Kevin Spacey

Name:	Kevin Spacey
Also Known As:
Occupation:	Actor
Medium:	Television and Film
Works:
Official Website(s):
Fan Website(s):
On Fanlore:	Related pages

Kevin Spacey is an American actor.

Comments on Spacey Fan Communities

Unknown Date (possibly 2000)

KevieBear:

ONCE UPON A TIME …

... when fan sites and chat rooms were fairly common things, Spacey fans used to do regular chats. First at Spaceyland, and then here. There would be a very popular Tuesday night chat and then a Saturday movie chat in which we’d synchronize our video tapes, or DVDs if we were very lucky to have a movie on DVD, and would chat while watching the movie. Today we’d all probably start streaming from Netflix at the same time.

Depending on the movie, there would either be little chatting because the movie was so good (The Usual Suspects) or a lot of chatting because it wasn’t (take your pick) or caused a heated argument (HurlyBurly – one time, never used for movie chat again) or extreme discomfort (Henry & June – not easy to watch and chat about with strangers, only used once as well) and we also gathered to chat while watching awards shows which was a lot of fun. On a rare occasion someone calling themselves Kevin Spacey or his PA would come by and say little and once someone asking questions like a reporter came by but it was never dull. Sadly, the rise of social media, trolls and the demise of some chat room services did in the DMS chats. We did them for years and so far attempts to find free rooms that everyone can access has proven to be difficult but maybe someday we can find a room and try again.

This list of chat abbreviations was posted so that anyone stopping by for the first time could kind of follow along until they got the hang of it. Of course, everyone was free not to use the abbreviations but when you had many people typing about a lot of things, the abbreviations made things easier for slow typists such as myself. Today we’d probably have to add something like GFG for “I can’t see, I need to go find my glasses” or HTTP for “Have to go take my pills”.

2004

Aja (bnfshavemorefun):

Back in the day, I was a member of the Kevin Spacey fandom. Yes, Kevin Spacey has a fandom. This was just over 5 years ago, and the largest mailing list in the fandom had a staggering 300 people. There was no fanfic, the community was based purely on fannish squeeing and OMG the Spacey love. It was all done on mailing lists and there was no livejournal.

I was a BNF in that teeny tiny fandom, not that I knew it at the time--and like every BNF I had a cluster of people who hated me, and one day I came online to discover that the mod of the fandom's one and only mailing list, the KSML, had unsubscribed me from the list without warning or explanation. By their own TOS they claimed that they always explained why they removed anyone, and that if 10 or more people requested a person's removal from the list for any reason, that person could be unsubbed. (I never found out what reason caused my removal from the list, but nevermind.) When word got out that I had been unsubbed the list went up in flames, all the members were outraged on my behalf, and my friends came up to me and said, "You should start a new list."

I said okay, and I did--but I did so with the disclaimer that I didn't want sole control over the group. I didn't think it would be right--so I let the person who had first suggested the idea to me take ownership. Everybody thought of it and promoted it as 'Aja's list'--and within like two days, the new list had drawn half the members away from the KSML and everybody was utterly appalled that the new list had gotten over 150 members in such a short time omg! and that now there were two lists in this fandom, and we all felt like revolutionaries of the Great WankSchizm. Our new list was laidback, cool, hip, generally unmodded, and relaxed. We were virtually wank-free for a little while. Good times.

And then, we had wank. To make a long story short, we had wank coming from Kevin Spacey himself, and the mods of both lists were running around freaking out that our lists were being spied on and 'infiltrated' by Spacey's assistants. It was crazy and chaotic, and really scary because as wanky as this is, our list actually was being infiltrated by Spacey's personal assistant--and in the middle of all the pressure, one morning I woke up to discover that the person I had allowed to be owner had deleted my mailing list.

She had done it out of the blue, just because of her own personal issues over the Spacey wank. It was completely my fault for unthinkingly letting her be owner while I was the head Mod, but I never thought that she would actually use the access to just delete it literally on in impulse, without telling or consulting any of the other mods. I mean, wtf WHO DOES THAT? I was hurt and betrayed and all my other mods were thrown into even more confusion, and I've never really forgiven her for it.

