinvited Tim Bolgeo under duress, and that their only choice was between no Guest or no con at all) **
Oh, give me a BREAK! Are you saying the inevitable cost of standing up to anonymous trolls who deliberately blackmail a con committee and whip up Internet lynch mobs, is “no con”? That’s errant nonsense.
The Archon Board caved in to a cowardly, manipulative, noisy internet bully. I believe a LOT more people will talk about this and stay away, permanently, for the moral revulsion caused by Archon’s con committee being totally spineless than because they’re offended by Timmy or truly believe he’s a racist. And that opinion comes from someone who IS frequently offended by various idiocies (in my entirely personal opinion) in Timmy’s newsletter, but who is ALSO one of the few honest-to-God minorities active in SF convention running.
Tim is sometimes crass. He’s occasionally socially tone-deaf. And he’s one of the kindest, most caring, and unfailingly generous people that I know, giving freely of his time, money, energy and every other resource to fandom as a whole. He would give ANYONE in need the shirt off his back, and as part of his own code of chivalry, stop on a busy Interstate to help ANY stranded mother, regardless of race, that he saw in trouble. When a person says of something he’s written or said, “Tim, that really hurt my feelings, and this is why…”, he always does his very best to understand; he apologizes, in the same forum where he hurt them; and he tries his best not to do so again. I’ve *seen* this, and I’ve seen his interactions between people of all races, religions, political beliefs and sexual orientation for almost three decades. There is no hate (which is the essence of racism!) in him. LibertyCon, the SF convention that he founded and ran for 25 years, has raised tens, possibly even hundreds, of thousands of dollars for completely color-blind charities such as public libraries, literacy programs, children’s hospitals, and food pantries (which organizations, I might point out, DO serve a disproportionately minority base in Chattanooga and the South, as in St. Louis – an unfortunate socioeconomic fact of the USA now.) He helps *people* wherever there’s *need*. He has done so for decades. And that this con committee was so ignorant as to apparently feel his *personal*, unjuried (and rather dyslexic-seeming…) newsletter was the ONLY reason to honor him as their Fan Guest of Honor – that the infinite number of good and unselfish things he’s done for others, in fandom and beyond, should be ignored because of one vicious, unnamed troll with an agenda! – is a shame and a disgrace.
I have no words condemning enough for Archon Board’s throwing Tim to the wolves, disinviting him as their Guest for out-of-context, largely misattributed quotes gleaned by an anonymous coward who drummed up an internet hate campaign, quite possibly driven by envy that THEY hadn’t been selected for such an honor. In Tim Bolgeo’s case, such an honor was well deserved. I say this *despite* being consistently put off by his right-wing opinions! I truly believe the protections of democracy and free speech must apply to ALL, or they mean nothing. Whatever happened to being allowed to face your accuser, or to offer a defense? For that matter, shouldn’t fans AS A WHOLE, not just a very few, very vocal Facebook lurkers who may not have ever even been to an Archon, have had a chance to weigh in, instead of this being rushed through, trying to sweep it all under the carpet? Surely we should have had opportunity to tell the Archon con committee the many real and good reasons for honoring Tim, and to point out the many misquotations, manipulations, and out-of-context intentional misleads that riddled the original screed? There’s probably not one of us who hasn’t said or written something that could offend, probably on a regular basis! We’re human, we’re fans, we’re opinionated/verbal. We DO offend. NO ONE is safe from unfair accusation if context, tone, personal background and milieu are all ignored! And NO ONE should have *other people’s quotes* deliberately misattributed to them, and not even be given a chance to speak in their own defense in an equally public forum! To immediately disinvite a Guest, in response to *one person’s* complaint backed only by heavily edited and misleadingly attributed “quotes”, gives that complaint both validity and substantiation that it did NOT deserve. Do the words “Slander” and “Libel” mean anything to the Archon Board? They certainly should!
Timmy may well offend, especially in print, where jokes frequently fall flat, but he’s a kind and loving PERSON, who’s done immense amounts both for fandom and for his community. I don’t think I agree with a single one of his political positions, and his jokes frequently seem 40 years out of date and unfunny to me *personally*, but if you measure his impact for unselfish good, there are very few people in or out of SF fandom who can match him. That’s all there is to it. And if Archon wants to do what’s RIGHT, they should RE-invite him, listing the many reasons they SHOULD have cited for having invited him in the first place, and flatly state that they were wrong to disinvite him based on an anonymous internet hate campaign! The reasons for doing so are morally sound, and based in enlightened self-interest. Fandom IS a family, and we *will* remember how Archon treats other members of that family. And if a con com can’t or won’t stand up to bullies, in defense of those who’ve darned well EARNED fandom’s respect and thanks, why should we be foolish enough to believe that they’ll stand up for US should we need it? That that same con committee will step in bravely, and say, “No, stop that!” if a louder, stronger or social media-connected person attacks a weaker or less connected one? Or if someone launches such anonymous attacks on, say, the convention’s longtime workers, for reasons of personal dislike or grudge? I, for one, believe Archon is NOT safe for any fan or for their reputation – female or male, worker or member, innocent or not – if vicious, manipulative internet trolls can control the Board’s decisions and policies!
