When was it first suspected that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman?

Cafe Society
21

I’ll bet you a nickel it was the intro to “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” in a Nebula or Hugo award-winners anthology. I think that’s the same place I first became aware of Tiptree, and it would have been published just after the secret was out.

I’m surprised to learn that it was really such a well-kept secret. I always assumed–with 20/20 hindsight, of course, since I didn’t read it until about 1980–that Harlan Ellison’s line in Again, Dangerous Visions emphasizing her assumed gender ("Tiptree is the man to beat this year. Wilhelm is the woman to beat, but Tiptee is the man. ") was written as a wink to those who knew the truth.

22

I got into science fiction in the early 1970’s (including convention-going) and had no clue Tiptree was female until the 1980’s - it was a shock to me! But not a huge one, because I don’t pick authors for being male or female but because I like their stories. Of course, I wasn’t one of the movers and shakers in the SF world, but no, most of us didn’t have a clue Tiptree was a guy until after the US bicentennial.

23

I’ve been a member of SFWA since 1975 and I got into the sf fan world in 1969. I’m not talking through my hat, unlike some people.

No evidence? Sez who? It’s trivial to set up checking account for a pen name. Even people without intelligence backgrounds can do it. She was never seen in public. She didn’t pal around with the sf community. How about some cites for your assertions?

I have a good friend who was driving with David Gerrold when they happened to be passing close by where they knew that James Tiptree lived. (She did correspond by mail with people.) They tracked down the house and knocked on the door. A woman answered who essentially asked them to get lost. They had no idea they had just talked to James Tiptree herownself.

I remember reviewing the important anthology Aurora: Beyond Equality, which came out in 1976. Tiptree had one story in it under her own name, the Hugo and Nebula Award winning “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” and another story under the pen name of Raccoona Sheldon, “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” I didn’t realize they were the same person or that Tiptree was a woman. Fortunately for my reputation, I praised Houston to the skies and panned Your Faces.

Take it from someone who was there at the time. It was a surprise. If you think otherwise put something more on the table than “they had to know.”

24

The incident is described in her biography as the closest that anyone came to figuring things out.

BTW, though Exapno has me beat by a few years, I’m also a member (and former officer) of SFWA and have been deeply involved in the SF community for over 25 years. As I said, I have never heard anyone ever say, “Yes, I knew it all along” after the truth was revealed.

25

Not in other words. In those exact words. I’ve repeatedly said I’m guessing. And I’ve said that I’m not “plugged into the science fiction community”. So why do you keep questioning these things like you’ve caught me out?

I’ll readily concede that you and Exapno were more “inside” the SF community than I was (or am). I am a regular reader and I remember when Tiptree’s identity was revealed but that is the extent of my personal knowledge. I certainly hadn’t known she was a woman but I’ve said I’m not privy to gossip in the SF community so it wouldn’t surprise me to not know something like this.

But let me ask this. If Tiptree’s gender was a complete secret, why did Silverberg feel the need to respond to the theory that Tiptree was a woman? Wouldn’t the fact that there was such a theory indicate that Tiptree’s gender wasn’t a complete secret?

26

No, it indicates that when a group of compulsively creative people respond to a mystery they generate all possible suggestions for answers. Earlier in the intro Silverberg says:

That’s where the “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female” appears. In context it doesn’t at all sound like a suggestion that is being taken seriously or that has gathered credit in the community. It sounds like, here’s yet another wild theory that people are throwing out in the absence of information. Once rumor starts, all sorts of wild rumors will accrue. Why pay attention to any of them?

27

No. It meant that perhaps some people noted that Tiptree portrayed female characters particularly well and speculated that he might be a woman. That’s it – pure speculation with no basis in fact.

As I keep saying (and you keep ignoring) no one has ever said they knew Tiptree was a woman before the news broke. No one. Even now, no one has made that claim.

David Gerrold showed up at her house, was greeted by a woman, and still didn’t believe believe she was a woman. Harlan Ellison heard the story and even suggested jokingly the woman was Tiptree, but still didn’t believe it.

Look, Tiptree’s biography has been published. Parts of it are in Google Books. The section quoted indicates dozens of SF writers who corresponded with Tiptree and never guessed the truth (including Joanna Russ, who certainly would have been attuned to the possibility). And there is not a single quote that indicates anyone knew the truth in advance. You’re welcome to read the section.

And, of course, if you can produce someone who knew in advance, by all means do so. But you’re just speculating with an absence of facts.

Your assumptions are all incorrect (that, for instance, Sheldon attended SF conventions), there are no facts to back them up, and so your conclusions are worthless.

28

I thought I had read that Alice Sheldon attended conventions as herself (without saying that she was James Tiptree) and that some people noted that things Alice Sheldon said in person were similar to things James Tiptree said in correspondence. But looking back now for where I thought I saw this, I can’t find it so I’ll withdraw that claim.