So my lovely little list that I was so proud of was gone forever, along with all its archives and member list--and we had no record of who had been on it, and no way to contact anybody on the list to tell them what had happened. We immediately made a new list, of course, and people found their way back, but now instead of being the cool revolutionaries we had been tainted by the wank, and it felt like we'd lost our street cred. Very rapidly after that the entire fandom became wankier and wankier, and I soon handed over the reins of the new list to somebody else and got the hell out of Dodge. The 9 month period I was in that fandom was the wankiest, most ridiculously dramatic, petty, and stupid online experience I've ever had. Nothing I've seen in HP fandom has ever come close to it, not even Ivy accusing me of threatening to kill her.

2006

Aja (Bookshop):

... I got into a different fandom—which I'm ashamed to say—was the Kevin Spacey fandom, which actually existed, but it primarily existed on individual websites and on mailing lists. So, I was in the Kevin Spacey fandom, back when it revolved around ONElist, which was the predecessor of e-Groups, which was the predecessor of Yahoo! Groups. Yeah, so I got into fandom that way. At the same time—around the time— my Kevin Spacey fandom participation was a very volatile flame that did not last long. (laughs) Primarily because Kevin Spacey's personal assistant was actually on our mailing list, watching us. He actually—. What happened—. Oh my God. This is classic wank right here that nobody knows about, because all the people who were there have gone on their several ways, but okay. So, the Kevin Spacey mailing list split because they had this policy—it was about 300 people on a mailing list, and they had this policy that if people didn't like you, they would boot you unceremoniously from the list. So, because I was me, there were a number of people who really, really loved having me in the list and a number of people who really, really didn't. And so, they booted me off the list. And when that happened, the list split into two lists, because people—. I don't know, this is my second fandom. There was wank and—(laughs) ) anyway, they formed a second list around me and so the second list became known as The Legacy, it was named after his dog.

[snipped]

All of us partied and everything, and then, at some point during the night [that we went to see "The Iceman Cometh" and interview Kevin Spacey] —. And I was not familiar with slash at all at this point in my fandom life. (laughs) You're like, This is getting good. So, at some point during the night, my friend Karen must have gone back home, because she lived in New York, so she didn't have as far to travel. And she must have posted to the list ... Because he had a personal assistant. We all knew that the personal assistant's name was Dana. And there was never really a lot of talk on the mailing list, because again, they were all discussion-based. There was no fanfic, and I'm thinking—I don't think there's ever any talk of fanfic. Which is really odd, because I know—obviously, I'd written it at that point, and we knew what it was. But there, in the Austen fandom, there was no slash. There was just no discussion of anything except heteronormative Austen everything. But somebody, Karen, made this comment on the list about how she wanted to see Kevin Spacey take dictation from Dana. (laughs) ) Right? Just harmless, one comment—one single comment and none of us knew at the time that Dana was actually on the list and had been on the list for months. And apparently was on the other mailing list too. When they read this comment, apparently he told Kevin Spacey, and Kevin Spacey flipped out —flipped out completely and called the owner of the other mailing list, the one who managed the Kevin Spacey mailing list, the fan club.... They called me, like, the day after I got back to New York, and was like, Oh, he's very concerned, and in the meantime, the woman who had actually created the list, and this is the lesson I learned: never let anybody else make a list that's for you. Like, you actually want to own the list, because this person actually sort of went crazy and deleted the mailing lists that we were all on, because she found out that Kevin Spacey's personal assistant was on it. Basically, I guess he called her too. There was a lot of drama. The list disappeared. Nobody knew where it went. (laughs) I

woke up and it was just gone, and I had a phone call from the Kevin Spacey mailing fan club president telling me that Kevin Spacey's assistant was very mad, and that Kevin Spacey wasn't going to be doing any more fan meet-ups ever. And after that I was like, you know, I don't think I want to be in this fandom anymore.... Eventually the mailing list settled down into a much more boring list run by other people who were not us, because obviously we couldn't be trusted not to make dick jokes.

