Monteleone Aftermath: Authors Seek Perspective on His Damaging Statements

Brian Keene and Barney Dannelke have added two notable responses to the widespread discussion about the ouster of Thomas Monteleone from the Horror Writers Association.

In a YouTube video aired yesterday, Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, and Christopher Golden, who each have known Monteleone a long time, used their exceptional gifts to analyze and share the deep emotional hurt they’re feeling over the things he said on Facebook and in a recent podcast. (An auto-generated transcript is available at the link,)

Barney Dannelke has also provided insights about the facts and issues in a Facebook post. Here are some excerpts.

…Little did I know that within 48 hours of my mentioning Thomas F. Monteleone in a Breakfast With Barney that Tom would walk out on to the public square, dowse himself with the kerosene of his own bullshit and gleefully and cheerfully set himself on fire….

…In that capacity he WAS a member of the Horror Writers of America (H.W.A.) and in that capacity he can/could nominate people for the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award – and so he nominated Stuart David Schiff. Except he did it in a manner (or perhaps he only proposed to do it, check my work here) that could best be described as a total dick move. Essentially, he drew attention to the fact that Schiff is an old white male, proposing that to dare to do such a thing in this day and age was somehow a revolutionary act.

Turned out, it was an act of pure “fuck around and find out.” He picked up the heavy stick. He walked straight up to the hornet nest that he had been watching for years. Then he hit the nest with the stick as hard as he could (not very) and then he pretended to be shocked that hornets waiting for an idiot with a stick, went and did what hornets were designed to do. Namely, sting the shit out of him.

Then (!) he went on a podcast linked to YouTube and complained in the most racist and misoginystic ways he could think of for OVER TWO HOURS about how stupid hornets were and how they didn’t properly appreciate him and how confusing sexual designations are for hornets these days and how dumb fat black hornets are and how lucky he was that he made enough money that his kids didn’t have to go to school with hornets and how he has gallons of hornet cream and being old and rich and Italian (note the Fedora) he doesn’t feel shit anyways.

I listened to the entire podcast. I have read the entire 38 page transcript. I am sure you will let me know if I am exaggerating any of this.

Running in background for the last 48 hours there have been dozens of comment threads about this. The most damning addition was a Cemetery Dance op-ed piece from Tom where he explains to the rest of us poor suckers that the ONLY reason that Samuel R. Delany had a career in SF was because of his skin color and that the work had no merit whatsoever….

(There is a copy of that issue of Cemetery Dance #21 [1994-Summer] downloadable from the Internet Archive.)

Dannelke does not object to Monteleone being removed from HWA, however, there are things he would have preferred to be said more explicitly, or not altogether omitted from HWA’s announcement. See the rest of his discussion at Facebook.

9 thoughts on “Monteleone Aftermath: Authors Seek Perspective on His Damaging Statements

  1. When I mentioned to Ted White that Monteleone had tried to drag Ted into his racist assault on Chip Delany, Ted replied:
    Thanks for this. Tom has it half right. It wasn’t a SFWA function. It was Tricon, the 1966 Worldcon.

    Chip worked, in the late ’50s, for Don Wollheim, and that’s why his early books were all Ace books. Terry Carr met him when he started working at Ace. Terry liked Chip’s books. I didn’t (I found them unreadable). But when I met Chip, in 1964 or ’65, I liked him and we became good friends. (He and I both heard SGT. PEPPER together for the first time when Alexei Panshin called me to to say the whole album was being played straight through on the radio Right Then, and we should turn it on, which I did. Chip was visiting me at the time.)

    During this period Chip and I bonded on the fact that we’d both been denied attendance at the Milford Conference, the original SF writer’s conference. Me, because I was disliked by Judy Merril (it was mutual), Chip because he wrote Ace books.

    But in 1966 the Milford Mafia (Knight, Blish, Merril, et al) discovered Chip was black — and everything changed. White liberal knee-jerk tendencies took over, and soon they were lionizing him.

    We laughed about it.

    My opinion of the MM did not go up. (Nonetheless, I saw to it that NyCon3 donated several hundred bucks to the fledgling SFWA.)

    Feel free to quote me on this.

  2. From the Dannelke:

    But do you know what would have been really brave? To let him come to the Stokers. To let him go to conventions and set up his stall.

    Oh, for fuck’s sake. This sort of solution — and it is proposed often — ignores how many of the people Monteleone insulted, either individually or as a class, would be present. In order to Prove A Valuable Point, their discomfort must be overlooked.

    There are a thousand thousand places people can choose to debate Monteleone if they so choose. A convention people attend as part of their professions has no need to be one of those places.

  3. Hello folks,

    First time poster here. Although I am Mike Glyer’s FB friend as of this morning, I had no idea chunks of my now 2,500 word piece had been exported here. Not a problem. I just didn’t know because there was no “share” and for whatever reason the tag never pinged anything on my end.

    Two things – First, thanks to new information about Ted White (specifically Ted’s response to Tom’s Cemetery Dance piece) I revised one word in one sentence and added a full paragraph addendum for why I changed that one word. I offer this in the spirit of transparency, because better that, than shoving things down the memory hole and pretending they were never said.

    The second thing is to say Madame Hardy is almost certainly entirely correct. That sentiment was offered sort of in the spirit of a Swiftian solution. The fact that I would enjoy that confrontation is sanely tempered against the fact that many others would not. I bow to that sentiment.

    I struck a long paragraph about setting up a carnival dunking tank or depending on con location a witch’s dunking pond. It was a fun paragraph to write but I had already strayed off point too much. But I can dream.

    At any rate, it was fun to write. Thanks for the acknowledgement.

  4. The site inserted a thumbnail pic of me from the Hava Java Coffee Shop (they’re out of business – I am not) in 1985. How this web page got that picture is…eerie.

    Just so you know, I am even prettier now.

  5. Barney J Dannelke: The site inserted a thumbnail pic of me from the Hava Java Coffee Shop (they’re out of business – I am not) in 1985. How this web page got that picture is…eerie.

    You have a Gravatar account. The photo is one that you uploaded to that account.

  6. I poked around at some of the other issues of Cemetery Dance I could find to see what else Monteleone was up to. I don’t remember seeing anything nearly as bad, but I did find him bragging about being a minor-league asshole on a panel at BaltiCon and getting banned (and how he later snuck in on someone else’s badge).

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