How did Alice Sheldon conceal her identity from the people she dealt with as on business transactions? When Warm Worlds and Otherwise, for example, was published, Sheldon might not have made business arrangements with Silverberg but presumedly somebody at Ballantine had to negotiate the publishing rights with and sign the checks to the author.

For example when Stephen King decided to create the fictional pseudonym of Richard Bachman he had to let people at Signet Books in on the secret. Paul Linebarger hid his identity as Cordwainer Smith by letting Forrest Ackerman in on the secret and designating him as his literary agent. Who did Sheldon use as her cover?

I’m also trying to understand the defensiveness here. I’ve openly said all along that I’m just guessing that some people knew Sheldon was Tiptree even though the majority of SF readers didn’t. I based that on the fact that most things which are “secret” like that aren’t really complete secrets and that fact that people like Silverberg and Ellison heard or made “jokes” about Tiptree being a woman. I figured there were SF professionals who were in on the secret and their jokes were a wink to other insiders. But apparently, Tiptree’s secret was one of the rare exceptions to the rule and the people who had been joking about Tiptree being a woman were surprised to find out she actually was a woman and my guess was wrong.

29

I suspect it may have been easier to construct a false identity pre-1970 compared to today.

30

Quite easily (especially back then).

When you send out a manuscript, you put the name you want on the check at the upper left corner, and the name you want with the story centered just below the title. The check is written to the name in the corner.

For Tiptree, all she needed was an account in which to deposit the check. Things were much laxer back then, so she could have set up an account “for a friend,” using her own SSN on the form. The bank would have opened it in Tiptree’s name. Check deposited; all set.

Nowadays, things are a bit different – you may have to show the person opening the check your own SSN card. But it is not illegal to use a pseudonym to get a bank account as long as the IRS has an SSN to be given the tax. The bank would know what you were doing, of couse, but it’s unlikely they’d be interested in the issue. If the check is deposited in an account that doesn’t pay interest, the IRS doesn’t get a notice and you can then write checks as Tiptree to Sheldon.

Other ways are to fill out an account with two people granted access and sign it both as Tiptree and Sheldon, with Sheldon’s SSN. It’s unlikely the banker would pay much attention to the arrangement.

I don’t know about King, but no one knew who Cordwainer Smith was after writing “Scanners Live in Vain.” It took five years a digging by H.L. Gold to discover his real name. If he hired Ackerman, it was after Gold found him (and his name became known to editors).

No defensiveness. It’s just that the speculation is wrong, proof was given, and you still kept saying, “but it can’t be wrong.”

31

King had already written as King by then? He may have had a contractual arrangement that he needed an exception to?

I don’t write poetry and fiction under my own name. I have never met an editor or publisher or talked on the phone with one. I make the checks over to myself and deposit them. No problem.

32

Maybe it’s just in retrospect, but after reading a few of Tiptree’s stories, how could anyone be surprised by her gender? They’re all classic 1970’s “men suck, women rule” genre stories (of which “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is probably the archetypal example).

33

Well, most of Tiptree’s stories that don’t fit into that (and that’s a pretty superficial description of “Houston, Houston,” which was a new twist on the idea of life with just a single sex). In addition, “Houston Houston” came out just about the time her identity was revealed and a year after Silverberg wrote his introduction, meaning that the suspicions preceded the story.

The question came up not with that, but with Tiptree’s 1973 story “The Women Men Don’t See,” which portrayed women quite realistically.

Tiptree first made her reputation with “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” still one of the best SF stories ever. What is absolutely stunning about the story is that she take a very innocuous sentence and, in context, makes it one of the most horrifying thing you’ve ever read. It also, in hindsight, seemed to predict AIDS (though a much more virulent form of it). But it is not a feminist story by any means.

Other great Tiptree stories include “And I Awoke to Find Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” “The Man Who Walked Home,” “Forever to a Hudson’s Bay Blanket,” “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death,” “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” “The Screwfly Solution,” “Time-Sharing Angel,” “We Who Stole the Dream,” “Backward, Turn Backward” (actually a reworking of “Hudson’s Bay Blanket” with a nice take on time paradoxes) and one of her posthumous stories (I think it was “In Midst of Life”) that is the creepiest story ever written (if you know about how Tiptree died*).

In any case, other that “Houston, Houston,” and “Women Men Don’t See,” the rest of her output did not have any particularly feminist bent.

*Tiptree committed suicide by shooting herself after killing her ill husband. The story portrays a person shooting himself and ending up in a wonderful afterlife. :dubious:

34

The way Sheldon did it would still work. She created “James Tiptree Jr.” as a business pseudonym and it’s still perfectly legal to do business under any name you want as long as you’re not trying to defraud someone. It’s not like she got birth certificates and a drivers license for that identity.