2018

Aja Romano:

[Aja Romano]: The thing is that, back in the day, it wasn’t even a shipper fandom, it was completely gen. There was no fanfiction, there was no shipping of him with anything, it was just a bunch of people wanting to talk about how he was a good actor. It was all mailing lists, and it was just very pure and wholesome. And if there was any type of shipping happening, it was not even talked about it, it was just completely under the radar from what the actual fandom was doing. And we were all extremely, extremely protective of his privacy. I don’t wanna say to a fault, but we were just so hyper aware of how private he was, and so hyper aware of respecting his space, and I look back on that now, and that really, really influenced how I thought about celebrity and RPF.

Because what happened was that ultimately we found out that his personal assistant Dana Brunetti was spying on our mailing list, and that he had been sort of keeping tabs on us to make sure we really didn’t say anything uncouth, to the point where someone made a shipper joke about him and Kevin Spacey together, just a like, literally just a joke about how they were maybe fucking, and it caused this giant meltdown—

Flourish Klink: Like a, “Hey you guys, oh yeah, my secret boyfriend Kevin Spacey, ha ha.” Like that?

Elizabeth Minkel: No, no. The assistant is Dana. Dana is a man.

FK: Oh, he’s dating his assistant.

AR: And actually now, Dana Brunetti is a powerful Hollywood producer. He executive produced Fifty Shades of Grey, he’s doing fine, but at the time he was Kevin Spacey’s personal assistant, and some made a quote-unquote “dictation” joke on my mailing list, and overnight, I woke up to discover Dana had freaked out about it, told Kevin who had freaked out about it, called the Kevin Spacey mailing list president, who had called my mailing list owner who had freaked out about it, and shut down the entire mailing list overnight, and that was how I left the Kevin Spacey fandom.

ELM: Wow! Wow.

AR: It was a big deal, because it was considered to be a sign that Kevin was right to be distrustful of fans, to not share anything about his personal life with the rest of us, and it just left me feeling so weird about celebrities feeling entitled to their privacy at the expense of realism, I guess.

FK: OK but, what a different time. This is blowing my mind.

ELM: This is a bonkers example, because it’s Kevin Spacey, who genuinely did have something to hide.

AR: Exactly! And I look back on that now and that sense of privacy that we were all so eager to cover had such a tint of shame around it, and it ultimately wound up being very dangerous, you know? And I feel like because of that, I’m like, “Why are you so eager to hold onto your quote-unquote ‘privacy’ at all costs to the point that you don’t understand that you have a public persona that people are going to interpret things about no matter what?” That kind of thing.

Because I feel like, that’s probably, ah, it gets into so many things about where the overlap of public persona and private identity is, and what that line is, and at what point it becomes, especially if we’re talking about people who are closeted, or queer actors, or people who are trying to be out, queer actors without actually coming out—there are a whole lot of lines there we can discuss, but I think what RPF is really capable of discussing well, or at least interpreting. But that whole experience left me feeling very wary about public persona, about celebrity persona, if that makes any sense.

ELM: Ah, man. If it was anybody but Kevin Spacey, such a fraught example.

AR: It is a fraught example, I’m sorry. That’s my history!

ELM: I’m very, you know, I subscribe to a strong fourth wall when it comes to RPF. I hate the kind of attitude in fandom among tinhatters of being detectives, and we’re gonna uncover the truth, but then it’s very tricky to think about someone like Kevin Spacey, who was committing assault, and be like, “Well, maybe some behaviors shouldn’t be protected by privacy.” Well, is it the role of fans to play that detective, or should that be the role of law enforcement?

AR: [laughter] Yeah, I don’t want fans to go after celebrities they suspect…

Sexual misconduct allegations

In 2017, Spacey was accused of sexual misconduct by 15 men , dating back to the 1980s when several of them were minors. Due to the scandal, Spacey was fired from the series House of Cards and all his shot footage from All the Money in the World was quickly excised and replaced with actor Christopher Plummer. Spacey's popularity and fanbase took a hit due to the allegations, but many still fondly remember his older work.

Communities and Websites

• Spaceyland (very early community)
• Driving Mr. Spacey! (DMS) here ("longest running Kevin Spacey fan site) (November 2000-present)
• Kevin Spacey Mailing List (KSML)
• Aja's second mailing list
• The Unofficial Kevin Spacey Fan Page, ^{Archived version}
• Aisle Se7en - The Kevin Spacey Mailing List members Site (Index), ^{Archived version}

Example Fanworks

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

Meta/Further Reading

• Kevin and Me (2000)