What the Archon board claims is not true. The fans had NOT spoken. The vast majority of us hadn’t even *heard* about this complaint – Facebook most certainly is NOT the world, or even the greater fannish community! – until the Archon committee had already made their decision. But even if it’s futile, I’m speaking now, because it would be shameful and wrong for me to remain silent, as bullies and cowards take over the fandom that I love.
Naomi Fisher
Japanese-American female, longtime con-runner/Con Committee member (at Regional to Worldcon-levels), and distinctly non-stereotypical/non-White Southern Fan since 1985
P.S. I’m also the daughter/granddaughter of third- and second-generation American-born citizens who were imprisoned, without trial, for being of Japanese descent, through the duration of WWII, losing everything they’d earned in lifetimes of hard work and saving. I was personally attacked as a child by a much larger male with a baseball bat, whose father gave him instructions to, “Beat the Jap’s head in!” So while I’m *quite* aware of racism when I actually encounter it (which I *haven’t* in Tim Bolgeo’s character or actions!), I’m ALSO aware of injustice, and of the evils of mob rule. Therefore, I hope Archon will honor its commitments, and stand by them and its Guests, fully explaining its reasons for having conferred Tim Bolgeo’s Guestship in the first place, rather than let itself be stampeded by internet flaming. And on purely practical notes, I ask them – how many of the online flamers *would really have bought an Attending membership* (or will put their money where their mouths are, and do so if they DO get what they demand)? Based on their past track records, will any of these people actually WORK on the convention? And perhaps most importantly, will the presence of such uncivil, manipulative, vitriol-spewing, PROVEN bullies make Archon a more “safe and inclusive” place to be…? I believe the answer to all these questions is “No”!
About 15 years ago I was helping a parapro in the school my daughter was attending raise money to get an adapted tricycle for her handicapped son. This was before Facebook, of course, but I raised the hundreds of dollars needed within two days by running an appeal in one place: Uncle Timmy’s newsletter. Do I need to say Uncle Timmy personally contributed? Apparently yes. Nobody asked the race of the child involved, because of course it didn’t matter to them. Timmy has raised in excess of a hundred thousand dollars for race-blind charities, from children’s hospitals to literacy programs, through his actions as a charity auctioneer and a con runner, and by organizing a scholarship fund for slain fan J.J. Johnson (look him up—HE was a fan). But you condemn Tim as racist because he shares ethnic jokes and news articles (as well as fannish news and science and technology articles) in an opt-in email newsletter. You know what’s racist? One person claiming to speak for an entire race, just like his anonymous accuser did—that’s racist.
You don’t want him as your guest of honor? Fine. But don’t pretend his disinvitation has anything to do with his actions. If you can call a kind, generous, intelligent person like Tim Bolgeo a racist, it says a lot more about where your head is than his. In fact, if you can’t act like fans, you don’t deserve to have a Fan Guest of Honor.
Brilliantly said, Naomi Fisher and Toni Weisskopf! You’ve described the Tim Bolgeo whom I know too. Attention Archon Committee; you’ve done a foolish and terrible thing in rolling over to the accusations and distorted lies of a fool. Attention “Em-Jay-See-Ess”; you’ve done a despicable and hurtful thing in what you posted about a far better man than yourself. You are wrong and I call upon both parties to issue a public apology to Tim Bolgeo and to the thousands of people in fandom who know Tim and who know that your hurtful, bullying words are lies.
I used to get his zine, but found it full of racist, sexist and in general stuff that I found offensive. I asked him to stop sending it to me, and he did.
Separately, I’ve sent you a post I wrote about how fandom-as-we-knew-it is being attacked by SF reader types who aren’t in the fandom that knows what “File 770” is a reference to, who communicate using “screen names”—pseudonyms—that allow them to pour out vitriol with no fear of being identified. This goes back to the Jonathan Ross tempest, which came and went in a day or two on Facebook, Live Journal, and other places.
Meanwhile, more and more magazines are dropping their comments sections—the latest one is National Review—precisely because of the hateful comments being made.