35

Hey, I don’t make up all this stuff on my own. I based this one what Frederik Pohl wrote. “Scanners Live in Vain” had been published in a magazine and everyone was trying to figure out how the real identity of “Cordwainer Smith” was. Pohl was republishing the story in a book and he said that one of the bonuses of doing that would be that “Smith” would have to sign the contract and reveal his real identity. Instead Ackerman signed the contract on Smith’s behalf. This is where I got the idea that publishers knew the real identities of their authors - Pohl certainly seemed to feel that was the normal routine except in very unusual cases where an author took active measures to conceal it. (And even here Smith’s identity wasn’t a complete secret because Ackerman knew who he was even if Pohl didn’t.)

It seemed to me that the only proof I was being given was people telling me that I was wrong and demanding I prove myself. I never said I couldn’t be wrong but I wanted some actual evidence.

36

People said you were wrong because, as you have acknowledged, you were wrong. On every point. Even your example with Pohl shows only that a single person - not any of the editors or publishers either, as you wrongly claimed - knew Smith’s real identity. That’s the opposite of an open secret. You were wrong on how publishing works, on how contracts work, on how the sf community operates, on what Silverberg wrote, and on how Sheldon behaved. That’s fairly comprehensive even for someone whose defense is that he’s guessing.

As for evidence, other than “I personally was there at the time”, what evidence could anyone present to satisfy you? Notarized statements from everybody else who was there at the time?

BTW, note that I’m not making the claim that absolutely no one knew. Maybe Vonda knew when she bought two stories for the anthology, one using Sheldon as a last name. The bios are cleverly written half-truths.

I don’t know whether these read as separate people or provide clues and hints that they are two parts of one life. I didn’t take it that way at the time.

I was good friends with Vonda then and she never spoke of it. Do I have to take a disposition from Vonda to find out what she knew and when she knew it and who she told?

This whole thing has become an example of one of those threads in which one side is provably wrong in every detail but instead of shutting up keeps demanding that despite the wrongness something must have happened and we can’t rest until we reveal what that was or worse, be forced to prove that nothing happened, the classic proving the negative. That’s the only reason I came back to answer. I hate threads that descend into that hole. If you want evidence, lay out in detail what evidence you are looking for, what will satisfy you, and how you think that evidence might be found. You being the generic you.

But mostly I said I had personal up close knowledge of that world and you decided that my being there meant nothing. Or I was lying in some way. You can’t win friends and influence people doing that. Righteous anger is not defensiveness. It’s offensive due to your offensiveness.

You’re wrong. Drop it already.

37

I’d say your continued hostility is a pretty good example of what I said. Not to belabor the point but I said right from the start that I was guessing and had no direct knowledge of what was known back in the seventies. Wendall and Chuck and you all wanted to argue with me but none of you were claiming any direct knowledge either so I figured my guess was as good as yours. Your original contribution to this debate was “It most certainly wasn’t. It was a huge surprise to everyone.” - which would have sounded a lot more credible if you had bothered to say then that you had been a member of the SFWA back in 1975 and actually was claiming some knowledge of what you were talking about. Or do you feel that the rest of us should operate on the principle that Exapno Mapcase said it so it must be true?

As for Wendell, he was the one who originally claimed that “Sheldon apparently occasionally attended science fiction conventions (or otherwise communicated with science fiction people), where she just introduced herself as Alice Sheldon with no mention of Tiptree” and “Eventually somebody who had met Sheldon at a convention (or had heard second-hand about her) and had read the Tiptree letters (or had heard second-hand about them) noticed the similarity in backgrounds” - two claims which he later had to concede weren’t true. Chuck was asked about how Tiptree managed her letter writing without revealing her identity and said he didn’t know. He apparently got most of his information about her by reading a book about her. Then he got into a tangent about “there was some suspicion” that Tiptree was a woman and there were “some people suggesting she was” but nobody “knew”. Which seems more than a little ambiguous to me to support the claim that it was a complete surprise a year later.

To be quite blunt, nobody in this thread has really convinced me that they’re an expert on James Tiptree and their word on her is beyond question. I figure everyone is speculating about something that happened over thirty years and they have only heard about second hand. (I’ll even concede that you seem to be the closest to having direct knowledge.) But I’ve admitted that about myself all along.

38

Little Nemo, maybe you’ll listen to an observation from someone looking from the outside. You look really bad in this thread. Take a step back. I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’ll defend it to the death is not a good debating style. I don’t remember you doing this before.

39

The first chapter of the Julie Phillips biography gives a good idea of how well hidden was Sheldon’s secret.

40

Tiptree/Sheldon used a post office box for the letters that were addressed to Tiptree. This is even easier to arrange than a bank account in Tiptree’s name. Note that although she didn’t attend science fiction conventions, Sheldon invited at least a couple of people from the science fiction community (who knew her only from her letters to fanzines as Sheldon and who didn’t connect her to Tiptree) to visit her at her home. I’m surprised to learn that as late as 1976 (when it was discovered that Sheldon was Tiptree) there were still prominent people like Sheldon in the science fiction community who only communicated with other science fiction people by letter and an occasional visit to their home without attending science fiction conventions. I always thought of that as more something that was done in the 1930’s.