Do we like Anne Rice?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Years of loud support for gay and trans people, set against one clumsy defence of a chef and a hard line on fan fiction.
Anne Rice was born in 1941 and raised in an Irish Catholic family in New Orleans, the city she set so many of her books in. Her debut, Interview With the Vampire, came out in 1976 and was written while she was grieving a death in her family. It spawned the Vampire Chronicles and more than 150 million books sold, plus a 1994 film.
On the harm test she mostly shines. In 2010 she announced on Facebook she was quitting Christianity, writing “In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay,” and adding that she refused to be anti-feminist. She told the AP she expected gay marriage would eventually be permitted nationwide, and she said troubling church scandals had pushed her out.
Her support was not just a one-off statement. In 2017 she said she'd always been a champion of gay rights and art by gay people, and a trans actress wrote after her death that Rice was the first person she came out to and called it “fabulous”. Rice also told a reviewer who said she thought homosexuality was fine, “Well, I do.”
The stain is the 2013 Paula Deen episode. When the Food Network dropped Deen over admissions about racial language, Rice posted on Facebook that “this looks like a crucifixion” and asked if America was becoming a lynch mob culture. Some New Orleans readers told her they were disappointed. It reads as a clumsy defence of a friend of a friend rather than a pattern, but it landed badly.
Two years later she called one-star reviews of a novel set at the Theresienstadt camp, with a romance between an SS officer and a Jewish woman, a form of censorship, after admitting she hadn't read it. Bustle's writer called that hypocritical, and noted that in 2013 Rice had pointed her followers at a blogger who panned her. That is a critic's view, but it fits a writer quick to feel besieged.
The other mark against her is fan fiction. She told fans in the 1990s that she was very possessive of her characters, and by 2000 her lawyers had reportedly sent legal threats to fan sites, which led Fanfiction.net to stop hosting her characters. It's an old-school copyright fight rather than anything hateful, but plenty of fans felt hounded.