Correction: National Journal, not National Review: From Media Bistro: “The National Journal announced Friday that it would become the latest publication to eliminate its comments section. While they remain committed to the noble calling of serving the public interest through the exchange of ideas, editor-in-chief Tim Grieve writes, the comments section of the venerable Washington insiders’ publication doesn’t live up to those standards. Poynter / MediaWire: Comments are currently disappointing, he writes: “For every smart argument, there’s a round of ad hominem attacks — not just fierce partisan feuding, but the worst kind of abusive, racist and sexist name-calling imaginable.” Comments sections will stay “open and visible to National Journal’s members” and “[Its] reporters and editors will remain extremely active and accessible on Twitter,” he writes. … In April, the Chicago Sun-Times temporarily turned off reader commenting on its articles due to “negativity,” “racism” and “hate speech.” Many other websites, including Popular Science and Vox.com, do not allow reader comments either.
One of the things I find annoying is when someone is called a racist/sexist/*ist, and lots of people chime in with “but he’s a nice guy.” This whole controversy is going to make me look more deeply into accusations of *ist behavior, because of how Uncle Timmy has been treated. Uncle Timmy is sometimes rude, crude, and socially unattractive. He’s also one of the kindest, gentlest souls I know.
You can make anybody look bad by cherry picking words, by removing context, by flinging the gleanings of this onto social media like these were the only words this person ever said. You can make anybody look bad if you thrust your selected quotes into enough faces, if you shout with enough outrage, if you keep at it until your audience is big enough to react the way you want.
I was not prone to taking someone’s selected quotes as proof of someone else’s bad behavior before this anyway. I tried to do some additional investigation, work to find context. I will remember this action against Tim Bolgeo when I read screeds against someone, and be even more diligent in my research.
I always thought Fan Guest of Honor slots at SF conventions were to honor the guest for their service in fandom. On that basis, Tim’s earned the slot about ten times over and he ain’t done yet.
If SF fandom is compelled to strike every fan,writer,artist and editor from the “true fan” rolls who ever repeated a bad joke or held on opinion left or right of center, the roll will be a blank one. , or at least short and bland.
I’ve attended a few Archons over the years and enjoyed the conventions and appreciated the volunteers who make them happen. That being said, I’m appalled by this decision and hope they will reconsider.
Kudos to Naomi and Toni for their well reasoned and even handed comments. I wish J.J were still alive to comment.
As a liberal, actions like this offend me.They do nothing to fix anything, they just give the right wing nuts who go on about a “liberal fannish elite trying to keep us down” more ammunition. The guy reprinted a few off color jokes in his fanzine? So what? People need to grow a bit of backbone.
The “he’s a nioce guy” argument often is true. My father was racist. It tipped out of him from time to time with improper langauge when he commented on the news, the people he worked with and people he saw in the street. It was not the sum total of his personality. When you have this in your background as knowledge, you just can’t totally reject a person’s views and behavior. I understand with great sorrow.
Naomi Fisher and Toni Weiskopf have said it all and more eloquently than I could.
I no longer know what a racist is. At one time racists were people who passed laws discriminating among people by race, or who personally did things to harm people on the basis of race, or who refused to help people in need on the basis of race: that is, who acted on a belief that the races were not only not equal by treating them differently, both in law and in practice.
Today Racism is Thoughtcrime: it does not matter what one does or how one acts, if one does not think the proper thoughts then that is crime enough. Die Gedanken sind frei, but only if they are the proper Gedanken. Thoughtcriminals should be shunned. Good works and proper actions are not sufficient: one must at all times think and speak properly as well.
Fandom at one time gloried in its tolerance of the otherwise unacceptable. This was done at considerable risk and inconvenience, but being willing to tolerate the outrageous was part of joining fandom. The only thing not tolerated was violence or the threat of violence. Fandom was racially integrated long before most other social institutions, sometimes at considerable cost, particularly when racial segregation was legal in many states. Fandom was integrated in sex and gender at a time when there were consequences to this.
Die Gedanken sind frei. Die Gedanken mussen frei sein.
Jerry: as fandom has gotten larger, it has allowed (is that the right word?) the “outsiders” to mingle with fandom, so the effect of fandom being a safe haven for misfits has diminished. Very few people have been banned outright from a convention, even those whose behavior was known to be disruptive or had bounced checks constantly.
Tim Bolgeo was not uninvited for his *thoughts,* so “thoughtcrime” does not enter into it. Nor has the government fined or jailed him for what he wrote, so free speech doesn’t enter into it.
It’s a fact of life that saying things that hurt people’s feelings makes you less popular at parties. Tim was uninvited from a party because he wrote and distributed things that hurt people’s feelings. Cause and effect.
Whether minorities in particular need to expect to have their feelings hurt and not mind (or at least never let on that they mind) is something society is still fighting over. In the past the answer was yes; now the needle is starting to tip to no; some people are having a hard time changing with the times.
“If you made unexpected movements they yelled at you from the telescreen.” Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
I expect nearly all sf fans have enough imagination to relate that quote about the Thought Police to the current exchange.
Most of fandom aren’t misfits. The internet age made it pretty clear that people with various fannish interests come in all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life.
So people who act in an exclusive manner by publishing racist jokes around the community are not being punished for their thoughts; they are being called to account for their actions.
And there we have it. You think racism has something to do with ethnic jokes that would be entirely unremarkable if told on Comedy Central, and the rest of us think that racism has to do with actual actions of exclusion based on irrational prejudice. You’d think with all this publicity at least one such act of racism could be proven. What? No? Only people of all political stripes stepping forward to defend Tim Bolgeo. You think someone who chose to go to an integrated school in the 1960s in Memphis, Tennessee is a racist, and I think anyone who has never gone to a school or lived in a neighborhood in which he was in the minority has no right to even touch that man’s shoes. What can I say but that I am happy we have progressed to a point where such a risible position as that definition of racism can be taken seriously even by an uninformed, a-historical, hysterical handful—do you think we would have if people like Tim Bolgeo had not actually done the hard work? His accusers probably do, and once again that says more about them and the projections of their small minds than it does about him.
Simon McNeil on May 23, 2014 at 11:55 am said:
Most of fandom aren’t misfits. The internet age made it pretty clear that people with various fannish interests come in all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life.
This isn’t true. There is such a thing as a fannish mindset. We timebind. We idea trip. We love knowledge for its own sake, and we love to argue. We are a tiny minority of humanity. Your sort can’t tolerate disagreement. You would deprive us of the joy of arguing. You totalitarians just aren’t our sort.
I am not one of “Tim Bolgeo’s relatives” nor am I a “far-Right conservative”, whatever that semantic-free phrase is supposed to convey, both of which are alleged to describe anyone in the Archon Facebook Group who is upset by what has been done. I’ve never met him, never communicated with him. I am not planning to attend Archon this year, having not done so for the past 29 years — but I am one of the co-founders of the convention, and the single individual who came up with the name “Archon” for it.
All that being said, what was done here was wrong. Just plain wrong, no excuse acceptable. If an already invited guest is perceived to hold an attitude about something far from societal consensus, the correct procedure would have been to look at his e-zines, ask him about the content and if it truly reflected what he held in his heart, what related opinions he actually had, and program and/or counter-program accordingly to meet societal consensus. Dialog over the issue(s) would have occurred, Teachable moments, even, for whether Mr. Bolgeo is a racist as claimed or not, I know from my memory and experience that one can find someone with a racist outlook in the general attendees at any convention, certainly not just Archon, and maybe a mind or two could be changed, or at least public behavior by some attendees modified to come closer to the societal consensus. That opportunity has been lost.
There is no such thing on this planet as a “good lynch mob.” The phrase is oxymoronic.
I only recognize the names of two people on the current committee, the others are come to convention fandom after my time. But it does appear that a majority were willing to be steamrollered, or at least unwilling to stand up to it. When it was brought to bear against them by the Mob Of Facebook, and its false twin, Bad Publicity, they laid down before them, not even having enough foresight to realize that real, not imaginary, Bad Publicity was going to result by their caving into a mob.
Science fiction fans without foresight. Another phrase one would have thought oxymoronic.
I am sorry for the humiliation which has been laid at the feet of Mr. Bolgeo. Regardless of his actual beliefs, which I do not know, he never, ever should have been treated with the insult of a convention committee which pretended to the idea that they were honoring him. Archon’s bestowing of “honor” to guests has been shown to not necessarily be real, that they could withdraw it so quickly, with so little forethought.
I wonder how “honored” the other guests would feel right now, if they became aware of what has been done. I wouldn’t feel very much so if I were one of them.
The focal point of fandom of yore were the books we read and the few movies and TV shows “we” all watched. “We” all knew and read about H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, read F & SF or ANALOG…today this has fractured…and theses days you’re a fan if you watch TRUE BLOOD or GAME OF THRONES or put on a costume. Some fine tuning has been lost.
Misfits? Yes, me. And a lot of the fans I met at Lunacon 1971 were also.
The mindset of “we are truefen, you are faking” is toxic. Who are you to tell anybody they aren’t allowed to consider themselves part of fandom? Why because they are fans of TV shows you don’t find worthy? And to call someone a totalitarian for being willing to speak truth to the corrosive effect of prejudice in our community? Bah.
That’s not what I meant: the main touch points of fandom has vanished. Back when I was start out in fandom, there were many points of simular interests, books, movies, comic books, fanzines….
I like the two TV shows I mentioned. The rest of your note is rhetorical.